Passing as autobiography: James Weldon Johnson's 'The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man.'

African American Review, Spring, 1996 by Donald C. Goellnicht

Before turning to an examination of some of the parodic elements in the novel, however, I want to state briefly that I employ the term parody not with the more traditional sense of ridicule or "a gross and superficial destruction of the other's language," which Bakhtin labels "rhetorical parody" (Dialogic 364), but in the sense that Bakhtin celebrates: an "internally dialogized interillumination of languages [in which] the intentions of the representing discourse are at odds with the intentions of the represented discourse" (Dialogic 363-64).(14) This coexistent tension of two voices, imitator's and imitated's, in one utterance he labels "parodic stylization" (Dialogic 364), a mode or degree rather than a genre.(15) He continues with an explanation that is both enabling and debilitating:

With such an internal fusion of two points of view, two intentions and two expressions in one discourse, the parodic essence of such a discourse takes on a peculiar character: the parodied language offers a living dialogic resistance to the parodying intentions of the other; an unresolved conversation begins to sound in the image itself; the image becomes an open, living, mutual interaction between worlds, points of view, accents. This makes it possible to re-accentuate the image, to adopt various attitudes toward the argument sounding within the image, to take various positions in this argument and, consequently, to vary the interpretations of the image itself. The image becomes polysemic. (Dialogic 409-10)

It is precisely such "dialogic resistance to the parodying intentions of" Johnson's mischievous preface - and the rest of his novel, including those passages I quoted above that appear to reinforce the dominant culture's stereotypes of African Americans - that makes this text so rich, but which also renders interpretation so difficult. The interpretive problem here is an intriguing one: How do we decide when a text is parodic? And is it possible for a text to "become" parodic as its publication history evolves? Bakhtin himself admits that, "except in those cases where it is grossly apparent, the presence of parody is in general very difficult to identify . . . without knowing its second context. In world literature there are probably many works whose parodic nature has not even been suspected" (Dialogic 374).

In an attempt to gain some leverage on this interpretive crux, I turn to Linda Hutcheon, who views parody in a broader sense as "repetition with difference," a difference signaled by an ironic distance "between the backgrounded text being parodied and the new Incorporating work" (32). She thus draws on Bakhtin's claim that "analogous to parodistic discourse is ironic" discourse (Problems 194) in order to diffuse the element of necessary hostility between incorporating and incorporated texts that Bakhtin stresses in his study of Dostoevsky. By examining Johnson's repetition and revision of some of the tropes from slave narratives, I will attempt to show how he employs parody in the novel proper, which may in turn cast some light back on the Preface, which I see ultimately as part of a whole, integrated text.