Nella Larsen's 'Passing' and the fading subject

African American Review, Fall, 1998 by Neil Sullivan

When Bellew discovers his wife's secret Harlem life, he confronts her at the Freelands' party. The prophecy contained in his pet name for Clare - "Nig"- is fulfilled, and so will be the displacement of Clare by the signifier (the diminutive of nigger) that demands her disappearance. Bellew repeats the gesture performed by Junior's unnamed tormentor at school, for he calls Clare the very name revealed in the Redfields' dinner-table discussion:" 'So you're a nigger, a damned dirty nigger!'" (238). The chain of events transpiring after this utterance has been hotly debated by the critics,(17) but we know with narrative certainty that the chain begins with Bellew's invocation of nigger and ends with Clare's plunge from the window, her body conspicuously absent from the scene by the time Irene descends to the street level. Whether Clare jumps or Irene pushes her, Bellew's" 'So you're a nigger, a damned dirty nigger!' "inaugurates Clare's disappearance from the window. In the Lacanian version of aphanisis, the subject disappears behind the signifier in dialogue with the Other, always while trying to determine the desire of the Other with the question, "He is saying this to me, but what does he want?" (Lacan, Four 214). Frantz Fanon notes in turn that, for black subjects in dialogue with the white Other, the answer must always be, "Turn white or disappear" (100). To both women in Larsen's novel, Bellew's" 'damned dirty nigger'" implies his desire for Clare's expulsion. Thus Clare, who is denigrated in Bellew's mind for consorting with Negroes, must die,(18) even if Irene catalyzes that death:

One moment Clare had been there, a vital glowing thing, like a flame in red and gold. The next she was gone.

There was a gasp of horror, and above it a sound not quite human, like a beast in agony. "Nig! My God! Nig? (239)

Clare's fall is a vanishing act, a sort of now-you-see-her-now-you-don't, where the signifier Nig seems literally to make Clare's body disappear in a high-stakes version of the infant's fort-da game described in Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle (13-15), for Clare is ". . . there . . . gone" (239). Significantly, her disappearance is punctuated by Bellew's final, double invocation of Nig, her uncanny nickname; her destruction is commensurate with the racist meaning of that word.(19) As the bystanders try to determine what happened, Ralph Hazelton surmises that Clare" 'fainted, I guess'" (241), an assumption that on the surface seems to be a sexist stereotyping of women's responses to crises. However, in Lacanian terms Hazelton is right, for Clare, like Irene, experiences a problematic subjectivity that leads to her fading, or aphanisis, in the narrative. Her death confirms the lethal relationship Lacan posits between signification and subjectivity since the word Nig, like the Lacanian signifier, "manifests itself . . . in the murder of the thing" ("Function" 104).

Bellew's interjection of "'damned dirty nigger' " - his response to Clare's "What am I to you?" - also reflects on Irene, for Clare is her idealized image. Although Irene has throughout the novel indulged her desire to tear and shatter Clare through displaced aggressions toward letters and teacups, Irene herself will shatter once Clare actually experiences corporal disintegration, for she cannot "separate . . . herself from Clare Kendry" (227). After Clare has fallen to her death, Irene experiences nausea when she imagines that Clare might have survived. The nausea stems not only from "fear" (the belief of most critics who assume her guilty of Clare's murder), but from "the idea of the glorious body mutilated" (240). This "idea" is a manifestation of the corps morcele, the imaginary fragmented body whose emergence indicates "the aggressive disintegration" of the I constructed during the mirror stage (Lacan, "Mirror Stage" 4). "The glorious body" is not exclusively Clare's, but a shared, idealized image of self; so its mutilation represents disintegration for both women. Thus Irene replicates Clare's death in a fainting spell mirroring the one that eventually led to her reunion with Clare two years earlier.