Kevin Bell. Ashes Taken for Fire: Aesthetic Modernism and the Critique of Identity.

Kevin Bell. Ashes Taken for Fire: Aesthetic Modernism and the Critique of Identity. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. 240 pp. $67.50.

Toward the end of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man 952), the unnamed narrator--ensconced in his illegally lit hole--utters the following statement: "And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that plan was conceived" (qtd. in Bell 1). In Ashes Taken for Fire, Kevin Bell appropriates that utterance as a "paradigmatic instance" of modernism's obsession with how language is used to supplant and thus conceal the nothingness, the void, the "profound absence" that precedes language (1). Investigating such uses of language through the lens of modernism, Bell explains, undoes "the essential logic of cultural identity" (1). Readers should approach Bell's work with the spirit expressed in Bell's own deft reduction of Diana Fuss's extended explication of the social practice of whiteness and Slavoj Zizek's complex articulation of the racialized Other into Fanon's succinct statemen that: "the Negro is comparison" (qtd. in Bell 161-62).

That having been said, the work is noteworthy for its contribution to the ongoing project of undermining and undercutting stasis and fixity, a project with wings rooted in Derrida's academy-changing 1966 entree, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." More specifically, Bell's project works well alongside contemporary projects of canon disruption in African American literature--projects that not only question racial representation and representations of race in forming the canon, but also the over-reliance on realism in configuring subjectivity. Bell's primary thrust in this work is that modernism is neither apolitical nor solipsistic as it has long been thought to be; rather, it is a source for rich philosophical investigations of the erasures, contradictions, and breakdowns from which subjectivity emerges. He shows how an approach that takes language's concealment of absence (or void) prior to language into account ultimately undoes "the essential logic of cultural identity" (1). In other words, just as language is used to mark subjectivity, it is also used to define the experiences that constitute identity and cultural belonging asserted in relation to subjectivity. Cultural identity is thus a fabrication of language and, as such, masks an absence that we can read for its potential rather than its fixity. Thus, Bell tells us, modernist inquiry in its obsession with the uses of language exposes cultural identities as strategies of shaping a self that fits a pre-figured cultural model. While "blackness" is often taken up as part of a conforming strategy for asserting cultural belonging, Bell offers a reading of blackness as void that reenacts or reconstitutes it as potential and possibility.

In pursuit of the question of nonidentity, Bell moves from the work of Joseph Conrad toward that of Chester Himes, with investigations of Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, Nathanael West, and Ralph Ellison along the way. Following an introduction titled "Modernism under the Sign of Suicide" are six chapters separated into three parts of two chapters each. In chapter one, "Holographic Ensemble: the Death of Doubt Itself in The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'," Bell uses the example of how crew members aboard the Narcissus achieve a "oneness" (a common/collective identity) through their association with the black-therefore-abjected Jim Wait that is merely fictive and easily dissipated once they leave the site and conditions upon which that shaky group identity rests. In addition, Bell posits, Jim Wait's "utter indifference to domination" serves to stabilize and centralize what is figured as "the marginal" (70). Chapter two, "Something Savage, Something Pedantic: Imaginary Portraits of Certitude in Jacob's Room," continues Bell's engagement with Conrad's "inquiry into the void at the center of all expression" (38), again setting the stage for re-projecting blackness as potential rather than nothingness.

In Part II, "Narcissism and Nothingness," William Faulkner's Light in August (1932) and Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) serve as foci for Bell's investigation of conformity. His reading of Faulkner's work reveals how identity is enforced through social rituals and violence--with dire circumstances for the failure, as Bell notes, to "identify properly" (112). Joe Christmas's "very flesh," Bell points out, "is a banner of nonidentity in that it exposes the possibility, even the likelihood, of his subjective untruth, of his essential core hollowness" (133). West's text provides a useful demonstration of the compelling and conforming effects of aggressive commercialism and over-commodification on identity, both serving as "techniques of mass hypnosis and mass deception" (134); Bell's reading reveals the difficulty of resisting the "banality of modernity," the "incessant encroachment of unreality," and "the perpetual deferral of the spontaneous" in a setting such as Depression-era New York City (134). Those who survive simply accept things as they are presented, or accept them with the understanding that they are incapable of changing them.

The final section of Ashes Taken for Fire, part III, is titled "Blackness (In)Visible." The two chapters, "Chaos and Surface in Invisible Man" and "Assuming the Position: Fugitivity and Futurity in the Work of Chester Himes," deal with the ways that "notions of selfhood originate out of lies institutionalized and replayed as foundational truths," which means that "constructions of meaningfully 'black' identity ... take on a doubly deceptive resonance in Western sociality and representation" (161). His readings of Ellison and Himes are the most interesting and engrossing part of the volume. Ellison's Invisible Man provides the critical terrain for delving into the ways that language and ideology circumscribe and thus limit "potentialities of self" (161). The final chapter begins with a Parisian encounter between James Baldwin and Richard Wright in 1953, an encounter witnessed by Chester Himes. The dialogue that ensues reveals each author's acknowledgment of the publishing industry's influence over the definition of "black writer," and thus the control over what gets represented as "black writing" and "blackness." Himes's work, argues Bell, confronts the problem of dismantling "the antagonisms of purity and contamination, home and homelessness, origin and absence that continually reproduce themselves as idealizations or abominations and that atrophy into social law" (219). For Himes, authenticity "unfolds not at the levels of the sociological but always within the exquisitely temporal core of the affective." It unfolds "within his refusal to arrogate to a function of identity or 'race' thinking the aphasic and suspenseful compulsions of thought, desire, and question that identificatory habituation stops cold; and that also cut art loose from any idea of its fixed comprehensibility" (205). The chapter ends with Bell's reading of Himes's The End of a Primitive (1955) as, in part, a "wicked burlesque directed at the racialist banality of American publishing"; Zora Neale Hurston raised such concerns about race and representation in her 1950 essay, "What White Publishers Won't Print," and the topic has been pursued thematically more recently in novels such as Trey Ellis's Platitudes (1988) and Percival Everett's Erasure (2001). Bell's closing point regards the "utter inability to stabilize the foundations of a solid state calling itself an 'I'," which leaves us with an image of potential and possibility, what Hurston called the Horizon.

Reviewed by

Lovalerie King

Pennsylvania State University