Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race.

Claudia Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. 238 pp. $45.00 cloth/$1 9.95 paper.

Claudia Tate's new book signals a welcome coming-of-age of African American literary criticism. Long immersed in what Tate herself refers to as a critical traditon that "demanded that a black text explicitly represent its lived experiences with racial oppression," black novels have been read primarily as social, political, or historical documents. But to do so, as Tate persuasively argues, has been to ignore the universal and psychological depths that black fictions embody as thoroughly as any literature written by human beings must. Tate contends that scholars of African American literature have "produced a black literary canon in which the politics of race forms the manifest text; at the same time, they have repressed problematic personal discourses of desire." Psychoanalysis and Black Novels uncovers and carefully dissects these "discourses of desire"--largely pre-oedipal and oedipal motifs in Emma Kelley's Megda, W.E.B. Du Bois's Dark Princess, Richard Wright's Savage Holiday, Nella Larsen's Quicksand, and Zora Neale Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee.

By focusing on five African American novels that have been largely marginalized from the canonical tradition, Tate reveals that black authors have encoded their neuroses as thoroughly in their works as has any other group of writers. But the literary establishment--both white and black literary critics--has been loath to acknowledge or even recognize obvious signs of psychological import in black novels, largely in what appears to be an attempt to categorize (and easily relegate?) African American literature as largely racial and social propaganda. Tate's carefully researched and defined study examines the personal life of each of these authors, revealing the ambiguous and ambivalent relationships they each had with their parents--relationships that in turn created the need in these texts to explore their innermost psychic traumas in the struggles of their white characters (who serve as highly displaced versions of themselves).

Tate acknowledges that these novels have been largely ignored because critics and readers have not been comfortable reading what amounts to a black novelist's displacement of his or her own personal anxieties onto unconvincing white or mixed-race characters. The larger issue that Tate confronts, however, is whether black novelists will ever be allowed to possess the same sort of inner psychic life that white writers are routinely acknowledged to possess. Thus, we have a discussion of Du Bois that recognizes his displaced guilt for the death of his mother: In Dark Princess we see a "heavily concealed, much displaced, unconscious desire to exclude the social world and re-embrace the dyadic union with the sovereign dark matriarch, who is yet another displacement for the lost and clearly omnipotent mother." The discussion of Wright is similarly intriguing, uncovering the "infantile sadistic fantasies" that cause the white hero of Savage Holiday to kill a neighboring woman in a substitutive fantasy of matricide. Wright's case is particularly interesting because he created so many works that explore "his recurring and yet unacknowledged fantasy of the sexually betraying mother, a fantasy that forms the core of the subjective dynamics of all of Wright's fictions."

The discussions of Larsen, Kelley, and Hurston--as female writers--tend to focus on their relationships with their fathers, as one might expect. The chapter on Larsen and the search for the lost father is particularly insightful, but Tate might well have more fully developed the discussion of rape fantasies in Hurston's novel. In each of these chapters Tate uncovers what she calls the intersection of desire with black textuality at the "tabooed site of black sexuality":

Each of these novels in this book suffers from eruptions of desire that are external to racial and/or social narratives and generate serious logical problems for the novels. We could even say that the dis-ease is fatal in almost every instance. The eruptions inhabit the novels' sexual tropes and obscure the works' social argument.

But surely readers of serious fiction are accustomed to expect and appreciate "eruptions" of personal and psychic content, and certainly no one expects or demands that every fiction written by members of any ethnic group must be a form of "social argument." By resurrecting these largely marginal texts, Tate has performed a valuable service. But her greater contribution has been to bring a sensitive and sophisticated voice to a larger issue: the universality of black fiction and black authors.