Writing Between the Lines: Race and Intertextuality.

Building upon Derrida's notions of the text as a refusal of boundaries and of writing as excess, or overflow, Aldon Nielsen advances the thesis that American writing - aesthetically, politically, and socially intextual - overflows its bibliography to generate and complicate the text of race. Writing itself creates racial differences, Nielsen assumes, and his earlier book Reading Race: White American Poets and the Racial Discourse in the Twentieth Century demonstrated this. The new book, however, examines the work of black and white writers to reveal the interstices between and among texts, not merely their crossings, and to show how "the excessiveness of language" - which for Derrida is axiomatic - generates in American writing "the excessiveness of race." That is, writing and race both supplement the text of America much as "Africans were forced to come to America as human supplements." But while involuntary servitude, long outlawed, still casts a dark historical shadow, an aggressive racial dialogue continually redefines cultural paradigms and rewrites the discourse of difference itself.

The spirit of C. L. R. James, once Nielsen's teacher, looms over this book. Nielsen's chapter in James's book on Melville, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways, acknowledges James's refusal to write a conventionally tidy book and his recognition, long before Derrida, of a notion of textuality that, like the Marxist vision of the state "withering away," dissolves the boundaries of plot and narrative. James argues that Melville's book refuses the confining conventions of narrative and therefore resists closure by embracing its own beginning. James's own book, Nielsen demonstrates, cannot contain his text because it "operates similarly at the boundaries of Western discourse" and emulates Melville's own "sense of unending," as does Charles Olson's Call Me Ishmael, a kindred text of self-reflexive excess. This sense of unending is historical as well as textual: It "bears within it that archetrace of both future and past that forms the text's excess." To this extent Nielsen follows James in finding textuality a diachronic as well as a synchronic phenomenon. The refusal to accept boundaries - whether the conventional strategies of narrative (James and Melville), the simple exegesis of metaphor (Amiri Baraka, Charles Johnson, and others), or even the axioms of twentieth-century theory - characterizes all of the writing Nielsen examines.

Perhaps the strongest chapter is "The Middle Passage," in which Nielsen argues that the voyages of slaves from Africa to America in ships' holds "may be the great repressed signifier of American historical consciousness." One might question how repressed this signifier remains, since Nielsen finds it almost ubiquitous in literature, not only in the work of Baraka, Lucille Clifton, Paule Marshall, Charles Johnson, and Robert Hayden, but in the obsessive guilt of Coleridge's ancient mariner. However, it is Hayden's "Middle Passage" that generates the most thorough intertextual reading in the book. Nielsen finds in Hayden's collage-like poem traces and crossings and gaps related to readings in Stephen Vincent Benet, Muriel Rukeyser, Melville, Coleridge, and numerous works of early American history. However, the formal texture of the poem, not its thematic concerns, embodies what Nielsen calls "the essentially palimpsestic nature of American and African-American cultural experience." That Hayden learned this from "the stylings of modernist poetics," an aesthetic of European origin, demonstrates how intertextual culture itself is. Nielsen might well have mentioned Homer, too, as the ironic progenitor of the catalogue of slave ships which opens the poem. These "bright ironical names" remind us how cruelly the act of naming turns on us, how even the simplest act of writing supplements itself with an excess that exposes the dialogic inequalities at work. Naming slave ships "Jesus, Estrella, Esperanza, Mercy" indicts language itself, and names all writing as co-conspiratorial.

Other chapters deal with Melvin Tolson's appropriation of modernist strategies; James Weldon Johnson's textualizing of his own life; William Carlos Williams and the appropriation of jazz and blues by Kerouac, Clark Coolidge, and others; LeRoi Jones and his reinvention of himself as the "race man" Amiri Baraka and the re-revision this has prompted in the work of white poets; and a final chapter contrasting various ways of enabling or disabling black women in fiction. Each of these chapters raises difficult, perhaps unanswerable questions. And the book as a whole suggests the most troubling and yet in some way most exhilarating possibility: that the discourse of race, which has enriched American literature by complicating not only its social and cultural stance but also its very language, is as boundless as textuality itself. This is troubling because the ugly nineteenth-century construct of race, with its cruel Darwinist overtones, still sticks in America's collective throat. Yet it exhilarates because our literature will go on reconstructing notions of race, each more problematic than the last, until perhaps one day the language will clearly expose the artifice to even the most unregenerate interlocutor. The text of race has no bounds, but recognizing that characteristic acknowledges a healthy indeterminacy. Nielsen demonstrates that a dialogic exchange of power, a shifting of stances, and an undoing of metaphor enrich African American writing yet derive from an intertextuality that embraces white and black writing alike. To refuse whiteness or blackness, to refuse the corrupt construct of race, may be impossible, but deconstructing and complicating that trope may be one of the greatest services our writers have done us.