The Unpresupposable Subject: “Man of Parts”
However, the narrator’s repeated questioning of the self-consistency of
black American experience foreshadows his emerging understanding
that the legitimacy of black America sought in exclusionary structures of
racial particularisms is yet another displacement of subjectivity that dis-
ables the multiplicity of subjective positions. Indeed, the internal differ-
ence that cuts across the closures of subject formation is already present
as the “annoying” question that delates the symbolism of his “birth” as
a racial subject:
They’re my birthmark… I yam what I yam… What and how much
had I lost by trying to do only what was expected of me instead
of what I myself had wished to do? What a waste… But what of
those things which you actually didn’t like, not because you were
not supposed to like them, not because to dislike them was consid-
ered a mark of reinement and education—but because you actually
found them distasteful? The very idea annoyed me. How could you
know?… I would have to weigh many things carefully … simply
124
Zlatan Filipovic
because I had never formed a personal attitude toward so much.
I had accepted the accepted attitudes and it had made life seem
simple…
(266–67)
Since racial visibility is “at once a
point
of identity,” as Bhabha writes,
and “at the same time a
problem
for the attempted closure within the
discourse,”
48
the binarism of racial identiication forces open a space
of invisibility that gathers the unproductive excess which escapes he-
gemonic articulation altogether. Invisibility in the novel articulates the
diasporization of racial difference, its slippage across the totalities that
determine its politics. It anticipates what Hall refers to as “the politics
of the end of the essential black subject.”
49
For the narrator, who feels
increasingly trapped in the process of subject formation where visibility
is determined by the racial schemas of identiication, this space becomes
a metaphor for freedom and a space for ambivalence and disclosure of
difference in subject formation.
Abandoning the Brotherhood and narrowly escaping from the na-
tionalist clutch of Ras the Destroyer and his cohorts, the narrator
inadvertently assumes invisibility through camoulage on the streets
of Harlem, making others mistake him for one Mr. Rinehart, whose
ambivalent phenomenology seems to resist oversimpliied strategies of
identiication. As the signiied repeatedly slips under the signiier in a
series of displacements where the narrator is assumed to be “Rhine
the runner and Rhine the gambler and Rhine the briber and Rhine the
lover and Rinehart the Reverend” (
IM
498), exposing the very move-
ment of supplementarity and deferral of presence, the narrator’s onto-
logical stability is progressively attenuated: “What on earth was hiding
behind the face of things? If dark glasses and a white hat could blot
out my identity so quickly, who actually was who?” (493). Having no
single signiier to represent him in the ossiied schemas of racial dif-
ference, Rinehart’s world of invisibility, as the narrator realizes, was
one of “possibility,” revealing the rhetorical structure of subjectivizing
regimes:
It was too much for me. I removed my glasses and tucked the white
hat … away. Can it be, I thought, can it actually be? … could he
be all of them: Rine the runner and Rine the gambler and Rine the
briber and Rine the lover and Rinehart the Reverend?… What is real
anyway? But… [i]t was true as I was true. His world was possibility
and he knew it… The world in which we lived was without boundar-
ies. A vast seething, hot world of luidity, and Rine the rascal was at
home [in it]… It was unbelievable, but perhaps only the unbelievable
could be believed. Perhaps the truth was always a lie.
(498)
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