A reading of Absalom Absalom! and Invisible Man vis-à-vis Obama’s electoral victory

by Mahendran THIRUVARANGAN

Ralph Ellison

“And so it came to pass that on Nov 4, 2008, shortly after 11 p.m. ET, the American Civil War ended, as a black man - Barack Hussein Obama - won enough electoral votes to become President of the US.” (Thomas Friedman, Nytimes.com.)

When I was watching the US celebrating Obama’s electoral victory on TV with a batchmate, I told my batchmate, “Benedict Anderson is wrong.” My initial response to Obama’s victory was somewhat similar to Thomas Friedman’s view, for I had thought Obama’s victory, in contrast to Anderson’s theory of the nation demonstrated a ‘real’ horizontal comradeship among the different groups of people-blacks and whites-who constitute the American nation. As in the case of Friedman, Obama’s victory, at that point, made me think that the exploitation of blacks by whites and the inequality between blacks and whites in the US had come to an end overnight. A few months later, however, when reading some key American literary texts which address the question of race in the US, I began to wonder whether my original thoughts on Obama’s election as President of the US were valid. I found my earlier position contested as I began to see Obama’s personality and the “historic” election results from a different angle, vis-à-vis the black characters whom I came across in those texts.

Invisible Man

In my attempt to position Obama’s electoral victory in the larger context of race relations between blacks and whites, and racial discrimination against blacks in the US as depicted in texts like ‘Invisible Man’, ‘Absalom Absalom!’ ‘Nigger Jeff,’ ‘Dry September,’ and ‘Crickets,’ I found myself grappling with a series of questions: Is Obama a “product” of miscegenation like Jim Bond in ‘Absalom Absalom!,’ and therefore his victory a sign of a shift in white Americans’ attitude towards miscegenation? Is Obama a representative of all African-Americans in the US? Or is he the antithesis of the exploited black hero of ‘Invisible Man’? Does Obama’s victory signify the transformation of the white American psyche to looking down on the black man as a rapist from glorifying him as the leader of the US? Though there are no clear-cut answers to these questions, (and I do not respond to all of them in this paper), they enable us, as readers of American Literature, to finesse our understanding of “race” in the US in the light of Obama’s victory and to explore the interactions and tensions between the (literary) text and the context as regards the question of race in the US.

William Faulkner

Whether it is in the US or any other country categories of race are not physiologically self-evident. Social, cultural and institutional forces actively engage in the construction and preservation of racial categories. In the US, white supremacists, particularly those from the American South, wanted to preserve a “pure white race” by imposing a taboo on interracial marriages. During the Civil War and even afterwards miscegenation was seen by Southern whites as a threat to white authority and to the superior position whites occupied by virtue of ‘race’ in the social ladder. In William Faulkner’s ‘Absalom Absalom!’, the fall of Thomas Sutpen, the white slave owner, is portrayed as having resulted from his “sin” of engaging in miscegenation. Faulkner draws our attention to the stringent manner in which the taboo on miscegenation was maintained by Southern whites through Henry Sutpen, the “pure-white” son of Thomas Sutpen, who considers miscegenation to be more awful than incest. In ‘Dreams from My Father’, Obama highlights that miscegenation was seen as a crime by white Americans when his African father married his white American mother:

In 1960, the year that my parents were married, ‘miscegenation’ described a felony in over one half the states in the Union. In many parts of the South, my father could have been strung up from a tree for merely looking at my mother the wrong way; in the most sophisticated northern cities, the hostile stares, the whispers, might have driven a woman in my mother’s predicament into a back-alley abortion. Their very image together would have been considered lurid and perverse, a handy retort to the handful of softhearted liberals who supported a civil rights agenda.

(Obama, 12)

Considering the vehement opposition to miscegenation widespread among white Americans in the middle of the twentieth-century, Obama’s election as President of the US in 2008 indicates a progressive shift in the white American psyche on the question of race. In ‘Absalom Absalom!’, Thomas Sutpen’s disowned son Charles Bon, a product of miscegenation, like Obama, returns to Sutpen Hundred to claim his paternity and inheritance. However, his quest for his rights ends up in a failure as he is killed by his half brother Henry. Although Faulkner’s novel does not predict that the USA would elect its first African-American President in the twenty-first-century, through the presence of Jim Bond, the only surviving member of the Sutpen family and a person of mixed-blood, and through Shreve’s remarks, Faulkner foretells that miscegenation would be inevitable in the future, and that people of mixed origins would be dominant in the western hemisphere:

I think that in time the Jim Bonds are going to conquer the western hemisphere. Of course, it won’t quite be in our time and of course as they spread toward the poles they will bleach out again like the rabbits and the birds do, so they won’t show up against the snow. But it will still be Jim Bonds; and so in a few thousand years, I who regard you will also have sprung from the loins of African kings. (Faulkner, 311)

Faulkner locates the story of his novel in a seventy-five year period ending in 1909. Interracial marriages were unlawful in the US until “the Supreme Court declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional” in 1967 (Microsoft(r) Student 2009). Nearly 100 years after the story of Faulkner’s novel, and almost forty years after the Supreme Court’s decision, the world has witnessed Obama’s electoral victory. When we look at Obama alongside the character of Charles Bon, we see that in 2008, a son of mixed origin, or a “product” of miscegenation, has been given political recognition by Americans including whites. Although we cannot jump to the conclusion that Obama’s election signifies the end of discrimination against blacks, for me, it is a radical opening step towards dismantling the edifice of race in the US, when compared with the situation portrayed in ‘Absalom Absalom!’

Barack Obama’s election as President of the US has drawn the attention of the entire world. Certainly, it is a turning point in the history of America and African-Americans considering the presence of white extremism in American society even now. However, when we look at Obama’s election vis-à-vis the trials and tribulations of the hero of ‘Invisible Man’, we see a marked difference between the two figures. Given that the majority of African-Americans in the US are poor, underpaid, politically marginalized and discriminated against in educational institutions, I see the protagonist of Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man’ as a better representative than Barack Obama of African-Americans. Obama himself, in his autobiography, expresses his fear and doubt that he was, like some of his fellow elite African-American students of mixed parenthood who preferred the label “multiracial” to “black” to describe themselves (Obama, 99), distancing himself from the problems of the underclass blacks in his student days:

William Faulkner

We, the half-breeds and the college-degreed, take a survey of the situation and think to ourselves, Why should we get lumped in with the losers if we don’t have to? We become only so grateful to lose ourselves in the crowd, America’s happy, faceless marketplace; and we’re never so outraged as when a cabbie drives past us or the woman in the elevator clutches her purse, not so much because we’re bothered by the fact that such indignities are what less fortunate coloureds have to put up with every single day of their lives-although that’s what we tell ourselves-but because we’re wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and speak impeccable English and yet have somehow been mistaken for an ordinary nigger. (Obama, 100)

In terms of education, in contrast to the hero of ‘Invisible Man’, who was expelled from college for a reason for which he is not responsible, Obama has “gone to some of the best schools in America” (Obama, Huffingtonpost.com.).

The hero of ‘Invisible Man’ finds himself and underprivileged blacks exploited and used as a “material” or a “natural resource” at white-dominant industrial centres and political movements-which the Liberty Paints and the Brotherhood represent respectively-not only by whites but also by self-interested blacks, who want to move up the social ladder at the expense of the black man or black woman’s emancipation (Ellison, 439). The denial of educational and employment opportunities and political freewill to Ellison’s hero, depriving him of his agency to bring about a positive and progressive change in his quest for individuality as well in the lives of underprivileged African-Americans, has made him feel frustrated. Ultimately, while Obama enters the portals of the White House and emerges as the most “visible” African-American of our times as well as in the history of the USA, the (anti)hero of ‘Invisible Man’, “hidden away” in a manhole, “comes to no true resolution of his dilemma except the realization that his humanity is invisible to most persons, Negroes as well as white, and that he must discover for himself what he thinks, feels, and is” (Margolies, 131). Obama’s white upbringing and the higher position he occupies in the social scale have aided him to fight Hilary Clinton and John McCain, two white candidates, successfully, in the race for the presidency.

Obama’s position, when juxtaposed with that of Ellison’s hero, demonstrates that African-Americans in the twenty-first-century are not a unified community, but are divided along class lines, and that the doors of success are open only to those who occupy the upper echelons of the social ladder.

Obama’s victory

In this regard, when we look at the politics of race in the US we should not ignore the points where class intersects with race, and creates internal hierarchies within the broad categories of race.

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country - a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old — is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know — what we have seen - is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope - the audacity to hope - for what we can and must achieve tomorrow. (Obama, Huffingtonpost.com.)

Though political commentators may celebrate that Obama’s electoral victory marks the liberation of blacks from historical exploitation, and that there is absolute racial equity in the US in the twenty-first-century, the above extract from Obama’s speech underlines that Obama does not agree with such views. While bringing to the fore the progress the US has made in terms of race relations between blacks and whites, Obama is aware of the fact that the country has much to achieve in the future to reduce the socio-economic gap between the two communities. We should accept the fact that there is a definite progression between the situations we come across in the two texts - ‘Absalom Absalom’! and ‘Invisible Man’ - and race relations between whites and blacks in the US at present, against the backdrop of Obama’s election as President of the US. An interesting point about these texts with regard to Obama’s electoral victory is that ‘Absalom Absalom’ and ‘Invisible Man’ have, in different ways, recorded the history of race relations in the US at particular points in time, and that they prevent us from being carried away by Obama’s victory by constantly drawing our attention to the historical injustices against blacks by whites.

By bringing to the fore the multiple ways in which blacks were marginalized in the US in the past, the texts consciously or unconsciously produce and re-produce the race binary-black vs. white-in the discourses which they have initiated. As twenty-first-century readers of American literature, we need to be cautious about approaching the question of race in the US along the binary of black and white as set out in the two texts. Many of us have internalized the idea that race relations in the US mean relationships between whites and blacks; but Obama, in his speech, wants us to see the presence of Asians and Latinos in the US to understand what “race” and “race relations” mean in the US at present. The texts discussed here centre on the issue of interracial relationships between whites and blacks, and therefore, for me, they only initiate a discussion on “race” and “race relations” in the US, which needs to be developed further and complemented by a discussion on texts which discuss the place of Asian and Latino immigrants in the contemporary social, cultural, political and economic milieu of the US. It is only when we consider the socio-economic and political footing of the races which fall outside the binary of black and white that we could explore the directions in which the conversation on race initiated by Faulkner and Ellison in the twentieth-century is being carried on in the US in President Obama’s time.