May 2024. Passing by Nella Larsen
1929, Reading Essentials, 128 pages. Written in English, read in English.
I have tried to write, and rewrite, the following several times, and I always have to get back to the point of why it’s very difficult — in order to explain Passing, the novel, I have to explain Passing, the concept — and it is very difficult to explain a concept that should not exist in the first place, because by explaining it we are giving it credence.
And yet, it is a part of history, and so we have to unravel even the unsavoury parts of history (and pretend that they are indeed solely part of history), and so forth:
Passing, the novel, is a concise review of of Passing, the concept, which is short for racial passing.
Passing, in the context of passing through, or passing a test. Essentially, it is based on the degenerative assumption that skin color infers anything besides the amount of melanin available in the body, and subsequently, that people with specific skin colors are superior to other people, with other skin colors. Based on that assumption alone, people who belong to the group which genetically, culturally, hereditarily are African-Americans, but that have lighter skin, can be accepted in social functions where they will not be welcome based on their skin color alone.
At the time the novel has been written and takes place — the 1920s — this has been a matter that had been held by specific laws in some places, in which segregation was enforced, but in New York, where the novel takes place (and in Chicago, where it also briefly does), it was a matter of cultural understanding — there are some places that some people should not have been seen in.
And in one of those places, the tea room of the Drayton hotel in Chicago, we find the novel’s first protagonist, Irene Redfield. She is an African-American woman with a lighter skin, and she is flooded with suspicion that everybody else is looking at her in hatred and contempt.
One of the women who she is particularily wary of turns out to be a long lost friend, Clare Kendry — the novel’s second protagonist, who Irene soon realizes has disappeared from their shared social circle because she has married a white man and has since tried to rewrite her past and erase any connection to the African-American community of her youth. Irene, on her part, is a proud member of that community, and therefore we can see the two possible expressions of passing — the incidental one, by which Irene can attend social circles that would have been restricted to her — maybe as a form of protest; and the deliberate one, by which Clare is attempting to become part of those social circles by completely renouncing her past and her community.
The novel then moves in two different directions, entangling Irene and Clare and their husbands in a predicament that leads to a punch-in-the-gut ending which is very much of its literary era — Clare on her part, attempts to take steps to integrate back into her Harlem past community, steps which Irene tries to deflect; Irene’s husband becomes fascinated with Clare and with her strife to become part of the white society; and Irene herself tries to determine whether she should expose Clare’s bigotted husband to the fact that his wife is, in fact, African-American.
Their actions, and their decisions, lead to that tragic end.
The novel is very concise — only about 120 pages. This gives it a benefit and a handicap. The benefit is that, having this short canvas to paint her scenarios on, Larsen has to show all of the different aspects of passing in very specific terms and with very broad strokes; this results in the handicap — that the novel feels a bit like a TV movie in which a subject is explained, in dramatic fashion, in a very belaboured way.
The June 2024 selection for the David Bowie Book Club will be Silence: Lectures and Writing by John Cage
