Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, Recalcitrant Subjects, and Wrong FeelingPriest, Madison
2021 Twentieth-Century Literature
doi: 10.1215/0041462x-9528787
Helga Crane, the heroine of Nella Larsen’s critically acclaimed 1928 novel, Quicksand, is a maddening protagonist. Hysterical, reactive, impulsive, and compulsive, she seems constitutionally incapable of finding any sort of happiness. In accounting for Helga’s frustrating and inexplicable choices, critics tend to blame either Helga’s psyche or her environment. This essay offers an alternative approach, one that troubles the sharp distinctions between interior and exterior on which these readings implicitly rely by arguing that Helga and recalcitrant subjects like her exhibit “wrong feeling.” Wrong feeling is a peculiarly twentieth-century phenomenon—an enactment of the modernist allergy to sentiment that nonetheless takes up modernism’s key tropes. Manifesting as affective overflowing, it has no discernible locus in either self or world and yields a series of repetitive, frustrating, and ineffectual choices. In disrupting the divide between interior and exterior, wrong feeling provides an unsettling critique of the world that undoes Helga, even as it implicates Helga in her own undoing. In the end, this essay tells a story of punishment—of the iterative mechanisms and repercussions of feeling the wrong way, about the wrong things and for the wrong reasons—tracing the workings of wrong feeling within Larsen’s first novel and beckoning toward the ways the idea might help us recognize the import of recalcitrant subjectivity beyond Quicksand itself.
James Weldon Johnson’s Feminization of BiracialityWalker, Rafael
2021 Twentieth-Century Literature
doi: 10.1215/0041462x–9528800
In considering fictions centered on characters of mixed Black-and-white parentage, critics tend to assimilate these stories into African American literary paradigms—in much the same way that, in real life, America considers biracial people as simply black. Working against this reductive reflex, this essay reads James Weldon Johnson’s 1912 novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man as a serious exploration of biracial identity and experience. Specifically, the article argues that Johnson draws on early twentieth-century conceptions of femininity as a vehicle for rendering mainly three facets of the lives of many biracial men: (1) hypervisibility (in a world obsessed with skin color), (2) sexuality (when identification is distorted), and (3) self-determination (where a racial hierarchy appears to eliminate agency). In its conclusion, the article suggests that the prevailing tendencies among readers of the novel to condemn the ex-colored man stems from an investment in the trope of the “tragic mulatto”—a plot device that at once sentimentalizes the fates of biracial characters and links those fates inextricably to biology rather than ideology.
Reading the Archival Remains of Arturo Islas’s La Mollie and the King of TearsFagan, Allison
2021 Twentieth-Century Literature
doi: 10.1215/0041462x-9528815
This essay considers Arturo Islas’s posthumously published novel, La Mollie and the King of Tears (1996), arguing that an examination of its “archival remains”—its drafted and rejected material found in Islas’s archive—offers compelling evidence of the text’s anxious resistances to bodily, narrative, and cultural annihilation. Drawing on textual scholarship that prioritizes notions of texts as “fluid” or “in process” as well as on theories of queer and asycnhronous temporalities, I argue for a reading of the novel as haunted by its erasures and absences, and for a reading practice that more purposefully imagines the role of the body—of the author, of the text, and of the reader— in constituting and reconstituting the narrative.
Setting The Waste Land in OrderBlevins, Jeffrey
2021 Twentieth-Century Literature
doi: 10.1215/0041462x-9528829
Are T. S. Eliot’s notes on The Waste Land a scholarly resource or a literary hoax? This oft-repeated question gets to the heart of the poem, which thrives on its allusions, whether seriously or cynically. However, scholars have largely passed over the notes’ (and the poem’s) numberings, despite their complexity and superabundance—a panoply of quantitative relations running alongside the qualitative references. These numberings, with startling frequency, do not compute, which poses a philosophical dilemma greater than arithmetical errors would seem to imply. As a graduate student at Harvard, Eliot took course notes on mathematical logic and number theory that show him grappling again and again with a concept of numerical irrationality, a dilemma that, for him, seems to threaten the coherence of the world itself, the failures of enumeration auguring broader pandemonium. Under the tutelage of Bertrand Russell, Eliot turns to logic in an attempt to discern a coherent system for numbers (and therefore life), but he grows disenchanted with how logic’s paradoxes of self-reference undermines that very possibility. In turn, these paradoxes inform The Waste Land as an irrational subtext, as small miscalculations in the poem and the notes herald impending physical disasters, psychological hazards, and metaphysical perils. In the end, how we count its numbers turns out to have important implications for how we account for The Waste Land’s puzzling and even deadly subjects.
Stupidity, Intellect, and Hierarchy in Lawrence and HuxleyParkes, Adam
2021 Twentieth-Century Literature
doi: 10.1215/0041462x-9528842
Pairing D. H. Lawrence with Aldous Huxley, this essay explores representations of aristocracy—hereditary and intellectual—in British modernism. Lawrence and Huxley often associate aristocracy with stupidity, satirizing the expertise of the expert as well as the intellectual vacancy of the rich and titled. And they satirize each other. But they do not follow Romantic poetry in idealizing the idiot, the simpleton, or figures of social deprivation, Huxley directly targeting Wordsworthian notions of virtuous simplicity in Those Barren Leaves (1925). Dissolving distinctions between rich and poor, high and low, stupid and intelligent, Lawrence and Huxley undo the hierarchicalism with which they are typically identified in modernist studies.