Nella Larsen Read Online Free PDF

materiality of the signifier (form) that Irene “reads.” Yet even when the contents of the letter are revealed, Irene finds herself “puzzling out, as best she could, the carelessly formed words or making instinctive guesses at them.” Thus, the illegibility of the letter simultaneously underscores Clare’s inscrutability, the elusiveness of the text, and Irene’s readerly incompetence. Later, that same inscrutability is written into “the look on Clare’s . . . face,” which Irene finds “unfathomable, utterly beyond any experience or comprehension of hers.” Importantly, the reader’s introduction to both Irene and Clare is framed by the act of reading and being read. And just as Clare becomes the text that Irene must learn to decipher, so Irene, in turn, becomes the text to be deciphered by the reader. What defines this moment, then, is a scene of reading in which the miscegenous text, a stand-in for the miscegenous body, results in “a crisis of representation.” 54 At stake in this crisis of representation is the incongruity between the visible sign and the social and legal meaning of the body. While legally defined as black, both Irene and Clare possess “unmarked bodies” in that both lack the visible markers of blackness.
    This crisis of representation, moreover, is textually embodied in the form and structure of
Passing.
Through its narrative gaps and repressions, as well as its open-ended resistance to closure and resolution, Larsen’s novel performs as an early exemplar of black (post)modernist indeterminacy. Thus, in spite of its modernist affinities, Larsen’s narrative would seem to be best understood in terms of a contemporary (post)modernist perspective, both in the performance of its narrative strategies and structure as well as in the philosophical assumptions grounding its notions of personal and textual identity. As we shall see, the narrative retrospective is punctuated by gaps and ambiguities that ultimately function to expose the contingency of knowledge, to interrogate both racial essentialism and constructionism, and to decenter the autonomous and desiring subject. 55 The repressions of this “writerly” text leave it to the reader, finally, to “fill in” the gaps and lacunae, thereby reconstituting the miscegenous text/body. 56 What is at stake here is the readerly reconstitution of a fragmented and/or suppressed social (and textual) identity.
    Since the message of the letter (text) is only partially revealed, its full meaning is, in effect, repressed. Not only do the textual ellipses and narrative gaps represent the textual unconscious, but Irene’s own repressions as central consciousness leave it to the reader to fill in the textual occlusions. Mindful that the challenge in reading the text is prefigured by Irene’s encounter with Clare’s letter, the reader/ critic, like Irene, must attempt to elicit the mystery of its meaning—to uncover the secret of the text (figured in some respects by the secrecy of Clare’s passing). It is indeed only by filling in the gaps of Larsen’s elusive, elliptical, and equivocal novel—a mode of reading that is demanded by the strategies of (post)-modernism—that the critic/reader is potentially able to reconstitute the meaning of the miscegenous text/ body.
    Again, the reader must bear in mind that Clare is represented only through Irene, thus allowing Clare only secondary characterization. Metaphorically, Clare’s interiority is a gap within the text; her inner life (including her hidden identity) remains sealed in the envelope, whose contents (like Clare herself) are later destroyed by Irene. And like the envelope, which bears no return address, its sender is associated with no precise place or origins (although she travels and resides in New York, Chicago, and Europe). Clare, as we shall see, functions as a kind of textualized network of