#25,
December 12, 2003
A
Common Wind
Pulled kicking and screaming from
the archive, this essay is one of the short pieces published in my second
book, Inside Out, Outside In: Essays in Comparative History (St.
Martin's Press/Macmillan, 2000). It combines the readings of a couple of different
novels separated by almost twenty years . The first was E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime,
which I read in the summer of 1980, not long after the book had appeared.
I had been spending a year as an exchange student at the University of Pennsylvania
and I was on a road trip out to the Rocky Mountains with my brother and some
friends. On the trip, when I wasn't doing my share of driving the beat up
1966 Mustang, I would read quite voraciously. I also consumed The World
According to Garp, I believe, and a fair amount of James Baldwin.
While reading through Ragtime
the novel struck me as very familiar. Quite by happenstance, I had just
finished reading all the Heinrich von Kleist short stories, and the similarities
between one of the subplots in Ragime and “Michael Kolhaas” seemed
to be more than coincidence. I have never seen any criticism of the work along
these lines, but I believe that this borrowing from Kleist is fairly well
known. What was compelling to me at the time was the use of a story about
nascent class struggle in Europe for the development of a narrative highlighting
American race relations. Using E.P. Thompson’s work on The Making of the
English Working Class for developing a social history of African Americans
(as I would later attempt to do in my first book, Sparks from the Anvil
of Oppression) was a logical extension of this transnational borrowing.
Many years later, however, I was
sitting in Pune reading V.S. Naipaul's A Way in the World. The manner
in which Naipaul questioned the notion of agency, particularly in the context
of analysis of race (almost claiming that deploying such a notion might be
ethnocentric), forced my mind back to my reading of Kleist and Doctorow. This
reading made me wonder whether "Michael Kolhaas" really worked in
the manner used by Doctorow, and whether that would still be the case if one
looked at another of Kleist's story which dealt specifically with the Haitian
Revolution. These thoughts led to the following musings.
Yet die not; do thou
Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow
Though fallen thyself, never to
rise again,
Live, and take comfort. Thou hast
left behind
Powers that will work for thee; air, earth and skies;
There’s not a breathing of the
common wind
That will forget thee; thou hast great allies;
Thy friends are exultations, agonies,
And love, and
man’s unconquerable mind.
– William Wordsworth, To
Toussaint L'Ouverture[1]
In E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, the central character,
a black musician named Coalhouse Walker, Jr. is driven to rebellion against
white society by the actions of members of a volunteer fire brigade. Walker
is a successful, self-respecting black man. He is driving his Model T. Ford
past the fire station when he is stopped and his car is dismantled as part
of a racist practical joke. The firemen are saying, in effect, you may be
successful but in America
you are still black.
[2]
Receiving no satisfaction from the authorities, Walker
takes the law into his own hands and carries out a reign of terror in New
York City, culminating in the takeover of J. Peirpont
Morgan’s museum and Booker T. Washington’s unsuccessful intervention to placate
the rebel and have him turn himself in. In effect,
Walker’s predicament and his response
to it represent a commentary on Washington’s
accommodationist philosophy.
As many know, this Doctorow novel owes its origin to a short
story written at the beginning of the 19th century by a young German novelist
named Heinrich von Kleist.[3] Kleist’s story, based
on events that occurred in the 16th century, was named “Michael Kolhaas” and
was about a successful young horse-dealer who has two of his hoses detained and
ill-treated by the Junka von Tronka, whose land he happens to be traveling
through. His horses are taken away from him in the most dishonorable fashion
and Kolhaas seeks retribution, sacrificing everything he has, family and
property, for revenge against the Tronka and the society that elevated him. The
story is set in the sixteenth century, and so we find Martin Luther attempting
to intervene. But Luther is concerned only for law and order, and is unreceptive
to Kolhaas's claim that he had to make this stand, he could do no other.
Almost two centuries divides these two authors, but the story
seems to work in both instances. On the first occasion it is applied to the
issues of class, the division between the aristocrats of Germany
and a nascent bourgeois class; the author is a man looking back at these social
developments through the events of the French Revolution. In the second instance,
the same scenario is attached to the racial divide in the United
States at the nadir of post-emancipation
race relations; in this case Doctorow is surveying this nadir from a post-Civil
Rights movement perspective.
But this equivalence is all too neat, and this is so in a way
that I think tells us something about the dangers of bringing categories of
class and race together. What do we miss if we make the jump from Kolhaas to
Coalhouse reflexively? What we miss is the event that always seems to be missed
– the Haitian revolution.[4] A short story that might easily be paired with
“Michael Kolhaas” is Kleist’s “Betrothal in Santo
Domingo.”[5] In this story we see
the world turned upside down. What we see is the Kolhaases of Saint Domingue
determining that they too need to make their stand. Their butchery, however, is
not looked on quite so favorably as Kolhaas's. In Kolhaas's case we are dealing
with a victim, and his rebellion is justifiable. In the case of Congo Hoango
and company, it seems to be evil and sheer savagery at work. While Martin
Luther is to be ridiculed for intervening on the side of authority in the
Kolhaas piece, one feels that there is a desperate need for some Luther figure
in the second story. Only if we carry
forward the story about Kolhaas to the era of ragtime without knowledge of Haiti
do we feel comfortable with the transposition. With Haiti
in place we feel some dissonance, that the narrative is doing work that it was
not intended to do. Either it cannot be
applied to race, or Coalhouse has in a way been deracinated – incorporated into
a system where we are to feel sympathy with him as no different from one of “us.”
But the questions that were evaded in
the previous story – what of the peasants whom Luther also condemned and the
other “walking fertilizer”, what of such people? – these
things become clear when we know that some stands against oppression are to be
valorized while others, however equivocal, however (non)-violent, are to be
condemned.
But here we do an injustice to Heinrich von Kleist. For,
what arises from the juxtaposition of these two stories is the realization that
it is inadequate to take on the position of comfortable narrator and have the
story develop along easy lines of good against evil. In the case of Kolhaas, we
now know that the first part of the story, based on an 18th-century chronicle
was written in 1808. The later part,
which introduces a lot of complication and tends to undermine the realism of
the first half, was written two years later, at about
the time that Kleist was writing his story of Santo
Domingo.[6] In this later part Kleist introduces a
gypsy-woman who gives to Kolhaas a talisman, and in so doing introduces a “bizarre
and fantastic sub-plot” to the story. What this sub-plot does, in effect, is
take the easy identification with Kolhaas as protagonist away from the reader;
Kolhaas now has a thirst for revenge that isn’t merely reducible to his
mistreatment. If this is an example of Nietsche’s aphorism that “I am just”
really means “I am avenged,” then this is no different for others, who like
Kolhaas have had their “agency” stripped from them. In effect, Kleist racializes Kolhaas, he also endeavors to “class-ify” Santo
Domingo.
In “The Betrothal in Santo Domingo,”
Kleist invites the reader to adopt a racial categorization in which white is
good and black is evil, and then at almost every point along the way he
attempts to dismantle this. A black woman’s evil act of luring a white
slaveowner to her bed when she is dying of yellow fever,
is contrasted with a white woman’s nobility when she goes to the guillotine
during the French Revolution in place of her fiancée. These are the two stories
that the Swiss mercenary tells to the two women who have themselves lured him
into an evil trap.
The younger of these two women, Toni, who is the daughter of
a mulatto woman and white Frenchman, and was born in Paris,
has been given the assignment of trapping white men so that Congo Hoango, an
ungrateful former slave and leader of ex-slaves in that section of the island,
can kill them. But Toni falls in love with this young Swiss mercenary, and in a
way seems to whiten herself. Her attempt to save the
Swiss soldier, however, leads him to suspect that she has been trying to trap
him, and when she finally brings about his rescue, he kills her. Once he learns
the truth, he puts a pistol to his own mouth and commits suicide (with the kind
of mess only Kleist seems to be able to savor, and in the manner that the
author would a few months later end his own life).
The racial categorization is complicated by Toni’s actions,
by the fact that in her eyes not all whites are the same as the French
slaveowners, and by Kleist’s attempts to humanize the actions of Hoango and
Toni’s mother as the story progresses. In addition, the former slaves are no
different from French revolutionaries, who are described in the story of the
noble white woman, as 'inhuman monsters' and 'butchers.' But, in the end it
does not matter: the Swiss man seems trapped in his vision of the woman as either good or evil, white or black – tragedy will follow.
The memory of these events and the couple’s love for each
other, occurring in the face of General Dessalines’ march on Port-au-Prince,
about which Kleist announces, “the world knows,” is
reduced to a small monument hidden beneath a bush in the garden of a Swiss
family who had been saved by the young couple. In such ways, stories that go
against the grain of world historical events become silences to be searched for
and retrieved.
Thinking of Kolhaas and Haiti,
of the “common wind,” V.S. Naipaul's A Way in the World comes to mind.
[7]
For it is altogether too easy to make one-dimensional
men out of revolutionaries – to divest Kolhaas of his irrationality. Naipaul
describes the work of an English travel writer during the period just prior
to decolonization, who was sympathetic to the Grenadian workers’ struggles
in Trinidad of that period. In one particular strike led by a Kolhaas-like
figure, Tubal Uriah Buzz Butler, and supported by a character Naipaul calls
Lebrun, who appears to be modeled on George Padmore (with a twist of C.L.R.
James for good measure), the English author gets carried away in his praise,
turning Butler into a figure of the stature of a Gandhi. According to Naipaul:
The strike he and the trade unions
called came close to being an insurrection. A policeman was burned alive in the
oilfield area. The government began to recruit and arm volunteers. The
atmosphere would have been like that of 1805 or 1831, when there was talk of a
slave revolt. And then, as happened in the slave days, passion died down, and
people returned to being themselves.
This was the subject of the English writer’s book. He
(Foster Morris)
wrote of Tubal Uriah Butler and the
people around him. He wrote of them with the utmost seriousness. He gave them
families, backgrounds; he treated what they said without irony. Nothing like
this had been written about local people before. He wrote of them as though
they were English people – as though they had that kind of social depth and
solidity and rootedness.
For Naipaul, this was praiseworthy, “well-intentioned,...but
it was wrong”:
What was missing from Foster Morris’s view
was what we all lived with: the sense of the absurd, the idea of comedy, which
hid from us our true position. The social depth he gave to ordinary people
didn't make sense. That idea of a background – and what it contained: order and
values and the possibility of stroving: perfectability – made sense only when
people were more truly responsible for themselves. We weren’t responsible in
that way. Much had been taken from our hands. We didn’t have backgrounds. We
didn’t have a past. For most of us the past stopped with our grandparents;
beyond that was blank. If you could look down at us from the sky you would see
us living in our little houses between the sea and the bush; and that was a
kind of truth about us, who had been transported to that place. We were just
there, floating.(p. 81)
Foster Morris, acting the part of social scientist, “didn’t
understand the nature of our deprivation.” He saw “versions of English people and
simplified us.” He could not see that Butler
was considered by his followers, simultaneously, “a kind of messiah” and “a
crazed and uneducated African preacher” (p. 82). Morris also could not
understand that the policeman was not someone reviled by the insurrectionists, “that
he was to become, in calypso and folk memory, a special sacrificial figure, as
famous as Uriah Butler himself, and almost as honoured.” (p. 82).
Morris's “rescue” project had avoided condescension towards
the Butlers and Kolhaases, it
is true; but what of those who could not be given their moment of reason in
the face of oppression? They would remain un-anglicized, their irrationality
– of which they would have the usual measure – characterizing them as far
as it was necessary to characterize them at all.
.
In Helen Gardner, ed., The New Oxford
Book of English Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), p. 504.
.
E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime (New York: Vintage Books, 1991).
.
Heinrich von Kleist, The Marquise of O and Other Stories (Middlesex:
Penguin, 1985), pp. 114-213.
.
Trouillot, Silencing the Past.
.
Kleist, The Marquise, pp. 231-269..
.David
Luke and Nigel Reeves, 'Introduction," in ibid., pp. 27-31.
.
A Way in the World (New York: Vintage, 1994).