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Paranoid Interpretation, Desire's Nonobject, and Nella Larsen's Passing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Brian Carr
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Abstract

This article claims that much of the contemporary scholarship on Nella Larsen's Passing attempts to correct the delusional apprehensions of the novel's main character, Irene Redfield. I suggest that this corrective effort ultimately places critics in the paranoid orbit they aim to diagnose. Critics are unable to escape the logic of paranoia primarily because they read Irene's paranoia according to a conventional tropology of paranoia, homosexuality, and delusional jealousy. The paranoid gesture tries to prove that Passing is “really about” homosexuality and simply passing itself off as a novel about racial passing. I work through the psychoanalytic concepts of desire and paranoia to show how the novel incessantly thematizes the processes by which race and sexuality are substantialized in the scholarship. Ultimately, it is because Passing rigorously drains identitarian categories of substance that the novel is available to the paranoid substantializing of critics.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 119 , Issue 2 , March 2004 , pp. 282 - 295
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2004

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