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Thursday
In my last two posts, after describing Edgar Allan Poe as an author who dreamt America’s nightmares, I went on to examine two authors—Stephen King and Toni Morrison—who have found themselves on banned book lists for having ventured into the same dark areas. Imagine my satisfaction, then, when I came across a recent article mentioning Morrison’s debt to Poe. In “To Haunt and Be Haunted: On the Exhumation of Edgar Allan Poe,” Ed Simon examines why an author who writes about European manor houses and Italian wine cellars is as American as Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. “There is no true American book,” he writes, “if it doesn’t address genuine monsters”:
Here is the paradox, for in his silence Poe was actually the most American, exemplifying our national talent at sublimation and repression. Edgar Allan Poe, adopted son of a Virginian enslaver; Edgar Allan Poe, who managed the sale of a human being owned by his mother-in-law. “No early American writer,” notes Toni Morrison in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, “is more important to the concept of American Africanism than Poe.” A writer who, as with the best of them, always said more in what he didn’t say, obsessed with that which was too horrible to contemplate. Such history can be buried, but it’s buried alive. The scratching at the lid is incessant.
The scratching at the lid is an allusion to Poe’s “The Premature Burial” although it could also apply to “The Fall of the House of Usher,” where Madeleine Usher is also buried alive. The horror of the latter story lies in the uneasy sense that precedes that actual revelation:
[A]nd now with a feeling of wild amazement –for there could be no doubt whatever that, in this instance, I did actually hear (although from what direction it proceeded I found it impossible to say) a low and apparently distant, but harsh, protracted, and most unusual screaming or grating sound…
This all occurs when the narrator is reading to Roderick Usher, who then confirms what he is hearing:
Not hear it? –yes, I hear it, and have heard it. Long –long –long –many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it –yet I dared not –oh, pity me, miserable wretch that I am! –I dared not –I dared not speak! We have put her living in the tomb! Said I not that my senses were acute? I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them –many, many days ago –yet I dared not –I dared not speak!… [I have heard] the rending of her coffin, and the grating of the iron hinges of her prison, and her struggles within the coppered archway of the vault! Oh whither shall I fly? Will she not be here anon? Is she not hurrying to upbraid me for my haste? Have I not heard her footstep on the stair? Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her heart? MADMAN!” here he sprang furiously to his feet, and shrieked out his syllables, as if in the effort he were giving up his soul –“MADMAN! I TELL YOU THAT SHE NOW STANDS WITHOUT THE DOOR!
Morrison says that this presence of something dark and looming—what she calls the “Africanist presence”–has always existed in the American psyche, countering the social narrative of optimism, confidence and newness that whites prefer. Turning a blind eye to how American exceptionalism has relied on slavery, Native American genocide, and the ruthless exploitation of various minorities (including, at various times, Mexicans, the Chinese, and the Irish) is one way that Americans could feel good about themselves.
Sometimes they will go to extraordinary lengths to ignore the history. A recent example is Defense Secretary Pet Hegseth exonerating the soldiers who carried out the horrific 1890 Wounded Knee massacre of 250 Lakota Sioux men, women and children. In past posts I’ve mentioned how, when I was learning about President Andrew Jackson in 7th grade Tennessee history, there was no mention of his infamous Trail of Tears, even though it went right through our playground. Nor were North Carolina students taught about the 1898 Wilmington massacre or Oklahoma students about the 1921 Tulsa race massacre.
Last night, in a session sponsored by Sewanee’s Friends of the Library (which I head), we learned about Tennessee’s continuing efforts to whitewash history, which includes removing from library shelves books about the Holocaust, the Japanese internment, and Black history in general. But such attempted erasures, instead of eliminating the scratching, just increase the intensity so that (to switch stories) they grow “louder! louder! louder! louder!” (“Tell-Tale Heart”).
As a result, the world feels like an increasingly frightening place, with new candidates for demonization cropping up every moment (and every election cycle): Muslims, immigrants, transgenders, feminists, city dwellers. As Freud has taught us, what is repressed becomes toxic and returns in the form of monsters, and in their fear people embrace guns and violence. Further repression, of course, just deepens the fears so that soon every protester, every Charlie Kirk critic, every Black female prosecutor, every Democratic governor who opposes Trump, must be locked up or fired.
In classic American literature, these dark fears achieve particular prominence in Southern Gothic writers such as Flannery O’Connor, James Dickey, and especially William Faulkner. Having witnessed the horrors of racism close-up, they realize they are harder to bury. Consequently, in a novel like Faulkner’s Light in August, one sees the hysteria set in motion by a biracial character who defies easy racial characterization, thereby calling into question that whole system of differentiation upon which people base their identities. In the end, Joe Christmas is castrated and killed in an act designed to restore order.
But order can never be restored as long as it is reliant on the oppression of others. Until we face up to it and actively seek to fulfill the promise articulated in “the Declaration of Independence,” that past will not only fail to die but (to borrow from Faulkner) never become past.
A further note on Sewanee’s Banned Book Week event: In last night’s session we heard from children’s book author Christina Soontornvat, a founding member of Authors against Book Bans, and Keri Lambert of the Rutherford County [Tennessee] Library Alliance, which recently received the Tennessee Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Award. Lambert reported on the concerted effort in Murfreesboro, Tennessee to ban books and how that effort has expanded to the state legislature, which is attempting to circumvent Supreme Court rulings while threatening teachers and librarians with legal action. Soontornvat, meanwhile, observed that parents should be grateful that educators are providing professional guidance regarding what books will benefit individual students, such guidance often being absent when it comes to their internet use. She also noted that book banners often cite passages out of context from books they haven’t read.
Lambert reported that, after a fundamentalist church would come to school board meetings in white shirts to attack books, their opponents countered by wearing purple. The result is that Murfreesboro librarians are now forbidden to wear purple. Rainbow colors are also verboten.
