Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race

She did not try to make me perfect. To her I was already perfect.

-- William E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater ( 1920)

I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Taghkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys' and girls' heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards--ten cents a package-- and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card,--refused it peremptorily, with a glance.

-- William E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk ( 1903)

Even in the matter of girls my peculiar phantasy asserted itself. Naturally, it was in our town voted bad form for boys of twelve and fourteen to show any evident weakness for girls. We tolerated them loftily, and now and then they played in our games, when I joined in quite as naturally as the rest. It was when strangers came, or when the oldest girls grew up that my sharp senses noted little hesitancies in public and searching for possible public opinion. Then I flamed! I lifted my chin and strode off to the mountains, where I viewed the world at my feet and strained my eyes across the shadow of the hills.

-- William E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater ( 1920)

Later, in the high school, there came some rather puzzling distinctions which I can see now were social and racial; but the racial angle was more clearly defined against the Irish than against me. It was a matter of income and ancestry more than color. I have written elsewhere of the case of our exchanging visiting cards when one girl, a new-comer, did not seem to want mine, to my vast surprise.

-- William E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois ( 1968)

This study proposes a critical strategy for analyzing a unique form of desire--the implicit wishes, unstated longings, and vague hungers inscribed in the rhetorical elements of novels written by African Americans. These textual features insinuate puzzling emotional meaning that seems superfluous to the novel's explicit social content. Such surplus meaning is not unique to black novels or black textuality, as I have explained, but is an intrinsic condition of language that Jacques Lacan has

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