Rhizome, Race, and Face: Nella Larson’s Passing and the Deleuzo-Guatarian Destabilization of Racial Identity

ENG 607: Literary Theory with Dr. Joyce Huff

Under the second aspect, the abstract machine of faciality assumes a role of selective response, or choice: given a concrete face, the machine judges whether it passes or not, whether it goes or not, on the basis of the elementary facial units. This time, the binary relation is of the "yes-no" type. The empty eye or black hole absorbs or rejects, like a half-doddering despot who can still give a signal of acquiescence or refusal.

—A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, “Year Zero: Faciality” Page 177

Irene's opinion, with those dark, almost black, eyes and that wide mouth like a scarlet flower against the Ivory of her skin. Nice clothes too, just right for the weather, thin and cool without being mussy, as summer things were so apt to be…. Very slowly she looked around, and into the dark eyes of the woman in the green frock at the next table…. for a moment her brown eyes politely returned the stare of the other's black ones… What strange languorous eyes she had!

—Passing Page 10

 Introduction

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s collaborative work A Thousand Plateau’s: Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a book that resists definition. If I were to attempt such an explanation, I would have to refer to it with the term it created for itself: rhizomatic. It moves and fills areas of influence and intensities as it seeks to describe a postmodern world of roots and rhizome, machines, and bodies. Deleuze and Guattari created it with this fluidity, and the ability to expand as new lines of flight are discovered, from their convergences new ways of seeing are possible. The connection between A Thousand Plateaus and Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larsen has not been noted at any length in the existing scholarship, and at first glance, her seminal novella Passing does not seem like a text that would benefit from a Deleuzean poststructuralist approach when there is ample scholarship viewing passing from a deconstructivist perspective. I would like to suggest, however, that Larsen’s text is an ideal specimen for Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic ideological landscape. This text exists, as with Clare and Irene, a plateau that connects the multiplicities of whiteness and non-whiteness from “underground.” The indeterminacy of Clare’s death is the extreme deterritorialization that Deleuze and Guattari warn us about and that remains the risk of any destructionist project. Emergent from these spaces is a picture consistent with Deleuze and Guattari’s systemic model of desiring-machines that come together in multiplicities, and assemblages that dissolve the artificial divisions of the world, representation, and subject. I argue that viewing Passing rhizomatically will allow us to both deconstruct the essential notions of racialized boundaries and people, but also to examine the mechanized organisms that result in ideas such as face, race, and space. I will develop this conception of Passing as not only a deconstructing act but a literary artifact that is its own assemblage of multiplicities illustrating lines of flight that reveal a new reality that contains growth and deterritorialization. Utilizing poststructuralist theorists Deleuze and Guattari, I will show how Larson’s text is engaged in the process of rhizomatic writing, as well as the pragmatic ability of this novel to subvert the mechanization of racially definite literatures.

            The landscape of this paper will move through the vantage points of A Thousand Plateaus and show that from these ideological positions we can view the system of connections throughout Larsen’s text. Of particular interest to our purpose is the conception of the Rhizome, but also that of the Body without Organs (BwO), and their conception of the Faciality Machine. The primary characters in Passing are two women who seek to move through the world by means of the construction and deconstruction of racialized identity in an act known as passing: “All passing figures possess two traits: undecidable bodies and a will to displace themselves. Passing is not so much a change of identity as it is an uprooting and a displacement from the place in which the passing figure was once embedded” (Carter 232). Passing is the act of uprooting the territorialized system of race and destabilizing the genealogical conception of racial identity. Passing is the performance of an identity other than the one you are expected to occupy based on your blood or perceived bodily traits, and often is practiced to increase agency, freedom, and movement in the world while subverting the mechanisms that attempt to organize your identity. Identity, especially racial identity is often seen as an external fact by which judgments are made. Passing allows race to become fluid and in this fluidity, a freedom from race seems possible. Marginalized groups seek to pass because it is by nature of their marginalized identity that their agency is restricted. They pass as a deconstructing act as to uproot themselves as a racialized subject, but as Deleuze and Guattari tell us, uprooting one’s identity is often a violent act. To pull the rooted plant up is to expose the roots and results in the vulnerability of the subject whose roots are now exposed to the world. The desire to “pass” however, emerges as a way to avoid the stopping mechanisms that would enact violence on them, and passing has always been an act of survival in a racist world. To pass is to be aware of the mechanisms that racialize you and the ways you are organized by the world, and with that awareness, the passing subject manipulates the assumptions of others to deterritorialize the identity that they would otherwise be labeled as.

There is security in identarian notions of self, but there is restriction. Likewise, there is the possibility of escape from the confines of race if you seek to break free of the abstract machines that act upon you and organize your existence, but there is a great risk. It is no simple affair to deterritorialize the face Deleuze and Guattari note, and as Clare fragments on the pavement, we see the consequences of becoming rhizome with too violent of an act. As we are developing this conception of the rhizomatic nature of Passing and of the act of passing more generally in this essay, an important aspect of the conversation that must be kept in mind is that a rhizome is without a middle. I am seeking to situate Passing within a rhizome and its greater sociopolitical contexts, and the characters that in some ways function as regions of intensities reflective of the greater outside world, because as Deleuze and Guattari explain:

As an assemblage, a book has only itself, in connection with other assemblages and in relation to other bodies without organs. We will never ask what a book means, as signified or signifier; we will not look for anything to understand in it. We will ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed, and with what bodies without organs it makes its own converge. A book exists only through the outside and on the outside. (“Introduction: Rhizome”, 4)

 A book is only limited to the lines of flight that we are able to see: “In a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification” (“Introduction: Rhizome”, 3). Nella Larsen’s Passing is both of these and presents a model for the kind of object that Deleuze and Guattari are describing in A Thousand Plateaus. The text that Larsen created cannot be limited to the words on the page alone, but rather must include the ways in which the world reaches into the plot and the lines of flight that escape the strata of the pages and emerge into new plateaus outside the printed pages. Within the book, as Deleuze and Guattari theorize, there exists a dual nature, that which seeks to stratify and the BwO that seeks to deterritorialize. Irene and Clare occupy these roles respectively and I will illustrate the ways in which the Organism and the Body without Organs remain in conflict throughout the text.

The way that Clare and Irene practice their subversions to the Racialized Organism brings them into conflict with one another, and this conflict is the BwO and its opposition to the racialized body is at work in Passing. Irene is a figure who desires the stability of the organism and territorialized strata and seeks to preserve the stability of her life by resisting movement and change. If we are thinking in Deleuzean terms, it is almost as if she is seeking out controlling power structures and genealogical identity to give her life stability in a way that is contrary to Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of Schizoanalysis.[1] Some examples of this in terms of Irene’s plot trajectory is how she resists the guidance to educate her children about the risks of being black in America. As well as this, the twisted jealousy she has about her husband’s supposed desire for Clare. Clare on the other hand stands in opposition to Irene’s desire for stability. Clare is a figure who defines herself by moving freely through the racialized boundaries that attempt to hold her down. Everywhere that Clare goes she is an unraveling force that breaks territories and desires to deterritorialize herself so that she is not limited in the connections she is able to make by becoming Rhizome.

In the following sections, I will move through the concepts of Rhizome, BwO, and Faciality. Trying as it were to stand from the plateaus that these perspectives make for us as we look towards Passing. The rhizome can only be viewed in part and from a vantage point, in the use of Deleuze and Guattari’s framework we will view the rhizome from the plateau’s that they create for us. Bringing these aspects together will allow us new possibilities with our understanding of passing as both a book and a text.

Rhizome

If it’s true as Brian Redfield claims when talking to Irene about passing, that it is the: “Instinct of the race to survive and expand." (Larsen 39), then there is nothing in more agreement with Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of the Rhizome and our task of approaching this text. Deleuze and Guattari use the book as their model for the rhizome, it is the assemblage of multiplicities and stratified territories and it is the body without organs, and more than this, it is the deterritorializing machine that moves through strata.

The rhizome is inseparable from survival, without a center it spreads around corners and the damage dealt to one part does not end the existence of the whole. Some of the oldest organisms in the world are rhizomatic, and they take the form of massive fungi that spread underground through their mycelium. The individually fragile pathways are protected in their multiplicities and the fragmented passages transport nutrients to all areas of life. Fungi are a deconstructing force—they are deterritorialized and deterritorializing—and the physical outcroppings of fungi are only one line of flight from their underground rhizomatic whole. As Sean Molloy emphasizes, “one does not understand a rhizome from within, but only after the line of flight has left it” (385), and while the rhizomatic mycelium is hidden beneath the earth, it is through exposure to the world that a line of flight takes shape as an intelligible mushroom. The history of racism is filled with underground rhizomes and lines of flight because it is from the stratifications of the rhizome that change occurs: “There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome” (9). The Underground Railroad was a rhizomatic survival strategy, and its lines of flight were indeterminable and constantly shifting, the rhizomatic nature of the enslaved person escaping the stratification of racism was inextricably linked to survival. To become a freed slave is to deterritorialize oneself from the violent enactments of enslavement as an organizing system. The more contemporary creation of grassroots movements and civil rights issues that seem well up from everywhere are effective because they lack a singular root cause. They send out lines of flight from the stratifications of power which take hold as new regions of intensity. They are called grassroots movements because they are created by the general population, and grass to is botanically rhizomatic because no singular blade of grass is necessary for the survival of the whole, but it is only through its multiplicities that we understand it as a whole.

Multiplicities are defined by the outside: by the abstract line, the line of flight or deterritorialization according to which they change in nature and connect with other multiplicities. The plane of consistency (grid) is the outside of all multiplicities. The line of flight marks: the reality of a finite number of dimensions that the multiplicity effectively fills; the impossibility of a supplementary dimension, unless the multiplicity is transformed by the line of flight; the possibility and necessity of flattening all of the multiplicities on a single plane of consistency or exteriority, regardless of their number of dimensions. ("Introduction: Rhizome”, 9)

 The rhizome is the living image of the world that premises A Thousand Plateaus, it is a moving series of connections and intersections that is defined by its resistance to definition. The rhizome does not have a center or an origin, there is not a seed from which everything else has sprung, rather it is without center and it is fundamentally antigenealogical. A rhizome is created from multiplicities and it is from the lines of flight that we can survey the rhizome as each departure creates: “a new plateau from which to survey the one beneath; the new plateau, however, in escaping the old is qualitatively different and has connected with other multiplicities. The rhizome, being immanent, defies definition. The rhizome, being a multiplicity, is in essence indefinite and can only be spoken of in part” (Malloy 385). Not all areas of the rhizome are the same, there are regions of intensity that are assemblages of lines of flight that explode from the strata of the rhizome into new possibilities. All rhizomatic intersections and stratification have the same potential to send forth lines of flight that in turn create new plateaus. 

Passing is an act of survival in a world that differentiates the value of life based on perceived markers of identity and enacts violence on some groups more than others. When we view the world rhizomatically we can see the power structures that define what is acceptable behavior and what is not based on what the dominant power structures expect to see. These power structures seek to control the body so that it is easily organized into society’s hierarchy. Passing attempts to adjust patterns of behavior in such a way that you are able to move undetected into a space that is occupied by a social group (often the dominant group) other than your own. There are layers of assumptions about racialized identity that are incorporated into the social mechanism that places people into racially definite boundaries and roles. Those who choose to “pass” such as Clare Kendry do so because their racialized selves are under threat of violence if they do not act and move in a way that is consistent with the policing gaze that seeks to organize them. Clare ruptures from the segmentarity of the racialized system she is was stratified into when she chooses to marry John Bellew:

“When the chance to get away came, that omission was of great value to me. When Jack, a schoolboy acquaintance of some people In the neighbourhood, turned up from South America with untold gold, there was no one to tell him that I was coloured, and many to tell him about the severity and the religiousness of Aunt Grace and Aunt Edna. You can guess the rest.” (Larsen 19)

We can see Clare’s motivation to depart from all that was known and familiar to her. She is living with her highly religious Aunts after having been dissatisfied with the ties of race. In this rupture, she begins her journey into becoming the Body without Organs, and as Critical Race Theorist Awad Ibrahim notes, “It [BwO] is a ‘line of flight’ or a constant state of possibilities, territorialization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization…it is pure intensities” (15). In Clare’s rupture, we see her deterritorialization, but in the text we see her reterritorializing in Irene’s gaze. The conflict between the deterritorialized self and the organism is imbodied in their relationship.

The Body without Organs

Ibrahim applies BwO[2] “in a metaphoric sense as an assemblage that does not have an end or a beginning, structure or restriction; as a state of becoming we are always at work to attain, we can never get there and once and for all say: we have reached the state of BwO” (15), and it is in that state of movement we find Clare. As Deleuze and Guattari highlight in their articulation of the book, every book has both the deterritorializing BwO and the Organizing Desiring Machines.  Clare is the BwO aspect of Larsen’s text and moves ruthlessly as a deterritorializing machine that threatens the stability of Irene’s life.

The BwO is desire; it is that which one desires and by which one desires… Desire stretches that far: desiring one's own annihilation, or desiring the power to annihilate. Money, army, police, and State desire, fascist desire, even fascism is desire. There is desire whenever there is the constitution of a BwO under one relation or another. (“Year Zero: Faciality”, 165)

The BwO is the site upon which desiring-machines take hold. It is a blank piece of paper, the undifferentiated and un-territorialized site. It is indefinite, and it has its own directions/ goals/ movements that move away from the machines that seek to organize it. Desiring machines act upon the BwO in an attempt to overtake and organize it. The example that Deleuze and Guattari use in this explanation is Capital and the Capitalism as the BwO and the Desiring Machine, respectively. The Capitalist seeks to overtake the Capital but is never able to. The Capitalist seeks to organize the Capital into a market (i.e. a controlled/organized system of capital). Desire is the organ(s) of a body, and as in an animal’s body, the organs define the ways in which they must act. A body with organs must eat and sleep, and it is through organs that life is organized. However, the BwO and the Organs are not enemies, the enemy of the BwO is the Organism. The Organism is the organized and territorialized body where the multiplicities are organized into a seemingly definite whole.

If the BwO is a limit, if one is forever attaining it, it is because behind each stratum, encasted in it, there is always another stratum. For many a stratum, and not only an organism, is necessary to make the judgment of God. A perpetual and violent combat between the plane of consistency, which frees the BwO, cutting across and dismantling all of the strata, and the surfaces of stratification that block it or make it recoil. (“How do you Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?”, 159)

The Organism seeks to reproduce itself and the desiring-machines which define desire to expand and organize others. While the Organism and the BwO are enemies and constantly engaged in a combat of territorialization and deterritorialization, it’s important to keep in mind that all objects possess both of these facets. However, some people embrace one over the other and often seek to suppress or subvert one or the other. As I have mentioned Clare is the deterritorializing force in Passing, but Irene is the Organism: “in her adherence to her own class and kind; not merely in the great thing of marriage, but in the whole pattern of her life as well” (Larsen 25). The divergence of Irene and Clare is such that they embody the opposition between the BwO and the Organism. Irene is the root book and resists the uprooting of identity along with the vulnerability that comes with it. Clare moves away from the organizing mechanism of race in the deterritorialization of passing, but there is always a risk in rupturing into a line of flight away from the organisms that seek to impose order:

These lines always tie back to one another. That is why one can never posit a dualism or a dichotomy, even in the rudimentary form of the good and the bad. You may make a rupture, draw a line of flight, yet there is still a danger that you will reencounter organizations that restratify everything, formations that restore power to a signifier, attributions that reconstitute a subject (“Introduction: Rhizome”, 9)

Clare’s line of flight is constantly frustrated by her encounters with organizing machines, and both John Bellew and Irene are forces that seek to lock Clare into a stable sense of identity. It is only in Clare’s constant movement between racialized spaces that she achieves a sense of deterritorialized self. Jack is an organizing and Racializing force that acts upon Clare in order to Organize her as a white body, a spouse, and a mother: “‘Damn Jack! He keeps me out of everything. Everything I want. I could kill him! I expect I shall, some day’” (Larsen 51). 

The perpetual and often encounters feel like the relationship between the BwO and Race as experienced by people who pass. They seek to move beyond the stratum that binds them and the racialized territories created by what Deleuze and Guattari call the Faciality Machine. Their efforts are perpetually met by yet another stratum that seeks to bind them again. The person who seeks to pass seeks to dismantle themselves as an organism, by unhooking themselves from the points of signification and they also risk a great deal, as Deleuze and Guattari mention, “in dismantling the organism there are times one courts death, in slipping away from significance and subjection one courts falsehood, illusion and hallucination and psychic death” (160).  Dismantling race is a project that seeks to move beyond the face because the face is the location that is acted upon by abstract machines in order to create race. In order to accomplish this, the subject must become rhizome and by doing this they are able to free the BwO from the confines of desiring-machines.

Faciality

Oddly enough, it is a face: the white wall/black hole system. A broad face with white cheeks, a chalk face with eyes cut in for a black hole. Clown head, white clown, moon-white mime, angel of death, Holy Shroud. The face is not an envelope exterior to the person who speaks, thinks, or feels.

— “Year Zero: Faciality page 16

We have discussed the ways in which people who pass break away from the organizing systems and the methods that the organism seeks to reterritorialize assemblages, but it is through the subversion of the Abstract Machine of Faciality that this is achieved. In “Year Zero: Faciality” is one of the few instances where race is explicitly discussed by Deleuze and Guattari, and their primary interest is a closer examination of the face. The face is the site upon which organization occurs and that an assemblage of organs and experiences become a recognizable subject. Clare is constantly trying to find ways to subvert the organizing gaze of the dominant white society who by racializing people as black is able to control them and place them into the social hierarchy.

The “Faciality machine” organizes the face but: “What triggers this machine?  How does it work?” are the questions Deleuze and Guattari ask. They conceive of the faciality machine as viewing a world that is a white wall and black hole(s), the eyes are put into the holes and from this, a face is recognized. The eyes in the black holes create the face, and the bordering effects that surround this are the features created or imagined by the multiplicities that define the “face”. This process has a few key parts, the black holes on a white wall are seen and faces are organized from this, and then there are bordering effects that differentiate the face and make it uniquely territorialized. As I understand it, the black holes are the facet of the process that triggers the faciality machine to organize traits into a face. Bordering effects are the markers that demarcate the boundaries of your face as it is organized and give it an identifiable identity.

Larsen’s text is fascinated with the face and the word “eye” is used 73 times throughout this 88-page novella. I want to look at the contexts that these happen because it is almost always Irene who gazes intently at the faces of those around her, as well as her own:

“Irene's opinion, with those dark, almost black, eyes and that wide mouth like a scarlet flower against the Ivory of her skin. Nice clothes too, just right for the weather, thin and cool without being mussy, as summer things were so apt to be.” (9)

"The Drayton? Oh, very much. Very much Indeed," Irene answered, her scornful eyes on Clare's unrevealing face.” (31)

“"No. Not at all. You couldn't. Nobody, none of you, could," Clare moaned. The black eyes filled with tears that ran down her cheeks and spilled into her lap, ruining the priceless velvet of her dress.” (47)

“she stood there looking into his face while Clare explained that she and he had made their own introductions, accompanying her words with a little deferential smile for Brian” (53)

“Satisfied that there lingered no betraying evidence of weeping, she dusted a little powder on her dark-white face and again examined it carefully, and with a kind of ridiculing contempt.” (63)

“He [Bellew] had, Irene knew, become conscious of Felise, golden, with curly black Negro hair, whose arm was still linked in her own. She was sure, now, of the understanding in his face, as he looked at her again and then back at Felise. And displeasure.” (70)

 Irene functions as an Organism that enacts the faciality machine on everyone around her. As we can see in this selection of passages taken from throughout the novella Irene is constantly looking into peoples faces, and it is through the face that she seeks to organize the world. It is her way of stabilizing and protecting herself from the world, and she desires to territorialize them so that she may make use of passing when it is convenient for her. If it is the case that there are no boundaries of race that divide the world into spaces that can be navigated, she loses some of her ability to manipulate them to her advantage. This is part of the reason she has such a deep sense of American identity and resists the prospect of moving to Brazil:

Was she never to be free of it, that fear which crouched, always, deep down within her, stealing away the sense of security, the feeling of permanence, from the life which she had so admirably arranged for them all, and desired so ardently to have remain as it was? That strange, and to her fantastic, notion of Brian's of going off to Brazil, which, though unmentioned, yet lived within him; how it frightened her, and — yes, angered her! (Larsen 40; my emphasis)

 Irene feels the need to be in control of her bordering effects that define how her face is interpreted: “Irene didn't like changes, particularly changes that affected the smooth routine of her household” (Larsen 41). Irene is threatened by Clare’s destabilizing presence because she needs Brian in order to retain her stability of identity. As a middle-class wife and a mother his economic position is necessary to create the conditions for her to be facialized in the way she wants. As well as this, his presence against the visual indeterminability of her light skin produces the bordering effect that allows her a sense of self within the African American community. Brian is a bordering effect, he is also the black hole juxtaposed against the white wall of white society, the lightness of Irene’s skin requires her to be near Brian’s black body in order for her face to be racialized. In a systemically racist country, the presence of the black body creates blackness more than blood. She needs to remain in America because she knows what it means to be organized in America, and outside of America’s racist system, Brian’s presence does not guarantee her membership into the African American Community. She notes as she sits in the Drayton staring at Clare’s face how: “They always took her for an Italian, a Spaniard, A Mexican, or a gipsy. Never...a Negro” (Larsen 11). Deleuze and Guattari ruminate on the bordering effects that define the concrete face:

“The face of a teacher and a student, father and son, worker and boss, cop and citizen, accused and judge ("the judge had a stern expression, his eyes were horizonless..."): concrete individualized faces are produced and transformed on the basis of these units, these combinations of units—like the face of a rich child in which a military calling is already discernible, that West Point chin. You don't so much have a face as slide into one. (“Year Zero: Faciality”, 177)

 It is less about where you came from or what you are than it is about what your eyes are surrounded with. The rhizomatic picture of the world is fundamentally antigenealogical and race cannot be based on blood as 1920s America would like Irene and Clare to believe, rather the face is recognized as a subject because of blackness on a white backdrop. The bordering effects of the facial multiplicities define the borders of the face and therefore the subject. The reason that Clare begins to pass into Irene’s life is that she is able to go to the mixed-race parties of Harlem. The backdrop and bordering effects of the African American people in attendance along with the white people who came results in a space where Clare was able to reterritorialize herself as a black subject and take part in the membership into African American society without dissolving her rhizomatic connection to John Bellew’s economic prosperity and the benefits of membership into white culture. She has to move between spaces to effectively control this process because: “the abstract machine of faciality assumes a role of selective response, or choice: given a concrete face, the machine judges whether it passes or not, whether it goes or not, on the basis of the elementary facial units” (“Year Zero: Faciality”, 177; my emphasis). The white face is only recognized as such in contrast to black faces and the borders that fall into place when this faciality is “triggered”, and in order to pass, you must identify and present the correct traits in order for your face to not be rejected.

            The solution to Faciality, if moving past it is advisable at all is to become Rhizome and to deterritorialize the face. Race and Face are inextricable linked and it is out of this connection that the importance of applying rhizome to racial passing emerges. Deleuze and Guattari offer advice for the project of deterritorializing the face, but also a warning:

Dismantling the face is no mean affair. Madness is a definite danger: Is it by chance that schizos lose their sense of the face, their own and others', their sense of the landscape, and the sense of language and its dominant significations all at the same time? The organization of the face is a strong one. We could say that the face holds within its rectangle or circle a whole set of traits, faciality traits, which it subsumes and places at the service of significance and subjectification. (“Year Zero: Faciality”, 188)

 Their guidance comes with a warning, and we can see the consequence of the rapid deterritorialization of the face in the conclusion of the text. As Bellew pushes up the stairs and into the room of the party, Clare stands next to Irene as the contradictory reterritorializations of Clare’s life collide. The movements that she had taken throughout the novella destabilized her concrete face, but as the organizing force of Bellew and Irene act on her simultaneously, the stress on her self is too great. Deleuze and Guattari warned on this when discussing how to become a BwO:

You don’t reach the BwO, and its plane of consistency, by wildly destratifying… If you free it with too violent an action, if you blow apart the strata without taking precautions, then instead of drawing the plane you will be killed, plunged into a black hole, or even dragged toward catastrophe. (“How do you make Yourself a Body without Organs?”, 160)

 Clare wildly destratifies when she falls from the window as Bellew catches her as she is beginning to reterritorialize herself within the African American community. The indeterminability of the event lends to the necessity of poststructuralist critique. Irene’s hand is upon her arm and the force of Bellew’s gaze both act on Clare’s body and violently rupture as the contradictory strata of Irene and Bellew’s organization rupture her. As she falls, she remains fractured and indeterminable even upon the pavement. “Death by misadventure, I’m inclined to believe” (Larsen 82) a “strange man, official and authoritative” looking at Clare’s fragmented body concludes, and the body upon the pavement is fractured between the black and white boundaries of the racially demarcated world. When thinking of his tone, the strange man looking down at Clare interprets her as a white woman who got caught up in an adventure in Harlem. Irene in a “Sob of thankfulness” (81) sees a body that is rapidly becoming a stratified object that is incapable of freedom when dead because Irene “Couldn’t have her free” (79). Clare did not take enough precautions when fighting against the organisms that when destratifying herself and because of this she was killed.

 Passing, Plateaus, and Possibilities

A rhizome can never be described in its totality and because of this, a full address of the extratextual life of Passing is outside the scope of this essay. That does not negate however from the importance of the question: What lines of flight depart from the pages of this novella to real-world plateaus? Nella Larsen created a BwO in the form of this book, a novella that is evading the control of desiring-machines that would organize the text’s meaning into strata of Race. The world is an organism and we are the organs as Ibrahim reminds us:

As soon as we come into the world we are by complicated mechanisms (language, desire, longing, love) are adopt societal values and obey them or else we are labeled as deviant. We must resist the organism that we are part of the organs of. We must become ­­conscious of the way that we are organs within the organism (Ibrahim, 16; my emphasis).

 The distinction between the characters within the novella and the novella itself as a machine is made clear through the distinction between the botched subversion of the Organism and the way it could be done. Larsen herself was someone who “passed” throughout her life. Different from the characters in the text, however, she found herself and lodged herself in the stratum and found the opportunities for lines of flight. The creation of the novella itself is the way in which she had “constructed your own little machine, ready when needed to be plugged into other collective machines” (“How do you make yourself a Body without Organs?”, 161). From the region of intensity around this novella, new ways of seeing the world are possible if we situate ourselves on its plateau and allow ourselves to become rhizome.

Works Cited

Carter, Perry L. “The Penumbral Spaces of Nella Larsen's Passing: Undecidable Bodies, Mobile Identities, and the Deconstruction of Racial Boundaries” Gender, Place, & Culture, vol. 13, no. 3, 2016. pp. 227-246.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans by Brian Massumi. University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

“Introduction: Rhizome” pp. 3-26;

“How do you Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?” pp. 149-166.

“Year Zero: Faciality” pp. 167-192;

Ibrahim, Awad. “Body Without Organs: Notes on Deleuze & Guattari, Critical Race Theory and the Socius of Anti-Racism” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, vol. 36, no. 1, 2015. pp. 13-26.

Molloy, Sean. “From The Twenty Years’ Crisis to Theory of International Politics: a Rhizomatic Reading of Realism” Journal of International Relations and Development, vol. 13, no. 4, 2010. pp. 378-404.

Larsen, Nella. Passing: A Norton Critical Edition. Edited by Carla Kaplan. Norton & Company, 2007.

[1] The conversation around Schizoanalysis is juxtaposed against psychoanalysis which offers an authoritarian framework to control desire. Schizoanalysis is the form of psychiatric analysis that Deleuze and Guattari describe that breaks free from the root cause and defining narrative that figures like Freud theorized. It was originally theorized in Anti-Oedipus and followed up in A Thousand Plateaus, and embraced paradox as it "is at once a transcendental and a materialist analysis” (Anti-Oedipus 2004, 109).

[2] The Norton anthology of Literary Criticism and Theory gives a helpful definition of the Body without Organs (BwO) for our purposes: “A way of thinking about bodily experience as an Interconnected system of flows and forces rather than a structure of organs. Also referred to as BwO, it highlights the difference between the unpredictable live body and the detectable dead body and sees the body as a ceaseless ‘desiring-machine.’”