Is the only kind of magic left to literature dark magic — the power to harm with words? Recent debates in literary studies sometimes make it seem so. Consider the most-downloaded episode of the C19 Podcast, a podcast series produced by The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. The episode, which appeared in 2019, is called “The N Word in the Classroom: Just Say No.” The Reaganite moralism of the episode’s title gives a good sense of the whole. Here are some college classroom rules insisted on by the host, a professor of American literature: The N-word won’t be used in this class by a person of any race, even if it consistently appears in our texts. The same goes for the F-word, regardless of a person’s perceived sexual orientation or gender expression. And this is simply not a space in which we call people trash. By “used,” the professor would at first seem to mean “mentioned” or “quoted,” although the equivalence with “calling people trash” begins quickly to suggest otherwise. She goes on: “My research specialty is African American literature. The N-word often appears in the texts I teach, but I never believed that I had to hear that word spoken in my workplace just because I had chosen to study art that often features it.” The emphasis on “workplace” erodes the distinction between use and mention; hearing a student read the offending word aloud might, in this case, constitute something like a discriminatory workplace environment for the professor, despite the fact that she herself had assigned the text. Later in the same episode, the professor acknowledges that she sometimes plays recordings of songs or of poetry in class that contain the offending word, spoken out loud and in its entirety: I mention this, because even as I acknowledge the power of performance to do harm when we give life to words by speaking them in the classroom, that doesn’t mean that we can’t respect an artist’s choices, while we also take our role seriously. My students and I are practicing what it means to be literary scholars and cultural critics. We are not reenactors, so we need not give the word life ourselves in order to engage the work thoroughly. Instead of giving the word “life,” students are asked when reading aloud to render it as the sound “en,” or “ens” if plural. Nor are such phonic reductions confined to the case of the word “nigger.” When teaching James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son,” for instance, the professor insists that the phrase “yellow-bellied Japs,” whose racism Baldwin abhors, be enunciated, rather ornithologically, as “yellow-bellied jays.” “We notice that Baldwin is as critical of the racial slur as we might be,” the professor says, “but that doesn’t mean that we have to give that slur life in our learning environment.” There is a combination of conceptual incoherence and primness here that seems to me all too common when it comes to the way contemporary literature scholars think about words that wound. Its mystical metaphysics aside, though, “The N Word in the Classroom: Just Say No” does present an interesting occasion for examining how denigratory and insulting language operates. In his novel Open City, published in 2011, Teju Cole dramatizes the problem in a more sophisticated fashion. The narrator, Julius, an American immigrant of European and Nigerian descent, is talking to a couple of Moroccan Muslims. They are telling him about Moroccan Jews. One of the Moroccans says, “They look just like us, though, of course, they do better in business. I think sometimes that I should become a Jew, just for professional reasons.” He goes on: “What I am against is Zionism, and this religious claim they make on a land where someone else is already living.” Julius, neither a Muslim nor a Jew and with no connection to the Middle East, feels uncomfortable: I wanted to tell him that, in the States, we were particularly wary of strong criticisms of Israel because it could become anti-Semitic. But I didn’t, because I knew that my own fear of anti-Semitism, like my fear of racism, had through long practice become prerational. What I would impose on him would not be an argument, it would be a request that he adopt my reflexes, or the pieties of a society different from the one in which he grew up, or the one in which he now functioned. It would do little good to describe for him the subtle shades of meaning evoked in an American ear by saying “Jews” instead of “Jewish people.” I wanted also to take him to task for attacking a religious ideal when his own central ideal was religious, but the skein of argument was beginning to feel like futility piled on futility. Julius would like to have a substantive conversation about the politics of the Middle East, but he’s not sure how, at least not with these Moroccans. Impacted taboos intervene. First, there is the possible coincidence of anti-Zionism with antisemitism, which triggers Julius’ worry about indulging a political argument that is actually a racist one. Julius quickly realizes that something superstitious — in his words, something “prerational” — is at work in this fear. Indeed, his “reflex” against bigotry encompasses not only his “fear of anti-Semitism,” but also his “fear of racism.” The grammar is ambiguous. Does he mean his fear of expressions of racism from others — a plausible concern for an African who spends his time in the United States and Europe? Or does he mean his fear of being caught out, inadvertently, in some expression of prejudice on his own part? And who is he afraid of? What superego-like monitor is listening to his conversation? Julius’ fear of bigotry involves a heightened attention to verbal nuance, and accordingly to the possibility of mistranslation across idioms: “It would do little good to describe to him the subtle shades of meaning evoked in an American ear by saying ‘Jews’ instead of ‘Jewish people.’” To talk politics,
Reading for Sins
