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Passing as autobiography: James Weldon Johnson's 'The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man.'
African American Review, Spring, 1996 by Donald C. Goellnicht
12. His aligning of himself with the girls is obvious when a comparison is made between this description and his earlier confrontation with himself in the mirror as a child: "I was accustomed to hear remarks about my beauty; but now, for the first time, I became conscious of it and recognized it. I noticed the ivory whiteness of my skin, the beauty of my mouth, the size and liquid darkness of my eyes, and how the long, black lashes that fringed and shaded them produced an effect that was strangely fascinating even to me. I noticed the softness and glossiness of my dark hair that fell in waves over my temples, making my forehead appear whiter than it really was" (11). The description conflates narcissism, racial denial, and ambivalent sexuality, as if Johnson is hinting - which is all he can do in 1912 - that the narrator may be as uncertain about his sexual orientation as he is about his racial identity. This confusion is further heightened through the narrator's powerful attraction to his millionaire, whom he describes as "the best friend I ever had, except my mother, the man who exerted the greatest influence ever brought into my life, except that exerted by my mother" (108). By comparison, his wife seems a fairly insignificant character. Johnson may also be parodying the heroes of traditional male slave narratives, who are usually intent on carving out their identities as men.
13. See Stepto for a full-scale discussion of the complex relationship between sieve narratives and their authenticating documents (3-31).
14. In Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Bakhtin explains the existence of one voice within the other in more detail: "But the author may also make use of someone else's discourse for his own purposes, by inserting a new semantic intention into a discourse which already has, and which retains, an intention of its own. Such a discourse, in keeping with its task, must be perceived as belonging to someone else. In one discourse, two semantic intentions appear, two voices. Parodying discourse is of this type, as are stylization and stylized skaz" (189).
15. Bakhtin's term parodic stylization needs some explanation because of his own apparently contradictory statements on the subject of parody. In Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics Bakhtin draws what appears to be a rigid distinction between parody and stylization: "The situation is different with parody. Here, as in stylization, the author again speaks in someone else's discourse, but in contrast to stylization parody introduces into that discourse a semantic intention that is directly opposed to the original one. The second voice, once having made its home in the other's discourse, clashes hostilely with its primordial host and forces him to serve directly opposing aims. Discourse becomes an arena of battle between two voices. In parody, therefore, there cannot be that fusion of voices possible in stylization . . .; the voices are not only isolated from one another, separated by a distance, but are also hostilely opposed" (193). In The Dialogic Imagination, however, Bakhtin views parody and stylization as the two ends of a continuum on which there is no clear line of demarcation: "Between stylization and parody, as between two extremes, are distributed the most varied forms for languages to mutually illuminate each other and for direct hybrids, forms that are themselves determined by the most varied interactions among languages, the most varied wills to language and to speech, that encounter one another within the limits of a single utterance" (364). The hybrid form of "parodic stylization" thus encompasses a more complex fusion of voices that enables the kind of dialogue - beyond simple hostility - that Bakhtin describes below. It is with this sense that I use the term parody here.
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