You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
It is humbling to recognize that the people I am supposed to be criticizing know more about the topic they are writing about than I do. It is disturbing to realize that I lack the integrative powers to give each paper its due, bringing them together to show how they elaborate a subtle theme none of us knew was there before I found it. That subtle theme is surely there, but I have not yet been able to find it. Instead, I will restrict myself to a not so subtle difference between two papers, begging Burack and Glass to accept my apologies that I have not been able to do justice to their fine papers.
If Caputi is right, then Wolfenstein is wrong. Wolfenstein writes that Du Bois is ambivalent about revolt and revenge, and that his ambivalence bears the mark of Oedipal guilt. To argue this, Wolfenstein has to resort to some pretty heavy-handed Freudian interpretation, such as interpreting the closing of John Jones' school as symbolic castration. The result is that Du Bois, or at least his characters such as John (not the same thing, it should be noted: sometimes authors use characters to represent positions they do not hold, or would be rid of), decline rebellion on moral as well as practical grounds. This, says Wolfenstein, is not good.
I like rage as well as the next person, but I wonder if Wolfenstein isn't seeing as castration what might better be seen as an acceptance of reality, above all the reality of racism, but also the reality of limits, mortality, and the very constrained goodness of the human species. Why can't Du Bois (or John; sometimes I'm not sure who Wolfenstein is writing about) be as melancholy as the rest of us—that is, all who think deeply about human life on this planet?
In this world there are but two ethical choices, and a thousand variations: to identify with the victim, or with the aggressor. As Caputi suggests, melancholy, maturity, the depressive position as Melanie Klein calls it, are all associated with identification with the victim. We are a