Juneteenth (51 page)

Bliss’s purpose (immediate) is to get money to carry him further west. Secondarily and psychologically, it is to manipulate possibility and identities of the townspeople and to take revenge upon his own life. And to play! He is the artist as child in this.

The more Bliss plays with the camera as a means of forgetting then of denying, and then of distorting, burlesquing, the more he is forced to forget the old identity and to speculate upon what it might have meant and what it might have become. Thus he abandons art. Each adventure is thus no mere enclosure in his coffin, but a plunge into death. But with no Hickman standing over him, and no congregation singing and rejoicing and shouting that he (and they), the spirit, has been once more resurrected. He turns then to more malicious means of denial—he wants to emphasize their otherness of skin, or through their skin—by playing upon their own urge to denial. This is destructive and criminal and antihuman. Hickman knows this, just as Bliss knows this. Humanity
must
reside somewhere else.

The point to stress has to do with what Bliss learns from his scam, and this has to do with the relationship between the movies and politics, and the American’s uncertainty as to his identity as an area exploited by the movies and politics alike.… He ties this in with his seduction of Severen’s mother, which gives him a sense of creative potency. He realizes that he doesn’t have to know who his parents were, and that he can create a political identity out of racial prejudice, and that this will not be questioned because it is centered not in biology and class, but in social power.

Bliss is fascinated by moments of blackness between cinematic frames, and his life is hidden here much as his activities before becoming politician are hidden. “Look for me between the frames, in the dark …”

Consider possibility that there is an obligatory incident missing from his character.

There is the contradiction that he continued to love the old people but exchanges his obligation to them and to his past for the formal possibilities
available to him through betrayal. The imposition of social hierarchy based upon color upon human values.

Bliss’s attacks on Negroes are a form of running away. He feels a guilt which he will not admit. His adventures with moving-making ditto. He is fascinated that the secret of film lies in the fact that most of the action which gives a movie movement lies between the frames, in the dark. Thus the viewer is manipulated in the dark and he is the manipulator. This carries into his politics, wherein his motives are hidden behind what appears as simple racial prejudice, but in his twisted way he sees himself as putting pressure on Negroes to become more powerful through political action. One of the implicit themes at work here is Hickman’s
refusal
to act politically, his refusal to use politics as an agency for effecting change. And at this point we enter the historical circumstances of the fifties wherein the Negro ministers became overtly political through the agency of passive resistance.

Hickman, are you a minister-man or a minstrel man?

I’m both, I’m afraid—But remember, the Word is tricky!

N.B. For Bliss the riddle of the Sphinx takes the form of his recognizing that Americans are actors, thus his manipulating the camera. But this leads to his further confusing his own basic confusion when he impregnates Severen’s mother; which, in a sense, returns him to and compounds the mystery of his own identity.

It is important to remember that Bliss’s denial of Hickman is a denial of himself. It is a denial which grants him a certain freedom, but it is a chaotic freedom and leads to an uncertain psychological balance. He becomes compulsive on the subject of race, Negroes and racial mixing. Thus his denial of Severen and his refusal to see him or to accept his role of father. (The old American refusal to recognize its racial diversity.)

If his flight is a night-journey, it is one through blazing lights wherein he remains in part unseen—Except to the Negroes who monitor his activities.

Bliss suffers because, as Hickman tells him, he has tried to be a total individual. In doing so, he runs away from those who have provided him with completion. By becoming “white” he tried to make himself part of a whole which rejects his essence, and in doing this he poisons his spirit. Bliss the Senator, remains incomplete, Hickman and the others are his missing part. He seeks power but he has detached himself from his true source of power and by doing so he has turned himself into a political demon.

When Bliss moves among Northerners he’s constantly surprised that he is aware of possibilities of which they seem unconscious—even though he realizes that they cannot
see
his background. Yet knows that this is also a matter of historical consciousness and that they have forgotten or have never known the real issues of American life. This is one reason that he enters politics. This is why he joins the Southerners; he realizes that they never stop playing their knowledge against the ignorance and disinterest of the Northerners. The strategy of the guerilla fighter transposed to the world of politics.

Account of how Bliss disciplines himself for the use of power. To master his facial expressions, to steel himself so as to hide any trace of his Negro past, his southernness except when he can use it to confuse. His adaptation of religious rhetoric for political ends. Perhaps this could delineate differences in attitude imposed by race. And draw out cultural traits that make for a shared cultural identity.