The Laughing "No": Interpellation, Expression, and Laughter in Quicksand.

QUICKSAND (Book : Larsen); LARSEN, Nella, 1891-1964; LAUGHTER in literature; AFRICAN American women in literature; RACE in literature

In this article, I read Nella Larsen's Quicksand (1928) as a parable of laughter in the face of interpellation. Although Larsen's Helga Crane cannot refuse the call to subjectivity that is inevitably a coercion to subjection, her laughter in fact can, unraveling individual subjectivity and threatening to overthrow the discursive paradigms of subjectification and identitarian taxonomy. Many US authors of the modernist period celebrated Black laughter as a "yes"—sometimes subversive, but always indexed to happiness, amusement, and relief. Larsen was the first to contest this characterization, depicting a laughing "no," a laughter of inchoate but clear refusal. The few scholars who have written on laughter in Larsen's work have focused exclusively on Passing (1929), largely interpreting laughter in that novel as a figure of repressed queer sexuality. In Quicksand , laughter has a broader and more basic force, expressing refusal of the ideological call to subjectivity, in its racializing, gendering, and sexualizing terms. This abject laughter enacts not what Sianne Ngai has called "the right ... of African American art ... to not express" but the right to express abjectly. Constrained and mediated by written form, it conveys Larsen's uncertainty as to whether refusal of oppressive models of subjectivity can be enacted through language, including literature, or only through a gestural, material mode beyond discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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