The cocker spaniel: Why? Why choose that as what the little boy thinks of when he looks at that floppy volume? It's a moment when being trained to classify and to categorize causes him to see the source of that linguistic precision, the book of Shakespeare, in very demeaning terms, or reductive terms or--I'm not getting quite the precise word I want--in deflating terms. So that, instead of grandeur, the book of Shakespeare becomes the source for the names of dogs. And the way the child's imagination blends grandeur and the ordinary, I think, gives us Coleman, who can imagine the details of everyday life, the life he lives, as a grand play. Doc Chizner furthers this transformation of the father's lesson in this very crucial passage, that I'm going to talk more about later, when Coleman passes as white or Jewish for the first time. And that's when he's boxing for the pit coach:
"If nothing comes up," Doc said [this is the bottom of 98] "you don't bring it up. You're neither one thing or the other. You're Silky Silk. That's enough. That's the deal."
"You're neither one thing or the other. You're Silky Silk." This takes the question of categorization--are you colored? Are you not?--it negates it: you're neither one thing nor another, but then reinstates it in a different mode: you're Silky Silk. Make up a new category for yourself. So, Doc Chizner takes that transgressing use of precision that we see in the cocker spaniel metaphor in the child's imagination, and he shows Coleman how to apply that to living race in America, living his race in America. You are Silky Silk. You're not a race. You're a proper name, the irreducible singularity of a person.
There is a third way of thinking about race, and that, of course, is as biology. That, too, is present in this novel. The body is relentlessly present, and I hope that you picked up on that. It's not hard to pick up on it. The very matter and specificity of the body is everywhere in this novel, and so I want to look back at 21 and 22. This is in that wonderful scene when Coleman dances with Nathan. So, we get a whole description of Coleman's body and what it is that Nathan sees in it, suddenly, now that he's shirtless on this hot summer night, and also now that he is no longer talking about the "spooks" business. This is 21.
On display were the shoulders, arms and chest of a smallish man still trim and attractive, a belly no longer flat, to be sure, but nothing that had gotten seriously out of hand, altogether the physique of someone who had seemed to have been a cunning and wily competitor at sports rather than an overpowering one. And all of this had previously been concealed from me, because he was always shirted, and also because of his having been so drastically consumed by his rage.
What you see there is the revelation of certain things we will find out to be true about Coleman, that he was a cunning and wily competitor rather than an overpowering one, that he is still fit and virile, that he has himself in hand, nothing that had gotten out of hand, seriously out of hand. Coleman very much still has himself in hand. He is still the maker of himself, the presenter of himself to the world in a deliberate way. But then we go on, and there are some things that we see that perhaps tell us something different. Rather than the body revealing the truth about Coleman-- certain kinds of truth, not a racial truth, other kinds of truth--we see marks on his body that don't produce that knowledge.
Also previously concealed was the small, Popeye-ish blue tattoo situated at the top of his right arm just at the shoulder joining, the words "U.S. Navy" inscribed between the hooklike arms of a shadowy little anchor and running along the hypotenuse of the deltoid muscle, a tiny symbol if one were needed of all the million circumstances of the other fellow's life, of that blizzard of details that constitute the confusion of a human biography, a tiny symbol to remind me why our understanding of people must always be, at best, slightly wrong.
What's revealed when Coleman is shirtless is the very sign that he cannot be known in any kind of complete way. It's the mark of a history on his body, that he was in the navy, a history we'll learn a little bit about, but not a lot, but for Nathan it is the mark of an irreducible difference between persons, that always there are details that are not accessible, circumstances of the other fellow's life. In this moment Nathan recognizes Coleman as a cipher, a sign that can be projected upon with meanings of his own. I would suggest to you that we don't see the full flowering of this until quite a bit later in the novel, but I think this is the first moment where, in Coleman revealing his body, he suggests to Nathan the possibilities of that body as a sign. So, he is no longer, in this moment, entirely "in hand" anymore. So, if his physique hasn't gotten out of hand, his circulation as a sign certainly has. In this case, he has now become a blank canvas for Nathan. Certainly, up until this moment at the beginning of the novel, what's most on the surface of the plot is how he has become the victim of rumor, how his self-presentation got completely out of hand, taken over by other people's erroneous readings of his words. So, if the body seems to be in his control, himself as a signifier is not. Here Nathan is invited into it, but in a very different way than the rumormongers who surround him at Athena College and in the town. So, the body is not going to be a place of revelation.
Speech, as I've noted, is a problematic moment of revelation, but it can be that. And on 81, 82, we see an example of that when his speech formally in the novel touches off what will be some of the most important revelatory passages in the novel. And this is when Nelson Primus, having berated Coleman and advised him in his clever, authoritative, arrogant way not to pursue anything against Lester Farley or Delphine Roux, has offended him and enraged him so much as to become the target of Coleman's rage. Coleman said, "I never again want to hear that self-admiring voice of yours or see your smug, fucking, lily-white face," and the question becomes why--and we see Nelson ask it the next page--why "white," why does "lily-white" become the insult that he hurls at Nelson? And formally, even though there's a little bit of an interlude here about Athena College and Coleman's rage, this is the moment when we launch into the tale of Coleman's childhood, and we learn for the first time what kind of family he comes from, and what the history of his passing has been, how he made that decision to abandon his family of birth.
So, speech can be revealing, but only in those moments when it is out of Coleman's control. Here, in this moment, "lily-white" is inspired by his rage. He is out of control, in that sense, and of course, "lily white" is the term his brother, Walt, applies to him in a similar moment of anger, after Walt discovers that he has told his mother that he is essentially estranging himself permanently from the family in order to marry Iris. Walt says, "Don't ever show your lily-white face here again." So, he's reproducing Walt's language, and, from that, it indicates to Nelson Primus and for us, in the unfolding of the novel, that there is a mystery here to be told. And then we get the telling of that mystery.
So, from that little word, all of this unfurls, and I would just note, just in passing, that this is quite a contrast to Delphine Roux. On 38 and 39, you can look at: Coleman is very surprised that she has made no effort to hide the identifying marks of her own handwriting. Delphine Roux--though her name suggests the Delphic, the oracular, the mysterious, the secret--Delphine is someone who cannot conceal herself. The very material of her language, of her writing, of her letters, puts her identity on the page to be read, and it seems as if she hasn't even tried to conceal it. So, Delphine's lack of depth, her lack of complexity as a character, her basic despicableness is summed up in that inability to conceal herself, whereas Coleman only reveals himself in moments when he is unguarded, or when he has become, not a person in control of his own representation of himself, but rather a sign at large among other representers (Nathan, Delphine, other people).
Secrecy, then, is at the very heart of what identity means in this novel, and now I want to get to this crucial passage on page 100. For me, this is where we learn really what identity means in this novel. So, he says he wants to be in this fight with--in front of the Pitt coach--with Ray Robinson.