start Nella Larsen's Passing today
why I picked this novel, plus a sentence-by-sentence close reading of the first paragraph
Dear friend,
I have something to confess. I originally had Passing slated for next spring.
But when I plucked my heavily annotated copy off the shelf and started reading…I decided to hell with waiting! This book is too good!
So, that’s why we’re going to read it together — in just two weeks — starting right now.
This 1929 novel by Nella Larsen, one of the best writers to come out of the Harlem Renaissance, is the *most perfect* end-of-summer book I’ve ever read.
The novel starts in the sidewalk-steaming temps of Chicago in late summer and ends during a light winter snowfall. We traverse this shift from summer to winter with two women who have drifted apart after sharing their school days and who reconnect, years later, after one of them has undergone a shocking, yet subtle, shift in her personal identity and politics.
The novel is “a remarkably candid exploration of shifting racial and sexual boundaries,” says the back cover of my copy. And Larsen’s biographer, Thadious M. Davis, writes that the novel depicts “the golden days of black cultural consciousness.”
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I first read Passing in September 2015
It was my very first semester of my PhD program and I was in a modernist literature course with the professor who would later become my dissertation advisor and one of the most inspiring mentors I’ve ever had the privilege to work with. (Shoutout to Dr. Maren Linett!)
I was excited for that class but I was also wary. During my undergrad, modernist literature had been exalted as the most difficult and most demanding to read. (Which I’m not sure is true; every era has literature that makes demands on us and have you ever read Beowulf?! Talk about hard to read.)
Anyway.
On day one of the class, as I scanned the syllabus, I recognized only two of the names: Virginia Woolf and Flannery O’Connor. The rest — Elizabeth Bowen, Jean Rhys, Olive Moore, Dorothy Richardson, Djuna Barnes, and Nella Larsen — were wholly unknown to me.
(Okay, I vaguely recognized “Djuna” because my Enlightenment professor from undergrad had a tortie cat named Djuna who I pet-sat a few times.)
I was nervous reading that syllabus of Modernist Transatlantic Women Writers. I felt so safe with the American Naturalists, who wrote stories like Sister Carrie and The House of Mirth and A Hazard of New Fortunes where the plots and characters were complex, but rendered in crystal-clear prose with photographic detail and a journalistic fidelity to the capital-R Real (as if there could be such a thing).
In the world of the modernists, however, all bets were off.
Plots required three or four or five close readings to start to open up, if they ever did at all. Characters were so complex I had a hard time understanding them, let alone following their streaming consciousness to any form of clarity. The prose was often gorgeous, but also overwhelming or confusing or downright shocking. The imagery: washes of color, tidal waves of noise. Far from photographic, it was all so Impressionistic, even absurdist. Gertrude Stein wrote my brain in circles; D.H. Lawrence confused the hell out of me.
I realized all of this was the kind of the whole point, and I felt something profound and important was at work in modernist work—and yet I struggled to connect with it.
So imagine my delight and surprise when I nervously cracked the cover of Passing later that week and found the prose not only accessible, in the way so much modernist literature had never felt to me, but sensual. Inviting.
It was a sheer pleasure to meet a modern text that felt as if it wanted to be read. And not just read, but consumed. Carefully followed. As I got deeper into the story, I started recognizing Larsen’s narrative voice: an edge of violence. A dangerous undercurrent. Story that flows like a secret dying to be told.
I fell in love with the novel fast. By the time we met for class the next week, I had read it twice, and by mid-December, I’d written my final paper for the course on it.
I was so ready to learn why this novel was modernist and what made it so important, and why it was on a syllabus with all these other women writers who I’d never heard of.
We’ll explore these things together over the next two weeks.
An invitation
Passing invited me to start learning and reading and thinking in new ways.
I hope in reading this strange and mysterious novel together over the next two weeks, you’ll find in it a similar invitation—that you’ll let it work on you, or open up to you, new perspectives and ideas.
Should you find that invitation, I hope you’ll follow it.
Need annotation ideas as you get into this reading experience?
Check out Petya’s no-bullshit guide to annotation!
Refresh your mind on what is close reading?
The first paragraph is a promise
First paragraphs in truly excellent literary novels, like this one, tend to function as a kind of promise or map of the story to come. They tell you, as the reader, a lot about what’s coming — if not in explicit plot detail, then in tone and style.
To follow along with this exercise, I recommend reading the first paragraph in full, then through each sentence (taking your own notes!) and then reading through the notes I’ve typed out below the photo.
If you don’t have your copy of the novel yet, that’s okay. Here’s the opening paragraph:
It was the last letter in Irene Redfield’s little pile of morning mail. After her other ordinary and clearly directed letters the long thin envelope of thin Italian paper with its almost illegible scrawl seemed out of place and alien. And there was, too, something mysterious and slightly furtive about it. A thin sly thing which bore no return address to betray the sender. Not that she hadn’t immediately known who its sender was. Some two years ago she had one very like it in outward appearance. Furtive, but yet in some peculiar, determined way a little flaunting. Purple ink. Foreign paper of extraordinary size.
Pretty damn good.
Now, let’s read the first paragraph together, sentence-by-sentence, nice and slow, and see how it makes some promises to us about what we’re about to read.
“It was the last letter in Irene Redfield’s little pile of morning mail.”
Passing starts us off with a word that tells us a lot: “It.”
The novel starts with a vague, unknown entity: “it,” the bottom-most letter in a pile of mail that a person, named Irene Redfield, is going through. The tone is inviting, implicitly: we want to know what it is and why Irene is paying so much attention to it.
“It” is noticeable because “it” — the last letter in the pile — is different from all the other mail and letters.
“After her other ordinary and clearly directed letters the long envelope of thin Italian paper with its almost illegible scrawl seemed out of place and alien.”
Ah, here we go. “It” is noticeably different because it contrasts the other mail in important ways.
Where her “other” mail is “ordinary and clearly directed,” this piece of Irene’s mail is in a “long envelope of thin Italian paper,” with an “illegible scrawl” that marks it as not just “out of place” but “alien.”
These details matter.
Our attention is being pulled to notice the significance of contrast — and Irene’s attention to oppositions and differences — as we move through these seemingly innocuous details that are anything but.
Letters and mail are mean to be ordinary and clearly directed, are they not? After all, mail is a highly regulated communications system and the more clearly directed the letter, the more likely it is to end up where it’s supposed to.
Yet this curious letter fights against its own form: it is long, thin (rather than stocky and sturdy, like most enveloped mail) and it is almost illegible.
Aren’t letters meant, inherently, to be legible?
“And there was, too, something mysterious and slightly furtive about it.”
Furtive: Done in a secretive or quiet way, so as to avoid being noticed.
Well, there’s a bit of a rub then.
This letter, which seems designed to not be noticed, has been absolutely 100% noticed by Irene — and now, by us, the readers.
Can you see the tension being crafted with each move here? The way each step forward is tugged back, slowing us into a moment of arrest with this mysterious “it,” which has disrupted an otherwise routine morning of letter writing?
“A thin sly thing which bore no return address to betray the sender.”
Curiouser and curiouser.
The letter is almost personified here — taking on the “thin sly” attitude of something slinking from discovery, of something “mysterious” that hides its identity from you.
The lack of return address was not, it seems, a mistake or oversight, but an intention. A decision.
And so the mysterious letter is rendered more mysterious by its lack of sender.
“Not that she hadn’t immediately known who its sender was.”
Oh, what a lovely moment.
We’ve been lulled into the description and then: character development. Irene Redfield, who goes carefully through her mail each morning, is confronted by “it,” a strange and “sly” piece of mail that seems designed to evade her recognition but — perhaps in spite of itself, or perhaps through its very pretense of anonymity — reveals its identity.
Irene knows who sent the letter.
“Some two years ago she had one very like it in outward appearance.”
So this is not the first odd letter, in this style, that Irene has received. Again, we get tension: the letter is unknown, but also known. It is unfamiliar, but also quite familiar.
I’m feeling tension, too, on this phrase: “outward appearance.”
We haven’t even opened the letter yet, yet there’s so much to read.
I think it’s safe to say that outward appearances—perhaps especially the ones designed to evade our noticing—matter a lot in this novel.
And Irene Redfield pays a lot of sustained attention to them. I think this tells us something important about Irene.
“Furtive, but in yet some peculiar, determined way a little flaunting.”
Ah ha! We got the word “furtive” a second time. That feels significant. We’re getting emphasis on this idea of things “done in a quiet way to avoid being noticed.”
There is emphasis, too, on the idea that this particular letter—this “it”—is in tension with itself: it is furtive yet flaunting. The letter is both hiding and revealing. Secretive and overt. Mysterious and known.
It is, perhaps, “determined” to be “peculiar.”
“Purple ink. Foreign paper of extraordinary size.”
I’d need to do more research, but my impulse is to say that purple ink is a bit ostentatious. I’d imagine most handwritten or typed letters would arrive in black ink. Perhaps the color matters.
We also get the word “foreign,” adding weight to the earlier mentions of “alien” and “Italian paper.”
Finally, we get the word “extraordinary,” as in something that is “extra” — or beyond, in excess of — the everyday.
Bringing it all together
So, let’s summarize some of what we might notice in this first paragraph — and how it might come to configure certain promises to us, as its readers, about what’s to come:
At the base of Irene’s “ordinary and clearly directed” pile of mail, we confront this “foreign,” “flaunting,” “furtive,” and “extraordinary” specimen that makes itself known under the guise of anonymity and demands our sustained attention.
The first paragraph’s promise: This is a novel about contrasts and opposites, about binaries and their curious tensions, about anomalies that stand apart even as they attempt to go unnoticed.
I can’t wait to keep reading.
Let’s get the commentary going
In the comments, try your damndest not to pull from other parts of the novel and stick only to this very first paragraph:
What did you notice?
What do you know about this story? about this world? based only on the first paragraph?
What are you curious about?
What do you want more of?
What do we know about Irene?
What do we know about the mysterious sender?
Where will the story go next?
Coming later this week
A guide to Part 1 of the novel.
Finish Part 1 before reading the guide if you want to stay on pace with me and avoid spoilers!
Okay. It’s time to get into the novel — go read!
‘Til next time, happy (closely) reading!
A footnote in my Norton Critical Edition has this to say about the purple ink: "Reflecting on decades of admonishments to black women to wear drab colors such as blue, brown, and grey, Helga Crane of Larsen's Quicksand insists on surrounding herself with brighter, more exotic colors and wonders why 'didn't someone write A Plea for Color.' Alice Walker's The Color Purple takes its title from this long-running debate over which colors are fitting for black women."
I haven’t read anything yet apart from your excellent email. But I would highlight the word betrayal in “ A thin sly thing which bore no return address to betray the sender.”
It seems so loaded. Rather than “no return address to *reveal* the sender” we have the word betrayal which immediately gives the sense of treachery. I looked up a dictionary definition and it includes “to lead astray”, “to desert in time of need”, “to reveal unintentionally”. And even “seduction”. All of this adds to the promise you mention. Who leads who astray? Who deserts who? What is revealed! And who is seduce by what?