"But what if I can't change?": Desire, Denial, and Melancholia in Randall Kenan's A Visitation of Spirits

The African American novel has an established tradition of depicting grieving characters to comment on socio-political circumstances; moreover, the melancholic's grief in African American literature often signifies resistance to a historiography that has systematically neglected the African American experience in antebellum southern history (1). Given this historical context, melancholia in African American literature should not be read as a symptom of a pathological mind, as a traditional Freudian reading might imply, but rather as a sign of cultural resistance that effectively questions exclusionary practices of historiography and identity politics. The black melancholic character in African American literature who cannot or will not stop longing for a specific lost object safeguards what would otherwise be lost to history were it not for the individual's commitment to memorializing a particular person or event. Melancholia in black literature is thus frequently political and often serves to build community around the shared acknowledgment of and commitment to who or what has been lost. Randall Kenan's A Visitation of Spirits continues this tradition of employing melancholia as a form of cultural resistance. Trudier Harris writes about Kenan's short story collection Let the Dead Bury Their Dead: "The southern soil of Let the Dead Bury Their Dead is the soil of the past influencing the present, of realistic and extranatural characters, of morality and immorality, of striking restrictions and excessive liberties" (107). Certainly this statement holds true for A Visitation of Spirits. One might even view Kenan's act of writing itself as melancholic, since he has expressed that his North Carolina-based fiction in part aims to create "some sort of record" of his ancestors' and relatives' oral culture so that their "stories would be guaranteed to be known to other people" (qtd in Rowell 139). At the same time, Kenan's novel also departs from the model of African American literary melancholia that locates loss as something from which a group or community can paradoxically derive its bonds and its strength. Instead, in A Visitation of Spirits, melancholia becomes the feeling of an isolated and painfully lonely person who has no one with whom to share his loss of identity because he cannot and must not admit in a heteronormative patriarchy that he is a gay black man. Invoking Judith Butler's theories on melancholic loss to illuminate the role of denied homoerotic desire in Horace Cross' development, I offer a reading of the melancholic losses plaguing both Horace and his community and investigate how these social economies of melancholia interact with one another. Set in the fictional small town of Tims Creek, A Visitation of Spirits recounts scenes from three particular, noncontiguous days, relying on multiple perspectives and narrators (including first-person narrators and omniscient narrators). The novel revolves around two stories that are woven together. The main story chronologically narrates the final hours of the main character, Horace Thomas Cross. Possessed by a demon, Horace takes his own life in the morning hours of April 30, 1984. His story is periodically interrupted by the chronological narrative of a winter day in 1985 in the lives of his relatives: his grandfather Ezekiel Cross, his aunt Ruth Davis Cross, and his cousin James Malachai Greene. His relatives are portrayed spending a day filled with grief, bitterness, and tension on December 8, 1985; this day is not closely linked to Horace's experiences. Furthermore, the chapters detailing Horace's and his relatives' actions are interrupted by the journal-like "confessions" of James Greene, Horace's first-person memory log, and two sections addressing the reader, recounting scenes from the past of a tight-knit community. Using this elaborate scheme of narration, the novel suggests that Horace's melancholia is rooted not only in his family history--the development of the Cross generations since slavery--but also in his inability to admit to his sexual identity in the face of an exclusive and heteronormative community. …