How Trustworthy are Letters?

We closely analyze letters within these narratives both because of their importance as plot devices, their structural/theoretical resemblance to passing, and to understand the characters’ unconscious thoughts. But just how much can we trust letters? Margaretta Jolly and Liz Stanley also discuss this relationship in their joint piece “Letters as / not a genre,” wherein they discuss their different theoretical perspectives on letters. Jolly suggests that one reason letters have not gotten standardized critical treatment is that, unlike biographies, “the truth is often less at issue than entertainment” so while the “letter may be valued for its personality, authenticity or intimacy, the meaning of those effects is not just to time and place but addressee” (92). That context and tone will shift depending on the relationship between the writer and its reader, where “you adopt a polite tone when writing to the bank manager, a respectful one to your granny, [or] a self-righteous vengefulness to your ex-lover” (Jolly and Stanley 92). Even long-term correspondences see a “subtle interchange between writing, fantasy, and relationship” (Jolly and Stanley 92). We want to determine how much we can say about the author’s psyche because of the letters they send, but that depends on the context. So, can we trust the letters in these narratives to successfully uncover the unconscious thoughts of their writers? Based on Jolly’s analysis and the context surrounding the letters in these novels, my answer is that it depends on the specific letter.

For example, Delphine Roux’s letter to Coleman Silk in The Human Stain is undoubtedly tied to her unconscious. After writing it in a rush, she reads it over and assures herself, “Of course that wasn’t her rhetoric. It couldn’t be,” when really, it exposes her hidden inner-rhetoric—she made no effort to disguise it while writing, and instead gives into her most personal thoughts and feelings (Roth 197). On the other hand, in The House Behind the Cedars, John Warwick receives a letter from Tryon:"This formal epistle was the last of a dozen that Tryon had written and destroyed during the week since the meeting in Patesville, —hot, blistering letters, cold cutting letters, scornful crushing letters. Though none of them was sent, except this last, they had furnished a safety-valve for his emotions, and had left him in a state of mind that permitted him to write the foregoing (107)."This letter does not give us a clear perspective of Tryon’s unconscious. He previously used letter-writing as a medium to manage his emotions, but he kept his audience—John Warwick—close in mind when writing and molded his final draft according to that audience. These two vastly different circumstances demonstrate the different degrees to which a letter can reveal the writer’s unconscious. Frustratingly, in Passing, we only read from Irene’s point of view, so we cannot know the workings of Clare’s unconscious as she wrote to her. When Clare writes to Irene “…For I am lonely, so lonely…cannot help longing to be with you again, as I have never longed for anything before,” does she reveal her inner-most, unconscious thoughts (Larsen 7)? Did she write to Irene in the spur of the moment (like Delphine), or did she carefully cultivate every word of her correspondence (like Tryon)? In her critical exploration of Passing, Mae Henderson suggests that “the enclosed content of the envelope would figure, on one level, as the textual unconscious—that which is risky, unsafe, or menacing. Irene, as addressee, then, faces the challenge of opening the letter and confronting the potential dangers of the psychic unconscious” (21). I agree with Henderson’s conception of the envelope as harboring a textual unconscious rooted in the risk inherent in writing a letter. However, I remain unconvinced that this letter gives us an accurate look into Clare’s unconscious because we do not have the context necessary to make such a judgment. We never see the writing process from Clare’s perspective, so we have no idea how much of the letter is contrived and how much is authentic to her unconscious. From my perspective, like much of Passing, the answer remains a mystery. (In fact, perhaps the textual evidence supporting Delphine’s letter revealing her unconscious is questionable, too, since it is from the perspective of biased Nathan Zuckerman. On these pages, we explore more about The Human Stain and Passing as metanarratives. Looking through that lens offers an interesting perspective on the question of the trustworthiness of letters.)

-MB