The Laughing “No”: Interpellation, Expression, and Laughter in Quicksand

Abstract

Early in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), Helga Crane, the novel’s itinerant, anguished protagonist, resolves to quit her job as a teacher at Naxos, a Tuskegeelike institution with a strict uplift ideology, and meets with Robert Anderson, the school’s director. In the text’s third-person narration, Helga becomes “the girl” and Anderson, with all the symbolic authority of the phrase, “the man”: “The man smiled . . .,” “The man said kindly . . . ”; Helga perceives him at first as “the figure of a man . . . blurred slightly in outline” (53). He hails her in an ordinary, professional manner—“Miss Crane?”—but, as with Louis Althusser’s infamous policeman, his “questioning salutation” implies the threat of an official recruitment to ideology. Is she “Miss Crane”? Will she recognize recognition on Naxos’ terms? Does she even have a choice?