211
personification of his disorder and chaos but that he will become
fact that which he intends only to symbolize; that he will be
somewhere in the mystery of hell (for there is a mystery in the
ness of blackness, the innocence of evil, and the evil of u'
mOICCIICl
though, being initiates, Negroes express the joke of it in the
and thus lose that freedom which, in the fluid, "traditionless,"
less," and rapidly changing society, he would recognize as the
man's alone.
Here another ironic facet of the old American problem of'
tity crops up. For out of the counterfeiting of the black
identity there arises a profound doubt in the white man's mind
to the authenticity of
his
own image of himself. He, after all,
into the business when he refused the king's shilling and
He had put all! a mask of his own, as it were; and when we
our concern with identity in the light of what Robert Penn
has termed the "intentional" character of our national beginnings,
quotation from W. B. Yeats proves highly meaningful:
There is a relation between discipline and the theatrical sense.
If
cannot imagine ourselves as different from what we are and assume
second self, we cannot impose a discipline upon ourselves, though
may accept one from others. Active virtue, as distinct from the
acceptance of a current code, is the wearing of a mask. It is the
tion of an arduous full life.
For the ex-colonials, the declaration of an American .
meant the assumption of a mask, and it imposed not only the
cipline of national self-consciousness, it gave
~ericans
an
awareness of the joke that always lies between appearance and
between the discontinuity of social tradition and that sense of the
which clings to the mind. And perhaps even an awareness of
joke that society is man's creation, not God's. 'Americans began
revolt from the English fatherland when they dumped the tea
the Boston Harbor, masked as Indians, and the mobility of
the
ciety created in this limitless space has encouraged the use of
mask for good and evil ever since.
As
the advertising industry,
is dedicated to the creation of masks, makes clear, that which
gain authority from tradition may borrow it with a mask.
is a play upon possibility and ours is a society in which possibilities
many. When American life is most American it is apt to be
theatrical.
