(Not) Articulating Roxana through Décalage

The moment in which Roxana’s name is spoken demands a shift in the reader’s conceptual framework, predicated on the idea that the heroine’s name encompasses a host of ever-changing identities. For although the title alludes to her name, we are uncomfortably denied its first utterance until midway through the novel, forced to consider the implications of her namelessness as we determine her character. But the uneasiness persists with the realization that the name Roxana exists as a placeholder that denotes a particular sort of identity: it is only when Defoe’s heroine assumes the costume of a Turkish princess that she answers to the name. How, then, are we to account for the many unnamed versions of Roxana that populate the book?

Although Roxana and Brent Hayes Edwards’ “In the Uses of Diaspora” make strange bedfellows, I hope to use Edwards’ terminology to trace Roxana’s resistance to naming. In “The Uses of Diaspora,” Edwards demonstrates how the “analytic focus” of the term diaspora “fluctuates,” remaining “open to ideological appropriation in a wide variety of political projects” surrounding the work on black culture and politics (54). He argues that, far from existing as an umbrella term with an easily accessible history, diaspora “forces us to consider discourses of cultural and political linkage only through and across difference” (54). Edwards’ reading of diaspora through difference persists through his conclusion, which suggests the French word décalage as a model for “what escapes or resists translation through the African diaspora,” existing as “both the point of separation…and the point of linkage (66).

I find décalage be a useful term in considering the unifying significance of Roxana’s name, despite her best efforts to avoid its use. It is impossible to consider the book apart from its title. We read the book searching for Roxana from the beginning, despite a clear warning in the Preface: “It is not always so necessary that the Names of Persons shou’d be discover’d…”(1). But when the moment arrives when Roxana is finally “discover’d,” it becomes apparent how crucial this name is to constructing her identity. Roxana’s name exists as both the point of separation—that is, the place where her identity diverges from that of the costumed Turkish princess—and the point of linkage demonstrating how the name is associated with each of Roxana’s distinct personas. In this sense, “Roxana” operates in the same sense as “diaspora,” by allowing us, as Edwards put it, to remove the prop and consider “the trace or the residue…of what resists translation…” (64). When the name “Roxana” is articulated, it brings to mind the initial creation of Roxana on the title page, then the surprise of a novel that lacks any reference to Roxana, and finally the discomfort of Roxana existing beyond our grasp.

Of course, there are several complications in using this terminology. Firstly, the identity claims I make for Roxana are vastly different than the claims Edwards makes for the African diaspora, in that mine lack the dimension of race. Secondly, while Edwards is addressing a field of study, I apply his definition of décalage to a character who employs her agency to reject the name Defoe bestows upon her. After her name is shouted out at a public assembly by an unnamed gentleman, the heroine takes great pains to hide the costume in which she was identified. Even more notably, when the reader determines—through a narrative “slip”—that Roxana’s birth name is Susan, she arranges for the murder of the daughter that bears that same name, effectively erasing all record of the original Roxana. Is it problematic to use the term décalage to apply to a character who actively attempts to avoid representation, even if that representation is inevitable? Edwards’ argument seems to hinge on the idea that diaspora be articulated again and again, each time gaining difference that can be woven into the definition of the word. What happens when Roxana refuses to be articulated?