That time had come for Lewis, whose intervention on the "race question" still stands today as one of the most original meditations on white identity in U.S. literature. For it was Lewis who introduced to mainstream America the idea that it was not the "Negro Problem" which afflicted the nation but rather "a White Problem," and a "white mythology" that kept it concealed (238). Kingsblood Royal is a theory of defection from the "white race" advanced through tropes Lewis had made famous in previous novels such as Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), and Elmer Gantry (1927)-works that earned him in 1930 the Nobel Prize in literature, the first such award to an American. Anti-intellectualism, conformity, the lies of official society, the sham of born-again Christianity, and the banality of consumerism had been each treated satirically by Lewis, and, with his acerbic wit all over them, raised to the level of Americana. Yet there seemed to be missing in these early novels a center of gravity, or, better, a historical cause of all the absurdity that Lewis so masterfully satirized. Tragi-comic narratives all, yet one wonders today what was the specific object of Lewis's gaze? In his day "Main Street" was that specific object, and his achievement then was to show how this particular trope was becoming a universal experience for Americans. But today the trope is rusting out in direct proportion to the deindustrialization of the nation's midwestern factory towns. Ironically, today it is Lewis's most "peculiar" novel, Kingsblood Royal-the only one that deals with race-which holds the most universal significance precisely because, whereas "Main Street" is fast becoming extinct as an American phenomenon, the white identity is not. An answer to why this is so lies in the pages of Kingsblood Royal.

Neil Kingsblood's "immediate problem-free organic nature" is destroyed not by a single dramatic event or social crisis but rather by a modest intellectual excursion into the historical past of his own midwestern family. Neil is set on a task by his father Kenneth through which proof is sought by the latter that the Kingsbloods "have sure-enough royal blood in our veins," a rumor passed down to Dr. Kingsblood by his own father (35). Neil's father is a dentist who "had puttered contentedly through life" (34). He worships Neil, who, the narrator explains, "would carry out all the reforms-large schools and a new water-reservoir-of which Dr. Kenneth had dreamed, but which he had been too busy with dentistry and gardening and scrollwork to carry out" (35).

Just as adept at the ironic inversion as Melville, Lewis quickly flips the script on good-natured Dr. Kingsblood when Neil's dutiful investigation of the family tree reveals that Kenneth not only lacks any trace of royal blood, but has been married all these years to an African American woman, his beloved wife Faith Kingsblood (née Saxinar). The evidence is compelling, documented in family letters, through a series of personal interviews Neil conducts with his maternal grandmother Julie Saxinar, and queries at the Minnesota Historical Society. Julie had always told her daughter Faith they were "part Chippewa," but the grandmother did not consider that her father, Xavier Pic, who had married a Chippewa woman, was African American. This fact is revealed when Neil explores the life of Xavier at the Historical Society, and learns that he was a famous Minnesota frontiersman. The genealogical part of Lewis's tale is carried out swiftly, within the first fifth of the novel. The stage set, Lewis's next move is the total destruction of Neil's white identity-a tour de force of epic size and unpredictability. "He was in a still horror, beyond surprise now, like a man who has learned that last night, walking in his sleep, he murdered a man, that the police are looking for him" (60).

The force of Lewis's critique of whiteness is that he works through systematically all the possible explanations for it, and arrives at what might be called the historically-relative theory of white identity. Lewis has Neil review with himself all the social constructions of whiteness he has accumulated in the course of his life. This takes about fifteen minutes of Neil's time. Each and every social construction is shown to be a simple negation of blackness. Neil is "white" and clean because he is not "black" and "more offensive than the animals who clean themselves." He is "white" and smart because he is not "black" and "unable-biologically, fundamentally, unchangeably unable-to grasp any science beyond addition and plain cooking and the driving of a car, any philosophy beyond dream-books." He is "white" because he is not "black" and "unable to keep from stealing and violence, from lying and treachery" (61). And he is "white" because...

To be a Negro, once they found you out, no matter how pale you were, was to work in kitchens-always in other people's thankless kitchens-or in choking laundries or fever-hot foundries or at shoeshine stands where the disdainful white gentry thought about spitting down on you. that you were never admitted to the dining table of any decent house nor to the assemblies of most labor unions. was to be obsequious to white pawnbrokers; to be a leering black stevedore on the docks at Naples, wearing an American uniform but not allowed to have a gun, allowed only to stagger and ache with shouldering enormous boxes; to be a field hand under the Delta sun, under the torchlight in salvation orgies, an animal with none of the animal freedom from shame; to be an assassin on Beale Street or a clown dancing in a saloon for pennies and humiliation. was to live in a decaying shanty or in a frame tenement like a foul egg-crate, and to wear either slapping old shoes or the shiny toothpicks of a procurer; to sleep on unchanged bedclothes that were like funguses, and to have for a spiritual leader only a howling and lecherous swindler (60-1).

The social constructions of race are decisive to Neil insofar as he needs to know that "We're not like that. Negroes are not like that" (62). But the far more crucial aspect of his new quest is contained in the string of mental notes cited above: the fact that learning to live white-free requires the repudiation of his white skin privileges, such as union membership for whites-only, better paying and easier work, white convenant neighborhoods, and, most significantly, the presumption of liberty. And as Lewis will show, there is a ruling class in "Grand Republic" who constructs these privileges, and who imposes a white racial order on Neil and every other member of his society. But before Neil can come to this understanding, and internalize the concept, he must embark on a journey described eloquently by James Baldwin fifteen years later in his legendary essay, "The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy." "To become a Negro man," Baldwin wrote...

one has to make oneself up as one went along. This had to be done in the not-at-all metaphorical teeth of the world's determination to destroy you. This is not the way this truth presents itself to white men, who believe the world is theirs and who, albeit unconsciously, expect the world to help them in the achievement of their identity (183).

This trope of making it up as one goes along becomes for Lewis the structure of his defection narrative. Many white critics of the novel missed this strategy in their reviews, calling the storytelling mere "propaganda" (Schorer, 759). In fact, Lewis admitted that the novel flew out of him, taking only five weeks to complete (Schorer, 748). Suffice it to say that it was Lewis's correct conceptualization of the white identity that enabled him to resist the impulse to construct a heavy literary edifice on which his hero is either "maniacally imprisoned in himself" or disillusioned with the world around him-where the attitude towards the outside world "is a lyrical one, compounded of love, and accusation, of sorrow, pity and scorn" (both phrases are from Lukács). In this way, Lewis's own repudiation of white skin privilege-the refusal of both abstract idealism and the romanticism of disillusionment as narrative forms for his novel about white people-happens simultaneously with his hero's defection from the "white race." Lewis's strategy was necessary, and it did not please the formalist critics, but then few liberatory actions ever do. It is worth noting that while writing Kingsblood Royal in Duluth, Minnesota (his hometown), Lewis managed to force permanent disassociations with many of his white friends and family by publicly speaking out against white supremacy at dinner parties and social functions (Lingeman, 498). According to biographer Richard Lingeman, Lewis became, during the writing of the novel, "the lonesomest man on earth" (500).

As the writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance showed the country and the world, making it up as one goes along involves agonizing self-critique. Neil Kingsblood's journey begins from this departure point. One of the first lessons he learns is that "the glee in becoming a colored boy" could be easily overdone (68). Freed from the white race corral, he experiences an existentialist elation: now nobody knows his name; he is free, precisely because nobody cares whether or not he exists, to define himself according to his own prerogatives. What occurs to him immediately is to fight: "If you are a Negro," he tells himself, "you be one and fight as one. See if you can grow up, and then fight" (62). But this impulse is quickly countered with another: "But I've got to learn what a Negro is; I've got to learn, from the beginning, what I am!" (62). This pattern of self-questioning continues throughout Neil's journey. It can be characterized as a swing between two poles: romanticism and idealism. What grounds Neil finally is the lived experience of being an African American in U.S. society.

Lewis's pace is so tireless and swift that one accepts early on in the narrative that Neil will not hover long between the two poles. Moreover, Neil is an unpretentious midwesterner, interested in simple things: his young daughter's development, his wife, his boyhood friends, sports, and work. It is telling in this respect that Lewis begins the novel not from the standpoint of Grand Republic, Minnesota-the story's location-but instead with a family of New Yorkers passing through on their way to Winnipeg. "As they were New Yorkers," the novel opens, "only a business trip could have dragged them into this wilderness, and they found everything west of Pennsylvania contemptible. They laughed at Chicago for daring to have skyscrapers and at Madison for pretending to have a university, and they stopped and shrieked when they entered Minnesota and saw a billboard advertising 'Ten Thousand Lakes'" (3). This set-up is important, for it allows Lewis to locate his defection narrative away from the machinery of media fabulation, Manhattan, where an environment of self-invention obtains that often goes no farther than the sublimation of either poverty or wealth.