Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series

Annette Trefzer, Ann J. Abadie, Annette Trefzer, Ann J. Abadie

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781626741539
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

Contributions by Hosam Aboul-Ela, Susan V. Donaldson, Richard Godden, Michael Gorra, Lisa Hinrichsen, Donald M. Kartiganer, Sarah Mahurin, Sean McCann, Noel Polk, Esther Sánchez-Pardo, Annette Trefzer, Rachel Watson, and Philip Weinstein Faulkner and Mystery presents a wide spectrum of compelling arguments about the role and function of mystery in William Faulkner's fiction. Twelve new essays approach the question of what can be known and what remains a secret in the narratives of the Nobel laureate. Scholars debate whether or not Faulkner's work attempts to solve mysteries or celebrate the enigmas of life and the elusiveness of truth. Scholars scrutinize Faulkner's use of the contemporary crime and detection genre as well as novels that deepen a plot rather than solve it. Several essays are dedicated to exploring the narrative strategies and ideological functions of Faulkner's take on the detective story, the classic "whodunit." Among Faulkner's novels most interested in the format of detection is Intruder in the Dust, which assumes a central role in this essay collection. Other contributors explore the thickening mysteries of racial and sexual identity, particularly the enigmatic nature of his female and African American characters. Questions of insight, cognition, and judgment in Faulkner's work are also at the center of essays that explore his storytelling techniques, plot development, and the inscrutability of language itself.

The Blackness of Absalom, Absalom!

DONALD M. KARTIGANER

The great mystery of Absalom, Absalom! is not why Thomas Sutpen rejected Charles Bon as a husband for his daughter Judith, but why it takes the four internal narrators of the story—these extraordinarily gifted prose artists and analysts of character—so incredibly long to answer that question. The motive for murder turns out to be what they have always known but dare not consciously acknowledge: the power of the African life that emerges as the inescapable core of the Southern history Thomas Sutpen enacts and represents. Racial and cultural blackness is the repressed reality the narrators dwell in and deny, exploit and dismiss, like a dark pleasure to be obsessively indulged even as it arouses a horror and a guilt that are not to be borne.

Rosa Coldfield, Mr. Compson, Quentin Compson, and Shreve immerse themselves in the imagery, literal and figurative, of the African: Haitian, Creole, American. Quentin, in his account of Sutpen and his slaves chasing the New Orleans architect in flight from the project of designing and building the Sutpen mansion, exemplifies the sensibility that permeates the entire text: “‘the niggers (the niggers mostly still naked except for a pair of pants here and there) with the pine torches smoking and flaring above them and the red light on their round heads and arms and the mud they wore in the swamp to keep the mosquitoes off dried hard and shiny, glinting like glass or china and the shadows they cast taller than they were at one moment then gone the next and even the trees and brakes and thickets there one moment and gone the next’”—the blacks, their shadows, like the woods and underbrush through which they move, “‘they were still there because you could feel them with your breathing, as though, invisible, they pressed down and condensed the invisible air you breathed.’”¹

However rich the imagery they employ, the narrators resist its fullest meaning, concealing the blackness of the history with various screens: the Satanic force of Sutpen’s depravity, the fatalism of the cosmopolitan Charles Bon, the incestuous, homoerotic desires of Bon and Henry. Whatever the motive for the murder of Charles Bon, it must have nothing to do with race, nothing to do with the blackness that circumscribes all the events, “‘there one moment and gone the next.’”

The most succinct statement of resistance comes from Sutpen, the man whose grand “design” rests on his conviction that blackness is not integral to, but an aberration from, his rise from poor white to plantation master. He tells Quentin’s grandfather how, as a boy of ten arriving with his family in Virginia, he discovered the ubiquity of blacks and their frequent roles as objects of white anger and resentment, and yet quickly learned that they are not the true object of that anger: “‘you knew that you could hit them, he told Grandfather, and they would not hit back or even resist. But you did not want to, because they (the niggers) were not it, not what you wanted to hit’” (186). What Sutpen learns is a truth that conceals a deeper deception which the narrators of Absalom invariably resort to as the mask, the “balloon face” (186) of their obsession. They “‘were not it, not what you wanted to hit,’” and yet the constant presence in their lives and imaginations of that which is not it reflects a doubled-edged desire of attraction and repulsion, a desperate need to claim difference in the very act of experiencing a profound intimacy.

Absalom, Absalom! is the most complete representation in American literature—and the most complete analysis—of what Toni Morrison has described as the standard white American literary practice of “gathering identity … from the wholly available and serviceable lives of Africanist others.” Blackness becomes “a playground for the imagination … a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire that is uniquely American.” The anxiety accompanying the practice, however, requires simultaneous repression of the blackness evoked; that “fabricated brew” must not be brought to full fictional life. White writers create a “language that mystifies what it cannot bring itself to articulate but still attempts to register.”²

To register but not articulate, exploit but not acknowledge. In the South, the culture of which is complicated and intensified by the continuous, close relationship that, despite constant tension, exists between white and black, there is indeed a need to register Southern history as a shared experience, lived, as Absalom, Absalom! makes clear, at every level of life—in love and hatred, labor and pleasure, honor and vengeance—but to write that experience through strategic screens that reverse intimacy into a hierarchical binary, reducing the African to secondary significance, as if determined to empty the imagery of the power that inspires it. The great originality of Absalom is that, despite the defenses of its narrators, it evokes the knowing and the not knowing as equal adversaries. Moreover, it ultimately shatters the impasse on a breakthrough that offers new vision, but without diminishing the devastating effects of the old. The triumph of the novel, that is, also foresees the continuation of the tragic dilemma.

* * *

Absalom, Absalom! is the first of Faulkner’s novels to take as its theme the African American as a central, not a marginal, figure in the South. In The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner’s first novel that has a major black character, the emphasis is clearly on the condition of black instrumentality to the white community. Dilsey Gibson is the epitome of the servant sharply divided from the family she serves: variously appreciated, but quite unknown to the Compsons because it is inconceivable to them that, other than her service, there is anything more to be known. What we may judge to be her moral superiority to the Compsons is itself a function of that service, since it too rests largely on her single-minded, selfless devotion to them. The African American Easter service she attends performs a comparable functionality for the novel as a whole, a means of exposing the Compson’s spiritual decay while remaining itself beyond our understanding. The Reverend Shegog’s sermon and the congregation’s response to it comes to us as a strange, contorted Christianity performed in order to reap a spiritual knowledge whose very inscrutability constitutes its power: “And the congregation seemed to watch with its own eyes while the [preacher’s] voice consumed him, until he was nothing and they were nothing and there was not even a voice but instead their hearts were speaking to one another in chanting measures beyond the need for words.”³

In Light in August the African American is not merely marginal, but nonexistent. What is most remarkable about a novel in which Faulkner seems to be moving toward a more complex rendering of the role of the African American in Southern life is the fact that there is scarcely a black character in it. Joe Christmas is the blank figure at the center who in childhood assumes a possible but never verified black identity, wholly derived from the white cultural stereotypes in which he lives. The initial source of that identity is his grandfather, Doc Hines, for whom blackness and “bitchery” are one, and who literally gazes Joe into the difference that he will adopt as his working definition: “That is why I am different from the others: because he is watching me all the time.”⁴ The name of difference, for Joe and for the other children at the orphanage, is “nigger.” In Light in August the African American is invisible, a free-standing, portable word that whites use in order to name the chaos that occasionally surfaces in their community: an orphan child’s unwitting voyeurism or the depths of sexuality or the alleged murderer of a white woman. The novel is essentially about how blackness effectively disappears, leaving the white community complete freedom to exploit it.

The Unvanquished, written as a series of short stories largely before Absalom, but expanded and revised afterwards for publication as a novel, returns African Americans to visibility. They remain, however, peripheral figures, despite the fact that the war that frees the slaves is the book’s most momentous action. While Barbara Ladd has made a strong argument for the autonomy of the slave Loosh as he joins the other slaves marching northward, in the concluding story, as she points out, Loosh is back on the plantation, absent of any explanation for his return.⁵ More importantly, the slave Ringo, despite John Sartoris’s claim that he is “smarter” than the narrator, Bayard Sartoris, and who for much of the novel plays a pivotal role in the action, has become by the end a secondary figure, his marginal status secured. Although they have been raised virtually as brothers, Bayard is the one who shoots Grumby, the man responsible for the death of “Granny” Rosa Millard, and Bayard alone will plan and execute a unique vengeance against his father’s killer.

In all these novels African American marginality is a given. Faulkner deepens the stereotypical roles of blacks, yet he continues to depend on them, only rarely pausing, as Ralph Ellison acknowledged, to “seek out the human truth which [stereotype] hides.”⁶ He makes clear the white exploitation of blackness, yet he seems to be decrying the brutality (and at times the absurdity) of the exploitation without providing an alternative image to the assumption of black subserviency on which it is based. There is no fictional vision of the white mind truly engaging, even if not with full consciousness, its own desires and fears, the paradox of practicing, simultaneously, intimacy and difference.

* * *

The question that arises, to put it baldly, is how and why does Absalom, Absalom! happen? Blackness in the novel remains within a language of white appropriation, but now it threatens constantly to break through what Morrison calls its “registration,” its “mystification,” into a fearful “articulation.” Ultimately it comes forth as the son, the brother, the lover who must be recognized—if necessary by compelling the white man into an act of murder. This is not the death, however, of the “black” man of Light in August, which becomes the topic at “suppertables on that Monday night” (443), the townspeople calmly speculating on the day’s violent doings, their lives returned to order with Christmas’s necessary, if horrifying, end. The death in Absalom, Absalom! brings down the entire Sutpen edifice—the design, the dynasty, and the world they imply—and leaves its primary teller in a state of shock, turned toward the suicide his creator has already put in place.

How does Faulkner get from his novels of African American marginality to the novel of their centrality—and not only get there but to insist, as I will be arguing in the following pages, that this centrality is the most difficult and the most necessary knowledge that the South must acquire? What is going on in Faulkner’s life, his reading, his writing, his north Mississippi world, or the South generally, that leads him to present what is for him and white Southern writing a strikingly new understanding of how the culture of race in the South works?

Definitive answers, of course, are out of the question, given not only the innumerable possible sources of influence and impact, but even more so the great complexity of how historical, social, economic, cultural, and biographical materials make their way into literary texts. In the course of representation does a text record, revise, or recreate its context? Or does it—can it?—imagine the acontextual: “a world elsewhere,” as Richard Poirier, more than a half century ago, proposed as the driving force in American literature?⁷ Nevertheless, if we look at Faulkner’s scene as he writes what will prove to be the beginning of Absalom, Absalom!—the story “Evangeline,” (1931)—and completes the typescript of the novel in January 1936, there are certain texts, conditions, biographical details I find suggestive, although hardly beyond dispute as significant factors in the shaping of Absalom.⁸ One is the collection of essays published in 1930 by “Twelve Southerners,” I’ll Take My Stand, analyzing the current state of the South. Another is what the historian Joel Williamson, in The Crucible of Race (1984), designates as a significant shift in black-white social relations in the 1920s and 1930s. Finally, there is the still unproven biographical speculation concerning a half-black daughter of Faulkner’s great-grandfather, William C. Falkner, proposed by Williamson in Faulkner and Southern History (1993).

Joining the two books of 1930 and 1984 is the fact that the first effectively illustrates the white attitude toward race diagnosed by the second. And the thrust of that attitude confirms the conditions of subserviency or absence that exist in The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and The Unvanquished. In The Crucible of Race Joel Williamson describes a Southern white perspective in the 1920s and 1930s that relegated the black population of the South to an absolutely peripheral status. Added to the customary domination of white over black was a new element, a remarkable psychic leap in the white mind, by means of which the African American population, numbering in the millions, virtually ceased to exist.

During this period, Williamson argues, the South abandoned the attitudes of what he calls the Radical era of 1889–1915, which focused sharply and narrowly on the supposed primitiveness of blacks, emphasizing an inherent savagery epitomized in the image of the “black beast” rapist of white women. Instead of presenting the black as menace, allegedly the result of the relaxation of white control once imposed by slavery, the conservatives of the ’20s and ’30s minimized the very presence of African Americans, reducing them to a necessary but shadowy instrumentality.

They were a people unto themselves, serving the whites but distinctly separate from them—not merely according to the system of strict segregation, but as if they constituted another species entirely. There was, Williamson maintains, a “white withdrawal from blackness both in the body and in the mind. A logical result of such thinking was the promotion of the invisibility of black people, the further removal of white people from the possibility of recognizing the equal humanity of blacks, and, finally, the loss of the black problem in the white mind.”⁹

While this kind of thinking might be regarded as an improvement over earlier Radical attitudes, it generated a detachment from the reality of black life that was equally dehumanizing. Blacks had, and would stay in, their “place,” becoming in the white mind the objects of a kind of complacent if strategic indifference. Supplanting the black beast was an older image renewed, what Williamson calls the “neo-Sambo” image. No longer the “child” of the antebellum period nor the “savage” of the Radical period, neo-Sambo was a useful adjunct to the white community and, like his earlier manifestation, “docile, subordinate, pliable, conforming, and loyal” (463).

To be sure, the guarantee of docility continued to be the violence that could be inflicted on those who refused that role. Lynching sharply declined in the 1930s, in part because of the crushing domination that prevailed, yet it still functioned as a very real threat. The fear of it, as Richard Wright writes in Black Boy, “hung over every male black...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Note on the Conference
• “And you are ——?” Faulkner’s Mysteries of Race and Identity
• The Blackness of Absalom, Absalom!
• Reading “Red Leaves”: Mouths, Labor Power, and Revolutions
• “Nice Believing”: Mystery and Mysteries in Light in August
• “To Survive What Looked Out”: The Forensic Trail and William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust
• The Mysterious Case of the Cold War Imaginary: Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust and Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky
• Critical Intruders: Unraveling Race and Mystery in Intruder in the Dust
• Reimagining the Femme Fatale: Requiem for a Nun and the Lessons of Film Noir
• Open Spaces, Open Secrets: Sanctuary’s Mysterious “Something”
• Unvanquished Uncertainty
• Faulkner’s Plots
• “It Just Doesn’t Explain”: “The Leg,” “Mistral,” Evelyn Nesbit, and the Unreadable World
• Contributors
• Index