Faulkner in the Twenty-First Century (Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series)

Faulkner in the Twenty-First Century FAULKNER AND YOKNAPATAWPHA 2000

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Faulkner in the Twentv-First Centurv . I

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FAULKNER AND YOKNAPATAWPHA, 2000 EDITED BY ROBERT W. HAMBLIN AND ANN J. ABADIE

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI JACKSON

www.upress.state.ms.us Copyright 0 2003 by University Press of Mississippi All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 4 3 2 1

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference (27th : 2000 : University of Mississippi) Faulkner in the twenty-first century / edited by Robert W. Hamblin and Ann J. Abadie. p. cm. Contributors to the 27th annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, held in 2000 at the University of Mississippi. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-57806-513-5 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Faulkner, William, iSg7-ig62-Criticism and interpretation-Congresses. 2. Yoknapatawpha County (Imaginary place)-Congresses. 3. Mississippi-In literature-Congresses. I. Hamblin, Robert W. 11. Abadie, Ann J. 111. Title. PS35i~A86Z783116 8 13’.52-dc21

2000

2002011650

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

For John Pilkington Our professor, mentor, and friend

Contents

ix

Introduction ROBERT W. HAMBLIN

xvii

A Note on the Conference

xix

Opening Remarks DONALD M. KARTIGANER

The Roster, the Chronicle, and the Critic

1

THERESA M. TOWNER

Faulkner in the Twenty-First Century: Boundaries of Meaning, Boundaries of Mississippi

14

MICHAEL KREYLING

William Faulkner, Edouard Glissant, and a Creole Poetics of History and Body in Absalom, Absalom! and A Fable BARBARA LADD

Faulkner and Spanish America: Then and Now DEBORAH N. COHN

Postcolonial Displacements in Faulkner’s Indian Stories of the 1930s

68

ANNETTE TREFZER

Haunting Yoknapatawpha: Faulkner and Traumatic Memory

89

LEIGH ANNE DUCK

Faulkner’s Future Tense: A Critique of the Instant and the Continuum

107

PATRICK O’DONNELL

Lucas Beauchamp’s Choices

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KARL F. ZENDER

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Introduction With its number of consecutive annual meetings now totaling twentyseven, the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference sponsored by the University of Mississippi is currently the longest running conference devoted to a single author. And with each successive meeting, as Donald Kartiganer observed in his opening remarks to those attending the 2000 conference, the inevitable question is raised: After all these years, is there anything more to be said about Faulkner and his works? This question, understandably, is given heightened prominence at the beginning of a new millennium. Thus the organizers of the 2000 conference selected the program topic “Faulkner in the Twenty-First Century.,’ As the papers included in this volume demonstrate, the presenters at this year’s conference clearly believe there is more to be said about Faulkner, and, in typical Faulknerian fashion, they believe that “more” involves looking backward as well as forward. Interestingly, the ten essays printed here are evenly divided on this score, with the first five representing promising current trends and the second five supplying fresh approaches to long-familiar Faulkner topics. I n the opening essay, “The Roster, the Chronicle, and the Critic,” Theresa M. Towner examines the issue of canonicity. Towner encourages scholars in the twenty-first century to challenge the long-accepted classifications of Faulkner’s characters and works as “major” and “minor.” Towner commends the innovative work of recent psychological, postmodernist, and race/class/gender critics but then faults them for unwisely imitating the earlier agrarians and formalists by limiting their attention to a virtually exclusive group of five novels-The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalorn, Absalorn!, and Go Down, Mosesfrom Faulkner’s so-called major phase, igzg-ig42. Citing such typically neglected or undervalued characters as Virgil Beard, Lucy Pate, Labove, Cecilia Farmer, Tobe Sutterfield, Samuel Beauchamp, Hawkshaw, and a plethora of Snopeses (to name only a few of her many examples), Towner calls for a closer examination of “the central marginality or marginal centrality . . . in Faulkner’s novels.” This shift in approach would heighten readers’ awareness of Faulkner’s “ability to populate his fiction with such particularity,” which, according to Towner, is “perhaps the greatest hallmark of his genius.” Michael Kreyling’s essay, “Faulkner in the Twenty-First Century: Boundaries of Meaning, Boundaries of Mississippi,” considers the interactions of Faulkner’s texts with the ever-evolving political and cultural ix

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INTRODUCTION

scene in his native state. Employing representative photographs of Faulkner that may be taken to symbolize the successive stages of his career, Kreyling traces Faulkner’s ambivalent feelings toward his homeland-from the young bohemian poet and novelist who agrees with H. L. Mencken’s assessment of Mississippi as “The Worst American State,” to the accommodationist Southern American largely created by Malcolm Cowley’s influential The Portable Faulkner, to the Southern liberal enlisted in the civil rights cause by c. Vann Woodward, James Silver, and others, to the Southern apologist who in Intruder in the Dust and a series of essays and personal interviews defends Mississippi against all outsiders. Since Faulkner’s career and literary reputation have been so closely intertwined with Mississippi’s unhappy and convoluted past, what will happen, Kreyling asks, “now that Mississippi has perhaps climbed out of the heart of darkness,” “when the image of Mississippi gradually shades away from ‘state terrorism’ to the relatively innocent and goofy asylum of Robert Altman’s Cookie’s Fortune,” when “tragedy will no longer be a potent metaphor”? One answer to this question, Kreyling asserts, is provided by the Caribbean novelist and critic Edouard Glissant, whose Faulkner, Mississippi (French edition, 1996; English translation, 1999) uproots Faulkner’s work from its native soil and replants it in that other modern South with a tragic past, the postcolonial Caribbean. Kreyling calls Glissant’s Faulkner “King Creole,” the label intentionally suggesting the degree to which Faulkner will perhaps be assimilated into “the global consciousness of the emerging century.” Barbara Ladd also finds Glissant useful in her approach to Faulkner. In “William Faulkner, Edouard Glissant, and a Creole Poetics of History and Body in Absalom, Absalom! and A Fable,” she objects to the traditional view that Faulkner’s works embody only or even primarily “the universalizing Western Historical vision”-derived in part from the philosophical ideas of Hegel-that stresses origin, logical development, and culmination. Against this Euro-American concept Ladd sets a Creole poetics-what Glissant calls “une poe‘tique de la Relation”-that “speaks from the intersection where History confronts and is confronted by the histories of the colonized, the dispossessed, the exiled.” In this lowercase-h history, as opposed to History, cultural mixing, simultaneity, irruption, and becoming-“the composite, the always emergent”-are privileged over essences, chronologies, and logocentric valuing. Thus Creole poetics celebrates place and body, not indefinite space and abstractions. In applying these contrasting views of the historical process to Faulkner’s aesthetic, Ladd argues that such characters as Quentin and Jason Compson, Rosa Coldfield, and Thomas Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom! and the Old General in A Fable represent the Western view of his-

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tory as an ultimate dead end, whereas Charles Bon, Jim Bond, Tobe Sutterfield, the British runner, and the Quartermaster General represent a creolization that posits hope for survival and future development in its processes of “integration and regeneration.” What all this will bring to Faulkner studies in the next century, Ladd concludes, is “not a threat but a promise,” since “those who resist History in Faulkner do so out of a deep identification of the human with place and body, with dlrectionality as determined by the location and position of the body (and not with the abstraction of a dialectic movement).” Like Kreyling and Ladd, Deborah Cohn, in “Faulkner and Spanish America: Then and NOW,”also examines Faulkner’s relationship to the other American South. She explores the influence of Faulkner upon Spanish American authors from the 1930s to the present, with particular s, Spanish Ameriattention to the “Boom” period of the ’60s and ’ ~ o when can literature gained international prominence. As Cohn demonstrates, several noteworthy Spanish American authors, including Gabriel Garcia MBrquez, Jos6 Donoso, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Juan Rulfo, Juan Carlos Onetti, and Luisa Bombal, have found Faulkner’s characters, themes, and techniques relevant to their own fictional (and in some cases political) purposes. The use of regional materials to express broader, even universal concerns; the emphasis upon a declining aristocratic and patriarchal social order; a lengthy history of conflict, exploitation, and defeat; the tragic experiences resulting from racial tension, marginalization, and poverty; the importance of family and community; the continuance of the past in the present; the numerous experimentations with narrative voice-these are only a few of the significant parallels that Cohn finds between the works of Faulkner and those of Spanish American authors. As Cohn points out, however, the longtime Spanish American recognition and use of Faukner has only recently created a reciprocal North American response. A further redressing of this critical imbalance, Cohn believes, will continue in the twenty-first century, to the benefit of both Faulkner scholarship and cultural studies, since such reciprocity contributes to “avoiding the creation of new monoliths and exceptionalist myths and, instead, building a hemispheric paradigm that acknowledges both the commonalities and the differences of its constituent regions.” Annette Trefzer is similarly interested in postcolonial theory, but as it applies to Faulkner’s treatment of Native Americans. In “Postcolonial Displacements in Faulkner’s Indian Stories of the ig3os,” Trefzer examines two Faulkner short stories, “Red Leaves” and “LO!,”in relation to the growing interest among literary scholars in the issues and politics of ethnicity. Drawing upon the work of Homi K. Bhabha and others, Trezfer argues that “Faulkner’s Indian texts do not produce mimesis but mim-

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INTRODUCTION

and the Hearth.” In a discussion based on both a close reading of the text and a consideration of the social and political implications of the story, Zender seeks to rebut the postmodern critics who claim, first, that the structure of the story is extremely disjointed and contradictory (reflecting Faulkner’s ambivalence) and, second, that the humor and silences of the narrative deflect and trivialize the story’s dramatization of African American oppression by the Southern plantocracy. On the contrary, Zender contends, “The Fire and the Hearth” is a highly integrated text in which both the main comic action and the nearly tragic flashback are unified by the common element of Beauchamp’s heroic actions in defending his dignity and selfhood against the racist attitudes and actions of Zack Edmonds. In Lucas’s separate actions of reclaiming his wife from the white man’s house and, years later, manipulating Zacks involvement in the court procedures relative to Lucas and Molly’s divorce proceedings, Lucas insists upon and ensures his identity as a “man” instead of a “nigger.” At the same time, according to Zender, Lucas’s acceptance of and accommodations to his white as well as his black ancestry and heritage, instead of being a serious defect in the story, as many postmodernists contend, is actually integral to Lucas’s triumph. Drawing upon his own personal experience in rising from an economically disadvantaged background, the steady if still hindered advance in the American mainstream that blacks and other minority groups have made in recent decades, and the concept of hybridity that plays such a major role in postcolonial discourse, Zender argues that Beauchamp’s summonsing of Old Carothers McCaslin (“I needed him and he come and spoke for me”) demonstrates a refusal to view race strictly in terms of binary oppositions and the possibility of achieving success through a racial politics that employs not only confrontation but also negotiation and compromise. What is important to Zender is that Beauchamp achieves his triumph within Faulkner’s text, as well as within the social system that seeks to restrain him. With this argument, what Zender does, in effect, is to deconstruct the deconstructionist approach to “The Fire and the Hearth” and Faulkner’s treatment of race in general, and by so doing he demonstrates still another avenue of interpretation avdable to Faulkner scholars in the twenty-first century. Walter Benn Michaels, in “Absalom, Absalom!: The Difference between White Men and White Men,” also hrther considers Faulkner’s handling of race. In a wide-ranging essay that compares and contrasts Faulkner’s novel with a number of other works, including Stark Young’s So Red the Rose, Elizabeth Madox Roberts’s The Great Meadow, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman, F. Scott Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby, and George Schuyler’s Black No More, Michaels analyzes the way that Faulkner reconfigures the past as

INTRODUCTION

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a retrospective projection of contemporary concerns. Thus, according to Michaels, “Faulkner’s Haiti, retrofitting the free to the slave, is an epitome of Absalom, Absalom!, which retrofits the social configurations of Jim Crow to the plantation”; Sutpen’s need for slaves is “to set him apart from white white trash, above all from his white-trash self”; and the “‘nigger that’s going to sleep with your sister’ is the bugaboo of Jim Crow, not of slavery.” In Michaels’s view, in Faulkner’s South, and indeed the United States as a whole, racial identification (the obsession with “one drop” of ‘%lack blood”) subsumes and overpowers all other issues and conflicts-whether slavery, states’ rights, class conflict, gender relationships, or biological fact. Faulkner, Michaels claims, is “one of the great metaphysicians of race, able so thoroughly to intertwine it with class, money, and sex that his best novels make a world without race . . . look figuratively as well as literally pallid.” Whether this aspect of Faulkner’s art will continue to be relevant in the twenty-first century is an open question, dependmg, as Michaels notes, on whether the problem of the color line will be as significant to the next century as it was to Faulkner’s. In the final essay in this volume, “Beyond the Edge of the Map: Faulkner, Turner, and the Frontier Line,” Robert Hamblin returns to still another familiar Faulkner subject, the frontier. Taking his cue from the maps Faulkner drew of his imaginary county, the “history” of Yoknapatawpha recorded in such works as Requiemfor a Nun and “Mississippi,” and the political and historical essays and addresses Faulkner produced in the ig5os, Hamblin reexamines Faulkner’s recurring interest in “that point in the evolution of culture where wilderness and settlement meet, where nature and landscape are engaged and domesticated.” Hamblin finds significant parallels in “The Bear,” “Delta A ~ t u m n ,the ’ ~ “Old Man” section of The Wild Palms, and Faulkner’s “Address to the Delta Council” with the “frontier thesis” of Frederick Jackson Turner, noting, among other points, that the disappearance of the big woods in “The Bear” during the 1880s is exactly contemporaneous with Turner’s date for the closing of the frontier in American history. For Hamblin, “The Bear,” with its setting located within the boundaries of Faulkner’s map of Yoknapatawpha, presents “a highly romanticized and humanized view of nature, one that still lies very near to the civilized world,” while “Old Man,” the principal action of which takes place off the edge of Faulkner’s map, symbolically depicts “the ultimate frontier, unexplored and terror-filled, beyond the known world, the place where land and water’s end falls away into chaos and darkness.” Despite these contrasting views of nature, both Ike McCaslin and the Tall Convict may be taken as types of Turner’s American pioneer and frontiersman. “Delta Autumn” and the “Address

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to the Delta Council,” on the other hand, describe a society much like the one Turner foresaw as resulting from the closure of the frontier. Like Turner, Hamblin argues, Faulkner laments the erosion of regional distinctions and individual values and the rise of national patterns of standardization and collectivism. By placing Faulkner’s works alongside Turner’s, Hamblin seeks “at least partially to position Faulkner in the mainstream of American literature and history, as opposed to the tributaries of Southern regionalism or European modernism”-which, he suggests, should be another concern of twenty-first century scholars. Taken as a whole, the essays in this volume demonstrate that Faulkner’s works will continue to engage the serious attention of readers and scholars well into the twenty-first century. And this will be so because, as Kartiganer reminded the conferees, “in some remarkable way [Faulkner] caught something about life itself.” Indeed he did, and writers who manage to do that seem to have a way of remaining relevant, whatever the century. Robert W. Hamblin Southeast Missouri State University Cape Girardeau, Missouri

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an exhibition of the works of Faulkner friends Bern and Franke Keating of Greenville, Mississippi. A highlight of the conference continued to be the special “Teaching Faulkner” sessions conducted by visiting scholars Arlie Herron, James B. Carothers, Robert W. Hamblin, and Charles A. Peek. Other activities included visits to Faulkner exhibitions sponsored by the Department of Special Collections at the John Davis Williams Library, a walk through Bdey’s Woods before the annual picnic at Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oak, and parties at Square Books, at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Will Lewis, and at Tyler Place hosted by Charles Noyes, Sarah and Allie Smith, and Colby Kullman. The week ended with bus tours of North Mississippi and the Delta. For the second year, thirty high school teachers, the recipients of fellowships funded by a grant from Saks Incorporated Foundation, on behalf of McRae’s, Proffitt’s, and Parisian Department Stores, attended the conference. Also attending were an Elderhostel group led by Carolyn Vance Smith and an Interhostel group led by Lynne Geller. The conference planners are grateful to all the individuals and organizations who support the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference annually. In addition to those mentioned above, we wish to thank Mr. Richard Howorth of Square Books, St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, the City of Oxford, and the Oxford Tourism Council.

Opening Remarks

D O N A L DM . K A R T I G A N E R

Welcome to the Twenty-Seventh Annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference. The theme this year is “Faulkner in the Twenty-First Century.” Our hope is that the conference will open Faulkner to new possibilities as we engage in some creative retrospect, offer new ways of reading Faulkner as well as reexamine some of the tradtional ways we have read him. On the one hand, to determine how the very conditions of the new century may have an impact on how we receive Faulknerthat is, how readings may change because the situation and needs of readers change. On the other hand, to continue to respond to the inherent power of the text-assuming there is a power independent of our situation as readers-to try to see what may be there that we have not seen, to that Faulkner that is not so much behind us as out in front, waiting for us to catch up with him. Glancing through the program and abstracts, you can see some of the directions in which we will be going: a new attention, for example, to Spanish America as the source of a literature not only influenced by Faulkner’s fiction but curiously parallel to it, in both its formal strategies and historical vision, an attention to the culture and history of the Creole in Southern consciousness, as well as to that of the Native American, groups whose presence in Faulkner’s work is both substantial and largely ignored by critics. Some approaches we will be hearing about and discussing attend to issues that are hardly new to Faulkner readers, yet they continue to dog us as problems we have yet to resolve adequately: the past; memory; the frontier-and that particular Faulknerian concern that promises to be with us as long as we continue to read him, namely race: the “problem of the twenty-first century,” as the author of one paper puts it, as it has certainly been the problem of the twentieth. I am occasionally asked-&er the decades of books and articles and conferences: is there still something new to say about William Faulkner? I always answer-usually with enthusiasm, but occasionally with a kind of resignation-oh, yes, indeed yes, there is something new to be said. xix

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For two reasons, both of which I have suggested above: One is that while Faulkner’s words do not change-although we sometimes have to decide which ones to use, “corrected’ or uncorrected texts-readers change, and with their changes readings change, manifesting new concerns, new determinations of what is important, of what it is we most need to know. The second reason has to do with the texts themselves. In a frequently quoted passage Faulkner wrote: “The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.” If Faulkner is right-and if his words “move” now for us, nearly a halfcentury &er his death, or if they will move for readers in a hundred years-it will not be because somewhere along the line he read Derrida, Foucault, or Kristeva, or because he thought twice (or even once) about new historicism, or postmodernism, or gay studies, or cyberspace. It will be because, in some remarkable way he caught something about life itself. So that, no matter how foreign or far-flung or surprising our reading strategies become, if they are truly relevant they will resonate in Faulkner because in fact he fulfilled the artist’s aim. The books are fixed, in a state of arrest, but what is fixed is life, and if we are lucky, and if we read well, it will always be on the brink of moving again.

Faulkner in the Twenty-First Century FAULKNER AND YOKNAPATAWPHA 2000

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The Roster, the Chronicle, and the Critic T H E R E S AM . T O W N E R For Noel Polk

The last thing an author does in the preparation of a scholarly book is to index it, and this usually happens under the intense pressure of a deadline from the publisher. In my case with Faulkner on the Color Line, it also happened &er two proofreadings of the page proofs under the same deadline; so somewhere in the “Faulkner, William, Characters” section of my index, I promised myself that the next book I wrote would contain no proper names whatsoever. Yet close upon that vow I was struck with a sudden sense of creatorly power-which may only have been the function of blurred vision or the need for a restorative jolt of caffeine: in essence, I, as indexer, got to say for the record who was a character in William Faulkner’s fiction and who, by my omission, was not. This revelation came during some of the pages on Requiemfor a Nun, the book Faulkner once called “an interesting experiment in form”‘ that also brings Temple Drake and Gowan Stevens together again eight years after the horrific events of Sanctuary. A little tentatively, after my entry for “Stevens, Gowan” and before “Stevens, Temple Drake,” I inserted “Stevens, infant daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Gowan.” It felt good to do that. Indexing the child satisfied a sense of injustice I’d always had upon thinking-as Noel Polk did so fruitfully in his book on Requiem-that the child murdered by Nancy Mannigoe was, to Faulkner anyway, as real a character as anyone with a proper name regularly appearing in an index.2 Then I started to think of all of the other Faulkner characters, many not even distinguished by proper names, who are nonetheless real parts of his novels and his world and of our experience of reading both. In fact, his ability to poputute his fiction with such particuIarity strikes me as perhaps the greatest hallmark of his genius. To illustrate what I mean by such a population, let’s look briefly at how many people are simply there in Faulkner’s books, and who, in the hands of a lesser talent, might not be. Byron Snopes survived Ben Wasson’s editing of Flags in the Dust as it I

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became Sartoris in the first Yoknapatawpha novel; in both, of course, he writes anonymous love letters to Narcissa Benbow. That Narcissa keeps these letters with her underwear suggests the barely suppressed and dangerous erotic side of Narcissa’s character; she will marry Bayard Sartoris partly because she had a crush on his twin brother and partly because Byron has already stirred her up and made her susceptible to Bayards violent sexuality. Major players all, but Virgil Beard, the means by which Byron’s letters remain anonymous, also made the transition from Flags to Sartoris, and for a while the boy has the distinction of out-Snopesing Byron with blackmail: “It’s funny that air gun don’t come on,’’ he says, “I reckon I better tell papa to go to the post office and ask ’em if it got lost. . . . I remember ever’ one of them letters. I bet I could sit down and write ’em all again. I bet I could.”3 In The Sound and the Fury, no exigencies of plot or characterization require the presence of the three little boys Quentin meets on the bridge, who “talked about what they would do with twenty-five dollars. They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become (They also tell Quentin he can find out the time from the clock in the “unitarial steeple” [119].)The soda jerk Skeet MacGowan gives Dewey Dell the “cure” for her problem in As I Lay Dying, but if all Faulkner needed were someone to show up Dewey Dell’s ignorance in sexual matters, he had that in Lafe, who seduced her by picking cotton into her sack. Skeet’s presence in the text is pure lagniappe: giving Dewey Dell the first part of her cure, he says, “I took a graduated glass and kind of turned my back to her and picked out a bottle that looked all right, because a man that would keep poison setting around in a unlabelled bottle ought to be in jail, a n y ~ a y . ”Likewise, ~ there is no real reason for the shy Lucy Pate to be Jack Houston’s wife in The Hamlet, or for Houston’s dog to be his avenging angel, or for Labove to play football and send his old cleats back home. Nor does the English sentry in A Fable have to know anything about horses, never mind spend a good part of his life on the lam in the American South with a three-legged one; and why, by the way, is the French architect French? Of course, the function of any “minor’’ character is to illuminate and amplify the “major” characters and themes of a given work of fiction. Deacon, Uncle Job, and the boys on the bridge tell us volumes about Quentin and Jason Compson; the racehorse demonstrates that men can and do act honorably on the basis of emotional attachments, even though such action might be doomed; Labove plays football the same grimly violent way that he courts Eula Varner one day in his schoolroom. In Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner comments indirectly about the creation of

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all fictions when he has Quentin and Shreve reinvent the Sutpen story: “it might have been either of them and was in a sense both: both thinking as one, the voice which happened to be speaking the thought only the thinking become audible, vocal; the two of them creating between them, out of the rag-tag and bob-ends of old tales and talking, people who perhaps had never existed at all anywhere.”6 Quentin and Shreve no more “exist anywhere” than the Sutpens themselves, no more than the lawyer Shreve invents in his “turn,,’ no more than their vision of Charles Bon’s home in New Orleans: “that drawing room of baroque and fusty magnificence which Shreve had invented and which was probably true enough, while the Haiti-born daughter of the French sugar planter and the woman who Sutpen’s first father-in-law had told him was a Spaniard . . .

whom Shreve and Quentin had likewise invented and which was likewise probably true enough” (268, emphasis added). With Faulkner, of course,

not the critic, rested the original power to say who his characters are; and having accepted the responsibility to make them “true enough’, to suit him-or, as he put it once, to make them “stand up on [their] hind legs and cast a ~hadow”~-he solved the paradox inherent in making imaginative reality. All of the minor characters running around in his pages cast any number of shadows, and as we read him in the twentyfirst century, I think we should look carefully at those shades and their concerns, no less present and real for being small. I would maintain further that it is the responsibility of the Faulkner scholar in the twenty-first century to look at how our own critical protocols determine the status of characters and their concerns-and, by extension, our assessment of Faulkner’s achievement. At the distance of some fifty years, it is easy to see how the agrarians and the New Critics adopted Faulkner to their political ends;8 it has been less easy to see how the same kind of adoption has plagued recent critics interested in psychology, postmodernism, or cultural issues of race, class, and gender. Andr6 Bleikasten opened this conference in 1992 by excoriating the practitioners of that “new holy trinity of American critics” in part for their failure to read Faulkner closely: “focusing on form is now frowned upon as a deplorable concession to formalism. And to some, even ‘close reading’ of the text has become suspicious. Thus [Wesley and Barbara Morris] contend that ‘out of respect for the text’ one should ‘refuse to read it closely,’ which is like saying that out of respect for a Haydn quartet one should refuse to listen to Significant to my purposes in this paper, Bleikasten also argued that Faulkner’s “great novels all attempt to dismantle the language of the tribe. . . . In breaking through these fictions, Faulkner discovered their horrendous costs, the waste, the madness, the injustice, the suffering, and came to listen to the marginalized voices of

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the dispossessed’ (18). Yet Bleikasten makes precisely the same sort of error of which he accuses the Morrises when he claims that Faulkner’s later novels, for instance, “are too well-meaning and too garrulous to be counted among his best7’(18). In that unsupportable claim lies merely the echo of critics ranging back to ig5g10who confuse Faulher’s public pronouncements with his fiction, substitute one sort of discourse for the other at will, don’t care about such muddlings, and continue to assert the greatness of Faulkner’s “major phase,” which lasted, as all Faulknerians know, from 1929 until 1942; from The Sound and the Fury to Go Down, Moses, that is, with the exceptions of The Unvanquished (too easy to understand) and If1 Forget Thee, Jerusalem [The Wild Palms] (not set in Yoknapatawpha, so not “major Faulkner” by definition). All we need to do to find evidence for this pattern is to skim the recorded proceedings of this conference, or to look in the MLA bibliography, and we see that every major trend in literary criticism has been applied to Faulkner’s five most famous novels; the other fourteen haven’t exactly languished unattended, given the voracious magnitude of Faulkner studies, but neither have they been examined with anything like the fervor that demonstrates, again, that Absalom, Absalom! is a masterpiece. The persistence of such unexamined critical commonplaces has led me to my present topic of minor characters in particular and the more general notion of marginality in Faulkner’s art. Readers as diverse as Edward Said, Roland Barthes, and the undergraduates in my recent Faulkner class offer correctives to the dogma of the “major phase” critics. Said could be referring to Faulkner criticism when he reminds us that “it has to be supposed that many arguments can be made to more than one audience and in ddferent situations. Otherwise we would be dealing not with intellectual argument but either with dogma, or with a technological jargon designed specifically to repel all but a small handful of initiates or coteries.”ll Barthes argues that regardless of what “the author” was or meant, “[tlhe reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.”12Almost forty of those individual “destinations” took a trip through Faulkner with me this spring, and during their oral presentations to the class on novels not on the common syllabus, I noted two things pertinent to my work here today: not one student assigned to the novels outside the “major phase” called the later novels “garrulous’’; nor did anyone seem to think that it was necessary or helpful to say that one book was not as “good’ as another. (I note in passing that as I have worked on Faulkner’s late fiction, nearly every other Faulkner scholar upon learning this fact has uttered a dismissive comment on that fiction; but every one who has done so also followed

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such a comment with some disclaimer for a particular later novel. By this time, I have now heard the later fiction dismissed with the exceptions of every one of the later novels, which I take as anecdotal evidence for my point of view and not just the wish of Faulkner scholars to be polite in All good readers, I think, look closely at whatever Faulkconver~ation.~~) ner was doing in any given novel, or what he tried to do, and at how well they think he did in that effort; great criticism begins in the critic’s great pleasure in reading the books and trying to figure them out. I believe that such pleasure will drive the reading of Faulkner in the twenty-first century and that it derives in large part from Faulkner’s own understanding and representation of “the marginalized voices of the d l s p o s ~ e ~ s e d . ” ~ ~ And the dispossessed and marginalized are everywhere in Faulkner. In The Town, for instance, the four half-Apache, half-Snopes children of Byron close the novel in which Linda Snopes, the anomalous, sad child of Eula and Flem, loses her mother to the relentless ploys of the men in the book. The Reverend Tobe Sutterfield and his deferential grandson turn up to help the English sentry in A Fable, and in doing so they unwittingly contribute to the deaths of hundreds of men, all of them pawns of governments and armies. Among the poorest of Faulkner’s poor, Mink Snopes and his wife in The Hamlet live in a “paintless two-room cabin with an open hallway between and a Ieanto kitchen, which was not his, on which he paid rent but not taxes, paying almost as much in rent in one year as the house had cost to build; not old, yet the roof of which already leaked and the weather-stripping had already begun to rot away from the wall planks and which was just like the one he had been born in which had not belonged to his father either, and just like the one he would die in if he died indoors.”15 In his portraits of Minks wife and children, Faulkner shows us in miniature the violent nature of the man who has killed Jack Houston over a pound fee: “Then he saw the two children in the yard before [the cabin], who even as he saw them, stood quickly up, watching him, then turned and scuttled toward the house. Then it seemed to him that he could see her also, standing in the open hallway almost exactly where she had stood eight hours before . . . standing there as if in all that time she had not moved, once more framed by an opening, though without the lamp, as she was standing in the savage lamplight, above the loud harsh voices of invisible men, in the open door of the mess-hall in that south Mississippi convict camp where he first saw her nine years ago” (243-44). Mink‘s poverty and violence are not unique, Faulkner knows, but Mink himself is; Faulkner uses the characters of his wife and children to show us that Mink “seems to be a different kind of Snopes like a cotton-mouth is a different kind of snake” (101). Much of Faulkner’s work looks dn-ectly at who lives on the margins of

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“outlanders”-whether characters in novels or readers in life-and “inlanders” is facile at base, sometimes silly, always elusive, and often extremely dangerous. In If1 Forget Thee, Jerusalem, for instance, the two alternating plots practically beg the question: which one, for instance, is “more important”-Harry Wilbourne’s or the tall convict’s? (And in asking that question that way, don’t we imply that the “real” story is a man’s story, and not Charlotte Rittenmeyer’s or the pregnant woman’s?17)Charlotte and Harry themselves live on the edges of society, defying prevailing mores and working very hard at staying in love, no “matter what it cost us, what we pay for it . . . or how,” as Charlotte says.18 Yet their brand of romance demands that Harry abort their child, which in turn kills her and sends him to the penitentiary. As the tall convict and Mink Snopes could attest, prison life is life on the margins; yet even there, social forms persist and have centers and edges. The short convict at one time forms the center of a group of convicts as he reads to them about the Great Flood (24-26), yet “[nlone of his fellow prisoners knew what his crime had been, save that he was in for a hundred and ninety-nine years-this incredible and impossible period7 indicating that the court had acted as “blind apostles not of mere justice but of all human decency” (23). Charlotte, Harry, and the tall convict live at the centers of plots about life on the edges, and the tall convict goes back to that edge on purpose: “All in the world I want,” he says, “is just to surrender” (146). Similarly, when Isaac McCaslin repudiates his patrimony in Go Down, Moses, he ‘just surrenders” to the history of incest and miscegenation begun by his grandfather and continued by his nephew. The novel opens with a foreshadowing of the many things Isaac is not (father, property owner) and ends with Gavin Stevens completely misunderstanding the significance of Samuel Beauchamp’s funeral. He acts “to bring a dead nigger home,”19but Faulkner wants us to understand that Butch represents what Isaac denies to Roth’s mistress: “the smooth young flesh where the strong old blood ran after its long lost journey back to home” (345). Butch’s life on the edge, like Charlotte’s, is over: “Pharaoh got him. . . . Sold him in Egypt and now he dead” (362-63). But at the end of Go Down, Moses, Butchs body rests at the center of life in Yoknapatawpha, and in the litany of characters around him we hear again the multivoiced quality of Faulkner’s world.20 Faulkner readers get used to such paradox; we come to love it, in fact, because he reveled in it so. That condition marks the most tragic moments in his fiction and some of the funniest, and he could even make fun of his love for it, as he did in this passage from The Reivers: Boon Hogganbeck has just tried to shoot Ludus with John Powell’s pistol, and “another deputy was holding Ludus about twenty feet away and still in

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the frozen attitude of running or frozen in the attitude of running or in the attitude of frozen running, whichever is right.”21As I bring these remarks to an end that in turn will I hope promote the beginning of your remarks, I want to look at the Snopes trilogy as perhaps the greatest extended example of central marginality or marginal centrality, whichever is right, in Faulkner’s novels. From the beginning of Faulkner’s career, the Snopeses were there essentially as we know them now; they appeared from the hills in Father Abrahum and in Faulkner’s correspondence and conversations, and in a 1938 letter to Robert Haas, Faulkner described Flem’s trajectory from sharecropper’s son to store clerk to restaurant owner to bank president. But listen to Faulkner’s projection of “the plot”: Flem gets his wife because she is got with child by a sweetheart who clears out for Texas. . . . his youngest brother tries to keep his father from setting fire to his landlords barn, believes he has caused the father to be shot, and runs away from home [this so far is the story we know as “Barn Burning”; here comes the departure from what we know], goes west, has a son which the other Snopes know nothing about. Flem moves to town with his wife whose child pretty soon sees what a sorry lot Snopes are. She goes to New York (has money from her actual father) and is overseas in the War with ambulance corps, where she meets the son of the boy who ran away from home, finds him a kinsman, finds how his father has tried to eradicate the Snopes from him. After the war she brings together this Snopes and the daughter of a collateral Snopes who also looks with horror on Snopeses. She and her remote cousin many, have a son who is the scion of the family. What this will tell is, that this flower and cream, this youth, whom his mother and father fondly believed would raise the family out of the muck, turns out to have all of the vices of all Snopes and none of the virtues-the ruthlessness and firmness-of his banker uncle. . . . He has not enough courage and honesty to be a successful bootlegger nor enough industry to be the barber for which he is finally trained after Flem has robbed his mother of what money her father and husband left her. H e is in bad shape with syphilis and all the little switch-tailed nigger whores call him by his first name in private and he likes it.

Faulkner spiels on, creating a convoluted description of Flem’s decision to leave his money to “this flower and cream” because “this boy will get rid of it in the way that will make his kinfolks the maddest.” The projection comes to a close with the boy trying to blackmad his aunt, getting drunk, and swaggering down the street tradmg insults with two passing black girls: “He replies, ‘hi, bitches’ and goes This projection interests me for several reasons. First of all, even though he often wrote such letters in order to show he could write fiction

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worthy in advance of financial support, he sounds sure of himself, as though he knows absolutely where the trilogy is headed. Second, in 1938, that’s where the trilogy was headed: Faulkner’s fiction of the mid-1930s was obsessed with intermanyings and incest and inbreeding and family treachery; why shouldn’t the Snopeses behave like John and Drusilla Sartoris, or Thomas Sutpen? Third, Faulkner in 1938 did not care how Flem h e d . H e just writes, “Flem is dead, all the kin have come in to the funeral, to see what they are going to get” (108). Fourth, Mink and Montgomery Ward Snopes are nowhere in sight. When Faulkner wrote The Town and The Mansion, however, those two emerged as major figures in Snopes and Yoknapatawpha history. In The Town, Montgomery Ward must be removed from Jefferson because his “atelier” stands in the way of Flem’s quest for public respectability; in The Mansion, Flem arranges for Montgomery Ward to be sentenced to Parchman so that he can get Mink to try to escape, because as everyone in the novel seems to know, Mink will kill Flem when he gets out. By the time he got to The Mansion, then, the manner of Flem’s death occupied Faulkner’s imagination completely. A deterministic novel indeed, “the plot is this”: Mink gets out of prison after thirty-eight years and goes to lull Flem. He is still a cottonmouth kind of a Snopes, but Faukner inhabits him, flaws and all, as completely as he ever did Quentin Compson or Isaac McCaslin: Until he stepped out of the store this morning with the pistol actually in his pocket, it had all seemed simple; he had only one problem: to get the weapon; after that, only geography stood between him and the moment when he would walk up to the man who had seen him sent to the penitentiary without raising a finger, who had not even had the decency and courage to say No to his bloodcry for help from lun to lun, and say, “Look at me, Flem,” and kill him.23

In this, the penultimate novel of his career, Faulkner also gives firstperson narrative authority to a Snopes. Montgomery Ward lets us know that I dont remember just when it was, I was probably pretty young, when I realised that I had come from what you might call a family, a clan, a race, maybe even a species, of pure sons of bitches. So I said, Okay, okay, ifthat‘s the way it is, we’ll just show them. They call the best of lawyers, lawyers’ lawyers and the best of actors an actor’s actor and the best of athletes a ball-player’s ball-

player. All right, that’s what we’ll do: every Snopes will make it his private and personal aim to have the whole world recognise him M THE son of a bitch’s son of a bitch. (409-10)

Two very different Snopeses with two very different kinds of internal lives, Mink and Montgomery Ward illustrate Faulkner’s skill as a miniaturist. He could give in the space of even a short sentence the telling

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detail that reveals a character’s inner life or, in another, completely change the emotional tenor of a story. Thus in As I Lay Dying we know the druggist in Mottstown: “Me, a respectable druggist, that’s kept store and raised a family and been a church-member for fifty-six years in this town” (202); thus we see Hawkshaw’s complicity in the lynching of Will Mayes in “Dry September”: “The others expelled their breath in a dry hissing and struck him with random blows and he whirled and cursed them, and swept his manacled hands across their faces and slashed the barber upon the mouth, and the barber struck him This talent for miniatures mirrors FauIkner’s abiding interest in the margins of life; and in The Mansion, the Snopeses that have littered the edges of Yoknapatawpha from its beginnings stand squarely in the center of Jefferson’s imagination, as Gavin Stevens and V. K. Ratliff and Charles Mallison keep track of and talk about them. Finally, though, we rest with Mink Snopes: Because he was free now. A little further along toward dawn, anytime the notion struck him to, he could lay down. So when the notion struck him he did so, arranging himself, arms and legs and back, already feeling the first faint gentle tug like the durned old ground itself was trying to make you believe it wasn’t really noticing itself doing it. . . . But he could risk it, he even felt like giving it a fair active chance just to show him, prove what it could do if it wanted to try. And in fact, as soon as he thought that, it seemed to him he could feel the Mink Snopes that had had to spend so much of his life just having unnecessary bother and trouble, beginning to creep, seep, flow easy as sleeping; he could almost watch it, following all the little grass blades and tiny roots, the little holes the worms made, down and down into the ground already full of the folks that had the trouble but were free now, so that it was just the ground and the dirt that had to bother and worry and anguish with the passions and hopes and skeers, the justice and the injustice and the griefs, leaving the folks themselves easy now, all mixed and jumbled up comfortable and easy so wouldn’t nobody even know or even care who was which anymore, himself among them, equal to any, good as any, brave as any, being intextricable from, anonymous with all of them: the beautiful, the splendid, the proud and the brave, right on up to the very top itself among the shining phantoms and dreams which are the milestones of the long human recording-Helen and the bishops, the kings and the unhomed angels, the scornful and graceless seraphim. (720-21)

I1 that lovely final paragraph, I hear prose as brave and splendid as any ever written. As he was getting The Mansion ready for publication, Faulkner wrote to Albert Erskine that the differences between what happens in The Hamlet and the third volume of the trilogy didn’t bother him very much. “I am a veteran member of a living literature,” he wrote; “So if what I

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write in 1958 aint better than what I wrote in 1938, I should have stopped writing twenty years ago; or, since ‘being alive’ equals ‘ m ~ t i o n , ~ I should be 20 years in the Well, he is now nearly forty years in the grave, and here we all are, in his town, in his county, talking about his world. We will continue to do this in the twenty-first century, and I hope we do it in the widest variety of ways. My own work so far has tried to look at the racial constructions relating to what I earlier called “inland” status in Faulkner’s fiction because I think that Faulkner knew better than he’s been given credit for knowing about how subtle yet unmistakable racial distinctions were and are drawn in this country; how insidious were the one-drop rule and the law that decreed slave children follow the conditions of their mothers rather than their fathers; how pernicious and destructive that a “black7 American individual identity should be ” ~ ~Faulkner also determined by “an accident of physical a p p e a r a n ~ e .But knew how women, especially women who don’t repress their sexuality, are imprisoned in America.27Think of Eula Varner, who dies and is entombed as Eula Varner Snopes. Think of the two prostitutes late for dinner in The Reivers, whom Mr. Binford gratuitously insults: “The trouble with you ladies is, you dont know how to quit acting like bitches.” One of them, Lucius notices, “was alone” and “nobody should ever have to be that alone, nobody, not ever’’ (813). On the other end of the spectrum, think of the asexual Drusilla Hawk in The Unvanquished, whose selfrighteous mother demands that John Sartoris “marry my daughter”: young Bayard hears the despair in “the light sharp sound when Drusilla’s head went down between her flungout arms on the table.”28Faulkner knew, too, how children suffer simply because they are small. In The Reivers, Lucius observes that “you should be prepared for experience, knowledge, knowing: not bludgeoned unaware in the dark as by a highwayman or footpad. I was just eleven, remember” (850). In “Barn Burning,” Abner Snopes strikes his son Sarty, and “it was as if the blow and the following calm, outrageous voice still rang, repercussed, divulging nothing to him save the terrible handicap of being young, the light weight of his few years, just heavy enough to prevent his soaring free of the world as it seemed to be ordered but not heavy enough to keep him footed solid in it, to resist it and try to change the course of its Faulkner also knew that any oppressor inhabits his own cage even as he constructs one for another. Charles Mallison of The Mansion chews his bitter thumbs over “Linda Kohl, Snopes that was77(4g28.),and we hear how cynical he has become: “If she had to shack up with a man for five years before he would consent to marry her, I mean, with a sculptor so advanced and liberal that even Gavin couldn’t recognise what he sculpted, made, he must have been pretty advanced in liberalism” (519).Gavin

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Stevens’s own cage claps shut when he doesn’t even listen to his beloved Eula the night she commits suicide in The Town, and The Hamlet demonstrates that anyone’s unexamined assumptions and beliefs can prove his undoing, as Ratliff discovers when he tries to beat Flem Snopes in a deal. These are but a few of the many “major” characters and themes that we understand and fully feel because of the constellations in the margins. As we read Faulkner in the twenty-first century, then, let the roster and the chronicle that we record of his achievement include Will Varner’s three mulatto concubines, the four slaves who finish building the Jefferson jail, Januarius Jones, the bragging little boys on the bridge, the store owner outraged at the revelation of Eula and Manfreds affair, Mr Talliaferro, Colonel DeVries’s nephews, the prisoners in the Jefferson jail with Mink, Charlotte Rittenmeyer’s abandoned children, Harry Wilbourne’s aborted child, Temple and Gowan’s daughter, Pat Stamper’s partner, the Iowan, and Myra Allanovna. To name a few. NOTES 1. Faulkner’s letter to Robert K. Haas, 22 May 1950, Selected Letters of William Faulkner, ed. Joseph Blotner (New York: Vintage, 1978),305. 2. Faulkner’s “Requiemfor a Nun”: A Critical Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981). Polks book has been invaluable in checking the tide of criticism that merely condemns Temple Stevens as the trollop who got what she deserved. 3. Sartoris (New York: New American Library, Meridian edition, 1983), 101. 4. The Sound and the Fury (New York: Vintage International, 1984), 117. 5. As I Lay Dying (New York: Vintage International, iggo), 247. 6. Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Vintage International, iggo), 243. 7. Faulkner in the University, ed. Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, iggs), 118. See also 47. 8. See, for instance, Lawrence H. Schwartz, Creating Faulkner’s Reputation: The Politics of Modern Literary Criticism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988). 9. “Faulkner and the New Ideologues,” Faulkner and Ideology: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, iggz (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, iggs), 9. Bleikasten is quoting from Reading Faulkner (Madison: University Wisconsin Press, 1989). 10. Hyatt L. Waggoner, William Faulkner: From jeflerson to the World (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1959); Irving Howe, William Faulkner: A Critical Study, end edition (New York: Vintage, 1962); Charles Peavy, Go Slow, Now: Faulkner and the Race Question (Eugene: University of Oregon Press, 1964); Melvin Backman, Faulkner: The Major Years (Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 1966);Joseph L. Gold, William Faulkner: A Study in Humanism from Metaphor to Discourse (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966); Walter Taylor, Faulkner’s Search for a South (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); James Snead, Figures of Division: William Faulkner’s Major Novels (New York: Methuen, 1986);Daniel J. Singal, Faulkner: The Making of a Modernist (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).The preceding citations are by no means exhaustive. 11. “The Politics of Knowledge,” Falling into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature, ed. David H. Richter (Boston: St. Martin’s Press, igg4), 196; originally published in Raritan 1i:i (Summer 1991).

Faulkner in the Twenty-First Century: Boundaries of Meaning, Boundaries of Mississippi1

MICHAEL KREYLING

Preface What we think and how we think about William Faulkner is bounded by what we think and how we think about Mississippi. And vice versa. From the perspective of YzK, the boundaries clearly enclose a continuous loop of cultural self-definition. The engines of the process are powerful, but obvious and hidden, direct and indirect all at once. A n annual celebration of Faulkner‘s work on the site in Mississippi of much of his life is one example of the looping. For more than a third of the previous century (certainly from 1930 to 1960), Faulkner created (and, I argue, was in turn created by) not only the fictional county over which he claimed sole proprietorship, but also the entire state with which, from time to time, he wanted nothing to do. Faulkner might have been the creator of Yoknapatawpha County, but in creating Mississippi he had the help of scholars and critics, politicians, marketing copywriters, photographers and filmmakers, careful readers and skimmers who, for a whole spectrum of motives, preferred Mississippi “barbaric” or “tragic,” American or thirdworld, sick or well, but never the median. Faulkner’s meanings depended on meanings of Mississippi that developed both directly from his texts, and at various degrees of separation from them. Now that these degrees of separation can be energized by the interest of the new millennium, and now that Mississippi has perhaps climbed out of the heart of darkness, what will become of Faulkner? What Faulkner will we need, what Faulkner will endure, in the twenty-first century? I intend to examine the reciprocal shaping of Faulkner and Mississippi by throwing one seemingly tangential aspect of the author’s “work,” his image in a series of author photographs, into a mix of readings of Faulkner and Mississippi. My textual examples include two essays by a man Mississippi and the South loved to hate, H. L. Mencken: “The Sahara of

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the Bozart” (1924) and “The Worst American State” (ig31).~An audience of Faulkner readers needs little reminder of the engineer of the next restructuring of Mississippi and Faulkner: Malcolm Cowley’s historical narrative of the mind of Faulkner in The Portable Faulkner (1946) dominates the mid-range of my time linem3 The rigors of being Mississippian and Southern between 1954 and 1962 were great, and Faulkner clung to his native ground even though the last decade of his life was, apparently, miserable both publicly and privately. In spite of his confused and confusing statements on race-the all-absorbing topic of this cycleFaulkner served as a model liberal Southerner and Mississippian under stress. James Silver’s Mississippi: The Closed Society (1964) is my focus for the late period: one example among several of the way Faulkner was used to navigate very troubled waters4 Finally, I offer a conclusion composed of a few speculative comments on Eduoard Glissant’s Faulknerfor-the-twenty-first century, Faulkner, Mississippi (1996, trans. 19~J9).~ By connecting the dots from Mencken to C h a n t , we have the rudiments of a theory of the ways literature (Faulkner’s) shapes history (Mississippi’s), and vice versa.

Barbarians That H. L. Mencken loved to bash the South is no surprise. How a writer in the South, Faulkner for example, would dodge the bashing takes a little speculation. It is worth repeating a few passages of Mencken’s indictment in “The Sahara of the Bozart,” just to quicken the pulse: Down there a poet is now almost as rare as an oboe player, a dry-point etcher or a metaphysician. It is, indeed, amazing to contemplate so vast a vacuity. One thinks of the interstellar spaces, of the colossal reaches of the now mythical ether. Nearly the whole of Europe could be lost in that stupendous region of fat farms, shoddy cities and paralyzed cerebrums. . . . (136) But consider the condition of his [the Confederate’s] late empire today. The picture gives one the creeps. It is as if the Civil War stamped out every last bearer of the torch, and left only a mob of peasants on the field. (138) Again, it is very likely that in some parts of the south a good many of the plebeian whites have more than a trace of negro blood. Interbreeding under concubinage produced some very light half-breeds at an early day, and no doubt appreciable numbers of them went over into the white race by the simple process of changing their abode. (146) The southerner, at his worst, is never quite the surly cad that the Yankee is. His sensitiveness may betray him into occasional bad manners, but in the main he is a pleasant fellow-hospitable, polite, good-humored, even jovial. . . . But a bit absurd. . . . A bit pathetic. (154)

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Boundaries of Meaning

Southern writers in Nashville, New Orleans, Richmond, and many less accessible places formed complex treaties with Mencken. The Fugitive Group in Nashville, for example, chose a high modernist mode of poetry, transatlantic rather than Southern, and with Allen Tate’s intellectual leadership forged a high-brow literary criticism to counter the charge of “paralyzed cerebrums.” Ellen Glasgow, vowing “blood and irony” in a new realistic Southern writing, was prominent among a group in Richmond who indeed signed on as allies of MenckenS6James Branch Cabell, her compatriot in irony in Richmond, was one of the few Southern writers Mencken admitted to liking. The Double Dealer group in New Orleans, among whom was a young William Faulkner, took up the cause of the bohemian avant-garde; they might have been living on the Left Bank of the Seine rather than the Mississippi. In fact, Faulkner made his expatriate tour after spending time with the Double Dealer group, and he brought back photographs of himself as the wandering man of letter^.^ “The Sahara of the Bozart” played a dynamic part in persuading the early Faulkner, then producing Swinburnian hothouse verse, to picture himself in non-Southern ways. Two of the first deliberate attempts by Faulkner to present himself to the public seem, in this context, to obliterate or evade identification with the South or Mississippi. The nebulous background of the author photograph for The Marble Faun (1924) obscures all context.* The pipe, which appears in almost all of the posed photographs of Faulkner, and in his own Thurberesque self-caricature, suggests the poet’s imagination as the sole source of context for interpretation, filling the frame of literary work and photograph with nothing but the exhalations of the poet h i m ~ e l fThere .~ might have been a world out there when the poet began to write-a Mississippi much like the one Mencken excoriated, for example-but this poet and his work are not responsible for it. The familiar image of Faulkner in his RAF uniform suggests another strategy for distancing himself from Mississippi: if obliterating milieu with pure imagination will not always work, create a substitute biography. Indeed, the cadet’s sojourn in Canada training for the Royal Flying Corps, and the alternate self Faulkner made from his experience there (both for publication and for diversionary usage in interviews), is part of a pattern that runs true into Faulkner’s late years, when he made J. R. Cofield photograph him in his hunting pinks.1° Literary critics’ narratives of Faulkner’s imaginative life and career, however, usually declare the early poetry phase a false start; not until Faulkner acknowledges his connection to Mississippi and to prose fiction, so goes the standard reading (one that Cowley’s The Portable Faulkner confirmed), did Faulkner begin the trajectory that would steer him into greatness.ll

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Boundaries of Meaning

cient police, as its lynching record shows, and its government is in the hands of office-seekers of low character. It is also deficient in decent hospitals, colleges, newspapers and libraries. . . . In the midst of its hordes of barbaric peasants there is some native stock of excellent blood. But the young men of this stock, finding few opportunities at home, have to go elsewhere. Altogether, it seems to be without serious rival to the lamentable preeminence of the Worst American State. (371)

There is more than accidental symmetry between Mencken’s image of Mississippi and the image in Sanctuary and “That Evening Sun Go Down.” If Mississippi had “efficient police,” why is Popeye still roaming free? How can Judge Drake brazenly subvert the judicial system which he is sworn to uphold? The state’s lynching record is confirmed in Lee Goodwin’s fate. Clarence Snopes likewise confirms that Mississippi’s “government is in the hands of office-seekers of low character.” The less said about the deficiencies of Mississippi’s colleges at this conference, the better. “Hordes of barbaric peasants” are summed up in Fonzo and Virgil-albeit, for comic relief. If the momentum of critical interpretation of Sanctuary had not made an aesthetics out of the lowlife cruelty that revolted early reviewers, perhaps we could see the synergy between Mencken’s Mississippi and Faulkner’s ironically as supply and demand. At the time, Mencken was pushing the image of barbaric Mississippi on several fronts. In the same issue of American Mercury with “That Evening Sun Go Down” he demolished 1’11 Take M y Stand, dismissing the Agrarians’ South as “dreadfully literary and pedagogical,” and asserting yet again the real South is “Mississippi, . . . its most barbaric.”l3 Sanctuary’s notorious offensiveness was a calculated image of Mississippi, a deliberate attempt to present more “worstness” than even Mencken expected, and thereby to mock Mencken’s claim to realistic representation. Under cover of low expectations, Faulkner slipped in something of the high culture avant-garde that Mencken could not find with searchlights in the Sahara of the Bozart. Faulkner hid it in plain sight: references to modernist lamp stands, cubist fragmentation, plantation myth revisionism, and camouflaged mythic patterns (such as the one linking Temple to Daphne) have become the mainstays of critical discussions of the novel. One positive effect of Sanctuary and the alliance of sorts with Mencken was that author photographs were in demand. In the summer of 1931, J. R. Cofield took the first of many studio photographs of William Faulkner, a Faulkner who is both scruffy and innocent, hardly the monster of his Sanctuary reputation. Cofield remembered that except in very rare instances he could not persuade Faulkner to clean himself up for a studio session (3).The resulting Faulkner persona, however, was not “Mr. Corn-

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cob,” but rather a bashful, reclusive, even faunlike poet. An interviewer for the New York Herald Tribune, meeting with the author of Sanctuary about this time, found “a pleasant, somewhat embarrassed young man, until he gets interested in something he is saying, when he speaks with assurance. He answers questions slowly, almost reluctantly, in a Southern drawl so low that he is a little difficult to under~tand.’’’~

An American Mind Faulkner’s trajectory as a literary genius lifts off from the myth that Mississippi is a place for which the term “dysfunctional” is laughably inadequate, a primitive country more appropriate for anthropologists than tourists. But this myth of absolute worstness, Faulkner recognized in Sanctuary, works two ways: it is both (if you believe Mencken) the plain facts about a place and the decorated screen behind which a deeper story can be deployed. If the character of Shreve does not believe the screen fiction of absolute worstness with sardonic glee, and if Quentin does not believe the deeper story with cold dread, Absalom, Absalom! does not work. But, Mississippi barbaric darkness did not survive unchanged to shape the meaning and reputation of William Faulkner. A pendulum swing of reaction away from barbarism and toward the Americanness of Southern history seems inevitable to us now. Malcolm Cowley’s The Portable Faulkner engineered the swing. Just at the moment in Faulkner’s career when the curse of the “worstness” of the South seemed to erase the sensitive young man and swallow his work in the oblivion of out-of-print, Malcolm Cowley rescued both by normalizing Faulkner’s fragmented narrative sequence and relating his fiction to American history without the obvious intermediaries of Confederate myth or Mencken’s obnoxious cultural triumphalism. The same pendulum swing transformed Faulkner from a faun who “answers questions slowly, almost reluctantly, in a Southern drawl so low that he is a little difficult to understand” into a mainstream American writer as clearly understood, to Cowley’s ears, as Hawthorne or Twain (ix, x, xx, xxvii). By rearranging Faulkner’s work along normative lines of historical chronology and cause-and-effect-by emphasizing “saga,” as Frederick Karl maintains-Cowley’s restructuring changed the chemistry of Faulkner-and-Mississippi.l5 Largely because of The Portable Faulkner, readers began to treat Faulkner as an authoritative voice on the South’s historical record as an American, not a third-world, barbaric, place. The transformation of the private Faulkner into the historian of Mississippi has had complex results for both. Cowley, by reconstructing Faulkner‘s works as a “saga” of time and place-and indeed asking for and

MICHAEL KREYLING

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Southerner should be secure enough in his national identity to escape the compulsion of less secure minorities to embrace uncritically all the myths of nationalism. H e should be secure enough also not to deny a regional heritage because it is at variance with nationaI myth. It is a heritage that should prove of enduring worth to him as well as to his ~ o u n t r y . ’ ~

The echoing “should” suggests that Woodwards Faulkner is the refrain of a motivational speech, and that the cryptic formulation “The modern Southerner should be secure enough in his national identity to escape the compulsion of less secure minorities to embrace uncritically all the myths of nationalism” is actually a call to Southern liberals to take the high road in the racial struggles of the time, not to succumb to distasteful “myths of nationalism” (innate white superiority, the purity of white ‘blood,” for example); Faulkner’s own reluctant realization that he would be drawn into the public struggle would darken his last decade. Throughout the intertwined history of Faulkner and Mississippi, the state obliged by consistently heling the myth of race-obsessed “sickn e s ~ . ” ’Lynchings ~ and assassinations (Mack Parker, Emmett Till, Medgar Evers), Ross Barnett and the insurrection at Ole Miss in 1962, Freedom Summer, The Closed Society, the Sovereignty Commission and “state terrorism,” and on and on, helped to make the last decade of Faulkner’s life miserable. The years from Brown v. Board of Education (1954) through Faulkner’s death, and on to the closing of the 1960s, wrung just about every drop of worstness out of Mississippi, in effect derailing the regularizing countermyth of Cowley and Woodward by demonstrating that as historian Faulkner could not be depended upon to live up to this totemic status. William Faulkner‘s place vis-8-vis “The Closed Society” is the theme of these years. The theme continues, albeit in a swan-song kind of way, into the contemporary moment. The Mississippi of 1954 through the end of the 1960s is a terrorist state; Mencken’s merely clownish constables become a totalitarian police force. The new barbarians can be brought around to American ways only through direct intervention and armed restraint. Like Byron De La Beckwith or Ross Barnett, the Southern white man is a little Duce. All the “shoulds” of Woodwards plea fall on stony ground. The lesson is that time has again (or still?) left Mississippi behind. The “closedness” of Mississippi retards historical progress and keeps the state resistant to beneficial dialogue with the modern world. It is no coincidence that these are also the years of the popular and critical vogue of “freaks” in McCullers, O’Connor, and Capote. Legally and imaginatively, there is a violent torque when normalizing American nationalism pulls one way and (what is seen as) Southern tribalism pulls another.

M I C H A E L KREYLING

23

again. “Just two dollars?” Now he just blinked once, then he did something with his breath: not a sigh, simply a discharge of it, putting his first two fingers into the purse. . . .20

At this point the real infighting begins. Lucas has control of the scene, first spreading a one dollar bill on the desk, then offering and retrieving combinations of coins adding up to another dollar. Finally, in his own time, he finds the winning move. “That makes it out,” he said. “Four bits in pennies. I was aiming to take them to the bank but you can save me the trip. You want to count um?” (246)

At the apparent last move in a game of cultural prestige, Stevens seems to pull out a draw: he prevails on Lucas to count the pennies. There are fully fifty. There is, however, a final move Stevens had not anticipated: “Now what?’ his uncle said. “What are you waiting for now?” “My receipt,” Lucas said. (247)

The novel ends here, the contestants suspended in a duel for racial notice. But the film dissolves the tension. In an extended final scene, Lucas is shown leaving Stevens’s office with his receipt; and in the final frames, shot from an overhead angle that pans back for an “objective” view more or less coextensive with the point of view of the two white men, Lucas is seen surrendering individual personality as he disappears among a crowd on the Square while Gavin and Chick mutter clichhs about conscience.21 This kind of ambivalence runs through all of Faulkner’s writing and thinking at this time. For every statement he made apparently in support of desegregation, he made another simply invoking the status quo. It is embarrassing now to reread his “Letter to a Northern Editor” (1956), and even more distressing to revisit his deadly interview with Russell Howe (1956) and his equally damaging attempt to fix it with “A Letter to the Leaders of the Negro Race” (1956). It is very difficult, now, to understand how Faulkner’s involvement with Professor James Silver and the Southern Historical Association in 1955 was construed as a proud moment for Southern liberalism. First, Faulkner’s remarks to the SHA must have made some members uneasy, if only for his amateurish sense of history, on which he bases this “tribute” to the American Negro: . . . the people who only three hundred years ago were eating rotten elephant and hippo meat in African rain-forests, who lived beside one of the biggest bodies of inland water on earth and never thought of a sail, who early had to move by whole villages and tribes from famine and pestilence and human enemies without once thinking of a wheel, yet in only three hundred years in America produced Ralph Bunche and George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington, who have yet to produce a Fuchs or Rosenberg or Gold or

24

Boundaries of Meaning

Greenglass or Burgess or McLean or Hiss, and for every prominent communist or fellow-traveler like Robeson, there are a thousand white ones.22

Such statements suggest that Faulkner thought no more deeply into the question of the African origins of African Americans than the lateimperialist editors of National Geographic, in whose photodocumentary stories of Africa a different black-white narrative ran as a counterpoint to the one enacted in M i s ~ i s s i p p i . ~ ~ Nowhere, however, does Faulkner’s deep ambivalence and the countervailing power of his presence show more clearly than in Silver’s enlisting of ‘‘Sill Faulkner” for the crusade against segregation in Mississippi. In the autobiographical introduction to Mississippi: The Closed Society, Silver tells his story of persuading Faulkner to participate in the meeting of the SHA in November 1955,and then approaching him a month later for something to be added to the published text of the papers. How Silver narrates the episode is as important as its eyewitness accuracy: On December 1, 1955, on my request for a short statement that might be added to the introduction to the pamphlet, Faulkner slipped a rather soiled sheet of yellow scrap paper into his battered old typewriter and, as if he had been musing over the matter all morning, quickly tapped out these words: The question is no longer of white against black. It is no longer whether or not white blood shall remain pure, it is whether or not white people shall remain free. We accept contumely and the risk of violence because we will not sit quietly by and see our native land, the South, not just Mississippi but all the South, wreck and ruin itself twice in less than a hundred years, over the Negro question. We speak now against the day when our Southern people who will resist to the last these inevitable changes in social relations, will, when they have been forced to accept what they at one time might have accepted with dignity and goodwill, will say, “Why didn’t someone tell us this before? Tell us this in time?” This message from William Faulkner is one of my most prized possessions. Add to it a few words from Intruder in the Dust and one has a firm basis for “standing up to be counted’ when the proper time arises: “Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and lshonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash, your picture in the paper nor money in the bank either. Just refuse to bear them.” (Silver, xii-xiii)24

It is easy for us to see, with hindsight, how Faulkner’s words and Silver’s usage are charged with Faulkner’s ambivalence. Southern liberals were

MICHAEL KREYLING

25

indeed an embattled minority, but it is arguable that they could have adopted a more straightforward champion than the conflicted William Faulkner . Silver uses the ragged Faulkner, the Faulkner of many and oftenreproduced Martin Dain photographs, to infuse a kind of indigenous and weathered wisdom into the Iiberal statement. “Bill’s” paper is a “soiled sheet of yellow scrap paper” and the typewriter “old” and “battered.” The “literary” features evoke Dain’s image of Faulkner’s spare workroom with the outline ofA Fable scrawled along the wall where, in the Renaissance, Fra Angelic0 might have painted frescoes from the lives of Christ and the saints (Dain, 149). But the statement itself is deeply ambivalent. If Faulkner’s words are to preface a discussion of the “immorality of segregation” (xi) from the liberal side, what is the impact of Faulkner’s framing the issue in terms of the purity of white blood and the freedom of white people? Was not the issue the freedom of black people? In the second paragraph, what collective noun is the referent for pronouns “we” and “our”? Hearing the echoes of Shakespeare’s Hamlet struck by the word “contumely,” the echoing question is who suffers “the law’s delay / The insolence of office and the spurns / That patient merit of the unworthy takes”? In the historical context, of course, the sufferers are African Americans, yet in the grammar of Faulkner’s statement “we” is the white South in jeopardy of wrecking itself over “the Negro question” for the second time in a century. In the third paragraph, it is “our [white?] Southern people” who “have been forced to accept” changes they do not want and have not initiated, who cry out like Job-not African Americans. Similar ambivalence encrusts Gavin Stevens’s words quoted from Intruder in the Dust. Stevens, in the context of the novel, is speaking to his nephew, instructing the young Southern prince in the absolutes of cultural heritage. The words are not aimed at black people, do not pledge them to refuse “injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame.” Indeed, later in his book, safely beyond the Faulkner zone, Silver radically opposes the position. “One of today’s recurring sophistries,” Silver writes, “has it that equality must be earned and can never be achieved by force or law” (is). I t is exactly “force or law” as agents of social change that Stevens protests in Intruder in the Dust; it is the ‘‘~ophistry~~ that equality must be earned that Faulkner establishes as his foundation for interracial relations, not only in Intruder in the Dust but also in such speeches as “Address to the Raven, Jefferson, and ODK Societies of the University of Virginia” (Essays, 157).

26

Boundaries of Meaning

Y2K Summer What of the twenty-first century? Have the tensions, the internal conflicts of Faulkner and Mississippi loosened? Is it true, as the Mississippi Travel Planner claims, “Across the state, the same [Norman?] Rockwellian scene unfolds before you-a quiet Southern neighborhood. Giant shade trees. White painted houses, the yards freshly mowed. American flags waving in the breeze. Lightning bugs at dusk?”25What will become of Faulkner if Norman Rockwell takes over Yoknapatawpha? When a reborn State of Mississippi mounts a Web site touting its wealth of movie locations? When the State’s tourism tag line is “The South’s Warmest Welcome”? What will happen to Faulkner-his books, his place, his people, his conflicts (more personally and urgently: how will we teach and learn them?)-if or when the image of Mississippi gradually shades away from “state terrorism” to the relatively innocent and goofy asylum of Robert Altman’s Cookie’s Fortune?26To be sure, there will continue to be restatements of the tragic Mississippi such as Building Bridges Radio’s production Unsealing Mississippi’s Past: The Sovereignty Commission, Racism, and State Terrorism.27 But, in time, tragedy will no longer be a potent metaphor. Maybe the onus of “The Worst American State” will fade away as well. Local and state tourism bureaus and commissions are hard at work to replace the image of Mississippi as dysfunctional antithesis to modern civilization with fertile bed for industry, welcoming place for retirees, and haven for tourists. Oxford, redolent with images imported from Yoknapatawpha in the photographs of Martin J. Dain, basks now in the praise of USA Today as “a thriving New South arts mecca.”28 If the successful marketing of a redeemed Mississippi continues-at least in the hyped- and hyper-texts of the tourism brochure and the homepage-what will happen to the intricate relationship between Faulkner and Mississippi? It will, of course, change. If the evidence of Larry Levinger’s recent essay “The Prophet Faulkner” is trustworthy, the change will occur subtly, under the cover of familiar images. Levinger’s essay delivers a more or less standard survey of Faulkner’s career; the “prophecy” of the title seems to come in an equation that connects the loss of authenticity in Mississippi to a wider sense of such loss in hyper-America: “Faulkner’s native soil has today been commandeered by upscale boutiques and shopping malls, but in his youth Oxford, a university town in the hill country of Lafayette County, seventy miles southeast of Memphis, Tennessee, was a village of unpaved streets with a population of about 1,500. If you stepped off the town square, you were in the woods.”2gLevinger’s Faulkner is reminiscent of Cowley’s:

MICHAEL KREYLING

27

“Faulkner meant Sanctuary as a metaphor not just for the South but for the American century during which he lived. He saw a crippled, unjust, morally and communally corrupt society, sexually confused and obsessed, as cool and cut off as its cold machines. In such a society everyone is on the verge of violence-and this was something he knew a lot about” (85). Levinger’s interpretation of Faulkner appears in the same issue of Atlantic Monthly as “Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber.” Perhaps Quentin has come back as Theodore Kaczynski, and the selling of the Compson land for a golf course is yet additional proof that Kaczynski’s diagnosis of the loss of the local and the human to global conglomerates is accurate.30

King Creole Later presentations at this conference will pursue Faulkner into the new century, chiefly by virtue of threads of connection between his work and that of Latin American and Caribbean writers. Let me raise one theme as an exit gesture, the theme of Faulkner the center of a creole poetics, elegantly developed in Faulkner, Mississippi, a book by Martinican critic Edouard Glissant. The aptness of Glissant’s title reaffirms the intimate interrelationship between Faulkner and place, but in Glissant’s interpretation, place, the writer’s life, and the writer’s work (Faulkner and Mississippi) are vitally reconfigured. First, by interleaving his own memories of his Caribbean place into a trip to Oxford, Glissant loosens Mississippi from its familiar but worn U.S. moorings, and reberths it among the Creole cultures of the Caribbean. There are rough spots in Glissant’s relocation of Mississippi, of course. As Glissant explains, the Creole cultures of the Caribbean accommodated race mixture; the U.S. South, and Faulkner himself, balked at the fluidity of racial identity. Indeed, in “The Sahara of the Bozart,” as we have seen, Mencken needled his Southern readers with suggestions of widespread miscegenation and passing-allegations he knew to be combustible. Faulkner, Glissant maintains, was no lower or higher than the common denominator of his region on this topic. In this thinking and writing on race, Glissant argues, Faulkner needs African Americans as racial absolutes, as The Other (85-86).31 But, so strong is the attractive power of the issue, that even though he resists he still sees and records the erotic tendency of Self to flow into and through the Other. The fluid, erotic principle is Charles Bon, the damming principle Henry Sutpen; the price of damming is metaphorically presented in Henry’s death-inlife in the decaying Sutpen house. Glissant’s reading of Absalom, Absa-

28

Boundaries of Meaning

lom! is fascinating in its persuasive argument that the South that is crucial

to Faulkner is not U.S. but Caribbean. Nor do Glissant’s interpretations stop at the boundaries of Faulkner’s texts. Glissant’s Caribbean consciousness, shaped as he sees it by the blended culture at the border of Europe and the New World, enables him to see the structural outlines of colony and capital myths. Capital cultures, he explains, are more likely to be “atavistic,” organized around the hub of a foundation myth of single genesis. The atavistic narrative tells the story of a unified and single “we,” a people destined for favor in a maelstrom of flux, protected by a supernatural agency: a design (114-15). Creole cultures, cultures of the colony, on the other hand, have seen their purity converted to mixture; instead of nurturing a genesis myth outside historical circumstance, these “composite cultures” are conceived (literally) in the collisions of the historical moment. Composite, or creole, cultures tell narratives of “digenesis” (115, 195). Since such origins are always in interruption of one or another ongoing narrative, Glissant explains, no story either the individual or the group tells can ever stay within its own boundaries. There is an inside-out feel to his postcolonial world. Since the U.S. is the huge atavistic culture bearing down upon the Caribbean, it has barreled across the North American continent and its indigenous peoples on the wheels of the myths of manifest destiny and assimilation. And, Glissant points out, when assimilation has not worked, massacre and smallpox have. In the globalized consciousness of the postcolonial world, when the erased voices return from oblivion, the narratives of destiny and origin back up on themselves. In formal matters, the cohesiveness of narrative voice weakens and fragments, the authority of single point of view abdicates, large areas of certainty become ambiguous. This is the point of entry for Glissant’s Faulkner as Southerner and as prose stylist. In a comprehensive reading of Faulkner’s works-sometimes rearranged as Cowley had in chronological order, but not read in lockstep-Glissant argues that Faulkner’s work is the narrative of resistance to “Relation,” blocked from a refuge in sameness (as it is in Quentin’s consuming desire for Caddy, his sister), appalled but yet drawn to relation with the Other (as it is in Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down,Moses). This obsessive-compulsive narrative, in Glissant’s handling, assimilates Faulkner to the global consciousness of the emerging century: And there we would find not only what could be called hope but also what we could conceive of as the only opening: a detour through the imaginary and impermanent, in our own sensibilities, the contradiction between this expan-

MICHAEL KREYLING

29

sion and this confinement. To be at one and the same time the insane free from here and the bird of multiplicity from over there. To enter into a new emotion and an unprecedented feeling of the world collectivity, where we neither lose nor dilute ourselves, and where the frontier and the inside-outside world no longer give rise to, or maintain, an impossibility. This is difficult. (220)

But this is also the Faulkner of the twenty-first century. NOTES 1. I wish to thank Herbert Peck, of the Department of Fine Arts, Vanderbilt University, for help with the photographic images discussed in this essay. 2. H. L. Mencken, “The Sahara of the Bozart,” in Prejudices: Second Series (New York: Knopf, i g q ) , 136-54. Charles Angoff and H. L. Mencken,“The Worst American State: Part 3,” American Mercury 24 (November 1931): 355-71; Parts 1 and 2, September and October, 1931. Cited hereafter in the text. 3. Malcolm Cowley, ed., The Portable Faulkner (New York: Vildng, 1946). Revised 1967. Quotations, cited hereafter in the text, are from the revised edition. 4. James W. Silver, Mississippi: The Closed Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1964).A similar case of posthumous participation is Louis D. Rubin, Jr., “Notes on a Rear-Guard Action,” in The Curious Death of the Novel (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), 131-51. Silver cited hereafter in the text. 5. Eduoard Glissant, Faulkner, Mississippi, trans. Barbara B. Lewis and Thomas C. Spear (New York: Farrar Straw & Giroux, 1999). French edition, 1996. Cited hereafter in the text. 6. Ellen Glasgow, A Certain Measure: A n Interpretation of Prose Fiction (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, ig43), 138. 7. William Faulkner in Paris, photograph by W. C. Odiorne, in Jack Cofield, William Faulkner: The Cofield Collection (Oxford, Miss.: Yoknapatawpha Press, igyg), 71. 8. Publicity photograph for The Marble Faun [ig24], by Willa Johnson, in William Faulkner Collection, Special Collections Department, Manuscripts Division, University of Virginia Library. 9. For the self-caricature and several other images of Faulkner, see “William Faulkner: Man and Writer,” Saturday Review, 28 July 1962, 11-26. 10. Cofield, Faulkner in RAF uniform, 55-56; Faulkner in hunting “pinks,” 8-9. 11. The most widely disseminated version of this narrative is Cleanth Brooks’s in William Faulkner: The Yoknaputuwpha Country (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963). 12. Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography (New York: Random House, ig74), 1:655. 13. H. L. Mencken, “Uprising in the Confederacy,”American Mercury 16 (March ig30), 380. 14. James B. Meriwether and Michael Millgate, eds., Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, 1926-1962 (New York: Random House, 1968), 19. 15. Frederick R. Karl, William Faulkner: American Writer (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, ig8g), 726. See also Leigh Anne Ducks essay elsewhere in this volume for a fine discussion of the Cowley Faulkner. 16. The allusion in the phrase “the mind of the South” is of course to W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Knopf, 1941). 17. C. Vann Woodward, “The Search for Southern Identity,” in The Burden of Southern History (New York: Vintage, 1960),25. Quotations cited hereafter in the text. 18. The metaphor of sickness is prevalent in discussing the racial violence in the South in the post Brown decade. See I. F. Stone, quoted in John Egerton, Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation before the Civil Rights Movement in the South (New York: Knopf,

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Boundaries of Meaning

igg4), 618; and Leon F. Litwack, “Hellhounds,” in James Allen, et al., Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe: Twin Palms Publishers, ~ O O O ) ,8-37. 19. Martin J. Dain, Faulkner’s County: Yoknapatawpha (New York: Random House, 1964L 150-53. 20. William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (1948; New York: Vintage, i g p ) , 245. Cited hereafter in the text. 21. I am happy here to acknowledge the source of this insight: a seminar reportlpaper jointly delivered by Tommy Anderson and Kyle Edwards in my Southern Literature seminar, spring 1999. 22. James B. Meriwether, ed., Essays, Speeches, and Public Letters by William Faulkner (New York: Random House, 1956), 14.9. 23. For a general survey of constructions of Africa and race in National Geographic, see Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins, Reading “National Geographic” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, igg3), particularly chapter 6. A contemporaneous example is Gertrude S. Weeks, “Into the Heart ofAfrica,” National Geographic 110 (August 1956):257-63. I am grateful to Bart H. Welling for the reminder that “rotten . . . hippo meat” might have come to Faulkner from Conrads Heart of Darkness, one of his favorite stories (Blotner, 1:388).In Heart of Darkness Marlow tells of his first trip upriver, employing “twenty cannibals” to dislodge the steamboat when it ran aground: “they had brought along a provision of hippo meat which went rotten, and made the mystery of the wilderness stink in my nostrils. Phoo! I can sniff it now.” 24. Readers will recognize these paragraphs as the final three paragraphs of “Address to the Southern Historical Association,” most readily to be found in Meriwether, Essays, Speeches, and Public Letters by William Faulkner, 146-51. 25. Anonymous, Mississippi Travel Planner (Ocean Springs: Mississippi Department of Economic and Community Development, n.d. [~ooo?], n.p. [2]. 26. Robert Altman, director; October Films, 1999. 27. For details about the program, visit http://www.igc.org/wbai-laborlmississippi.htm1. 28. See http://~.tele~m-south.com/Mississippi/MLPGlcities/oxford.html. 29. Larry Levinger, “The Prophet Faulkner,” Atlantic Monthly 285 (June 2000): 76. Cited hereafter in the text. 30. Alston Chase, “Harvard and the Making of the Unabomber,” Atlantic Monthly 285 (June 2000): 41-65. 31. In this position, Glissant echoes the argument of Thadious Davis, Faulkner’s ‘Negro”: Art and the Southern Context (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983).

William Faulkner, Edouard Glissant, and a Creole Poetics of History and Body in Absalom, Absalom! andA Fable

B A R B A R AL A D D

“A Mobile and Upright Scar”‘

Early in Absalom, Absalom!, Thomas Sutpen appears in Yoknapatawpha County with a band of Caribbean slaves and a French architect from Martinique. On a previous visit, he had quietly negotiated the purchase of 100 square miles of land with money presumably gotten in the Caribbean; and he has returned to begin clearing the land and building his mansion.2 Until a few years ago, one found in the commentary on Absalom, Absalom! little dealing with the significance of Sutpen’s ties to the Caribbean even though his fortune, his band of slaves, and the Frenchman he hires to design a mansion were all gotten in the islands. Instead, most readers understood Sutpen and his infamous “design” in terms of his West Virginia origins and his fall into Virginia where he quickly learns where he stands in the hierarchy of humanity and begins to dream of improving his condition within that hierarchy.3 In other words, most read Thomas Sutpen within an insular (U.S.) nationalistic context. That this should have been the case is not surprising given that nationalistic models have dominated in the writing and the teaching of literary history and criticism since the major Western revolutions of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But over the past twenty years or so, some of the assumptions that lay behind those revolutions have been questioned, among them the idea that “nationalism” finds its logical expression in the political sovereignty of the nation and that the Nation State reflects and determines the identity of its inhabitant^.^ Geographers have redrawn regional maps to capture the tracks and traces of the human migrations that characterize the modern epoch, overriding State borders in the process. Unlike older maps which delineated a U.S. South, an arguably distinctive region within the United States, these new maps tie the U.S. South to the Caribbean and to the eastern portions of Central and South America to form a

32

Faulkner, Glissant, and Creole Poetics

transnational Plantation/Postplantation region. The work of these new mapmakers delineates a different range and scope of human cultural experience and will become more and more useful in the twenty-first century as (iJ) State boundaries continue to become increasingly permeable and transculturalism more viable in a globalized economic context. Literary scholars and critics have already begun to explore connections (thematic, aesthetic, rhetorical, historical) among the literatures of the U.S. South, the Caribbean, and Central and South America. Among the voices reminding us that nationalistic models are inadequate to the realities of literary experience in the U.S. South, including the realities of reading William Faulkner, is that of Martinican novelist and essayist Edouard Glissant, who refers to the transnational plantation/ postplantation region as the “Other America” to distinguish it from the Euro-American region many of us think about when we hear the word “America” and which more often than not is taken to be synonymous with the “United States” itself. Glissant is himself an “Other American” writer of French and African descent, a Creoles6When Glissant speaks of the creole and of creolization, however, he speaks more broadly and more figuratively, not only to suggest “m6tissage,” a mixing of races, but also the “long-unnoticed process” of integration and regeneration to which it gave birth; “creolization,” Glissant writes, “adds something new to the components that participate in For Glissant, William Faulkner is creole, despite his U. S. citizenship and predominantly British ancestry, by virtue of his identification with the Other America of the U.S. South and his immersion in its own process of cultural and racial regeneration. In Caribbean Discourse, Glissant takes up this idea of creolization and identifies a representative “novel of the Americas” possessed of its own distinctive creole poetics, using the work of Faulkner to do SO.^ Among the features of the “novel of the Americas” that Glissant identifies are “the assumption of history as passion” (Si),(i.e., the inscription of History on the body in a cathartic dramatization of memory and suffering); “a tortured sense of time” (144),(the American writer struggles in the confusion of time and a multiplicity of histories); and a sense of “transferred space” (144-45)(in other words, American “space” and American “time” bear the tracks and traces of other places and times, along with the tracks and traces of their violent de~poiling).~ See, for example, the prologue to Act z of Requiemfor a Nun, where Faulkner describes in double-time, fast-forwarding to the present and the future, the different settlings and unsettlings in the area that would become Jefferson, Mississippi: The rich deep black alluvial soil . . . printed now by the tracks of unalien shapes . . . and unalien men . . . the obsolete and the dispossessed, dispos-

BARBARA L A D D

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sessed by those who were dispossessed in turn because they too were obsolete: the wild Algonquian, Chickasaw and Choctaw . . . peering . . . at a Chippeway canoe bearing three Frenchmen . . . and then a hundred and then a thousand Spaniards come overland from the Atlantic Ocean . . . the Frenchman for a moment, then the Spaniard for perhaps two, then the Frenchman for another two and then the Spaniard again for another and then the Frenchman for that one last second, half-breath; because then came the Anglo-Saxon. . . . Obsolete too.10

When seen as a representative of Euro-American rather than Other American literary traditions, Faulkner has been read as a writer embedded in the universalizing Western Historical vision. In other words, he has been interpreted in terms of a specifically Western concept, associated with Hegel, which maintains that human and cultural events are part of and the product of a transcendent and rational force that encompasses and gives direction to those events. This conceptualization of History implies an origin, a direction of movement (determined rationally, through the working of the dialectic), and a culmination or endpoint. As a philosophy (and it was the first true “philosophy” of History) it is based on the universalizing idea that there is an absolute “reason” or “logic” controlling human events across different cultures and times. There are no “other” historical narratives at work, only the one; and according to its logic, cultures can be classified as ahistorical, prehistorical, and Historical. For Hegel, African cultures are ahistorical; Native American cultures prehistorical; and Western (inclusive of Europe and Euro-America) Historical. Faulkner’s many references to this universalizing History are obvious-in his efforts to be exact in his use of significant dates, in the search for origins among so many of his characters, in his elaborate (but never quite elaborate enough) genealogies, and in his interest in characters who have fallen from some height of aspiration or purity.ll But for Faulkner, as for many writers of the “Other America,” there is, for good reason having to do with the experience of slavery and colonization, little sense of an actual investment in this History. The idea of a progressive and coherent Historical force has been rendered especially problematic for the novelist of the Americas precisely because of the way colonialism serves to establish cultural, economic, and government “centers” and “margins,” the metropolitan “centers” being the sites of the making of History and Historical discourse, the site of the State itself, the “margins” . . . marginal.I2 As the current vehicle of History, an instrument of the absolute, and the manifestation of the transcendent totality in our epoch, the State has used and been used by History to justify a lot-colonialism, slavery, genocide, assimilation-and colonized people (whether they be

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the Creoles of America or the colonial and postcolonial populations of Africa, India, and elsewhere) have suffered and continue to suffer from the “design” of that History. Our habit of seeing the presence of History in Faulkner’s texts as an irresistible force and Faulkner himself chiefly as a Euro-American writer in the midst of exploring the South’s obsolescence has blinded us to his creolite‘,to his own roots in a creole context, to his creole suspicion of and resistance to the Historical narrative, andalmost always-to the regenerative possibilities associated with me‘tissage in creole characters like Charles Bon and his grandson Jim Bond. As Glissant himself has demonstrated, in speaking as a creole, one speaks from the intersection where History confronts and is confronted by the histories of the colonized, the dispossessed, the exiled; one speaks to and on behalf of the complexity of human and lower-case-h historical experience in the Other America, on behalf of the cultures dismissed as ahistorical or prehistorical, but even rnoreso on behalf of transculturalism itself, imagined figuratively as an expression of a creole sensibility. For Glissant, the voice of William Faulkner speaks from this intersection against History-surrounded by and marshalling the voices of the Other America. His Faulkner has more in common with the writers of Plantation/ Postplantation America than with writers of the U.S. at large, more in common with Alejo Carpentier and Jacques Roumain than with Hemingway and Fitzgerald. l3 As an alternative to History, Glissant articulates and performs a creole poetics which he also calls une poe‘tique de la Relation or a cross-cultural poetics. This is a poetics founded upon transactions and interactions across cultures rather than upon any attempt to locate “essence” or origin. There is, Glissant reminds us, no hope of identifying an origin, an “essence,” in the Other America anyway. We are we because we are hybrid. To be a part of the Other America is to be the product of cultural mixing, more often than not violently carried out in conditions that have precluded any real synthesis among elements of the mixture. So, in our project of understandingmaking ourselves in terms of a past and with hope for a future, it is necessary to shift attention from the search for an origin or an essence of our culture to the interactions, to the relations, among the various peoples and histories that are intermingled in us.14 Une pobtique de la Relation, or a creole aesthetic, privileges hybridity itself, the composite, the always emergent in the face of a Western aesthetic associated with a quest for purity and full realization. A creole poetics is defined in terms of simultaneity rather than chronology or succession, in terms of irruption rather than development, in terms of exile and return rather than origin and departure. A creole poetics suggests another way of reading Faulkner-i.e., with an eye to the cross-cultural

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transactions and interactions that govern his work and with attention to the irruptive, the composite, and simultaneity in that work as the means through which he suggests a means of survival in the face of obsolescence, which is the manifestation of History’s violence. In a previously published essay, I argue that the creole context is essential to making sense of Absalom, Absalom!‘s Charles Bon, that the various speakers (representing different generations) in the novel construct dfferent Bons depending to some extent on their own personal needs but also and perhaps to a greater extent on the relationship between the U.S. and the Caribbean at the time of their first attempts to come to terms with the mystery of Bon’s presence at Sutpen’s Hundred. In short, Grandfather Compson, Jason Compson, and Quentin represent several generations of U.S. involvement with or in the Caribbean, or, more broadly speaking, with or in the cross-cultural realities of the Americas. In Absalom, Absalom!, the relationship between the U.S. and the Caribbean provides an axis upon which U.S. nationalistic and racial discourses revolve. Jason Compson, for example, with his fascination for French “decadence,” uses Bon to understand the South’s defeat in the Civil War; Quentin and Shreve, of a generation obsessed with the possibility of race-mixing, construct Charles Bon as a mulatto (and they are, incidentally, the first in the novel to do so, although we usually forget the sequence of “constructions” in our tendency to synthesize them into our own “thirteenth way of loolung at a blackbird’-another doomed effort at synthesis in the face of American realities). In that essay, I conclude that Quentin and Shreve (like the other speakers in the novel) fail to the extent that they fail to rewrite the old stories in a way that provides Quentin with a future.15 At the end of Absalom, Absalom!, Quentin is curled up in a dormitory room in the dead of a Boston winter, only a few months from his suicide, a victim of History. Quentin’s inability to imagine a future is predetermined by the impact of History in the form of the “design” that obsesses Thomas Sutpen. In the following passage, we get a sense of Sutpen’s character as he explains to Grandfather Compson his design in terms of his first encounter with History. This takes place within a country schoolhouse where the schoolmaster, despairing of ever keeping the interest of his students, sometimes resorts to the reading of History. Sutpen, son of an illiterate Scottish mother and child of the mountains and of solitude, tells General Compson that he never could “condescend to memorise dry sums and such” although he would listen when the teacher read aloud. Sutpen explains: “I learned little save that most of the deeds, good or bad both, incurring opprobrium or plaudits or reward either, within the scope of man’s abilities, had already been performed and were to be learned about only from

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of her own, adjunctive or incremental to the design which I had in mind, so I provided for her and put her aside” (194). He has the idea, but not the breeding, according to Rosa: “no younger son sent out from some old quiet country . . . to take up new land’ ( i i ) ,saluting with that florid, swaggering gesture to the hat (yes, he was underbred. It showed like this always, your grandfather said, in all his formal contacts with people. H e was like John L. Sullivan having taught himself painfully and tediously to do the schottische, having drilled himself and drilled himself in secret until he now believed it no longer necessary to count the music’s beat. . . . He may have believed that your grandfather or Judge Benbow might have done it a little more effortlessly than he, but he would not have believed that anyone could have beat him in knowing when to do it and how. (34-35)

Unfortunately, imitation is the rule for Quentin too. Like Sutpen he is bound by faith to the book, although it is another kind of “book’ to the extent that he has received History in the form of stories repeated rather than read to him. The power of those stories for Quentin is indicated in his reaction to the letter from Charles Bon to Judith that Jason shows him. For Quentin that letter has a distinct unreality in the face of the stories he has been listening to. He refuses its very materiality as he “read the faint spidery script not like something impressed upon the paper by a once-living hand but like a shadow cast upon it which had resolved on the paper the instant before he looked at it and which might fade, vanish, at any instant . . . : the dead tongue speaking after the four years and then after almost fifty more, gentle sardonic whimsical and incurably pessimistic, without date or salutation or signature” (102).This letter, for all the difference it could make to Quentin’s own reconstruction of the story when he begins to speak in chapter six, remains of no consequence to him as he continues to build the story of Thomas Sutpen on hearsay, on legends that make up the “book’ from which he recites. But just because Quentin can’t read Bon’s letter is no reason that we can’t read it. Faulkner puts it in the novel, verbatim. Bon’s letter is important. It is our only evidence of an acknowledged and self-aware “creole” presence in the novel. What does it say? “You will notice,” Bon writes, “‘howI insult neither of us by claiming this to be a voice from the defeated even, let alone from the dead. In fact,

were a philosopher I should deduce and derive a curious and apt commentary on the times and augur of the future from this letter which you now hold in your hands” (102). He goes on to recount the story of the stationery itself, “‘salvaged. . . from the gutted mansion of a ruined aristocrat,” and of the ink, “the best of stove polish” gotten from a hoard

if I

of supplies intended for U.S. troops and initially thought to be ammuni-

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exile and grieving or the inability to grieve are central, the bear and the deer-themselves at some times fleshly enough to lay down tracks, at other times visionary or spiritual--function as totemic animals evoking both Native American and African histories; by analogy, their tracks are sometimes visible and sometimes not to Ike McCaslin, whose quest is, in large part, to uncover and to understand his own complex relationship to the now “annealing” and now reappearing scar of History. It could be argued that Ike (whose condition is much like Quentin’s in his need to solve the mystery upon which his own identity depends) learns to read the traces of handwriting on the ledgers in his uncle’s office only through the lessons in reading and interpretation he learns while tracking the totemic animals in the woods. What Ike finally learns from these traces of other histories is his own history (of miscegenation and incest, i.e., of the undoing of what Absalom, Absalom! terms the “design”), unavailable to him except through the mediation of traces left by the displaced. One of the many tragedies of Absalom, Absalom! is that Quentin never learns to read or hear what he most needs to read and hear: evidence of the traces of survival and regeneration inscribed in Bon’s letter and in Bonds persistent howls. According to Shreve, Bond will “conquer the western hemisphere” (302).But is this a threat or a promise? Jim Bond is certainly a sign of the “creolization” of America-the suggestion of racial mixing in the image of myriad Jim Bonds “bleach[ing]out” (302) is pretty obvious. Clearly the likelihood of a creole future spells disaster for Quentin. In the light of History’s impact in Yoknapatawpha County, however, the survival or regeneration of Jim Bond seems to be more a part of the counternarrative provided by the creole aesthetic that underwrites Absalom, Absalom!, more the promise of a future than the threat of one. Dare we suppose that there are some places-that I shall call Archipelago places (in the Caribbean, in the Pacific, and in so many other areas . . . )-where such a concept of the Relative, of the open links with the Other, of what I call a Poe‘tique de Za Relation shades or moderates the splendid and triumphant voice of what I call Continental thinhng, the thought of systems? (Glissant, “Creolization,” 275)

Faulkner’s historical context in A Fable is an intersection where France and America, History and a creole poetics, meet-just as it is in Absalom, Absalom! A Fable is for the most part set in France and tells the story of a World War I mutiny in the French army led by an obscure corporal (“not even French’) who turns out to be the illegitimate child of a liaison between a French officer of the upper crust-the old general-and a Central European peasant woman of mysterious origin. On

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respect for such singleness of purpose and profoundly devoted to serving the animal despite his own obscure origins and relative worthlessness. The groom’s respect and devotion are very much a matter of his admiration for the horse’s “nature,” in which he, a Westerner with all of the Western desire for purity and singleness of purpose, sees reflected his own best nature and the best aspirations of his culture-ven to the point of taking the horse’s death to be a sign of his and his culture’s moral death. When he is no longer needed as caregiver to the noble animal, he is returned to, or once again allowed to be seen in terms of, his former role, that of a confidence man. There are parodoxes piled upon ironies in the tale: most notable is that while the groom’s respect for and devotion to the animal suggest some of the best aspects of the human being, the animal himself is at once the emblem of the Western quest for purity and singleness of purpose and the victim of human greed and arrogance. So is the groom. Later in the novel, the fable of the horse and his groom is recapitulated in a French prison where two thieves await execution. One is called Lapin, the other Casse-tete (“Horse” for short). Horse is a man in this case, traumatized by war, with “empty and peaceful hands . . . drooling a little at the mouth” (302). Lapin, a habitual thief with even less claim to respectability than the horse’s groom in the American version of the story, is nevertheless thoroughly devoted to his own Horse and determined to preserve him as much as he can from any knowledge of what awaits him. Here in the French prison the State is omnipresent; this is no frontier. And this is not frontier humor, the story of a man in the process of self-making. It is, instead, a story of two men, one of whom has been frightened by the military into a madness that makes him look and behave like an animal, and the other who is, in his own words, like other men in being not “the sum of his vices: just his habits” (303).There is none of the regenerative joy that characterizes the racehorse story. Arguably, there is no innocence either, even in the case of Horse, if by “innocence” we mean the quality of being untouched by evil. And despite the surrounding brutality which elicits sympathy for the thieves, their crime is not the Robin Hood-like theft of a ruined horse from a millionnaire but the murder of an elderly woman who resisted being burgled and was killed (“had to be”) in order for the two thieves to accomplish their own singular purpose, to “get to Paris” (303).In the story of Lapin and Horse, singleness of purpose takes on a much more ominous meaning and is associated with death, not with regeneration. The French prison during the Great War is far removed, geographically speaking, from Faulkner’s rural South, but the emotional power of this later and much briefer story is largely due to the uncanny echoes

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from the American fable; and particularly to the fact that what the groom admires so deeply as a principle of being in the thoroughbredsingleness of purpose-turns out to be something very different when it appears as a principle of being in a man. In the Fatherland during World War I, it is associated with criminality and disability, an incapacity for reflection or self-awareness, whether it is exhibited by two thieves who have become murderers or by the State. Moreover, Horse’s condition is in no way “natural”; it is the product of war and its terrorism. In this second story, however, one of our most admirably “human” qualities, devotion to another, remains and remains admirable despite the changed context. That devotion is here represented by a man whose claim on our sympathies would ordinarily be very small makes it resonate all the more in the absolutism of History, in what Charles Bon calls “a period without boundaries or location in time” (104). Another fact remains too: devotion, if it is admirable, is going to be inspired by and dependent on relationship. On the one hand, this underscores the ascendency of humanity over History in A Fable where devotion to History, here, works only in the service of violence.lS But on the other hand Faulkner’s aesthetic of “relationship” also suggests C h a n t ’ s idea of relation and underscores the mutually constitutive aspects of the American and European stories. On the aesthetic register, then, significance in A Fable is a matter of une po2tique de la Relation, or a cross-cultural poetics. The second story of the Other America is told by the old general as he tries to save his son, who is about to be executed as the instigator of a mutiny. He offers escape and seclusion, escape and worldly power, and finally-when the son has refused both-“Take life,” he says, illustrating exactly what he is offering with a story: Listen to this. It happened in America, at a remote place called by an Indian name, I think: Mississippi: a man who had committed a brutal murder . . . went to his trial still crying his innocence and was convicted and sentenced still crying it . . . until a priest came to him . . . : the murderer at last confessed his crime against man . . . until presently it was almost as though the murderer and the priest had exchanged places and offices . . . the murderer [now] . . . the strong calm steadfast rock . , . of conviction and . . . faith, on which the priest himself could now lean for strength and courage; this right up to the very morning of the execution . . . right up to the gallows itself: which at Mississippi I understand is out-of-doors in the yard of the jail . . . [the murderer still] standing calm composed and at peace . . . [with] one single branch of an adjacent tree extending over the stockade as though in benison, one last gesture of earth’s absolution . . . when suddenly a bird flew onto that bough and stopped and opened its tiny throat and sang-whereupon he who less

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than a second before had his very foot lifted to step from earth’s grief and anguish into eternal peace, cast away heaven, salvation, immortal soul and all, struggling to free his bound hands . . . crying ‘Innocent! Innocent! I didn’t do it!’ even as the trap, earth, world and all, fell from under him. (296-97)

The links that Bon’s words forged between body and memory in Absalom, Absalom! are rearticulated by the old general, the mutinous corporal’s biological father and the highest ranking officer in the novel, in a line of thought that closely, ironically, and quite unexpectedly echoes Bon’s but with a telling difference. “In time you become old, you see death then,” the old general concludes; “Then you realise that nothingnothing-nothing-not power nor glory nor wealth nor pleasure nor even freedom from pain, is as valuable as simple breathing, simply being alive even with all the regret of having to remember and the anguish of an irreparable worn-out body” (296). In this passage the Old General picks up on the subject of the corporeal of which Charles Bon speaks in Absalom, Absalom! and links it-again as Bon does-through the body’s senses to memory. To the extent that the old general’s lament invokes the lament of Charles Bon, the difference in the perspectives of the two men is all the more vital for what it suggests about Faulkner’s immersion in the conflict between the realities represented by the creole experience in the Other America and the Western Historical narrative. The old general figures the body as “irreparable,” Bon figures it as “immortal”; the old general figures memory in terms of the past and regret, Bon figures it in terms of the future and of expectation. The general’s lament is Western; for him the “omnivorous” and the “carrion-heavy” is body. For Bon, the “omnivorous” and “carrion-heavy” is History. Although the general’s words do underscore his human complexity as a man and a father, those words also reaffirm (rather than challenge as do Bon’s words) the idea of the body’s subordination to mind, to History. They are not, then, a cry against History (which is the creole cry, the cry of the “new man”), but a cry against the body’s dangerous capacity for memory, against the unfitness of the body to serve History faithfully and without growing 01d.l~ Glissant finds an alternative to the desire to escape the body associated with “Continental thinking” in the American novel’s “assumption of history as passion” (Caribbean Discourse, Si), suggesting the “Passion of Christ,” or, more generally, martyrdom. “Passion” in this sense means suffering in which the spiritual is immanent in the corporeal, in which suffering is indistinguishable as spiritual or bodily, in which there is no conceivable degree of separation between the two-recalling the Incarnation. Often, it suggests suffering and bodily death carried out with full consciousness of the inevitability of suffering and its redemptive neces-

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sity, suffering that such full consciousness cannot relieve to any degree but intensifies.2o In its own aesthetic project of inscribing History on the body as a form of dramatic and finally liberating interpretation, “the assumption of history as passion” as part of a creole poetics of the body mounts a powerful challenge to the Western project of a ‘‘transcendence’’ of History. At the end of A Fable, the corporal and his entire regiment have been executed, the corporal’s body has in all likelihood been buried in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, but the seeds of human resistance continue to germinate in two former officers who have been converted by the corporal’s mission. The first is the British “runner,” who now bears on his body a horrible scar dividing that body into two sides-a healthy mobile side and a frozen, immobile one. He is a walking sign of the conflict between the destructive potential of History’s instrument, War, and the persistence of the body. The other convert is the former Quartermaster General, “pure” peasant, whose large, flaccid, and “sick’ body had, from the beginning of his career, augured an early death but who succeeds in outliving his generation, chiefly through his own passion, to which Faulkner often refers. In the end, both the runner and the Quartermaster General have assumed History as passion. In their suffering, what they offer to History’s victims is a kind of communion, the sharing of body and blood which is-for both of them-the means to memory and therefore to survival. They are first seen together after the corporal’s death as they approach his family farm, where they are served a meal of bread and soup. They continue to be seen and heard from here and there. Years later, the final scene of the novel shows them at the public memorial service for the Old General, who is brought to lie in state at the war memorial. When the funeral cortege stops there to honor the Old General, “something burst suddenly out of the crowd-not a man but a mobile and upright scar” (368). The runner taunts the officials and mocks the patriotism of the ceremony-for which he is beaten. He is, at this point, well known and one spectator even hopes aloud that “he will die this time” (370). Nothing stops him. When he comes to, he laughs, promising that he is “not going to die. Never” (370). In his final words in the novel, he makes the same promise that Jim Bond makes at the end of Absalom, Absalom!, which is the promise of immortality in and through the body. Recently, Edward Casey, a historian of philosophy, has published a book entitled The Fate of Place, which follows the line of development by which “place” (a viable philosophical concept until the early modern period) was, after that point, displaced by ideas of “space,” until by the late modern period we had seen what he calls the “apotheosis of space”

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in Western philosophical thought.21 Today we often use the words “space” and “place” interchangeably or, more tellingly, avoid the word “place” altogether-since “place” is entirely “disempowered, deprived of its own dynamism” (Casey 201). This is a serious mistake, especially for those of us interested in questions of corporeality, the impact of colonialism in the present, regionalism, or the environment. Consequently, although I have been quoting Glissant in his (or his translator’s) use of the word “space,” as in “transferred space,” throughout this essay, I have been doing so with some reservations. The word is certainly in common use, especially among cultural and literary critics, as in studies that attempt to “create spaces” for this or that kind of cultural action or reflection. But “space” is less an issue in my application of a creole poetics than is “place”; and I would rewrite (deliberately misreading, perhaps) Glissant’s phrase “transferred space” as “transferred places” in order to emphasize the central importance of the body, memory, and situatedness to a creole poetics. In doing so, I am departing very little from Glissant; “place” is of fundamental importance in his work and he speaks often of it. To make a long story short, space is a matter of dimension and extension-one point in “space” is no different from any other point in space (Casey 201). In other words, the idea of “space” does away with questions of situatedness and with questions of relative value. It has, according to Casey, operated as a “crushing monolith . . . in the modern era” (203). On the other hand, “place,” unlike “space,” “situates, and it does so richly and diversely. It locates things in regions whose most complete expression is neither geometric nor cartographic” (201). The proper “region” of place may well be the body and memory its most complete expression. Casey notes that contemporary philosophers are seeking to reclaim place “by way of body” (202) and adds that “if we are surprised at this . . . , it is only because one of the main agendas of philosophical modernity is the subordination of all . . . phenomena to mind” (203)~ which is what Hegel’s philosophy of History does-and which is what Glissant’s creole poetics hopes to undo. Importantly for my argument, there is no “Absolute,” no capita1-HHistory under the aegis of place. Place is one aspect of the idea of the Relative and depends on the kind of directionality that we know and understand only through the body. When Bon describes War as a “period without boundaries or location in time,” he evokes the State’s instrumentality for History in its quest for the absolute. But in speaking as a creole, Bon asserts his own experience in the face of History, willfully claiming a corporeality-and therefore a place-despite History’s attempts to transcend both in ‘‘glorious’’War. So does the scarred runner in A Fable,

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albeit in a different-more performative-mode. In short, the creole voice in Absalom, Absalom! and the voice of creolitk in A Fable speak an aesthetic of the body, of memory, and of place in their critique of the Western aesthetic of mind manifest in History. This makes it central to any creole or cross-cultural poetics. The revaluation of place and body and the belief that it will be through place and through the corporeal that we will survive History are themselves based to a large extent on the experience of the colonized, the dispossessed, and the exiled in the modern epoch. What these possibilities mean for Faulkner in the twenty-first century is, I think, not a threat but a promise. Those who resist History in Faulkner do so out of a deep identification of the human with place and body, with directionality as determined by the location and the position of the body (and not with the abstraction of a dialectic movement). They open up for us a new context in which to assess the writer, his South, his modernity, and his significance for the future. NOTES 1. William Faulkner, A Fable (New York: Random House, Vintage, 1978), 368.Subsequent references will be cited in the text. 2. “West Indies” and “Caribbean” are used synonymously by many, although for some scholars working in the field, the “West Indies” properly speaking refers to former British holdings in the region; the “Caribbean” to areas colonized by France and Spain. This essay is dealing exclusively with French and Spanish holdings and will use “Caribbean,” even though Faulkner uses “West Indies” in Absalom, Absalom! to refer to Haiti. 3. Recent work, however, provides another perspective: see &chard Godden, Absalom, Absalom!: Haiti and Labor History: Reading Unreadable Revolutions,”ELH 61 (Fall igg4), 685-720; my own “‘The Direction of the Howling’: Nationalism and the Color Line in Absalom, Absalom!,” American Literature 66 (September igg4),525-51;Sean Latham, “Jim Bonds America: Denaturalizing the Logic of Slavery in Absalom, Absalom!,” Mississippi Quarterly 51 (Summer 1998),453-64; Ramdn Saldivar, “Looking for a Master Plan: Faulkner, Paredes, and the Colonial and Postcolonial Subject,” The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner (New York: Cambridge University Press, iggs), 96-120; and Maritza Stanchich, “The Hidden Caribbean ‘Other’ in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!: An Ideological Ancestry of U.S. Imperialism,” Mississippi Quarterly 49 (Summer, 1996):

603-17. 4. For a discussion of these ideas, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of NationaZism, 2nd ed. (New York: Verso, 1991);and, for a nineteenth-century point of view, Ernest Renan, “Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’ Oeuvres ComplBtes (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1947-1961),vol. 1, 887-906. 5. Other American regions that have been described by some of these scholars include

a Meso-America [Mexico, Peru, Guatamala] and a Euro-America [Argentina,Chile, and the bulk of the United States and Canada]. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983);Edouard Glissant, “Creolization in the Making of the Americas,” Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, ed. Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, iggs), 268;Rex Nettleford, Caribbean Cultural Identity (Los Angeles: Center for Afro-American Studies and UCLA Latin American Center Publica-

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European traditions, Glissant writes: “‘American’literature is the product of a system of modernity that is sudden and not sustained or ‘evolved.’ For instance, was not the tragedy of those American writers of the ‘lost generation’ that they continued in literature the European (or ‘Bostonian’) dream of Henry James? The United States thus combined two kinds of alienation in a great number of its reactions: that of wanting to continue politely a European tradition to which the United States felt itself to be the ultimate heir; and that of wanting to dominate the world savagely in the name of this ultimate legacy. Faulkner’s roots in the Deep South free him from the dream of becoming European. This is his true modernity as opposed to Fitzgerald, for example, or Hemingway, in spite of the ‘modem’ themes of the latter” (“Cross-Cultural Poetics,” Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, translated and with an introduction by J. Michael Dash [Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 19891,149-50). 14. When we do that, it is almost impossible not to notice the absence of any public acknowledgements of these interactions: no markers, no monuments to speak of in the American landscape. When the sight of that emptiness overwhelms the sight of the European presence itself on the continent, we will then see more clearly into the creole space that Glissant describes. We can then begin to see our own cultures and their possibilities in ways that a persistent clinging to the Western Historical project makes impossible. is;, “‘The Direction of the Howling’:Nationalism and the Color Line in Absalom, Absalom!, American Literature 66.3 (September 1994):525-51. Reprinted in Subjects and Citizens: Nation, Race, and Gender from “Oroonoko” to Anita Hill, ed. Cathy Davidson and Michael Moon (Duke University Press, iggs), 345-71. 16. Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Random House, Vintage, iggo), 195. AU subsequent citations are cited in the text. 17. Both are very much like the traditional fable, with its use of animals to illustrate human qualities in a short narrative with a cautionary or inspirational purpose. 18. This is true even in the case of the corporal’s mutinous action. He too is more devoted to the men around him than to any “principle.” This is not to say that principles are not involved. 19. A revulsion against the body characterizes the military throughout the novel. Prior to the Old General’s appeal, several representatives of the officer class have articulated sentiments that underscore the Western distrust and devaluation of the body, always associating body with the peasants, the masses, the common soldier and always defining themselves as free of its “weaknesses.” General Gragnon, the commanding officer of the division in which the mutinous regiment was housed, defines the perfect soldier as “pastless, unhampered, and complete” (17), a description in which it is hard to find room for the corporeal since where there is body there is always an inscription of the past, there is always the “hampering” weight of relation, and there is always incompletion. In the following passage, the corps commander attempts to reassure General Gragnon, the general in charge of the regiment that mutinied, that the mutiny represented a failure of the common soldier and not of Gragnon himself: “We hauled them up out of their ignominious mud by their bootstraps; in one more little instant they might have changed the worlds face. But they never do. They collapse, as yours did this morning. They always will. But not us” (25). 20. For a discussion of the meaning and significance of “Passion” in this context, see Albert W. Schweitzer, The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, trans. William Montgomery (New York: MacMillan, 1955 [c.1931]), 141-59. For brief discussions, see “Passion” and “Passion of Christ” in the Encyclopedic Dictionary of Religion, ed. Paul Kevin Meagher, Thomas C. O’Brien, Sister Consuelo Maria Aherne (Washington:Corpus Publications, 1973-1979) and The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible: A n illustrated Encyclopedia, ed. George Arthur Buttrick (New York: Abingdon Press, 1962). 21. Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, igg7), 200. All subsequent references are cited in the text.

Faulkner and Spanish America: Then and Now*

DEBORAH N. C O H N ~

In 1997,when the University of Mississippi Libraries put together A Faulkner z 00: The Centennial Exhibition, the University archivist invited

Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Mhrquez to contribute a piece. The reflections of this author who, in the archivist’s words, “is indelibly associated with the number one hundred,” were, appropriately, the final item in this exhibition of one hundred items of Faulkneriana.2 “Ever since I first read Faulkner in my twenties,” Garcia MBrquez wrote, he has seemed to me to be a writer from the Caribbean. This became more apparent when I tried to describe settings and characters from Macondo, and I had to make a great effort to keep them from resembling those of Faulkner. . . . A few years went by before I discovered the key to the problem; the Caribbean is poorly delineated. It is not a geographical area around the sea, but, rather, a more vast and complex region, with a homogeneous cultural composition which extends from northern Brazil to the U.S. South. Including, of course, Yoknapatawpha County. Within this realistic conception, not only Faulkner, but the majority of the novelists from the U.S. South, are writers possessed by the demons of the Caribbean. But it was Faulkner who showed me how to decipher them.3

This statement builds upon Garcia MBrquez’s famous declaration of thirty years ago that “Yoknapatawpha County has banks on the Caribbean Sea; so in some way Faulkner is a writer from the Caribbean, in some way he’s a Latin American it er.''^ It echoes the claims made time and again by other Spanish American authors over the past forty years that Faulkner was “ours” and “one of us,” and that “maybe Latin America begins south of the Mason-Dixon line, the South is in a way Latin American, as is F a ~ l k n e r . ” ~ Both Garcia MBrquez’s words and the fact of his inclusion in the Faulkner exhibition anticipate the two main emphases of this essay. On the *Earlier sections of this essay appear in Do the Americas Have a Common Literary History?, published by Peter Lang, and are used with permission of the publisher.

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one hand, he invokes a number of commonalities between the South and Spanish America that have underlain Faulkner’s appeal to Spanish American authors since the 1930s. On the other, the fact that the archivist sought a contribution from Garcia MQrquez alone-whom he described as “the one contemporary writer I thought a magisterial match for Faulkner, and the one writer I most wanted to contribute to our catalogue’’ (Verich n.p.)-is eloquently suggestive of contemporary changes in the field of Faulkner Studies. The most important of these are, from my perspective, the increasing recognition of relations between Spanish American and American literatures and the growing dialogue and reciprocity of influence between the two fields themselves. Thus I begin with a discussion of “Faulkner-Then,” that is, with an overview of Faulkner’s role in Spanish American6 fiction during the critical period known as the , this body of literature essentially “Boom” of the 1960s and i g ~ o swhen hit the international mainstream. I will illustrate how Spanish American authors used Faulkner as a bridge to move them away from a realist style and local concerns towards a nascent transnational discourse and identity. In addition to exploring the reasons why Spanish American authors were so captivated by Faulkner and his South, I will identify general trends in the rewritings of his works between 1950 and the midi g ~ o s ,addressing several questions in particular: which of his works were most influential? which aspects of these works did Spanish Americans find particularly compelling? why? I will also examine several problematic implications of using Faulkner and his vision of the South as a model for one of the Boom’s main concerns: the development and promotion of a pan-Spanish American literary and cultural identity. In “FaulkI will note the recent development of interest among ner-Now,” Faulknerians in Faulkner’s reception in Spanish American literature-a topic which has, until recently, been primarily the concern of Latin Americanists. This growing reciprocal interest may be at least partly attributed to an awareness of commonalities of historical trauma and social structure which situate Faulkner’s-and the South’s-experiences within a hemispheric context. I n this way, it is emblematic of the broader convergence of interests of the fields of American Stuhes and Latin American Studies, and thereby reflects the movement towards an interAmerican approach to culture and literature. This is a shift in paradigms that will, I believe, offer significant insights into the questions of race and regional identity that are at the heart o f Faulkner’s works. 1. Faulkner-Then

Faulkner and other modern writers first started making inroads into Spanish American fiction in the late 1930s and 1940s. The literature of

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the preceding years had been dominated by a realist mode, the so-called novel of the land, which Chilean author Josk Donoso once described as a way of writing “for [the] parish . . . [a way ofl cataloging the flora and fauna . . . which were unmistakably ours . . . all that which specifically makes us different [from] other countries of the ~ o n t i n e n t . But ” ~ the generation of young authors who made their literary debuts in the igsos, includmg Donoso himself, Garcia Miirquez, Julio Cortiizar, Carlos Fuentes, and Mario Vargas Llosa, rejected both the style and content of regionalism. In the first place, the realist style of the “novel of the land” was considered bland in comparison to the experimental stylistics that had already taken root in contemporary Western literature; additionally, realism was construed by many to be a colonial legacy, a style that had been imported and imposed by the Spanish, and that therefore had to be refuted for the Spanish Americans to be able to assert an autonomous literary identity. In the second place, regionalism’s focus on rural and other nonurban locales was far removed from the experiences of the young authors, whose works and lives revolved around more modern, urban environments. (Paradoxically, though, the thematics of the decline of and transition from an agrarian way of life were one of the elements that drew these same writers to Faulkner.) Finally, because regionalism’s emphasis was on “all that which specifically makes us different,” it was associated with a narrow cultural nationalism that these authors sought to transcend, for they considered themselves to be part of a group whose cultural agenda was the construction and promotion of a pan-Spanish American identity. As Garcia Miirquez stated in 1967, “The group is writing one great novel. We’re writing the first great novel of Latin American man. Fuentes is showing one side of the new Mexican bourgeoisie; Vargas Llosa, social aspects of Peru; Cortiizar likewise, and so on. What’s interesting to me is that we’re writing several novels, but the outcome, I hope, will be a total vision of Latin America . . . It’s the first attempt to integrate this world.”8 During these same years, the Spanish Americans also aspired to become part of “world” literature and to gain a Western audience. To this end, they proclaimed the universality of their work, their roots in international avant-garde movements and timeworn Western myths. Enter the modern writers. While the work of authors such as Hemingway, Joyce, Kafka, Proust, Woolf, and, of course, Faulkner, had circulated throughout Spanish America since the ig3os, during the 1950s and 1960s in particular Spanish American authors actively traced their genealogy back to these writers as a means of gaining entry into the international literary arena and claiming a place for themselves within the same cultural currents. The critical industry growing up around the movement followed

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suit, proclaiming victory for cosmopolitanism. in its war on literary regionalism and cultural nationalism. For example, the English version of Luis Harss’s important collection of interviews with the up-and-coming authors, Los nuestros-literally, “Our Own,” as in “Our Writers”-was a ~ . himself also given the extremely apt title of Into the ~ a i n ~ t r eHarss articulated the double movement of the authors’ cultural project, that is, its simultaneously pan-Spanish American and westernizing orientation. On the one hand, he spoke of writers who shared a “sense of common achievement and solidarity”9 and who comprised “a cultural unit” that was working towards “the true birth of a Latin American novel” (32).1° On the other, he was equally insistent upon the universal resonance of the new literature: “Our world has become universalized, and [the writer] is more at home in it . . . in the positive sense of the man who . . . feels himself to be a part of the universe. . . . Our continent is a microcosmic crucible. . . . Wherever we stand today we are at the center of the world, the point of fusion where all trends meet” (24). The incorporation of modernist stylistics and thematics was a fundamental part of this project. By the 1960s, they had been appropriated, integrated into a style that authors considered to be “their own,” something that reflected their reality and experiences far more aptly than realism. Of all the modernists, Faulkner seems to have had the greatest impact on Spanish American literature. Today, he alone tends to be singled out as an object of homage. In 1999, for example, Garcia Miirquez claimed that a discussion with Fuentes, William Styron, and President Clinton about how the Caribbean is a vast “historical and cultural space extending from the north of Brazil to the Mississippi delta” led Clinton to “happily proclaim his own Caribbean affiliation.”ll And back in the 1950s and 1960s, as the desire for international standing for Spanish American literature increased, authors and critics alike began both to invoke Faulkner as a cultural touchstone with unprecedented frequency and to credit him with ushering Spanish American literature into the inter national mainstream. Hence Harss’s declaration in Into the Muinstream that “Faulkner has been the single greatest influence on our literature in the past twenty years or so. . . . [He] was the paragon of the dedicated artist . . . and weaver of absolutes. And, as our narrative art comes of age, it inherits this eternal vocation . . . the novel lives in its sense af responsibility, not only to a time and place but to a universal human need. . . . It would be dangerous to underestimate the Spanish tradition, which is still strong. . . . Nor can one ignore certain atavistic subcultural hangovers in our writers. . . . But the sui generis, the original, are already emerging” (24). The extreme universalism of Harss’s claims for Faulkner reflects both the aspirations of the day for Spanish American

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of community may be approached synchronically, as in the relationship of the individual to his or her society, or diachronically, as in the community’s relationship to its past and present. I would argue, in fact, that Spanish American writers have been drawn much more to the sagas of the Compsons, Sutpens, and Sartorises than, say, to the Snopes trilogy, precisely because the former’s depiction of societies that continue to live by the codes of the Old South, trapped in a past that history-and modernity-have left behind, resonated with their own experience^.^^ In particular, Spanish American authors found models for their work in those Faulkner characters who embody the theme of historical paralysis, spending their Iives at an emotional impasse which is often reified in the houses into which they lock themselves, shutting out the world and its changes. There is, for example, Emily Grierson of “A Rose for Emily,” who spends over forty years shut up in her decaying house, refusing to acknowledge the passage of time both within her house and in the town.15 There is also Gail Hightower of Light in August, who lives in a house that no one enters for twenty-five years, thinking only of his grandfather’s death in the Civil War “as though the seed which his grandfather had transmitted to him had been on the horse too that night and had been killed too and time had stopped there and then for the seed and nothing had happened in time since, not even him.’’IGAnd, of course, there is Quentin Compson, who lives in “the deep South dead since 1865 and peopled with garrulous outraged baffled ghosts . . . who was still too young to deserve yet to be a ghost, but nevertheless having to be one for all that, since he was born and bred in the deep South,” and who listens to Rosa Coldfield, “one of the ghosts which had refused to lie still even longer than most had, telling him about old gho~t-times.’’~7 Spanish American authors found the image of people who are unable to extricate themselves from a personal past and who function as objective correlatives of a society in decline to be ideally suited to representing the unresolved conflicts that overshadowed the present in their homelands. Thus we find numerous examples of this character-type in works from the 1950s through the 1970s. In Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Pbrumo, for example, Susana San Juan, Dolores Preciado, and the title character himself submerge themselves in memories of a long-gone past in order to thwart the pain entailed by the passage of time.l8 The protagonist of Fuentes’s The Death ofArtemio Crux presents the obverse of this scenario: he is simply unable to cope with the past, and at each stage of his life he wipes the slate clean, excising all memories that would remind him of his primal expulsion from family and love. His grandmother, in contrast, spends thirty-five years sealed off in a chamber that no news of historical change penetrates and immersed in her memories: “She did not want to

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know more, but only to remember the old times. And within these four walls, she lost track of everything, except the essentials: her widowhood, the past.”lg Garcia Mgrquez, of course, offers us quite a few similar characters as well: there is Adelaida of Leaf Storm, who closes off the room where an ungrateful guest had lived, essentially reifying his memory, and who, like Macondo as a whole, has decided to stop living and simply await the Judgment Day; the guest in question moves into a house in which, for years, he closes himself off from the town and fresh air alike; there is also Rebeca of One Hundred Years of SoZitude, who “closed the doors of her house and buried herself alive” after the death of her husband and, oblivious to and forgotten by the outside world, continues to use the outmoded dress and currency of the previous century.20Finally, in Juan Carlos Onetti’s “The Purloined Bride,” Moncha Insaurralde, unaware that her fianc6 has died, awaits his return wandering around town in her wedding gown, a “ghost . . . always dressed with the smell and appearance of eternity.”21Faulkner and the Spanish American authors alike used this paralysis to reflect at the level of the microcosm the predicament of regions clinging to a way of life now lost to war or the advent of modernity, and unable to enter the present. In addition to this character-type, the themes and structure of several specific works seem to have had a lasting effect on the generation of writers that was instrumental in consolidating modernism’s place in Spanish American fiction. It is to these works-“A Rose for Emily,” As I Lay Dying, and AbsaZom, AbsaZom!-that I now turn, for the manner in which they were read and rewritten sheds light on many additional commonalities between Faulkner’s world and that of the Spanish Americans. The first of these, “A Rose for Emily,” is set in a town caught between the old and the new. Told in the first-person plural from the perspective of the townspeople, the narrative voice complements and underscores the depiction of Miss Emily’s alienation from the town, for the collective voice articulates shared norms and visits judgment on Emily for failing to conform, while her own perspective is granted no outlet.22Here as in the Spanish American works, this device functions as a means of social criticism by implicating communal values in the protagonist’s fate. As the first-person plural is an extremely uncommon narrative perspective in Western literature, its use in a number of works by avowed Faulkner fans-in conjunction with the symbiotic relationship between structure and content-directly points towards “A Rose for Emily” as a prototype. One example of such modeling is to be found in Vargas Llosa’s The Cubs, which alternates between two narrative voices, a first-person plural and a focalized third-person perspective, both of which reflect the middle class values to which the novel’s alienated pro-

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tagonist is denied access. Jean O’Bryan-Knight has shown how in Faulkner and Vargas Llosa this narrative strategy illustrates how marginalized individuals are rejected when they are perceived to have committed “sexual transgressions that threaten the [group’s] identity’’ (34.1).Ad&tionally, the community’s codes are shown to be responsible in both cases for the individuals’ suffering and ostracism, as well, ultimately, as the very deviations for which they are condemned (342). Fuentes made similar use of a collective narrator-albeit with an interesting twist-in The Death of Artemio Crux. The narration of the magnate’s life and death is fragmented into the three grammatical persons (all of which refer to Cruz) and the three temporal divisions: the firstperson “I,” narrated in the present tense, centers on the protagonist’s dying moments; the third-person sections revisit significant events in his past; and the second-person sections use the future tense to confront him with facts and memories that he denies throughout his life. The latter sections are often interpreted as the voice of Cruz’s conscience, but they may also speak for a collectivity that is determined to hold him accountable for his actions. As Fuentes once remarked, “A Rose for Emily” “is narrated by a ‘we.’ In fact, I think that all of Faulkner’s novels are narrated by a collective voice. So for me the ‘tzi’ [you] was totally important as a recognition of the other, as a stylistic means of recognizing the other. It is not just Artemio Cruz’s double who speaks to him; it is perhaps the Mexican people-the collective voice-that speaks to Artemio Cruz saying ‘tzi,tzi, tzi.’’’23 And Onetti incorporates the image of a woman living by time and a community’s wayside as well as the communal narrator in “The Purloined Bride.” The story begins with a deliberate nod to Faulkner‘s story: Moncha’s tale, he writes, “had already been written and . . . lived by another Moncha in the South liberated and destroyed by the Yankees” (283). Like Emily, Moncha shuts herself up in her house imagining an impossible wedding day, as oblivious to the modernization transforming Santa Maria as Emily was before her. The first-person plural narrator here likewise conveys the opinions and judgment of the townspeople, as well as implicating them in Moncha’s condition: they, too, insist on “denying time, on . . . believing in Santa Maria’s static existence,” and on fomenting her illusions in order to protect themselves from having to face a scandal (299). Hence the doctor’s identification of the cause of Moncha’s death as “Santa Maria, all of you, I myself” (306). If forced to choose, though, I would have to say that, of all Faulkner’s works, As I Lay Dying and Absalom, Absalom! have had the most profound and lasting impact on Spanish American fiction. As I Lay Dying provided the basic paradgm for a genre of novels in which multiple perspectives centering around a dying or dead figure offer a kaleidoscopic

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Lewis “is yours, and as such, interesting and important to us. William Faulkner is both yours and ours, and as such, essential to us. For in him we see what has always lived with us and rarely with you: the haunting face of defeat.”z6Jorge Luis Borges acknowledged parallel commonalities of experience when he declared that, with its “[rlivers of brown water, disorderly villas, black slaves . . , cruel wars: the peculiar world of The Unvanquished is of the same blood as this America and its history; it, too, is creole”27-“~riollo” in Spanish, meaning “of pure Spanish ancestry,” which in this case may be broadly interpreted as “white.” In these representative remarks, we find elements of the Spanish American consciousness-including war, defeat, and racial conflict-that authors were trying to publicize during this period, a project that, as I have suggested, was almost as much a part of the Boom as the literature itself. As much as they speak to affinities, though, Fuentes’s and Borges’s statements hint at the problematic side of appropriating Faulkner as a model, for the collective identity that was affirmed on the basis of similarities with Faulkner and the South is a monolithic and exclusive imagined community that resembles the notions of Southernness that have been radically challenged over the past ten years by scholars such as Thadious Davis, Richard Gray, Fred Hobson, Michael Kreyling, Barbara Ladd, Scott Romine, and Patricia Yaeger, and in collections such as Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan Donaldson’s Haunted Bodies, which have additionally helped to transform gendered notions of Southern culture.28 The question thus becomes: for whom does Faulkner speak? And what does this tell us about whom the Spanish American identity developed by Boom authors represents? As Jon Smith has pointed out, what these writers ultimately identify with in Faulkner is the vision of the white South that he depicts, its version of its history as a series of frustrations, failures, and defeats, and the ensuing conquest by the NOT^^.^^ When they acknowledge a shared nostalgia for an idealized, long-gone past, sympathize with the South’s loss of autonomy, or claim that Spanish America and the South share the experience “of defeat, o f . . . tragedy,” they accept the white South’s legend of the Lost Cause, a vision of the past that was shared by many white Southerners, but not, presumably, by the black Southerners who were emancipated. As Smith has observed, Faulkner and the Boom authors alike are speaking from a creole subject position: the perception of commonalities between Southern and Spanish American history and the resulting parallels in the identity envisioned for Spanish America may be at least partly attributed to the fact that the Boom authors occupy class, race, and gender positions comparable to those of Faulkner in the South. Despite Boom authors’ repeated invocation of race and racial conflict as a point of contact between the South

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and their own region,3oracial issues were not part of Faulkner’s legacy to Spanish American literature: what is central to Faulkner’s work is peripheral, if not often a nonissue, in the most canonical works of the 1950s through the 1970s. Accordingly, despite the centrality of discourses of hybrid identity such as Afiocubanism, nbgritude, and mestixuje (similar to me‘tissuge or miscegenation) to official national and cultural identity politics throughout Latin America and the Caribbean from the 1920s and despite the contemporary literary movement known as indigenism (represented by authors such as Jos6 Maria Arguedas and Rosario Castellanos), the sensibility reflected in the novels that dominated the market during this period is largely creole, upper-class, and cosmopolitan; the (relatively infrequent) depiction of black and indigenous characters in these works is often tinged with primitivist overtones. Faulkner was claimed by the Spanish Americans as one of their own, then, but his concern with race-and the parallel consideration for ethnicity-was left out of the picture. Hence, however well-intentioned the efforts to write “the first great novel of Latin American man” and give “a total vision of Latin America,” the histories that were reclaimed in the Boom novels and the collective regional identity that these fomented nevertheless continued to marginalize the histories and literatures of ethnic and racial groups beyond the scope of the authors’ own subject position. Borges was all too right: Faulkner’s world is “of the same blood as this America and its history; it, too, is creole.” 2. Faulkner-Now

I will conclude now by examining the transformations, restructurings, and convergences currently taking place in the relations among the disciplines studying “American” literatures. The laying bare of presuppositions such as those that I have just identified in the Spanish American authors and of their implications for constructions of collective identity is an endeavor that has been shared recently by Faulkner critics, Southern Studies in general, Latin American studies, and the burgeoning field of inter-American studies, bringing these fields into close alignment with one another. The recent problematizations of monolithic notions of Southern identity form part of a much larger movement that has called into question notions of (and relations between) so-called centers and margins; in Spanish American literature, the work of Peruvian critic Antonio Cornejo Polar in particular has likewise drawn attention to the racist and elitist presuppositions upon which definitions of “the literary” and “the national’’ have been based,32and elucidated how dominant groups have canonized their own interests and standards, reproducing and valid-

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ating the current hierarchy and their position in it. In cases such as the one that I have discussed here, where Faulkner’s influence was acknowledged to have been facilitated by a sense of empathy with his historical experiences and view of the South, such insights ask scholars to examine the ideological underpinnings of the bond between authors, especially when it is the foundation of an identity which is presumed to be universal and projected widely. In general, though, the focus of recent comparative studies of Faulkner in Spanish America and throughout the Americas has shifted away from the question of influence per se. The study of Faulkner’s influence, as well as inter-American literary relations in general, has historically been the domain of Latin Americanists: as Fuentes said, Faulkner has been both “yours and ours,” not just “interesting” but “essential to us”whether this “us” refers to the authors themselves or to the critics. But while Faulkner’s move south of the border was critical to our understanding of our literary history, the same has not been true for Faulknerians or Americanists. Over the past ten years, however, the interest has begun to be reciprocated: prominent Americanists have taken new approaches to the study of these literary relations (Philip Weinstein, for example, is exploring Faulkner’s relations with “Others” such as Toni Morrison and Garcia Mhrquez-both of whom have acknowledged Faulkner’s influence-within a postcolonial context33)and, of course, there is the landmark double issue of the Faulkner Journal on the “Latin American F a ~ l k n e r , which ” ~ ~ translated classic essays and published new and important articles, drawing considerable attention to this field at a time when interest was rising. This reciprocity parallels the questioning of nationalism in American Studies in recent years which, in addition to challenging monolithic views of the South and its exceptionalism, has opened new avenues of study for the South and shed light on commonalities shared by the South, Latin America, and the Caribbean. The most important of these are, I believe, the legacies of the plantation and slavery, poverty and underdevelopment, and the experience of historical traumas such as war, all of which bridge both the past and present of these regions. George Handley, for example, has studied these phenomena in the hope of delineating a “cross-cultural poetics of oblivion” that spans Plantation America and represents a means of coming to terms with the region’s history, as well as with the silences d~erein.~S Others such as Barbara Ladd and Richard Godden3‘jhave examined the ripple effect of revolution in Haiti and the overturning of the islands racial and social structures across the slaveholding states of the South, an event which also struck fear in the elite of many Spanish American nations. Susan Donaldson is similarly working on a project which explores the

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5. “Carlos Fuentes: An Interview (by John King),” On Modern Latin American Fiction, ed. John King (New York: Noonday Press, 1987), 139. 6. In this essay, “Spanish America” refers to the nations previously under Spanish colonial rule; the designation is geographic, and does not address the question of racial or ethnic heritage. Also, I will not be exploring Faulkner‘s presence in Brazilian literature or, for the most part, in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, despite the fact that authors as distinct as Alejo Carpentier and Rosario F e d were profoundly influenced by Faulkner. (Essays by Michael Kreyling and Barbara Ladd in this collection touch upon Faulkner’s relationship to Martinican writer Edouard Glissant.) However, as authors and critics tend to use the terms “Latin America”-which technically includes Brazil-and “Spanish America” interchangeably, when quoting, I follow the usage in the original texts. 7. The Boom in Spanish American Literature:A Personal History, trans. Gregory Kolovakos (New York: Columbia University Press, ig77), 11, 15. 8. “Con Gabriel Garcia MArquez,” interview by Rosa Castro, La cultura en Mbxico 23 August 1967: vii. Carlos Fuentes and Emmanuel Carballo similarly argued twelve years earlier that the Spanish American publishing industry should foster and promote such an endeavor. They write that the Fondo de Cultura Econbmica, one of Latin America’s most prestigious and important presses, is “the most lively example of our spirit in Latin America, and the first step in overcoming our traditional apathy towards the [other] Spanish-speaking nations. In the long term, Mexican cultural politics . . . must turn towards these other nations: the true greatness of the Spanish American community lies in our actions and thoughts. And what path is there that is better than literature . . . to lead us towards mutual comprehension . . . ? One wishes that the Fondo would start, in addition to its excellent series, Letras mexicanas [Mexican Letters], another, analogous series: Letras hispanoamericanas [SpanishAmerican Letters]. We must realize that our literature only has a deep meaning within the context of the language that we share, and that we all use. Overcoming all of the (artificial) boundaries that divide our local literatures is a task that the Fondo should undertake, and it must be the constant goal of our writers. . . . A collection of Letras hispanoamericanas . . . would be the ideal starting point for a literary community based on the experience of brotherhood. . . . In this community, new generations of writers in Spanish would find their place . . . ; here, the freedom of expression of so many writers who feel their voices muted by the oppressive rigor of the dictatorships of Spain and Latin America would find shelter. Here, these writers would find a powerful launch pad for international diffusion.” “Tal6n de Aquiles” [monthly column], Revista Mexicana de Literatura 3 (enero-febrero de 1956):284-85. 9. Luis Harss, Introduction, Into the Mainstream: Conversations with Latin American Writers, ed. Luis Harss and Barbara Dohmann (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1967)>29. 10. This identity project is also at work in a similar collection of interviews with prominent authors: Seven Voices: Seven Latin American Writers Talk to Rita Guibert, published in 1972. This book, however, was published in English, in order “to give the American people a broader and deeper view of what’s going on in Latin America” (xvi).That is, it was designed for international consumption and meant to further enhance the reputation of these authors on the world stage. Emir Rodriguez Monegal, one of the most prominent critics of this period, wrote the introduction to Guibert’s work. His description of the movement echoes that of the authors as well as Harss’s, most notably in its focus on the project of creating a pan-Spanish American consciousness: “[The authors’] differences of origin and destiny (national as well as individual) do not obliterate a common pursuit. The final paradox of these very individual writers is that they sometimes cannot avoid being spokesmen for the whole continent. Even when (like Borges) they explicitly refuse to do it, their denial is a way of revealing the tension between their individual and their representative personae. The common link of language, a Hispanic tradition that encompasses and absorbs local traditions, and very obvious geopolitical ties are always present in their works. Somehow, the seven have struggled to be themselves and have wonderfully succeeded, but in their work a whole continent is also alive and visible.” Introduction, Seven Voices:Seven

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Latin American Writers Talk to Rita Guibert, ed. Rita Guibert, trans. Frances Partridge (New York: Vintage, igp), xiii-xiv. 11. “En primera persona,” El Pais [Spain] 24 January 1999:2. 12. Creating Faulkner’s Reputation: The Politics of Modern Literary Criticism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988),141. 13, Casa con dos puertas (Mkxico: Joaquin Mortiz, ig70),65. 14. Garcia Mhrquez observes that “Macondo is the past, and, well, since I had to give this past streets and houses, temperature and people, I gave it the image of this hot, dusty, finished, ruined town, with wood houses with zinc roofs, which look very similar to those in the southern U.S.; a town which looks very similar to Faulkner’s towns, because it was constructed by the United Fruit Company” (Garcia MQrquezand Vargas Llosa, La novela 54).Vargas Llosa describes the aftermath of the United Fruit Company’s presence in Colombia in markedly similar terms: “When Garcia M6rquez was born, almost none of this was left: paradise and hell alike belonged to the past, the present reality was a limbo made of misery, heat, and routine. However, this extinct reality was still alive in the memory and imagination of the people . . . and it was their best weapon for fighting the abandon and emptiness of the present reality. For want of anything better, Aracataca-like so many American towns-lived off memories, myths, solitude, and nostalgia.” “Garcia M5rquez: de Aracataca a Macondo,” Nueve asedios a Garcia Marquez, 3d ed. (Santiago, Chile: Editorial Universitaria, S.A., igp), 128.At this very conference in 1982,Jorge Edwards declared that, following the War of the Pacific and Chile’s civil war in 1891,within buildings “that had represented the nitrate splendor of the nineties, a sort of creole belle Bpoque’ . . . there were impoverished families, and in the rear dormitories . . . old people that remembered and told stories about that lost splendor and about the terrible civil strife.” He further claims that his generation grew up “between memories of a brilliant and glorious past, in contrast with a decayed present, a present whose main quality was stagnation, frustration, poverty, underdevelopment.” “Yoknapatawpha in Santiago de Chile,” Faulkner: International Perspectives. Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1982, ed. Doreen Fowler and Ann Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984),69. 15. “A Rose for Emily,” The Portable Faulkner, ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York: Viking Press, 1946),489-501. 16. Light in August (New York: Vintage Books, 1987),69. 17.Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Vintage Books, igp), 9. 18. Pedro Ph-amo (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura EconCimica, 1982). 19. The Death of Artemio Cruz, trans. Alfred MacAdam (New York: Noonday Press, iggi), 286. 20. Cien afios de soledad (Barcelona: Bruguera, 1967),164. 21. “La novia robada,” Tan triste como ella (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1984),300-1. 22. Jean O’Bryan-Knight discusses the use of this narrative voice extensively in “From Spinster to Eunuch: William Faulkner‘s ‘A Rose for Emily’ and Mario Vargas Llosa’s Los cachorros,” Comparative Literature Studies 34.4(1997):328-47 (see especially 335-45). 23. “Didogo con Carlos Fuentes,” Simposio Carlos Fuentes, ed. Isaac Jack Levy and Juan Loveluck (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1978),225. 24. In addition to this paradigm, stylistic and thematic parallels to Absalom abound in the modem Spanish American novel. George Handley, for example, has shown that Alejo Carpentier reworked a number of these and related motifs and themes from Absalm in Explosion in the Cathedral, his exploration of regional identity and self-identity within the context of revolution (the novel explicitly addresses the French Revolution, but was published three years after the Cuban Revolution): the incestuous menage 2 trois; questions about the origins, nature, and fate of plantation society; the relationship of the plantocracy to the French Revolution and Haiti; and the matter of U.S. imperialism in the Caribbean. Postslavery Literatures in the Americas: Family Portraits in Black and White (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000). Also, as Efrain Kristal has discussed, Absalom served Vargas Llosa as a model for his study of Peruvian society in the multi-layered conversations of Conversation in the Cathedral, in which Santiago Zavala, like Henry Sutpen, repudiates his birthright and, with it, the successful father whose corruption is emblematic

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of that of his social world. Temptation of the Word: The Novels of Mario Vargas Uosa (Nashville:Vanderbilt University Press, 1998),58-59. 25. The Autumn of the Patriarch, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Harperperennial,

1976),1, 269. 26. “Central and Eccentric Writing,” Lives on the Line: The Testimony of Contemporary Latin American Authors, ed. Dons Meyer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 119. 27. Review of The Unvanquished, by William Faulkner, El hogar 22 January 1937;rpt. in Ficcionario, ed. Emir Rodriguez Monegal (MCxico: Fondo de Cultura Econdmica, 1985), 124. 28. See in particular the following works: Thadious Davis, “Expanding the Limits: The Intersection of Race and Region,” Southern Literary Journal 20.2 (Spring 1988): 3-1 1; Richard Gray, Southern Aberrations: Writers of the American South and the Problems of Regionalism (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000);Fred Hobson, Tell about the South: The Southern Rage to Explain (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998);Michael Kreyling, Inventing Southern Literature (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998);Barbara Ladd, Nationalism and the Color Line in George W . Cable, Mark Twain, and William Faulkner (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996);Scott Romine, The Narrative Forms of Southern Community (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999); Patricia Yaeger, Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1g30-1ggo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); and Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan Donaldson, Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997). 29. Personal communication, 29 August 1999. 30. Mario Vargas Llosa’s declaration that “In the Deep South, as in Latin America, two different cultures coexist, two different historical traditions, two different races-all forming a difficult coexistence full of prejudice and violence” is paradigmatic of this view-even though his identification of only two cultures and historical traditions is questionable (Reali t y 75-76). 31. For discussions of the cultural politics of Afrocubanism and of mestizaje in Mexico during this period, consult, respectively, Robin Moore’s Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1gzo-ig40 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997) and Claudio Lomnitz-Ader’s Exits from the Labyrinth: Culture and Ideology in the Mexican National Space (Berkeley: University of California Press, iggz), and, in particular, his excellent chapter, “Racial Ideology and Forms of Nationalism” (26181). 32. Silvia Spitta, Between Two Waters: Narratives of Transculturation in Latin America (Houston: Rice University Press, iggs),11. 33. “Cant Matter/Must Matter: Setting up the Loom in Faulknerian and Postcolonial Fiction,” in Look Away! Postcolonial Theory, the U.S. South, and New World Studies, ed. Deborah Cohn and Jonathan Smith (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming). 34. Faulkner Journal 11.1-2 (Fall-Spring 1995-1996). 35. “A Poetics of Oblivion,” in Look Away! 36. Richard Godden, Fictions of Labor: William Faulkner and the South’s Long Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 37. South to a New Place (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002).

38. LookAway!

Postcolonial Displacements in Faulkner’s Indian Stories of the 1930s

ANNETTE TREFZER

In 1903 W. E. B. Du Bois prophetically announced that the problem of the twentieth century would be “the problem of the color line.” At the end of the twentieth century, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., dared another prophecy when he wrote that the problem of the twenty-first century will be “the problem of ethnic difference^."^ Ethnic differences and the politics of identity, which found their way into academic and popular discussions in the last few decades, have provided literary study with a new political urgency. Challenging traditional figurations of American literary history, scholars have begun to listen to the silenced voices of ethnic minorities in the American canon, a process which has profoundly changed the ways in which we read literature. Toni Morrison points out that research on race and ethnicity “has rendered speakable what was formerly unspoken and has made humanistic studies, once again, the place where one has to go to find out what’s going Particularly in canonical works whose power lies in their subtle engagement with America’s central philosophical, constitutional, and moral dilemmas, renewed attention to ethnic presences might help us gain new insights into American culture. William Faulkner’s work is no exception to this, and, if I may add my own little prediction for the twenty-first century (which has not even begun yet), the recovery of silenced ethnic presences in Faulkner’s work--African, Arabic, Jewish, Chinese, Polish, Caribbean, Caucasian, Native American, and others-will reveal the unbounded openness of his texts as well as insights into how American culture is never merely present but always produced. Taking my methodological cue from scholars in the field of postcolonialism, and having made the journey from Oklahoma-Indian territory-to Oxford, Mississippi, in the last year, I am particularly curious about Faulkner’s construction of the Native American presence. In his influential 1974 study The Indians of Yoknapatawpha, Lewis Dabney wrote that “the Indians are a neglected people in F a ~ l k n e r . ” ~

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More than a quarter of a century later, they still are. Although references to Indians appear in much of Faulkner’s fiction, few studies have focused on these characters and their functions in Faulkner’s fictional universe. Even though the topic of “Faulkner and Race” is a favorite among Faulkner scholars, Indians do not often enter this discu~sion.~ In the South, the subject of “race” seems to signify primarily black and white relations to the exclusion of other Americans. This continued invisibility of Native Americans in Southern culture and fiction might perhaps be caused by the apparent absence of Native Americans from the postremoval South and the repression of this traumatic experience into the national unconsciousness. Whatever the reasons responsible for this erasure, in attempting to write Indians back into our understanding of Faulkner’s fiction, I have chosen to focus on two of the four stories Faulkner collected in the section “The Wilderness” of his 1950 volume, Collected Stories of Willium F ~ u l k n e r The . ~ four Indian stories that comprise this section are “Red Leaves” (1930),“A Justice” (1931),“Lo!”(1934), and “A Courtship” (1948).Among these stories, “Red Leaves” and “Lo!” are most interesting for the purposes of my investigation because they deal with Euro-American colonial aspirations and Faulkner’s representation of these issues in the 1930s. Set during the early decades of the nineteenth century and loosely based in Mississippi Indian history, these stories are marked by a high level of typically Faulknerian intertextuality and fictional license, and it is safe to say that the characters and their rituals are entirely products of the pseudoethnic reality of Faulkner’s imagination.6 In studying Faulkner’s representations of Indians it is tempting to get caught up in questions of historical accuracy, ethnographical authenticity, and political correctness. These are appropriate questions because the history and culture of Native Americans have been miscommunicated in American literature since the captivity narratives and such distortions continue to be misrepresented as truth. Faulkner is no exception to the long list of American authors whose works employ and perpetuate stereotypes about Native American culture. Almost all Faulkner scholars mention Faulkner’s inconsistencies in tribal names and dates, and many agree that “Indians were indeed not central to Faulkner’s own experience; nor for that matter does he seem to have had a developed historical sense for anything much preceding the Civil War.”7 Listing the misuses to which Native American culture has been put in Faulkner, recent studies like Howard Horsfords tend to have an irritated if not genuinely angry tone. Setting out to examine the authenticity of Faulkner’s knowledge of the native inhabitants of his own “little postage stamp of native soil,” Horsford lists many of the ethnographic and historical mistakes in Faulkner’s Indian fiction, ranging from issues of black and red miscegenation, inter-

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an ironically reversed way through the Indian But, why go through such an elaborate charade? I believe that Faulkner’s displacement of the narrative voice from Anglo-American culture to Native American culture achieves two main goals: one goal is to estrange the familiar American logic of economic production and consumption; the second is to signify on nineteenthcentury discourses about “savagery” and “civilization” from the more unfamiliar perspective of the “savage.” Faulkner seems to suggest that the native population’s entry into an economy based on the capitalist marketplace of production, consumption, and slave labor results in significant changes to native cultures and life styles which do not represent “progress’’ but, on the contrary, problems.26Echoing Faulkner’s white characters, the Indians of “Red Leaves” complain about the burden of slavery. Their complaints are not motivated by pious humanitarian interests or superior moral convictions, however, but by economic ones. Owning slaves, the Indians now have to keep them busy. Three Basket explains: “A[n Indian] man’s time was his own then. He had time. Now he must spend most of it finding work for them blacks] who prefer sweating to This crucial change in the native economy causes fundamental do” (314). cultural problems, and in order to solve them Three Basket and Berry absurdly contemplate eating the slaves; that is, replacing the capitalist economy of consumption with a more literal (and primitive?) version of consumption. However, Faulkner’s Indians realize that eating the slaves offends the laws of the market place, and they decide that profit-producing labor must be conserved. Faulkner’s vision of excess is rendered in comic form. When Three Basket and Berry speak about the burdens of slavery, the following exchange takes place: “. . . Man was not made to “That’s so. See what it has done to their flesh.” “Yes. Black. It has a bitter taste, too.” “You have eaten of it?” “Once. I was young then, and more hardy in the appetite than now. Now it is different with me.” “Yes. They are too valuable to eat now.” (314)

Besides the fact that none of the civilized tribes was known to practice cannibalism, Faulkner revives the stereotypical image of “savages” as cannibals, a popular practice of representing utter alterity and inhumanity. Faulkner, however, seems to suggest that the Indians are savage not because they have tasted the flesh of a fellow human, but because their appetite for the flesh is restrained only by economic considerations that the “white man” has taught them. Ergo, the “white man’7is the greater

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savage: he has dehumanized other human beings by reducing them to the status of commodities and passed on this cursed system of cultural and economic incorporation to those he failed to successfully enslave. In this ironic reversal of the positions of “savage” and “civilized,” Faulkner suggests that what the Indians have learned from ‘‘civilization’’ is everything that is “uncivilized’ in Western society. This message with its cannibal metaphor is reminiscent of nineteenthcentury arguments, popularized in the American context for instance by Herman Melville in novels such as Type (1846), in which the narrator deplores the European corruption of unspoiled cannibalistic savages in the Marquesas: “Alas for the poor savages when exposed to the influence of these [Western European] polluting examples! Unsophisticated and confiding, they are easily led into every vice, and humanity weeps over the ruin thus remorselessly inflicted upon them by their European civil i ~ e r s . ”Sarah ~ ~ Winnemucca Hopkins’s Lije Among the Piutes, a late nineteenth-century Native American text, also inverts the positions of savage and civilized. Hopkins casts the white American intruder into Piute country into the role of cannibal as well: “Our mothers told us that the whites were killing everybody and eating them.’’2gWhen whites indeed approach their camp, frightened women and children run to hide, but progress with small children is slow and the women decide to bury their children instead: “So they went to work and buried us, and told us if we heard any noise not to cry out, for if we did they would surely kill us and eat us.”30Caused by rumors about the fate of the Donner Party, the image of white cannibalism renders the American colonizers as inhuman savages whose approach literally and symbolically buries the Native American lives and cultures. Although Faulkner’s text seems to reactivate these nineteenth-century arguments and perhaps even shares their message of blame, his narrative mode is radically different. Unlike Hopkins’s traumatic personal narrative and Melville’s open didacticism, Faulkner’s twentieth-century modernist revision of primitivism privileges strategies of displacement and mimicry which result in literary and political irony. By choosing the perspective of “primitive outsiders” to inspect the economics of consumption and the production of surplus through slavery, Faulkner mocks the ways of Anglo-American society. Through the lens of Native Americans, the practice of slavery is rendered alien, and this estrangement effect helps Faulkner to criticize this most unsavorable byproduct of civilization. Faulkner’s critique of slavery continues in section four of “Red Leaves” when the narrative focus shifts to the escaped slave and his vivid recollection of the Middle Passage. Faulkner again is careful to evoke a hint of cannibalism in the description of the slave, a “Guinea man” who

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“had been taken at fourteen by a trader off Kamerun, before his teeth had been filed’ (327-28). In the slave’s recollection of the Middle Passage, Faulkner links his critique of civilization even more clearly with images of consumption: “They had lived ninety days in a three-foot-high ’tweendeck in tropic latitudes, hearing from topside the drunken New England captain intoning aloud from a book which he did not recognize for ten years afterward to be the Bible. Squatting in the stable so, he had watched the rat, civilized, by association with man refi of its inherent cunning of limb and eye; he had caught it without difficulty, with scarce a movement of his hand, and he ate it slowly, wondering how any of the rats had escaped so long” (330). Linking literal and political levels of incorporation, the text produces a clear message: by comparison with the man who enslaves others and reads from the Bible-a major civilizing and colonizing instrument-the rat is civilized. In the narrative present of the man hunt, the black man who survived the Middle Passage is meeting his fate like the ants he eats who walk into “oblivious doom with a steady and terrific undeviation” (334). Faulkner leaves no doubt that the slave is “doomed’’ by the larger economic system and haunted by the tribal chief of the same name whose legacy overshadows the events. The black man whose body is “gaunt, lean, hard, tireless and desperate” (334) fights hard until he is struck by a cottonmouth moccasin and his arm begins to swell and smell of death and decaying flesh, like Issetibbeha’s body. When the black man becomes delirious from the snake poison, the Indians capture him and ready him for the sacrifice. Faulkner returns the black man to a primeval condition: naked, mud-caked, singing and speaking in his own native tongue. H e is a man whom the Indians respect for his endurance. “‘Come,’ the Indian said. ‘You ran well. Do not be ashamed”’ (338).31In the end, the human sacrifice, which remains outside of the textual boundaries, seems like a relief, a humane ending to the man’s fight. These narrative events have given rise to critical arguments that seek to universalize Faulkner’s narrative. Floyd Watkins argues that human sacrifice “is part of the long history of the life of every race that ever and Edmund Volpe agrees that “Man is part of nature, and in the immutable pattern of natural existence, all things living live by feeding upon one another, and all living things must die.”33 Faulkner has always attracted criticism of the universal and symbolic school, and in this perspective “Red Leaves” has been seen as symbolic of man’s fall from grace in a wilderness that is “a &m reflection of that original Garden that man lost when evil came into the Superimposed on a history of slavery, removal, and extermination, such a typological readmg successfully replaces specific historical and political referents in the text with a

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Western Christian theological blanket statement. This kind of rhetoric perpetuates and reinscribes an ahistorical understanding of Native peoples that makes them part of a vanished world, a so-called primeval past, a rhetoric that ensures their continued invisibility even today. Part of this myth is also perpetuated by Faulkner himself who, when asked about his representations of African Americans versus Native Americans, answered that the black man “has a force, a power of his own that will enable him to survive. He won’t vanish as the Indian did, because he is stronger and tougher than the Indian.”35 Arguments that aim to justify the “vanishing of the Indian” on the basis of racial fitness also get perpetuated in Faulkner criticism. Based on Faulkner’s comment, Gene Moore, for instance, argues that Faulkner contrasts the slaves’ “progenitive vitality” and “cultural integrity” with the Indians’ loss of these qualities. Faulkner’s depiction of the slaves in “Red Leaves” suggests that “the slaves have preserved a far more natural and unified culture than the borrowed and degraded cultural trappings of their masters” who suffer from “cultural By inverting the positions of “civilized” alienation and loss of and “savage” in such a way that the most “uncultured’ group of black slaves seems superior to Indians and whites, Faulkner critiques the dominant culture’s colonizing practices. But he also reinscribes cultural and racial hierarchies. Nostalgic for a myth of pure cultural origins, Faulkner’s text (or Moore’s reading of it) replicates the hierarchical ranking of people on the basis of race by assuming some sort of “natural” state of nature (the African’s) which is better than a (semi-)civilized state of culture (the Indian’s). 2.

The Danger of Looking into French Mirrors: Doubling Identities

On a closer look, however, Faulkner’s text supports a different kind of reading in which differences between Indians, whites, and blacks on the colonial frontier are not stable and interchangeable but merging and blurring and indeed becoming “mottled.” Both “Red Leaves” and “LO!” yield a reading against the grain in which ethnic identities do not simply change places, but in which each identity changes as it occupies the place of the “other.” As a result, hierarchies are not clearly inverted as it first seems, but transformed. Even the black slave who appears as an uncorrupted example of “native ~itality,~’ according to Moore, wears a charm that “consisted of one half of a mother-of-pearl lorgnon which Issetibbeha had brought back from Paris, and the skull of a cottonmouth moccasin” (330).By designing this hybrid amulet, half French, half American, Faulkner seems to suggest that in the colonial context of the Southern

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frontier, there are no “pure” cultural identities. The lorgnon, an instrument of French specularity slung around the hips of an African man, suggests the hybridity of colonial identities and environments. Homi Bhabha argues that the production of colonial identity is never simply based on a binary opposition between colonizer and colonized, even if that binary is presented as inverted, but on a doubling of identities. Such doubling is not a form of “dialectical contradiction,” but something that exceeds the frame of simple binaries and in the production of cultural hybridity gives rise to something new.37 Faulkner, I propose, explores such cultural hybridity by means of a number of mirror images. We encounter the first mirror in Issetibbeha’s steamboat residence. The decaying steamboat turned into a residence for the new chief has traditionally been read as a central symbol both of the Indian’s greed for European things and of their ultimate corruptive power: Once a splendid symbol of civilization, “the saloon of the steamboat was now a shell rotting slowly; the polished mahagony, the carving glinting momentarily and fading through the mold in figures cabalistic and profound; the gutted windows were like cataracted eyes” (324). Blinded and estranged from their original purposes, European things take on a new life as signifiers of cultural subversion. By absorbing and transforming the steamboat, the Indians have inscripted it with a new significance. Like the coveted red slippers from France which have become a sign of native power, the hybrid items we find in Faulkner’s ‘‘wilderness’’transform the native culture as well as the colonizing culture. Inside the steamboat are the gilt bed and the girandoles that Issetibbeha brings back from Paris. “From the ceiling [of the steamboat], suspended by four deer thongs, hung the gilt bed which Issetibbeha had fetched from Paris. It had neither mattress nor springs, the frame crisscrossed now by a neat hammocking of thongs” (324). Like the gilt bed with the deer thongs, Faulkner’s text itself is a hybrid object crisscrossed with historical and political determinations that mark the Indians as the inheritors of eighteenth-century French history. The pair of girandoles, ornate brackets for a candelabra with a reflecting mirror at the back of the shelf, insert French history into Faulkner’s hybrid environment. Louis XV and Madame Pompadour enter the text (and the lives of the Indians) with the girandoles “by whose light it was said that Pompadour arranged her hair while Louis smirked at his mirrored face across her powdered shoulder” (320). Why did Faulkner insert these historical figures into his Indian “wilderness”? What is Faulkner reflecting on? Is the inhrect evocation of Louis XV a reference to French and British colonialism of which North American Indian tribes felt the vicious and lasting effects?3sIs it a reference to the decadence of style and decorative self-aggrandizement mirrored in the

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stylistic confusions of Issetibbeha’s “house”? Or is it an indirect comment on the failure of political leadership? Louis XV is the French king who is supposed to have said “After me, the deluge,” a policy that Faulkner’s lethargic Indian chiefs also seem to follow. It seems that Faulkner’s text crisscrosses back on itself with this reference to the age of Enlightenment, the starting point for European colonialism and race theories that helped justify the enterprise of exploration and subjugation. The mirrors behind the candles of the girandoles are part of a system of colonial specularity that does not produce clear-cut reflections of colonizer and colonized. Instead, the figures of Louis XV and Issetibbeha are refracted and reflected back doubly inscribed. Faulkner also uses the colonial mirror for breaking down the symmetry and duality between self and other in the opening passages of “Lo!” when the president (we assume it is Andrew Jackson) looks at himself in a “hand mirror of elegant French design” (381)and beholds his own image blended and blurred with that of his Indian opponent:

. . . he raised and advanced the mirror. For an instant he caught his own reflection in it and he paused for a time and with a kind of cold unbelief he examined his own face-the face of the shrewd and courageous fighter, of that wellnigh infallible expert in the anticipation of and controlling of man and his doings, overlaid now with the baffled helplessness of a child. Then he slanted the glass a little further. . . . Squatting and facing one another across the carpet as across a stream of water were two men. He did not know the faces, though he knew the Face, since he had looked upon it by day and dreamed upon it by night for three weeks now. It was a squat face, dark, a little flat, a little Mongol; secret, decorous, impenetrable, and grave . . . it seemed to him that in some idiotic moment out of attenuated sleeplessness and strain he looked upon a single man facing himself in a mirror. (381-82) Presented in the mirror is not the subject of authority, but precisely the want of authority: Jackson is helpless like a child overwhelmed by the task of controlling the children of the Nation, the Indians. The colonial roles of father and child, Nation and nations, powerful and powerless are not only inverted here but doubled. The Indian presence (which should be an absence) in the mirror of the nation confounds the boundaries of colonial authority and besieges the president with his own nightmarish phantoms of Otherness and the persistence of a so-called problem that will not be solved. What is visible in the mirror is not only the gaze of the colonizer looking at the Indian “Other,” but the Indian who holds and returns the look. In the mirror, the return of the repressed has literally manifested itself and negated the visibility of difference: the president’s own face merges with the “squat face” of the Indian other so that “he looked upon a single man facing himself in a mirror.’’ Homi Bhabha

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comments on the effect of the kind of hybridity Faulkner produces here: “The display of hybridity-its peculiar ‘replication’-terrorizes authority with the ruse of recognition, its mimicry, its mockery.773Q The hybridity of colonial authority reflected in the mirror literally unsettles the figure at the center of the American credo of democratic ideals. The personal trauma of the president is the political trauma of the entire nation whose Indian policies alienate its own language of liberty. The president knows that “he faced not an enemy in the open field, but was besieged ~i~~~~ his very high and lonely office by them to whom he was, by legal, if not divine appointment, father” (383, emphasis added). The enemy within produces a schizophrenic split mocking the patronizing Enlightenment rhetoric of legal and divine fatherhood by its contrast with political reality. The interior warfare on Native Americans, the “land treatises,” and the impending radical removal of Native Americans east of the Mississippi mars the language of democracy, threatens the rationalist hegemony, and opens a wide schism for national anxieties. This is even more interesting and ironic in 1934, considering that the United States was once again gearing up to defend democracy this time against the irrationality of the rise of fascism in Europe. Faulkner locates the Indian “problem” at the heart of the nation, centered “in the very rotunda [of the white house] itself of this concrete and visible apotheosis of the youthful Nation’s pride” (384).The Indian crisis in America does not go unnoticed abroad: the Indians camped out at the white house are “serene beneath the astonished faces and golden braid, the swords and ribbons and stars, of European diplomats” (384).The European diplomats might be astonished indeed because the American nation was originally built on the rejection of its status as a British colony, yet the “young Nation” went on to colonize other nations in its interior. Renee Bergland addresses the shame and resulting repression associated with American colonialism: “American nationalist subjectivity internalizes the colonial relation, but, since the nation was established by denying the validity of colonialism, American subjects repress this interiorized colonialism far more deeply than do Seizing on this American anxiety, Faulkner hones in on the national irony even more when he describes the Avenue leading to the White House as “the stage upon which each four years would parade the proud panoply of the young Nation’s lusty man’s estate for the admiration and envy and astonishment of the weary world” (385). The term “estate7’is not accidental since land acquisition is the crucial issue and root cause for national anxieties. From Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Jackson and beyond, land was exchanged for “ci~ilization,~~ as each president hoped that with increasing acculturation the Indians would need less land.41

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Considering this setting, we must ask, what is Faulkner’s purpose in (mis)representing Native Americans? As a result of our investigation, one answer may be that Faulkner’s superimposed images of a feminized, despotic, irrational, and backward East upon the culture of the Native Americans end up endorsing the myth of the superiority of the “West.” Written during the period between the two World Wars, Faulkner‘s Indian stories seem to justify American national history even as they question it. Taken together these narratives form a showcase for the way in which American systems of cultural description are deeply informed by national strategies of power. What Said says about scholars is also true about writers: “there is in each scholar some awareness, partly conscious and partly non-conscious, of national tradition, if not national ideology.’’47 If that is so, we could ascribe the political currents that run through Faulkner‘s texts to the cultural traditions and the national ambience of the ig3os, more specifically perhaps to Faulkner’s modernism. The Oriental hues in Faulkner’s Indian stories might be part of the interest American modernists had in the Orient. Whatever the source of this discursive pattern in Faulkner’s representations of Indians, Faulkner’s language of Orientalism produces national discourses of power that give rise to the stories’ cultural overdetermination and heterogeneity. The closure of the plot in either story does not reduce the contradictory energies the reader experiences; it does not ease the ideological tension or the sense of “Unbehagen.” Hidden behind the light-hearted tone and the comic mode of narration, the texts are plagued by questions of national guilt and haunted by American colonization even as they endorse the mythology of the West and American nationalism. As we have seen, Faulkner’s texts mirror the political ambivalence towards Native Americans and in a gesture of mimicry typical of postcolonial texts, they ironically echo the problems caused by (1) Euro-American intrusion into Indian territories, (2) the civilizing missions of the U.S. government, and (3)the land treatises and negotiations between the U.S. government and the Indian nations. In reflecting on these geographical and political transgressions, Faulkner substitutes fantasy for anthropology in narratives that are themselves deeply entrenched in the climate of Western colonialism. The mythology Faulkner invents in his Indian stories participates in a historical discourse which reflects national interests, a discourse that keeps haunting American writers, scholars, and politicians. Lewis Dabney argues that because Faulkner realized that Native Americans were the “first dispossessed and ravaged people of the South,” he was haunted by their ghosts.48 Faulkner said in 1957: “I think the ghost of that ravishment lingers in the land, that the land is inimical to the white man because of the unjust way in which it was taken from Ikkemotubbe and his

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taw?) clan, the other by a (Chickasaw?)family named Weddel or Vidal. Walter Taylor in “Yoknapatawpha’s Indians: A Novel Faulkner Never Wrote” [in The Modernists: Studies in a Literary Phenomenon, ed. Lawrence B. Gamache and Ian S. MacNiven (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1987),2041 points out that each of the families has loose connections to Mississippi’s historical Indians. For instance, the Weddel family in “Lo!” recalls the famous Choctaw chief Greenwood LeFlore. LeFlore’s father was a Frenchman who operated a stand on the Natchez Trace called “French Camp” and married a Choctaw woman. Their son, who changed his name from LeFleur to Greenwood Leflore, became a Choctaw chief and a Mississippi state senator. As this example shows, Faulkner took great liberties with local (Indian) history and was apparently not very interested in the tribal affiliations of his characters. 7. Howard C. Horsford, “Faulkner’s (Mostly) Unreal Indians in Early Mississippi History,” American Literature 64.2 (Summer 1992):312. 8. Ibid., 311. Horsfords study has an understandable preoccupation with historical accuracy in the interest of correcting errors, and perhaps more studies might be needed to correct Faulkner’s blatant distortions. 9. Elm0 Howell, “William Faulkner’s Chickasaw Legacy: A Note on ‘Red Leaves,”’ Arizona Quarterly 26.4 (Winter 1970):293. 10. In light of America’s continuing struggle with “Indian Affairs,” the question of Faulkner’s knowledge of Native Americans cannot be brushed away because together Faulkner’s Indian stories represent particular forms of knowledge (factual or mythical),and the stories in turn produce specific kinds of ideologies and power relations. The exact extent of Faulkner’s knowledge about Southern history before the Civil War and what he did read about Native American tribes of the Southeast remains largely subject of conjecture. Was he familiar with Angie Debo’s 1930s book The Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic? Was he influenced by the chapter “Archeology and Indians” in the WPA Guide to the Magnolia State? Was he inspired by Calvin Brown’s 1926 book on the Archeology of Mississippi, a book Faulkner owned? These questions remain open and are, on the whole, much less interesting for me than the kind of “history” Faulkner in turn produced. 11. Faulkner composed three of the four stories-“Red Leaves,’ ‘A Justice,” and “Lo!”-in the early years of the 1930s. Joseph Blotner writes that Faulkner recorded his submission of “Red Leaves” to the Saturday Evening Post on July 24, 1930, and the story was accepted and published that same year (663). According to Blotner, “A Justice” may have started out as “Indians Built a Fence,” which was probably also composed in 1930. After being rejected by Scribner’s (January igsi), “A Justice” was first published in These 2 3 (1931). The composition date of “Lo!” is less clear. The story may have been written between 1932 and 1933 because chief Weddel is a character that also appears in “Mountain Victory” (1932) and Blotner notes that “Lo!” did not immediately sell (808). After being rejected by Scribner’s, it was published by Story in 1934. See Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography (New York: Vintage Books, 1991). 12. Howell, 293. 13. Faulkner-Cowley File, 153. 14. Howell, 293. 15. Faulkner is quoted in Horsford, 311. 16. Native American activist Vine Deloria argues in Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manqesto (New York: Avon Books, 1970) that “the American public feels most comfortable with the mythical Indians of stereotype-land who were always THERE. These Indians are fierce, they wear feathers and grunt.” He goes on to explain that “most of us don’t fit this idealized figure since we grunt only when overeating, which is seldom,” 10. 17. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, igg4), 85. 18. Jacques Lacan, quoted in Bhabha, 85. 19. Ibid., 87-88. 20. Ibid., 87. 21. Freud’s original title for his essay Civilization and its Discontents published in 1930 (trans. and ed. James Strachey, New York: W. W. Norton) was “Das Ungliick in the Kultur.” The word “Ungluck’ (unhappiness) was later altered to “Unbehagen” for which it was

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difficult to find an English equivalent but which catches the feeling of malaise and unease much better. 22. See for instance Edmund L. Volpe, “Faulkner’s ‘Red Leaves’: The Deciduation of Nature,” Studies in American Fiction 3.2 (Autumn 1975): 122. 23. Gilbert H. Muller, “The Descent of the Gods: Faulkner’s ‘Red Leaves’ and the Garden of the South,” Studies in Short Fiction 11.3 (Summer 1974):244. 24. Ibid., 245. 25. Arthur F. Kinney, “Faulkner‘s Other Others,” Faulkner at zoo: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2000), 199. 26. Slavery among the Choctaws and Chickasaws starts with the introduction of cotton farming to native farming communities. James Taylor Carson in Searching for the ~ ~ g h t Path (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999) writes that the first federal Choctaw agent disbursed cotton seed to his Choctaw neighbors in 1800 and that women took to the new crop quickly (79). 27. About Faulkner’s Indians who refuse to sweat, Carson explains that Choctaw men did not consider field work, including cotton farming, as suitable or appropria~efor them. Biracial men, however, were free from such i d e s (79). In order to avoid the stigma of male farming, prominent leaders bought slaves to do the work for them. “Not surprisingly, the growth of the cotton economy paralleled the spread of slavery in the nation” (80). 28. Herman Melville, Typee: A Peep at Pol~nesianLife (London: Everyman, igg3), 16. 29. Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Life among the Piutes, first published in 1883 and republished by the University of Nevada Press in 1994. 11. 30. Ibid., 11. 31. Faulkner‘s Indians change their opinion about their slaves during the story. In the early part of the narrative, Basket and Berry spew insults about their black slaves who are called “savages” and compared to horses and dogs. “They are worse than white people” (314). Towards the end, when they have captured the slave, they seem to develop respect for him and patiently wait until he is ready to die. 32. Floyd C. Watkins, “Sacrificial Rituals and Anguish in the Victim’s Heart in ‘Red Leaves,’” Studies in Short ~ ~ c t i 30 o n (1993): 73. 33. Volpe, 122. 34. Muller, 248. 35. James B. Meriwether and Michael Millgate, eds., Lion in the Garden (New York: Random House, 1986), 182-83. This quotation is from an interview conducted in Japan in 1955. Faulkner’s attitude about the helplessness of “vanishing Indians” in the 1930s is not much different, however. In 1937 when Faulkner and his friend Ben Wasson returned from California, they passed a group of Indians in the Southwest desert and Faulkner supposedly said, “This [the land] was theirs. . . . All of it. This whole country. We took it away from them and shoved them off onto reservations. I reckon it’s bad enough the way we treat the black folks. But they re like children and need looking after, expect to be looked after.” Quoted in Joel Williamson, Willinm Faulkner and Southern History (New York: Oxford University Press, igg3), 257, 36. Gene M. Moore, “‘European Finery’ and Cultural Survival in Faulkner’s ‘Red m Short F~ction:An I n t ~ r n n t i o nS~y~~ p o s ~ed. u ~Hans , H. Leaves,’ in W i ~ l ~ aFnulk,ner’s Skei (Oslo: Solum Forlag, igg7), 265, 263. 37. Bhabha, 49. 38. Louis X V ’ s (1715-74) failure to provide strong leadership contributed to the crisis that brought on the French Revolution. During his reign France was involved in three wars and during the last of them, the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), lost most of its overseas possessions to the British. 39. Bhabha, 115. 40. Renee L. Bergland, The N a t i o ~ lUncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects (Hanover: University Press of New England, 20001, 13. 41. On Thomas Jefferson’s Indian politics see, for instance, Reginal Horsman’s Expansion and American Indian Policy, 1783-1812 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992) ”

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and Anthony F. C. Wallace’s Jeflerson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999). Thomas Jefferson imagined carrying out American expansion with justice towards the Indians. Jefferson saw Native Americans as capable and deserving of civilization, and he viewed American expansion in terms of spreading a superior culture, In Jefferson’s Enlightenment views, land acquisition and the spread of civilization were intertwined. When Jefferson realized that he could not hope “both to obtain the land he wanted and at the same time gain land only when the Indians were happy to offer it to the United States” (Horsman 107), he suggested that lands east of the Mississippi be exchanged for lands west of the Mississippi. As early as 1803, Jefferson wrote on several occasions of the idea that Indian removal would eliminate the hction between settlers and Indians, an idea that was turned into practice during Andrew Jackson’s administration nearly thirty years later. 42. Lothar Honnighausen’s essay “Faulkner Rewriting the Indian Removal” (in Rewriting the South: History and Fiction [Tubingen: Francke Verlag, 19931,335-43) proposes that Faulkner, in inventing the ‘burlesque invasion of Washington by the Indians as a backlash to their Washington directed removal, rewrites a tragic chapter of history as a burlesque comedy and transforms the victims into victors,” 339. 43. The relevant passages from the Removal Act are quoted in American Mosaic, ed. Barbara Roche Rico and Sandra Man0 (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995), 535. 44. Honnighausen, 343. 45. Susan Bordo, “Reading the Slender Body,” in Donn Welton, Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998),295. 46. Said, 272. 47. Although Said speaks mostly of scholars in the field of Orientalism here, he makes clear that all writers are embedded in their national and institutional circumstances. See 263 and 271, for instance. 48. Dabney, 21. 49. Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia, 19571958, ed. Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner (Charlottesville:University of Virginia Press, 19591, 43. 50. Brenda Norrell, “Clinton Addresses Indian Country in Phoenix,” Indian Country Today 20.3 (Wednesday,July 5, zooo), Ai, A3.

Haunting Yoknapatawpha: Faulkner and Traumatic Memory

L E I G HA N N E D U C K

Though we consider, in this volume, how one might read Faulkner in the twenty-first century, many reviewers believed, during the early years of his writing life, that he hardly belonged to the twentieth. Unlike later critics, who praised Faulkner for contemplating the continuing influence of the past on the present, Depression-era critics saw the author himself as a figure who belonged to the past, helplessly attempting to forge some relationship to m0dernity.l In the exemplary argument of Philip Rahv, Faulkner’s identification with a region still shaped by the past was said to isolate him from the present, and, concomitantly, from meaningful social interaction: “Hemmed in by his own consciousness, he beats his fists against its walls, finding a forced release only in violence and melodrama.”2 But where Depression-era critics found Faulkner’s interest in the past a debilitating trait, mid-century intellectuals described it as the source of his aesthetic power. In many cases, individual critics simply reevaluated the author’s work. Though Alfred Kazin, for example, argued in 1942 that Faulkner’s fascination with a regional past distorted his view of reality, leading him to produce “corn-fed, tobacco-drooling phant o m ~ , he ” ~ explained in 1958 that this same interest in traditionalism enabled Faulkner to see more clearly than other Americans the degree to which their contemporary identities were shaped not only by their immediate cultural moment, but also by diverse histories and tradition^.^ These later assessments, according to which Faulkner is a valorous modernist, coincide, in other ways, with the earlier accounts that describe him as a pathological romantic: in both cases, he is a writer whose subjectivity is shaped by a certain relationship to a regional past. What changes in these evaluations is the estimate of what constitutes a useful relationship to the past, an estimate shaped in each period by contemporary concerns about how individuals position themselves in time-the degree to which they understand their identities through their memories of or beliefs about the past, their relationship to contemporary culture,

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or their hopes and plans for the future. Recent writing about culture and identity often tends to diverge along similar lines, pitting those who insist upon the importance of the past against those who believe that such insistence may occlude opportunities for progress in the present. In this article, I suggest that, by idealizing Faulkner’s representations of the relationship between past and present, previous critics may have unwittingly misdirected more recent attempts to consider these questions. Another way of considering Faulkner’s changing critical reputation would be to describe the way it has mirrored the shifts in national understandings of the South i t ~ e l fbut , ~ these understandings, too, often reflect changing ideas of how the nation should position itself in time. Depression-era intellectuals understood the contemporary South as a region in which the past continued, without giving way to their concept of the present; it seemed the site of an anachronistic time uncannily existing in the space of the nation. Using gothic descriptors to explain its white supremacy,6 its p ~ v e r t y and , ~ its evangelical Protestantism,8 they represented the region as gothic space, “linger[ing] in the dark backward abysm of For these critics, Faulkner’s anachronisms marked only his separation from national modernity, but were well-suited to the contemporary South, which had reached a “state of catastrophic decay.”1° Because 1930s U.S. literary critics, from a broad spectrum of political positions, tended to emphasize the importance of representing possibilities for change and collective progress in literature, they found Faulkner’s representations of haunting and stagnation so uncanny as to suggest that the author himself had emerged from gothic space, a writer whose understanding was decaying into “witchcraft,” a “throwback to a much older world than the antebellum South.”ll By mid-century, however, both region and nation had changed in certain important material ways. The Southern economy was increasingly modernized and integrated into that of the nation, and, by this time, the partisans of Southern apartheid faced challenges in their argument that it was an irremediable and organic element of Southern culture. Though racial segregation was still aggressively enforced in the South, many of the nation’s intellectuals were less concerned, during this period, about Southern conservatism than about the temporality of national culture, which seemed to constitute an era of “suspended animation and cultural confusion,” an utterly presentist time pervaded by a homogenizing mass culture which lacked creativity regarding the future and comprehension regarding the past.12 From this perspective, Faulkner’s interest in a regional past appeared not a gothic anachronism but the mark of a reflective critical consciousness-one particular to the South, but exemplary for the nation.

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For critics during the early years of the Cold War, seeking to create an account of national identity which celebrated something other than their own contemporary cultural moment? Faulkner seemed an ideal national writer because his haunted Southerners, like Hawthorne’s haunted New Englanders, revealed a structure through which national “myths” might be affecting contemporary lives,13 suggesting that the past might still influence individual consciousness in its images and habits, its “‘ways of seeing and sensing experience.’714 Malcolm Cowley, in the introduction to his influential collection of Faulkner’s work, argued that the representation of “psychological horror” was one of the “principal traditions in American letters,” one shown to be vital, in its use by both Faulkner and Hawthorne, in representing a culture’s “moral fables” and “legend~.”~5 In making this argument, Cowley suggests that a “strong sense of regional particularity’’ enables writers better to recognize the manifestations of the past that still influence the nation’s citizens: writers fascinated with a localized history would be particularly sensitive to the effects of a specific cultural past within the space of individual consciousness. In this context, Faulkner’s novels were used not only, as Michael Kreyling has recently argued, to construct a static, monolithic model of Southern cultural identity,16but also to construct a way of relating to the past which was considered paradigmatic of cultural identity itself. Critics began to see Faulkner’s haunted characters as representative not of a regional pathology but of a national ambivalence toward tradition. This account of the national character was produced through the study of literary “myths” and “symbols,” tropes that emerged in literary texts that sought to represent the continuities between past and present, and it has been widely noted that such study displaced the importanc~of the linear progressive time that had been so important in Depression-era understandings of the nation’s cultural hi~tory.’~ It is also significant, however, that this critical project domesticated gothic space and time, constructing national identity around a model that had earlier been labeled psychologically pathological. Studes such as R. W. B. Lewis’s The American Adam:

Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (igss), Richard Chase’s The Amer~canNovel and Its Tradi~ion(ig57), Harry Levin’s The Power of Blackness: Hawthorne, Poe, Melville (19~8)~ and, with a less celebratory valence, Leslie Fiedler’s Love an.d ~ e a in ~ the h American Novel (1960) explored the national character through the work of artists represented as, like Faulkner’s Quentin Compson, unable to participate fully in their own historical moment, anxious to escape from tradition yet skeptical of modernization, and vitally concerned with a culture from which they were nonetheless alienated. This representation of Faulkner’s work overlooks the degree to which

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his early critics were correct: in Quentin Compson, the character said by critics of both decades to embody a Faulknerian consciousness,18he depicts a relationship to the past which is less intellectually productive than paralyzing. Absalom, Absalom! holds that Quentin does not imagine or remember images from the Sutpens’ history, but hallucinates them, experiencing first an encounter with Thomas Sutpen’s ghost, “enclosed by its effluvium of hell,” and then a kind of ghostly possession by Sutpen’s sons, as he and Shreve become “not two but four.”1gRepresented as a haunting, Quentin’s encounter with the past is disturbing and sometimes uncontrollable, separating him from his contemporary world. Though critics often admire Quentin’s agency in revising and even creating sections of the Sutpen narrative with his Harvard roommate Shreve, Quentin is by the novel’s close again isolated in his own hallucinations, observing, in his consciousness, the demise of the Sutpen mansion “without listening” to his friend’s analysis of the tale (299). Believing himself a “ghost,” Quentin is passive and pessimistic, assuming the Sutpen tale will haunt him ‘Lforever” (222). The gothic imagery in the text suggests we should understand Quentin’s memories not as the controlled, conscious return to a past that one wishes to review or reconsider, but as the invasion by the past of a consciousness which cannot secure its position in a contemporary moment. In short, as he hallucinates scenes from the Sutpen family history, repeatedly returning to the confrontation between Henry and Judith as he announces he has killed Charles BonyQuentin displays the symptoms of a post-traumatic return to a past that he did not personally experience. By the early twentieth century, it was widely acknowledged that persons could experience the unwanted return of traumatic memories, reproducing the originating sensations and emotions, often without the participation of the conscious mind; until patients can “work through” their relationship to the originating trauma, to which they often feel they did not respond adequately, its pain and horror are simply reexperienced.20 Modernists represented the experience of these symptoms through gothic conventions, a logic effective because traumatized subjects are, in effect, haunted by the originating event through hysterical symptoms, hallucinations, and nightmares. Accordingly, after Joseph Conrads character Marlow views a scene he finds unassimilable to the conscious mind-in his words, “monstrous, intolerable to thought and odious to the soul”-he experiences a mnemonic disorder: his memory of Kurtz, unlike “other memories of the dead that accumulate in every man’s life,” has a tendency to emerge, in hallucinatory fashion, against his will (117).~lSimilarly, James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus is haunted by the traumatic image of his dead or dying mother, whom he angered on

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her deathbed, and who appears gothically bathed in “ghostly light,” “green with gravemould” (473).22 Faulkner’s use of this logic is consistent and traceable: though he often dismissed the possibility that his writing might be influenced by Freud, he was openly influenced by Joyce, and especially C ~ n r a d further, ;~~ Freud’s interest in trauma was joined, during World War One, by much of the psychotherapeutic community. When “large numbers” of soldiers began to experience “shell shock,” its treatment became a medical and a strategic priority;24given his fascination with the war e x ~ e r i e n c eFaulk,~~ ner could hardly have failed to note the widespread discussions of veterans’ susceptibility to traumatic memories. In short, Faulkner’s characters, like Freud’s hysterics, “suflerfrom reminiscences.”26In this context, however, Quentin’s haunting by the ghosts of Thomas Sutpen and his sons emerges not as an admirable nor, necessarily, as a regional form of identity, but as the painful result of a destructive investment in a trauma he did not experience. Paradoxically, this aspect of the novel has been naturalized by the very logic that, on its first appearance, enabled critics both to recognize and repudiate Quentin’s pain-the belief that an acute investment in the regional past is a Southern cultural trait.27Depression-era critics believed this fascination to be inherently pathological, and were, therefore, particularly sensitive to the almost palpable sense of isolation represented in Quentin’s relationship to time. This aspect of the novel elicited little commentary by mid-century, however, at which time critics tended to suggest that Quentin’s affiliation with a traditional community rendered him less vulnerable to alienation than other, more modern, subjects. But while the portrayal of Quentin Compson corresponds to the identity narratives that hold that Southerners have a particularly intimate relationship to the past, that relationship is not associated in Absalom, Absalom! with a pleasurable sense of meaningful be1ongingaz8Rather, the novel suggests that Quentin capitulates to the presence of the regional past both resentfully and involuntarily: he argues that all white residents of the “deep South” were killed by the Civil War, but protests that he is “too young to deserve yet to be a ghost”; “nevertheless,” he believes that he is constituted by his society, “his very body” serving as a “barracks” for these “ghosts” who continue to look “with stubborn recalcitrance backward beyond the fever [the Civil War] and into the disease [slavery] with actual regret’7 (7). In Faulkner’s representation, Quentin believes his community has suffered from an experience he analogizes to a physical crisis; though Quentin recognizes that he did not experience this crisis personally, he believes that it shapes his life as surely as it does that

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of those who lived through it, because he, too, was “born and bred in the deep South.” The novel questions Quentin’s ideas concerning the inevitability of these regional memories, however, by representing his participation, with Shreve, in a recreation of the Sutpen story, insisting that the roommates are ‘%both thinking as one.” Thus, the novel suggests both that the Canadian Shreve shares Quentin’s access to this Southern story and that Quentin need not acquiesce to the memories of a Southern community. On the contrary, he is capable of reconstituting these memories and his relationship to them with a new community-himself and ShrevemZ9 It also suggests that Quentin fails to resolve his relationship to the Sutpen tale because he and Shreve ultimately acquiesce to the belief that national or regional identification must determine one’s memories. Moments after Shreve asserts his Canadianness, and announces that the compulsion “never to forget” is “something [his] people haven’t got” (289), Quentin ceases to listen to his roommate, and begins to hallucinate, even “tast[ing] the dust” of Mississippi, and “to breathe hard again” (290-91); when the novel represents his consciousness’s return to “the cold New England night,” he is “thinking ‘Nevermore of peace. Nevermore of peace’” (298). This reading-which describes the portrait of Quentin Compson not as the representation of a potentially “nourish[ing]” sense of belonging to a community of shared memories,3obut as that of a debilitating fascination with a trauma not personally experienced-is not so out of line with previous Faulkner criticism as it might seem. Even Cleanth Brooks, perhaps the most prolific and influential celebrant of the former reading, suggests that a sense of intimacy with a Southern regional past results ’ ~ ~ this in an “ingrained sense of the stubbornness of human ~ J T O ~ , ’and ingrainment of a memory-this deep penetration-and a belief in life’s recalcitrance or immutability are also characteristic of post-traumatic victims. But this shift-from collective to traumatic memory-marks a very different understanding of how these memories affect Quentin’s process of development. Absalom, Absalom! suggests that regional memories are neither inherent nor productive: individuals who maintain this traumatic relationship to the past do not participate in a community of shared suffering and gained wisdom, but are each isolated in an encounter with the unique moment that they cannot understand, whether because it proved too destructive in their own lives or because it seems to provide a key to another, more personal This suggestion is also explored in Light in August, the novel Faulkner completed previous to this one. And though Quentin argues that an investment in a traumatic regional past is en-

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demic in Jefferson, this is not the case in Light in August, which is set later in chronological time. Though this novel, completed directly before Faulkner began work on Absalom, Absalom!, also uses the representational logics of haunting and temporal displacement in its depiction of Gail Hightower, this character is clearly differentiated from the rest of the community of Jefferson. Through depicting his ostracization, the novel insists that Gail is haunted by an event that is not formative or significant for others in his community, as it is for him. Gail Hightower, like Joe Christmas, is represented as the victim of a childhood trauma: stealing into the attic and finding his father’s Confederate uniform, with its single dark blue patch, he experiences “horrified triumph and sick j0y7’;33unable to ask his father whether he killed the Union soldier from whom the patch came, and lacking intimacy with his parents, who were rendered “phantoms” by their experience of the Civil War, he is overwhelmed by the sudden awareness that his father, largely a stranger to him, might have killed a man (487).34But Gail is not haunted by this memory; nor does he, like Joe Christmas, experience hysterical symptoms whenever he encounters an image that might remind him of this childhood event.3” Gail masks his discomfort with endless curiosity concerning his grandfather who died in the war, and ultimately his grandfather’s death becomes the trauma that haunts him: every evening, he experiences again the hallucination of soldiers galloping toward the spatial and temporal scene of the memory he has taken for his own, a haunting he claims to be all he knows “of life” (492, 60). Approaching the actual close of his life, he realizes that he has never lived as an individual, so great has been his investment in the memory of his grandfather: “I have not even been clay: I have been a single instant of darkness in which a horse galloped and a gun crashed’ (474-91). Gail ultimately determines that his investment in this vicarious trauma has prevented him from fulfilling his responsibilities in the present: his final horrific realization is that, though he has “bought [his] ghost . . . with [his] life,” that is not, as he had thought, his “privilege,” for it implicates him in the destruction of others as well (4go), particularly in the death of Joe Christmas and the racist violence of Percy Grimm. The novel suggests further that the damage caused by his memorialization of the past is compounded by his misrecognition of these memories as collective hauntings, shared by all residents of the region. Remembering the way he described his vision of the galloping Confederate soldiers to his wife as they approached Jefferson for the first time, Gail recalls saying, “You can see it, hear it,” and exulting that God would “share” the dead with the living, as if, in speaking of his hallucination, he were acknowledging an experience they already shared (484-85). Similarly, he real-

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j e ~ t , a” type ~ ~ of judgment that has often been neglected in the memorial narratives of white Southern identity. The problem is not that Rosa remembers Sutpen’s insult, or that she remembers the Civil War; indeed, it is inconceivable that she would not. The problem is the way she is positioned in relation to these memories, such that they have power over her: unable to comprehend or to relieve the pain of Sutpen’s insult, and unwilling to exercise any critical distance in her memories of the Confederacy (memories we must believe she augments for her poetry, in that she does not seem to have felt, at any point in her life, intimately connected to other members of her community), she is unable to overcome her past. In short, though Faulkner’s work does not support a definition of white Southern identity as one essentially determined by a regional “heritage,” neither does it support a definition of “Southernness” in which the past is unimportant. Rather, it raises the possibilities that certain pasts can overwhelm individual subjects and that collectivities can become so invested in a given interpretation of historic events that they provide little opportunity or support for persons who need to work through their traumatic relationships to these events. The concern that an interest in traumatic events might separate individuals from their contemporary social milieu has also shaped presentday conversations about the usefulness of discussions concerning collective memory, which has occasionally been thought to provide a mutable set of images and narratives through which social groups could negotiate both their interpretations of the past and the goals and ideals of the present.40In order for an understanding of the past to function in this way, however, individuals must have some critical purchase on it. Post-traumatic victims, notoriously, lack such agency, and are more likely to believe that the past has power over them; as represented in the language of “haunting,” the past seems, in these circumstances, to have the power of a hostile spirit to displace the contemporary world at the moment of its unwilled emergence. Dominick LaCapra has theorized that, when the experience of a trauma is shared by a group of people, these persons’ senses of affiliation with that group may overwhelm their senses of individual elfh hood.^^ This possibility has prompted considerable debate concerning contemporary politicized and cultural identity-formations, many of which assert demands in the names of groups who have been victimized. The concern is that, in such formations, the distinction between collective memory and vicarious trauma may blur, as individuals who attach their identities to historically traumatized groups may feel it their duty to assimilate the trauma, to bear its pain, even when not directly experienced, as an expression of allegiance with and tribute to the sufferers .42

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traumatic scenes; worse, it defines itself as unique in its commitment to the future, among a panoply of nonnational cultural identities which are defined by their past. In considering this process, it may be useful to consider the way in which the works of William Faulkner, particularly his representation of Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom!, were used to exemplify the understanding of cultural identity institutionalized in mid-century American Studies. This regional cultural identity was positioned in relation to national identity as both marginal in content and emblematic in form, a cultural identity existing at a level beneath that of the nation (in terms of space and population) and bearing an intimate relationship to historical phenomena-the Civil War and slavery-which might otherwise be considered national. This formulation, which suggested that these memories were the particular province of Southerners, provided for their continued consideration through the recognition of Southernness, but did not provide for their examination in a critical context. Nor did it consider that Southerners themselves would have heterogeneous affective relationships to that past. For mid-century critics, the South was simply interesting for its attention to the past, and though they sought to locate a similar fascination in national culture, American Studies came to describe a history of increasing inclusiveness, its tradition forged from the shedding of other traditions which oppose such progress.50As we have seen, the Americanis ts and regionalists who embraced these narratives had diverse motives; regardless of such concerns, a logic was established whereby the temporality of a nonnational culture could be distinguished from the purportedly progressive time of the nation not by its traditional practices (which were still aggressively instituted in the South at that time) but merely by its interest in the past. This logic may continue to exert an insidious power over our contemporary efforts to think about the relationship between past and present, discussions which often suggest that there is no relationship to the past that is not traumatized, in the pathological sense of the termoverwhelmed, determined, debilitated. In recent years, for example, the term “regionalism” has been applied to other identity groups that have called for national recognition; the use of this term to describe “a regionalism of gender, race, sexual orientation, and later ethnicities imagined on a racial model” not only disavows the global connections that shape the concerns of these discourses of identity, but also applies the failings of Quentin Compson and Gail Hightower, fictional characters fixated on a regional past, to innumerable politicized identities, and configures national identity as unique in its ability to accommodate change and mobility.51In contrast, Walter Benn Michaels has demonstrated that belief in

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an intimate link to a group past has been used to define a racialized national identity, as well as that of multiple other identity groups; but he, too, believes that such usage inevitably replicates essentialist logics. His analysis suggests that any sense of an intimate relationship to a past that extends beyond biographical boundaries must prove totalizing and constitutive of individual identity, such that individuals, Quentin-like, must finally acquiesce to the position that, in “know[ing] which past is ours,” we “know who we are.”52Through such logics, the concept of collective memory has come into critical disfavor, because it seems inherently linked to nationalism and pluralism. Critics who seek to preserve a multicultural criticism capable of discussing the relationship between history and contemporaneity without reifying group identity-formations have argued that this impasse results from the ascendance of “individualism” in contemporary culture, and suggest new ways of understanding identity itself-as “unstable, never secured,” or as produced through “desire,” rather than history. 53 Rethinking this dynamic at the level of identity, however, addresses chiefly the needs of those individuals who do feel that a traumatic past has produced a totalizing identity-formation upon which they are helplessly fixated. And yet it seems plausible that, given the dynamics described by these theorists, the claims to victimhood and the citation of the “past of injury” that they find in politicized identity may emerge, in many cases, not simply from individuals’ understanding or experience of their own identity, but from a perception that, without the discourse of politicized or minoritized identity, the memory, or the vivid and meaningful awareness, of the nation’s crimes and traumas will be lost. In other words, contemporary identity politics may be shaped no more by the way in which the nation configures its contemporary state-through the image of juridical protection and redress in the present-than by the way in which the nation has distributed its past. In this case, an engagement with collective memory may be not an obstacle, but a means, to redressing the impasse currently experienced in debates concerning identity, injury, and n a t i ~ n h o o dFor . ~ ~though collective memory may have been represented, or even occasionally mobilized, as an investment in vicarious traumatization, in which case it readily serves a pluralist agenda, it need not function in this way, even when the events memorialized are traumatic. On the contrary, it seems vital that the discussion and recognition of traumatic events not be restricted to persons affiliated, through their own or through hegemonic pronouncements of identity, with the victims in those events, a construction which suggests that the larger culture or nation had no relation to the trauma.55 It is not only the case that such interpretations suggest that,

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historically, the status or identity of the victim is more important than that of the perpetrator; it is also the case that such interpretations, in restricting the possibility of mourning to persons who feel (or feel that they ought to feel) some allegiance to the victims, both reify “victim communities” and oppose the success of any attempts at mourning. For to mourn is not only to feel the pain of a loss, but also to muster a sense that it is possible to continue despite that loss-to regain interest in one’s society and to shape a fulfilling life within it.56This may be immeasurably more difficult in a society which refuses to acknowledge the circumstances of that In sum, the twentieth-century positioning of Faulkner’s characters as emblematic backward-looking white Southerners served to limit our understanding of the psychological dynamics explored there, the degree to which he explored not only the pain that follows a devastating event, but also the reasons individuals might affix their consciousness to the image of a trauma that did not occur to them, and the effects of such fixation. Further, mid-century celebrations of the ways in which Faulkner represented the presence of the past in contemporary consciousness understated the degree to which his novels explore the obstacles encountered by characters who wish to reposition themselves in relation to that past, and reconsider the role it plays not only in their consciousness, but also in social space. In many cases, these characters are opposed in their attempts by some concept of white Southern identity-the belief that all white Southerners share their symptoms and that no other persons could understand; worst of all is the belief that the Confederacy must be upheld as an ideal. As demonstrated by the papers in this volume, however, twenty-first century readings of these novels promise to increase our awareness of the relationship between the scenes of violence and dehumanization represented in Yoknapatawpha and those that have occurred in regional, national, and transnational history, and seek to create the kind of dialogue that can maintain critical analysis of both the historical events surrounding a trauma and the pain it has produced. And it may be that such discourse can help the inhabitants of the twenty-first century imagine new ways of positioning themselves in relation to the past. NOTES 1. See, for example, Lionel Trilling, “Mr. Faulkner’s World,” Nation 133 (1931): 491-92; Henry Seidel Canby, “The Grain of Life,” Saturday Review of Literature g (October 1932): 153; Granville Hicks, The Great Tradition (New York: Macmillan, ig35), 262-68; Malcolm Cowley, “Poe in Mississippi,” New Republic (November 1936), rpt. in William Faulkner: The Critical Heritage, ed. John Bassett, Critical Heritage Series (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, ig75), 206; Louis Kronenberger, “Faulkner‘s Dismal Swamp,”

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Nation 146 (1938): 212, 214; Alfred Kazin, “Faulkner: The Rhetoric and the Agony,” Virginia Quarterly Review 18 (Summer 194.2): 398-402. 2. Philip Rahv, review ofAbsalom, Absalom!, New Masses (1936): 20-1, rpt. in Bassett: 208-10.

3. Kazin, “Faulkner,” 391. 4. Alfred Kazin, “The Stillness of Light in August,” Twelve Original Essays on Great American Novels, ed. Charles Shapiro (1958), rpt. in William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism, ed. Frederick J. H o h a n and Olga W. Vickery, (np: Michigan State University Press, 1960), 247-65. 5. See Michael Kreyling’s contribution to this volume. 6. Gerald W. Johnson, “The Ku-Kluxer” (1924) in South-Watching: Selected Essays by Gerald W. Johnson, ed. Fred Hobson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 16. 7. Sherwood Anderson, Puzzled America (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, ig35), 63. 8. Thomas Hart Benton, A n Artist in America (ig37), 4th rev. ed. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983), 109. 9. Josephine Pinckney, “Bulwarks against Change,” Culture in the South, ed. W. T. Couch (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ig35), 44. 10. Cowley, 206. 11. Bernard De Voto, “Witchcraft in Mississippi,” Saturday Review of Literature 15 (31 October 1936):3, 4, 14; Isabel Patterson, “An Unquiet Ghost Out of the Old South,” New York Herald Tribune Book Review (25 October 1936): 3. 12. Rxhard Chase, “The Fate of the Avant-Garde” (1957), The Partisan Review Anthology, ed. William Philips and Philip Rahv (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1962), 212. 13. Irving Howe, William Faulkner: A Critical Study (New York: Random House, igsi), xii, 20-24, 53-56, 202; R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ig55), 198-99; Chase, 219; Kazin, “Stillness,” 249-50. 14. Lewis, 3. For another influential account of the importance of the past in the contemporary nation, see Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ig40), xi, 4. 15. Malcolm Cowley, “Introduction,”The Portable Faulkner, ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York: Viking, 1954 [ig46]), 22-23. 16. Michael Kreyling, Znventing Southern Literature (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 126-30. 17. Elaine Tyler May, ‘The Radical Roots of American Studies’: Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 9, 1995,” American Quarterly 48 (1996): 186; David Shumway, Creating American Ciuilization: A Genealogy of American Literature as an Academic Discipline, American Culture 11 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, igg4), 22 1-344; Lawrence H. Schwartz, Creating Faulkner’s Reputation: The Politics of Modern Literary Criticism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), 73-98, 142-7 1; Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: A n Znstitutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 214-23; Grant Webster, The Republic of Letters: A History of Postwar American Literary Opinion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ig7g), 238-5 1. 18. See, for example, Rahv, review, 21; Howe, William Faulkner, 59. 19. William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (1936; New York: Vintage International, iggo), 8, 267. 20. Bessel A. van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart, “The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma,” Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, iggs), 158-68. For a brief summary of Janet’s analyses of traumatic and “subconscious” memories during the early 1890s, see Pierre Janet, Psychological Healing: A Historical and Clinical Study, v. I, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (New York: Macmillan, igzs), 589-96. The following discussion of trauma relies more heavily on the theories presented in Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on “

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Hysteria [18931, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, v. 11, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, ig55),1-18, 183-305.

Janet, Breuer, and Freud each agree that, during this time period, they agreed to a significant extent concerning the functioning of traumatic memories and the treatment of subsequent hysteria Uanet, 601; Breuer and Freud 229-33, 235-38); each also cites the investigations of several psychologists proceeding along similar lines. Freud did not theorize “working through’ until the twentieth century; see “Recollecting, Repeating, and Working Through (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis 11)” (igq),The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, v. XII, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1957).However, in the late nineteenth century, many European therapists agreed that, in many cases, the assimilation of the traumatic event to narrative form would allow the patient to “discharge” its associated overwhelming emotions. For a history of these debates, see Ruth Leys, “Traumatic Cures: Shell Shock, Janet, and the Question of Memory,” Critical Znquiry 20 (Summer

1994):623-62.

21. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899;New York: Penguin, iggs), 104, 117. Though Marlow is, through his narrative, represented as being hostile to psychological inquiry, he uses Janet’s language with remarkable precision; Conrads fictional doctor explicitly states his interest in the clinical psychology of colonialism. 22. James Joyce, Ulysses (1922),ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Vintage, 1986),g,

473. 23. Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography , v. 1 (New York: Random House, ig74),388, 4-29,448,4.57,520. 24. Leys, 622-34. 25. Donald M. Kartiganer, “‘So I, Who had Never had a War . . .’: William Faulkner, War, and the Modem Imagination,” Modern Fiction Studies 44 (1998):627-31. 26. Breuer and Freud, 7. 27. See, for example, Peter Brooks, “Incredulous Narration: Absalom, Absalom!,” Reading for the Plot: Design and lntention in Narrative (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 311-12, which acknowledges that Quentin’s narrative practices demonstrate traumatic symptoms, the source of which cannot ultimately be located in Quentin’s own lifespan. Brooks concludes that the trauma underlying the text must be the Civil War, as if that answers the question. 28. For a discussion of the belief that the sense of belonging to an identity group provides a sense of security, see Cornel West, “A Matter of Life and Death,” The Zdentity in Question, ed. John Rajchman (New York: Routledge, iggs),15-16. For an influential account of white Southern identity, see Louis Rubin, “An Image of the South,” The Lasting South: Fourteen Southerners Look at Their Home, ed. Louis D. Rubin, Jr., and James Jackson Kilpatrick (Chicago: Henry Regnery, ig57),10. Rubin did not, at mid-century, suggest that Southern African American identity is similar to Southern white identity in this way, but C. Vann Woodward did (“The Search for Southern Identity” [ig58],The Burden of Southern History, 3rd ed. [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 19931,22).Discourses of African American identity have often focused on the U.S. South as an important site; for a brief history of such discourse, see J. Martin Favor, Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance, New Americanists (Durham: Duke University Press, iggg), 13-16 and passim. For an example of comparative work theorizing white and African American relationships to a regional past, see Thadious Davis, “Wright, Faulkner, and Mississippi as Racial Memory,” Callaloo no. 28 (1986):469-78.Davis’s discussion of “racial memory” is similar to Maurice Halbwachs’s arguments concerning “collective memory” in that she does not attribute direct memory of events occurring before their lifetime to Wright or Faulkner, but argues that their representations of and interest in the regional and racial past are shaped by their interactions with their contemporary society; the theoretical specificity of her account distinguishes it from mid-century descriptions of the importance of memory in identity. 29. Alison Landsberg also notes that Quentin and Shreve create a “transferential space,” but does not address the point at which this transference seems to collapse. See “Prosthetic

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Memory: The Logics and Politics of Memory in Modem American Culture” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1996),105-12. 30. Cleanth Brooks, “Southern Literature: The Past, History, and the Timeless,” Southern Literature in Transition: Heritage and Promise, ed. Philip Castille and William Osborne (Memphis: Memphis State University Press, igS3),9. 31. Cleanth Brooks, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963),314. 32. As some members of the conference audience pointed out, Quentin’s fixation on the events that occurred to Henry, Charles, and Judith seems explainable through their similarity to events occurring to his family in The Sound and the Fury. 33. William Faulkner, Light in August (1932;New York: Vintage, iggo), 468-69. 34. To say that Gail Hightower experiences trauma because he cannot communicate with his traumatized parents is not to say that he takes on their trauma. The representation of Gail’s development does suggest that the traumatization of one generation can affect the next, however, and that possibility has become a topic of social scientific investigation. See, for example, Jose Marques, Dario Paez, and Alexandra F. Serra, “Social Sharing, Emotional Climate, and the Transgenerational Transmission of Memories: The Portuguese Colonial War,” Collective Memory of Political Events: Social Psychological Perspectives, ed. James W. Pennebaker, Dario Paez, and Bernard Rim6 (Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997)>253-75. 35. At the age of five, Joe Christmas suffers an experience that combines an aural witnessing of what would seem, to a listener, abusive adult sexuality, a feeling of physical sickness, and an encounter with adult racial hatred; later in his life, when femininity, race, and intimacy are linked in his mind, his body is returned to that moment eating toothpaste among the dietitian’s lingerie, and he is nauseated all over again. (Deborah Clarke also notes this “lasting association”in “Gender, Race, and Language in Light in August,’’ American Literature 61:3[1989]:410.) 36. William Faulkner, Flags in the Dust (New York: Random House, 1973). 12-20.This novel was originally published in abridged form as Sartoris in 1929. 37. Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865-1913 (New York: Oxford University Press, igS8),115-59. 38. For example, she allows Caspey, a returning veteran and previous servant to the family, ‘a day to get over the war‘ (45).The novel claims that Caspey was, during the war, “working a little and trifling with continental life in its martial mutations rather to his future detriment,” a representation which is doubly reactionary in that it also associates this “total loss” with the history of increased African American demands for civil rights following WWI. 39. Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984),214. 40. Peter Novick, The Holocaust in American Li$e (Boston: Houghton MifAin, iggg), 279; Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (1941/1952), trans. Lewis A. Coser, Heritage of Sociology (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, iggz),184. 41. LaCapra, 12. 42. This individualized sense of attachment to an identity-formation should be distinguished from any essentialist or constructivist account of what traits might be associated with such identities, as correlated, for example, through culture, gender, sexuality, race, or ethnicity. As Judith Butler argues, the sense of an attachment to such an identity-formation may, at the individual level, occur through the acceptance of an address that may, or may not, be directed toward the subject, and that, analogous to the Lacanian mirror-stage or Althusserian interpellation, is probably exerted before the individual is capable of comprehending the stakes of such an address or of the response to it. See Judith Butler, “Subjection, Resistance, Resignification: Between Freud and Foucault,” Rajchman, 244-45. 43. Wendy Brown, “Wounded Attachments: Late Modem Oppositional Political Formations,” Rajchman, 205. 44. Ibid., 211. 45. Etienne Balibar, “Culture and Identity (Working Notes),” trans. J. Swenson, Rajch‘I

”

Faulkner’s Future Tense:

A Critique of the Instant and the Continuum P A T R I C KO ’ D O N N E L L

The relation between Faulkner’s discourse and temporality, or Faulkner’s representation of time past and passing into the future, has been a constant subject of criticism about his work. I believe that this relation significantly constitutes our conception of Faulkner as a modernist author bearing a distinct profile and signature who partakes fully of an epochal fascination with the experience and destruction of time. From Sartre’s early existentialist reading of the connections to be found between time and self in The Sound and the Fury, to John Irwin’s brio discussion of temporality in Faulkner constituting identity in the mode of repetition, to more recent work such as Gail Mortimer’s Lacanian assessment of the relation between the past and loss in Faulkner, or Thomas S. Hines’s consideration, from the perspective of architectural studies, of the architectonics of the past in Faulkner’s novels, Faulkner’s readers have collectively developed a compelling argument for regarding temporality as a key element in the understanding of his ficti0n.l These words-time, temporality, the past, the future-are themselves contested terms that, in their own relationality as conceived by specific readers, reveal the extent to which the language of Faulkner’s fiction is a fabric shot through with reference to what is past, passing, and to come. It is the latter-the sense of the future, and its relation to historicity, or the manner in which the experience of history is both represented and unrepresentable-that I wish to consider in this essay. As much as discussion of temporality has focused on representations of the past in Faulkner’s fiction, an interesting and, indeed, symptomatic lack of discussion has dwelt upon the construction of the future in his novels. Perhaps this is because it is generally perceived that his body of fiction is so thoroughly dystopic, so driven by an obsession with a fragmented and inscrutable past, that any representation of futurity is necessarily bound to be merely virtual, merely a repetition, a faint echo of a monumental history that never came to p a s 2 Certainly, this is how Mr. Compson

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conceives of the past in Absalom, Absalom! in his infamous exclamation that we have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw; we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions. . . . They are there, yet something is missing; they are like a chemical formula exhumed along with the letters from that forgotten chest . . . you bring them together again and again nothing happens: just the words, the symbols, the shapes themselves, shadowy inscrutable and serene, against that turgid background of a horrible and bloody mischancing of human affairs.3

Founded on the assumption that the “deep” history of origins and heritage is always partial and fragmented, Mr. Compson’s statement encapsulates all of the tenets of a Faulknerian mythic, monumental, and monstrous past that can only be imperfectly traced in its ruins, the illegible transmission and redaction of a “primal” language. In such a formulation, the present appears as the incremental wreckage of the past, and the future-as suggested in the endings of many of the novels-either offers sheer repetition of an unending present viewed as the accumulation of the ruins of the past, or an apocalypse that transforms the past into a manifestation of the future imperfect: an anti-climax, a flawed continuity. The former alternative can be seen in the ending of As I Lay Dying, where the new Mrs. Bundren merely replaces the old one as all of the novel’s circular logics of return are reinforced. The latter is visible in the ending of Light in August, where the execution of Joe Christmas signifies the vanquishing of a tragic, haunted past that clears the way for the ironic landscape across which the itinerants Lena Grove and Byron Bunch will slowly make their way as a kind of corporeal metonomy: ‘“My, my. A body does get around,”’ says Lena, in the novel’s final sentences: “Here we aint been coming from Alabama but two months, and now it’s already Tennessee.’ ”4 In either mode, the future is virtual, in that it is a simulation or projection of the past in the aftermath of experience, when the past itself, as it comes to be known in the present, is comprised of broken genealogies, fragmentary notes and signs, commemorations of the spectacle of loss. This is to view the past, and its relation to the future, in a manner strikingly similar to Benjamin’s notorious representation of history in his reading of Klee’s “Angelus Novus” as “the angel of history”:

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not been actuated or experienced, thus, ironically, upon a negation of experience and event. His vision projects, as part of the triumphant capitalism that will overtake and destroy the agrarian order of a lost land and a lost past, a future epoch that will see the prevalence of what we might term, in our present moment, multiethnicity, though delivered with the racist intonations that pervade Ike’s discourse. In his vision of the future, Ike is horrified at the twin specters of racial mixing and the weird economic egalitarianism which allows both blacks and whites to own mansions and become millionaires as long as they are segregated by city and mode of transportation. The contradictions and catechreses of Ike’s figures are notable: is cultivation taking over nature here, as the land is “deswamped and derivered,” or is nature cultivation’s silent partner-the symptom of culture’s future-in the image of the cotton stalks growing up through the cracks in the sidewalk? Ike’s elocutionary incongruities as expressed in this passage about race, economics, and identity might be seen as exemplary of what Walter Benn Michaels has termed “blood supplements,” or “strategies for insisting on race-based models of identity when more literal strategies for preserving it have failed.”gFor Ike, the mode of preservation is that of nostalgia for a wilderness before multiplicity and difference set in, though it is this same wilderness where-once again, in the nostalgic mode-the difference and iconoclasm attached to unique identity is achieved, set against a “future” where difference has been pluralized to the point of utter assimilation. Further, Ike’s speculation figures what he considers to be the future eugenic nightmare of eternally successive present instances where time and identity (and, thus, history) disappear altogether in an orgy of “breeding and spawning.” If we consider those features Agamben attributes to the modern experience of the disjunction between time and history, we might credit Ike with some prescience in his view of the future (though it is a prescience that, in fact, repeats the present as the future), but we also need to recognize that Faulkner has set up Ike in such a way that, in Ike’s discourse, interraciality becomes the scapegoat for the experience of modernity as such. What to make of the syncretism that brings together in the same breath and under the same logic-the “cultural logic of late capitalism,” as another theorist of the future will put it-the commodification of the land, racial paranoia, rampant sexuality, and the vanquishing of temporality and difference in this epoch where “no man has time to say which one is which”?lo For Faulkner, we “moderns” are the inhabitants of the future which Ike proscribes as the negation of a past bound to be fabricated, after the fact, as wholly other than this future, thus a negation of a prior negation, past and future in this case existing as mutually constitutive

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and self-cancelling. How are we to come to terms-not with Ike’s racism or irrationality, which Faulkner makes quite visible-but with the fact that many of the components of his racist nightmare bear remarkable similarity to the elements of liberal, late capitalist culture: an economic environment where, supposedly, race makes no difference (and where, of course, it continues to make all the difference in the world); where there is access to limitless wealth (consonant with an increasing gap between the immeasurably rich and the measurably poor); where the multiplicities of identity and the priorities of the instant vie with the desire for unique histories and destinies, even if these must be cast or performed quite visibly as simulations? As Michaels has compellingly argued for a number of modernist works, in Go Down, Moses, Ike’s racism is disturbingly similar formalistically to “our’’ pluralism, our liberalism; both, for the purposes of this discussion, rely upon a view of historical experience that Faulkner scrutinizes by means of his own narrative formalism. Ike’s view of the future, articulated in the penultimate entry into Go Down, Moses, is one founded upon what Agamben refers to as the nature of experience in modernity, which he describes as “simply the name for a basic characteristic of consciousness: its essential negativity, its always being what it has not yet become” (33), and thus affectively as a kind of “[elstrangement, which removes from the most commonplace objects their power to be experienced’ (42). In other terms, Ike is a structuralist of sorts: having determined that experience as such is retrogressively always the experience of loss (evident even at the level of syntax-“derivered,” “deswamped”), Ike articulates a future (really, the repeated present of modernity) that, as a site of sheer multiplication or combinatory excess (“Chinese and Afi-ican and Aryan and Jew, all breed and spawn together”), supposedly stands in stark contrast to a fully experienced, ritualized past. But, rhetorically speaking, this past-the one described in the ledgers, the past of failed rituals, partial genealogies, and empty, inverted objects such as the urn-is invented entirely in the terms of the future to which this past serves as a referent. Implicitly, both past and future in Ike’s projection are mere stand-ins for the present, or in Agamben’s sense the experience of modernity, which is an endless present only formally divisible-so that we might simulate the experience of temporality-into the triptych of past, present, and future. This is not the last word, however, at least not in Go Down, Moses; and once more, in terms of narrative form, perhaps as an ironic counterweight to what I have described as Ike’s formalism, Faulkner provides a rejoinder to Ike’s discourse. The novel-assemblage concludes not with “Delta Autumn” and, thus, Ike McCaslin’s final dispossession in the

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tragic life and its continuance in the afterlife of history and public recollection, the passage resonates with contrariety. The black blood that issues from Christmas’s wound would seem to signal that at long last he has achieved a determinate identity at the moment of death, but we cannot fail to note that the issue of whether Christmas’s ‘%blood’is metaphorically black or white, thereby paradoxically signaling his racial identity, is consistently undermined in the novel by the biological fact that all human blood is literally red, as it is in this scene, even, in a turn of phrase, metaphorically, as the rush of blood is compared to the trail of sparks from a rising rocket. No red-blooded American could fail to hear echoing ‘Cby the rocket’s red glare” in this passage, particularly when Christmas’s death comes at the hands of Percy Grimm, espousing a fascistic patriotism that is nationalism writ large. In short, the passage recapitulates, rather than resolves, the problem that has haunted Christmas throughout-whether racial identity is literal or metaphorical, a matter of blood or social construction-and projects its irresolvability at the moment of the death of identity as the future of public memory, or what has and will constitute our consciousness of historical process. This is a construction of the future that reverses the one provided by Ike McCaslin, but it is a reversal that repeats the same mathematics of the relation between past, present, and future that we found in his secular vision. Here, the future putatively becomes the temporalized site of the purification of the past; Christmas’s “mixed blood,” the racial confusion of identity that has dogged his every step and cursed his existence, is resolved at the moment of death as he becomes transformed into a singularity, “itself alone serene . . . itself alone triumphant,” that stands for our highest individualistic aspirations as subjects seeking the origin and originality that will provide substance and meaning to our experience of events leading to death. But this is a construction confounded by its very elements: Christmas, now castrated and memorialized, is the living-dying embodiment of sexual and racial identity confusion; neitherhoth male and female, neitherhoth literally and/nor metaphorically black, at once animal and human and divine, in death Christmas explodes rather than resolves the logic of identity that undergirds the trajectory of his narrative. That logic, which suggests that the past is a repository of clues awaiting assemblage into the subject that one will become, is the inverse of McCaslin’s “future logic,” in which the future perennially devolves as the dissemination of a singular, integral past. Both depend upon a process by which past and future exist, in Agamben’s terms, as expropriations of experience mutually constituting each other oppositionally as historical. In between, the present-the continuous succession of instants-is constituted as an aporia that both past

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and future are posited against as temporalized epochs which unfailingly replicate it. Of course, this is not the final word in Light in August either, and once more, the formalistic aspects of Faulkner’s modernism foreground a view of historicity. There is, penultimately, Hightower’s retrospective which concludes with the failed cleric “leaning forward in the window, his bandaged head huge and without depth above the twin blobs of his hands upon the ledge,” “the wild bugles and the clashing sabres and the dying thunder of hooves” (493) that signify for him the eternal repetition of the past at a second remove sounding perpetually in his ears. And, in the final chapter, there is the portrayal of Byron Bunch and Lena Grove moving on, which I have already indicated can be seen as the projection of a future as endlessly repeatable as Hightower’s hand-me-down past. These, I suggest, are not alternative endings to the novel portending alternative futures, but codas that reinscribe the conditions of historicity that are attendant upon all of the novel’s intertwined narratives. The child that Lena bears-often viewed as signifying a rebirth, a second coming following Christmas’s sacrificial death in the pastoral of the novel’s conclusion-can equally serve as a sign of generational repetition or sheer ongoingness (“[sletting back there in that truck, with him by her now and the baby that hadn’t stopped eating, that had been eating breakfast for ten miles, like one of those dining cars on the train” [ S O T ] ) . In this sense, the future configured in Light in August is but the past writ small, as if Christmas’s voracious appetites had somehow been revivified and transmitted to the infant, who is all appetite, all desire focused and materially embodied. These figures-the corpse, the devouring infantposit the future in Faulkner, which is to say that they are inscriptions of Faulkner’s modernity that reveals, in Agamben’s terms, the painful “split between . . . being-in-time as an elusive flow of instants and . . . beingin-history” (loo), or a state in which historical experience is revolutionary, the experience of a “qualitative alteration of time” (105). To the extent that Faulkner’s work reveals the inadequacy of the relation between the experience of time and modernity’s “idea of history,” it is historical in a way that has little to do with the accuracy of any representations of the historical past or to an idea or concept of history that is primarily metahistorical or narratological. This is why, perhaps, the seemingly endless task of figuring out who is related to whom in Faulkner’s novels, and how they are related (and recalling that Ike McCaslin’s greatest fear is that in time we won’t be able to figure out who is who or who is related to whom because racial differences will no longer be visible), is at once pertinent and irrelevant. Pertinent, because the exercise of doing so reveals the disconnection between lineage and historical ex-

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which plurality and repetition become the same. We all seem to want one history, or many, one’future, or multiple futures that appear to hold forth the liberal promise of the neverending novelty of experience. For Faulkner, it is an aspect of the condition of modernity that this historical desire, or desire for history (that is, for a match between our experience of temporality and the expropriation of experience) is everywhere promulgated and nowhere satisfied. So we invent substitutes, as we always do when it comes to the satisfaction of desire. This condition, for Agamben, does not necessarily portend a hopeless or unalterable future, but it does accurately designate the future that modernity constructs as well as the “experience” of modernity as limit. We can conclude with the thought that, under these circumstances, and in its narrative negotiations of history under modernity, Faulkner’s fiction revises an old saw: those who forget the future are condemned to repeat it, and to live it the first time as recurrence of the past. NOTES 1. Jean-Paul Sartre, “On The Sound and the Fury: Time in the Work of Faulkner,” in Literary and Philosophical Essays, trans. Annette Michelson (London: Rider, 1955):79-87; John T. Irwin, Doubling and ZncestlRepetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975); Gail Mortimer, Faulkner’s Rhetoric of Loss: A Study of Perception and Meaning (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983);Thomas S. Hines, William Faulkner and the Tangible Past: The Architecture of Yoknapatawpha (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 2. On monumental, “sepulchral” history in Faulkner, see Edgar A. Dryden’s compelling reading of Absalom, Absalom! in The Form of American Romance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 137-67. 3. William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (1936; New York: Vintage, 1986),80. 4. William Faulkner, Light in August (1932; New York: Vintage, iggo), 507. All subsequent references will be noted parenthetically in the text. 5. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. and intro. Hannah Arendt. (New York: Schocken, 1968):257-58. 6. Giorgio Agamben, Znfancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (New York: Verso, igg3), 42, 100. All subsequent references will be noted parenthetically in the text. 7. Patrick O’Donnell, “Faulkner and Postmodernism,” in A Faulkner Companion, ed. Philip Weinstein (New York: Cambridge University Press, iggd), 45-58. 8. William Faulkner, Go Down,Moses (1942; New York: Vintage, iggo), 347. All subsequent references will be noted parenthetically in the text. 9. Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham: Duke University Press, iggs), 13. 10. See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991).

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for the gradual amelioration of injustice; and it implies that desirable political alternatives-particularly for marginalized individuals and social groups-can only be discerned by reading beyond, rather than within, the manifest content of Faulkner’s fiction. In the argument of this essay, I wish to contest these views, by arguing that it is possible to discover a valuable and livable, even a desirable, politics for Southern blacks inside the represented world of “The Fire and the Hearth,” rather than only in its margins and silences. In the service of this possibility, I propose first to revisit, in a New Critical fashion, the novella’s central dramatic conflict, between heroic individualism and communal identity; then to explore the challenge posed to interpretation of this conflict by recent postmodernist readings; then to situate myself (in terms of my own personal history) relative to these new readings. Out of this combination should emerge an alternative to the present consensus regarding the political significance of “The Fire and the Hearth’ and of Faulkner’s racial representations in Go Down,Moses more generally considered. 1

A convenient place to begin is with the question of unity. As Michael Millgate suggested a number of years ago, a first reading of “The Fire and the Hearth” can leave one wondering how the long flashback scene culminating in Lucas Beauchamp’s confrontation with Zack Edmonds relates to the story’s main comic a ~ t i o nThe . ~ difference between these parts of the narrative is indeed great, for the events of Lucas’s youth are separated from those of his age not only in time but in tone. Where in the one instance we see a young man engaged in an agonizing struggle for self-affirmation, in the other we see a Faulknerian tall tale, replete with shrewd blacks, gullible whites, and an orchard salted with silver dollars. Yet as Cleanth Brooks and others have noted, the comic action is more than a tall tale, for it “trenches hard upon p a t h o ~ . Also, ” ~ it bears a significant resemblance to the flashback scene, in that both focus on threats to the continuation of Lucas’s relationship to his wife, Molly, and to members of the Edmonds family, threats construed in all instances as arising from a tension inherent in the relation between heroic individualism and communal identity. This tension can be stated paradigmatically. A recurrent pattern in heroic literature depicts heroism simultaneously as a form of service to a community and as a threat to the hero’s communal ties. The hero exhibits his heroism-I use the male pronoun advisedly-by performing an extraordinary act of service for his family, tribe, or nation; but by perform-

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completes his journey into his new community by shifting entirely from allegiance as a “nigger” to the plantation to allegiance as a “man” to home and family. But in this new alignment as well, the tension between heroic individualism and communal service asserts itself, for in the encounter in the bedroom, Lucas does not act from communal motives alone. When Molly returns to her own home after Lucas’s first confrontation with Zack, the strictly practical problem has been solved, even though the white child that Molly has brought with her still needs to be taken back to the plantation house. But for Lucas, the struggle with Zack has ceased to have only practical implications. As he says to Molly, “I went to Zack Edmonds’ house and asked him for my wife. Let him come to my house and ask me for his son!’’ (so).When Zack fails to play his appointed part in this selfconceived drama of reconciliation, Lucas chooses to confront Zack in the bedroom, even though doing so risks his life and hence his continued membership in the community he believes he is defending. When Zack springs for the pistol, we are told that he and Lucas “met over the center of the bed where Lucas clasped the other with his left arm almost like an embrace” (56). This near-embrace expresses the furious separation of Lucas from any tie to wife and family. In the encounter over the bedthe bed which in a sense he is fighting for-Lucas abandons a connubial embrace for an heroic one, with the consequence that we are made vividly aware of how his self-affirmation threatens the community it ostensibly serves. As with the flashback scene, so with the main comic action. By the good fortune of the misfire, Lucas survives his youthful journey into heroic individualism. But the dangers evaded in his youth return to haunt him in his age, where they are surmounted in a fashion that many current commentators on “The Fire and the Hearth’ find profoundly troubling. The sixty-seven-year-old Lucas of the main action clearly has his genesis in the confrontation in the plantation bedroom. For more than forty years, Lucas balances the imperatives of his heroic self-conception against the realities of his status as a black tenant farmer in the South, evolving in the process his oblique strategies of self-assertion. But when the mound shifts and casts forth the gold coin, the balance he has achieved is dangerously altered, for the coin is the “one blinding glimpse of the absolute” “vouchsafed’ Lucas by “the dry insensate dust” (38-39). It is the agency through w h c h he is allowed once again to engage in heroic action. Lucas’s new quest, however, is even more threatening to his communal ties than his earlier one. As Molly recognizes when she fears that Lucas is “gonter be lost, lost7’(loo), the discovery of the gold coin comes

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novel but also in its scrutiny of characters formerly considered to be minor. Focusing on the novel’s female characters (many of whom, as several commentators have noted, remain nameless), feminist critics have asked whether these characters, in particular the ones who are black, “push at the boundaries created by the white male characters whose narrative spaces exceed theirs” or whether they merely “serve [the] master narrative.”1° Similarly, cultural-materialist critics have detected in seemingly minor black male characters-in Tomey’s Terrel, Rider, Uncle Ash, Samuel Worsham “Butch” Beauchamp-traces of stories that the dominant narrative of Go Down, Moses seems anxious to conceal. In Butch Beauchamp’s life and death, for example, contemporary critics detect a counter-narrative to the account in “The Fire and the Hearth” of Lucas Beauchamp’s accommodation to the plantation social order. In Butch’s theft from the commissary, flight north, and turn to an urban style of dress and appearance, these critics detect an oblique representation of the “great migration” of the late 1930s and early 1940s. And in Butch’s execution for murder and the return of his body to Jefferson, they detect a fantasized resistance to that social transformation. “In stealing from the commissary,” Thadious Davis says, Butch “strikes out against the embodiment of economic power and exploitative control in the plantation system. But Faulkner can only envision him as the bad seed of a bad father, who must be punished for leaving the South and transgressing its political e c ~ n o m y . ” ~ l As these comments have already begun to suggest, postmodernist critics combine with their interest in marginalized characters an extremely skeptical view of the accommodation Lucas Beauchamp reaches with the plantation social order. Central to Lucas’s sense of identity is an understanding of himself as a “man-made” McCaslin ( ~ z )descended , in the male line from L. Q. C. McCaslin, in contrast to the “woman-made” Zack and Roth Edmonds (si), who trace their lineage back through L. Q. C. McCaslin’s daughter. Throughout the scene of the confrontation in the bedroom, Lucas refers to this belief in his genealogical superiority, seeking to guide his behavior by “what old Carothers would have told me to do” (52).And afterwards he thinks to himself, “So I reckon I aint got old Carothers’ blood for nothing, after all. Old Carothers. . . . I needed him and he come and spoke for me77(57; italics omitted). Postmodernist critics find this aspect of Lucas’s characterization deeply unsatisfactory, not only because of the gender bias it exhibits but because of the limit it suggests on Faulkner’s ability to envision alternative forms of black male identity. In various ways, the critics voice the same objection. “Why does Faulkner,” asks one, “find it necessary not only to turn Lucas into an imitation white man, but also to place him at

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by immersing him within the living resources of a native black culture but by phantasmally aligning him with the authority of his white male soul mates” (What Else But Love? 93, 87, 96).

3 The critical consensus just described has emerged in both general and specific terms, as a change in political climate and cultural and aesthetic theory, and as a reading of “The Fire and the Hearth” and Go Down, Moses. To identify a position from which to advance an alternative to that consensus, I need to speak personally for a bit. Weinstein begins What Else But h u e ? with a reminiscence of Van Price, a black woman who worked as a maid for his family during his childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. Seeking, as he says, “to register . . . a bit of [his] own racial innocence lived through and later decoded’ (xviii), he describes, ruefully and eloquently, his youthful blindness to the extent of his dependence on Van Price, and he locates in his affection for her a source of his growth as a person and literary critic. “Without Van Price,” he says, “there would have been no interracial love to acknowledge, no book to write” (mix). I read this account with sympathy and with appreciation for its courage and its candor, but also with some degree of bemusement. The reason for the bemusement is that my mother performed the same sort of work as did Van Price. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, my mother frequently worked outside our home, most often as a housekeeper (the word “maid” was not used in our house), but at other times as a waitress at a drugstore soda fountain. Living seven miles outside town, our family owning one car, herself never having learned how to drive, my mother traveled to and from work by bus. I can remember her complaining over having been assigned a split shift at the drugstore. Working from 10:oo a.m. to 2:oo p.m. and from 4:oo p.m. to 8:oo p.m. (to cover the lunch and dinner rush), she found the gap between shifts too long to fill, yet too short to make returning home very worthwhile. Working outside the home in this fashion continued a pattern that had begun long before my birth, for my mother left school and began full-time work at the age of twelve. I mention these facts somewhat reluctantly, both because I have been acculturated to discretion on issues of economic and class status and because I fear implying a false equivalence. White male privilege is white male privilege, and I know that opportunities came my way by virtue of my being white and male that were unavailable to blacks and (to a considerable extent) to women in the American society of my youth. But

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if the “postmodern turn” has taught critics of my generation anything, it is the importance of an awareness of the positionalities from which we view experience, both to our capacity for insight and to our susceptibility to blindness. I do not include myself-how could I?-among those “for whom,” as Weinstein speculates, “[his] positioning as white and male partially or entirely discredits [his] project” (xviii). But I note that he does not include class in this comment, and that he mentions class only infrequently in his book as a whole. When I read his account of feeling silently virtuous whenever he and his brother would drive Van Price an extra two miles to a more distant bus stop ( 4 4 , I read (as it were) from the other end of the bus line. Linked to these observations is the question of the influence of class on the development of my (and of other people’s) literary-critical attitudes and values. Recalling an occasion in a high-school classroom in which a teacher asked if he and his brother were “nigger-lovers,” Weinstein says, “With such encounters accumulating, it was easy in 1958 to decide (for other reasons as well) to go to the Northeast to college” (What Else But hue?, 5). I too left my home (in southern Ohio) in part to avoid such encounters; but in looking back, I place more emphasis than does Weinstein on those “other reasons” that he mentions parenthetically. Although I scarcely knew it at the time, I left southern Ohio not only to escape a culture but to acquire one. In Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove, as Merton Densher awaits a conference with Mrs. Lowder concerning his wish to marry Kate Croy, he takes in “the message of her massive, florid furniture, the immense expression of her signs and symbols.” That message, he decides, is “a portentous negation of his own world of thought-of which . . . he became as for the first time hopelessly aware.”14A substantial portion of my intellectual effort since I discovered my vocation as a student of literature has been to surmount this “merciless difference” (55),to insinuate myself into a cultural order seemingly richer and more attractive than the one my rural upbringing and my family’s relatively straitened circumstances had afforded me. That effort-for me, and, I imagine, for others of similar backgroundhas had variable consequences. One of its less attractive features is a jealous sense of proprietorship. Viewing the Western literary tradition not as an inheritance but as an acquisition, I for a long while found it difficult not to personalize critiques of Eurocentrism and of the maleI have worked my dominated canon. Although I believe-hope-that way past that reaction, for a considerable time the critiques felt very much like theft, as if something I had acquired at considerable expense were being taken away unjustly. A second unattractive feature is a tendency to overvalue and overgeneralize the American mythology of self-

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creation. Blessed by the accident of some amount of academic talent, I find it easy to overlook the extent to which my development as a scholar-my “success”-has been socially sanctioned and supported. And I find it tempting as well to overgeneralize the virtue of self-reliance, to view the impediments to advancement by the underclass in American society less as systemic than as individual. Yet there is also a positive side to the middling sort of American success story that I have lived, one that I believe extends beyond the pleasures and advantages that the story has afforded me personally. Choosing the phrase “what else but love” from Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon as his title, Weinstein suggests that in Van Price’s caring for him “physically and emotionally and unsentimentally, like a mother” (3), lay the affectional source of his adult commitment to egalitarianism. “My own sense of Vannie7spreciou~ness,~~ he says, “. . . turned that word nigger into an unbearable offense” (14). Yes. But what of others of us, those whose racial interactions in childhood and adolescence were less frequent and less personal? Whence arises our commitment-however incomplete or intermittent it may be-to egalitarian principles and to racial justice? Although in my teenage years I observed with extreme distaste an instance of prejudice visited upon a black schoolmate (my only black schoolmate), I cannot honestly say that my racial attitudes were very much based on direct experience. Growing up in a rural all-white enclave-a southern Ohio equivalent of Frenchman’s Bend-there simply wasn7tvery much direct experience on which to draw. The source of my and of many other people’s positive racial attitudes, it seems to me, is more diffuse than the one Weinstein describes in his book. It is nothing less than the American democratic tradition, as taught in the schools and as disseminated in political rhetoric, law, and social practice. To the extent that the source for me is also personal, it is a sensed analogy between my family’s class status and the status of many blacks in American society, and a sensed analogy as well between my social and economic aspirations and theirs. The history of attempts in America to form class-based affiliations across racial lines is of course more one of failure than of success, and it is certainly true that African Americans have often borne the brunt of lower-class white economic frustration and anger. But at an individual level, wherever a mutual possibility for aspiration exists, affiliation does seem to occur. What else but love? Something less easy to valorize than love but no less important to the success of the American democratic experiment and to the emergence of a truly multicultural society-a shared sense of grievance, a desire for redress, ambition, opportunity.

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4 These last observations can provide a route back to Lucas Beauchamp and to “The Fire and the Hearth.” The postmodernist critique of the restricted range of Faulkner’s representations of black life in Americahere I am thinking in particular of his depictions of black male lifeseems to me irrefutable. For a fuller representation of the problems and possibilities facing black males in their struggle for identity, we need to look elsewhere, to Toni Morrison’s fiction (especially Song of Solomon) and-to stay within the orbit of my own reading-to the works of Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison. But having arrived at this observation still leaves open for consideration the question of how to interpret and judge the representations that Faulkner does provide. How, that is, other than in the postmodernist fashion summarized earlier, might one interpret Lucas Beauchamp’s “Old Carothers. . . . I needed him and he come and spoke for me” (57)? A characteristic of postmodernist literary criticism-perhaps of all literary criticism-is that conclusions are reached and effects are achieved as much by rhetoric as by argumentation. A phrase like “thrusting male will” cannibalizes the idea of ambition from the outset, by enclosing it inside a larger critique, often only implicit, of patriarchal social and political structures, of phallocentrism, of the hegemony of the dominant order, of the limitations of the male imaginary. Given this set of rhetorical and argumentative alignments, it is perhaps inevitable, certainly understandable, that Lucas’s “he come and spoke for me” should be interpreted by Weinstein (and by others) as an instance of Althusserian “interpellation”-as the creation of an illusory identity inside Lucas through an invasion of his mind by a “white signifying economy” (Fuulkner’sSubject, 74). In this fashion, as Ross King says, interpreting Althusser, “the human subject is given back, through ideology, an imaginary construction of his own autonomy, unity and self-presence.”1” In the point of view being advanced here, though, the one to which I am impelled by my own history, a considerable degree of agency still resides within the individual, and the signifying economy of the dominant order is not an inheritance but a goal. From this point of view, Lucas’s “he come and spoke for me” can be understood not as interpellation but as acquisition, as an aggressive and ambitious co-optation for his own purposes of the voice of the dominant order. As Theresa Towner observes, advancing a similar argument, “Nowhere in [Go Down, Moses] does Old Carothers ‘speak,’ not even in the ledgers. It is Lucas who imagines his voice and directs it to serve his own need, Lucas who in fact ‘speaks’ for Carothers.” And as she also says, in his fiction of the 1940s

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his white ancestor’s values-mimics and mocks them-while seeming to enact them. While it is true, as Towner says, that L. Q. C. McCaslin never speaks in Go Down, Moses, traces of his being are everywhere evident, in the color of his black descendants, who “were supposed to be black but were not quite white’’ (28), and in the document that the ledgers refer to as “Fathers will” (257). The first of these traces encodes Old Carothers’s dominant sense of racial superiority, enacted in the form of incestuous sexual relations; the second his subordinate sense of family feeling for the black descendants ensuing from those relations. In appropriating Old Carothers’s voice, Lucas inverts the relation of dominance and subordination between these two traces. He assigns to Old Carothers a paternal identity and feeling toward his black descendants that in life L. Q. C. only slightly and belatedly exhibited. And (in a fine irony) he transforms the man who arranged the marriage of his black mistress to his black servant as a matter of personal convenience, and who treated his own black daughter as sexual property, into a spokesperson for black self-affirmation and for the integrity of the black family. We can arrive at a similar interpretation of Lucas’s appropriation of Old Carothers’s voice if we consider his behavior in social terms. In the interval between Molly’s return to their cabin and the encounter with Zack in the bedroom, Lucas imagines himself as confronting two options. “I will have to kill him,’’ he thinks, “or I will have to take her and go away” (48). These options encode alternatives prominently available to blacks, at least imaginatively, in the first half of the twentieth centurythe separatist movement, shading over into fantasies of racial revenge (the “Seven Days” of Morrison’s Song of Solomon), and, for Southerners, migration to the North. What alternative can we see encoded in the accommodative outcome ensuing from Lucas’s appropriation of his white ancestor’s voice? For postmodernist critics, in that outcome, as in “Ike McCaslin’s convoluted defense of southern racial gradualism,” we see encoded “Faulkner’s long losing battles against the impotence of southern moderation on social issues” (Matthews, “Touching Race,” 21). In it we see encoded as well a “warning to . . . the agitated North of the 1940s: go slow now, do not interfere with a regional racial struggle inexorably working itself out in Southern terms, family terms” (Weinstein, W h a t Else But Love?, 78). As a way of aligning Faulkner’s fiction with his public positions on racial issues, this view has merit. But as an interpretation of “The Fire and the Hearth,’’ it undervalues significantly both the degree of Faulkner’s fictional self-awareness and the amount of progress that has taken place in American (and Southern) racial relations in the time since the publication of Go Down, Moses. The fictional reply to Ike McCaslin’s

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turn of the century is also an egalitarian and a nationalist novel; the nation that it imagines born out of resistance to Reconstruction is a newly democratic America. But in the return to prominence of the Southern novel some quarter of a century later-in Faulkner, Young, Erslune Caldwell, and even in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind-Reconstruction plays at best a circumscribed role. And this is true even though the novels in question are mainly historical. Elizabeth Madox Roberts’s The Great Meadow is set in Virginia and Kentucky at the end of the eighteenth century; So Red the Rose begins more conventionally with the build-up to war but it ends before Reconstruction. Absalom, Absalom! takes place at least partially in the appropriate time frame but even though the dissolution of Sutpen’s Hundred might be understood as an exemplary instance of what defeat meant for the South and especially for the class of planters with which both Young and Faulkner are concerned, Faulkner pushes the political story of that dissolution to the margins of his own account. Charles Bon survives the war but he doesn’t live to take on the carpetbaggers and scalawags; Henry Sutpen lives through the postwar, but can hardly be said to play a role in it. And, most significantly, Faulkner disconnects the destruction of Thomas Sutpen himself from any of the events so central to the narrative of Southern defeat and national rebirth. Reconstruction in The Clansman is the technology through which those soldiers who fought against each other in the fratricidal war are brought to recognize that they belong to the same family by the discovery of what it means to belong to the same race. They perform this national reconciliation by marrying each other’s sisters and hence becoming brothers-in-law, which is to say, when the laws are Jim Crow laws, brothers in whiteness. Sutpen, however, refuses even to join the clan, and the relevant brothers in Faulkner belong to the same family not because they belong to the same race but even though they don’t belong to the same race. So the desire of one to marry the sister of the other is the occasion for, rather than the transcendence of, f r a t r i ~ i d e .If, ~ then, a certain eagerness to “tell about”-and to be told about-“the South” appears once again in Ameri, stories that are told about can literature in the late ’20s and early ’ ~ o sthe it are new. What does the South mean in So Red the Rose that its great contribution to American Progressivism, a nationalist racism, can be ignored? And what does the South mean in Absalom, Absalom! that the destruction of its great plantations will seem to be imagined not as a consequence of Northern imperialism, but as the result of events that would have taken place even if Reconstruction (or for that matter, the war itself) had not? To begin to answer these questions, we have to return to Young’s

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Charles Taliaferro and Faulkner’s Charles Bon, both dead before 1867, before the Old South dies. Both Charleses have women in New Orleans; Young’s is a “quadroon” with “pale gold-colored skin,”4 Faulkner’s is a little whiter, an “octoroon” with “a face like a tragic magn~lia.”~ Both Charleses are involved with-or are, at least, the object of the passionate affection of-white women: Henry’s sister, Judith Sutpen, loves Charles Bon; the sister of his friend Edward McGehee loves Charles Taliaferro. The relation that both Charleses have with the brother is prior to and in some way more fundamental than the relation either has with the sister. “It was not Judith who was the object of Bon’s love” (gs), says Faulkner, by which he doesn’t only mean that it was Henry; it will, perhaps, make more sense to say that it was Henry and Judith’s father, Thomas. And it’s certainly not Edwards sister Lucy that Young’s Charles is in love with; the “great, impetuous affection” (127)he feels is for Edward himself. The only other person Charles Taliaferro loves, Young says, is his own father. So both these novels deploy the historical events of 1861-the young men going off to the war-in the form of triangles, triangles involving a white man (the Charleses) and two women (one white and one black), and triangles involving that same man (the Charleses) and a brother and sister. In So Red the Rose, the meaning of this triangle is complicated but clear: Lucy loves Charles, Charles loves Edward, Edward loves “the Southern cause” (log). The replacement of a person-“he had not any girl that he was in love with’-by a cause is crucial here. When Edward dies in battle, Charles’s death is an inevitable aftereffect, and that cause becomes-what it really has been all along-the ultimate object of Lucy’s affections too. It is, in other words, as if these people’s love for each other turns out really to be a way first of generating and then of understanding their love for the “cause.’’ And this replacement of person by cause accounts also for the complication, since the love of a cause instead of a person is made possible here by imagining the cause as a kind of person, the sort of thing that, since he “had not any girl that he was in love with,” can pass through Edwards mind “like a face” (log), the face that replaces and perfects the face of any actual girl. Edward understands that there are issues involved in the war-“rights,” “policies,” “laws,” “sections,77but what he loves and fights for makes these issues beside the point. To love a cause instead of a person is here to love a cause as a kind of person, and to love a cause as a kind of person is significantly to alter one’s sense of the kind of thing a cause is. So Red the Rose thus sets aside not only the Northern view of the Southern “cause”--that the antagonism between North and South “was due solely to the existence of slavery”6 and that the South fought for

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slavery-but also the popular Southern view that it fought for the political principle of states’ rights: Edwards father-the actual person who comes closest to embodying for Edward the war’s point-believes neither in “slaveryy7nor “secession.” But it isn’t his father’s beliefs that matter to Edward: “It was not so much the thought, the conviction his father held, but rather a rightness and depth in the blood, which he himself seemed to share and live in. It was this inner thing of feeling” (25).According to Young, then, the South did not fight for either the moral or the political reasons that had been ascribed to it, or, indeed, for any other moral or political reasons, and, in this rejection of moral and political accounts of the war’s origin, So Red the Rose aligns itself with what had become by the mid-’3os the newly dominant account of the war as, in the words of Charles and Mary Beard, the revolt of “capitalists, laborers and farmers” against the “planting ari~tocracy.”~ The South did not fight for slavery, the Beards wrote in 1933, because the North did not oppose slavery, and it did not fight for the principle of states’ rights because it subordinated that principle whenever necessary to what the Beards thought it did fight for. The conflict between North and South, they argued, was a class war, “founded on differences in climate, soil, industries, and labor systems . . . rather than varying degrees of righteousness and wisdom, or what romantic historians call ‘the magnetism of great personalities.”’s And, even though their insistence on the economic motives of the planters may seem very different from Young’s insistence on “the inner thing of feeling” that he calls “a rightness” “in the blood”; even though Edwards analogy between his “country” and “a beloved girl” may seem to epitomize the romantic history they disdained, it is easy to see that Young’s romanticism is entirely compatible with the Beards’ economism. For what he and the economic historians share is not only their sense of the irrelevance of moral and political reasons for the war, but also their sense of the irrelevance of reasons as such, or, put more positively, their sense of the primacy of desires. Thus in the essay Young wrote in 1930 for I’ll Take My Stand, he makes a particular point of insisting that his “cause” cannot be argued for or justified by any appeal to “reason”; “it is based on preference only’’ (335). And what inspires Edward in So Red the Rose is not his father’s beliefshis “convictions” about slavery or secession and the reasons he might give in support of those “convictions”-but an “inner feeling” the father has and the son inherits. Although this replacement of reason by preference in one text and feeling in the other may look like a confession of failure in argument (I have no reasons, I have only my desires), it is in fact a declaration of immunity to argument. For if the difficulty with such feelings as the basis for action is that they cannot be justified, their advan-

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Americans and poor whites. But, redescribing the lost cause of the Confederacy as the promise of “Southern culture,” Young disconnects it not only from morality and politics but from economics too. Disconnecting their class from their money, Young rescues his planters from the charges of injustice and exploitation that might otherwise be brought against them. Economic classes are higher or lower, and the differences between them have nothing to do with “preference”-what makes you a planter is not your preference for the planter’s kind of living but the fact that you own a plantation. Once, however, the question of money has been turned into a question of taste, the Civil War becomes a culture war. But, even in the most abysmal moments of, say, The Unvanquished, plantation culture occupies no such position in Faulkner, and, of course, the boys going off to war in Absalom, Absalom! certainly don’t imagine themselves to be fighting for their class or for “the inner thing of feeling and goodness,” the “rightness” “in the blood’ that Young’s boys get from and share with their father. But if they’re not exactly fighting for theirs and their father’s class or blood (if Faulkner doesn’t even seem particularly interested in what they are fighting for), this doesn’t, of course, mean that their father’s class and blood aren’t crucial to Absalom, Absalom! and to them. Indeed, insofar as class and blood are central to, even constitutive of, Thomas Sutpen’s “design,” one of the boys (Henry) embodies its success, the other (Charles) its failure. So Red the Rose simply asserts the class identity of its protagonists. “It had not taken long for the settlers pouring over the Southern States to find their levels and divide” (7), Young says; the level his McGehees and Bedfords find is a high one because they belong to “a special class,” what becomes “the planter class,” and “all the people” they know and all the people he writes about belong to that class. But the division into levels that is the precondition of So Red the Rose is the subject ofAbsalom, Absalom! In this respect, Absalom, Absalom! is unusual but not exactly unique. “With a ruthless singleness of purpose, he desired his own house, his own plantation, his own horse, his own slaves.’’9These things could be said of Sutpen but they are in fact said about Scarlett O’Hara’s father, Gerald. It’s an important fact about Gone with the Wind that Gerald O’Hara is “a self-made man” (44), a man who “wanted to be a slave owner and a landed gentleman” (48)and who succeeded, but it’s also an important fact about the book that his career is back story. Unlike Sutpen’s “big house,” Tara gets built in a paragraph, and the kind of ruthlessness that preoccupies Gone with the Wind involves holding on to it, not “drag(ging) it out of the soundless Nothing” (4). By contrast to Gone with the

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Wind, Elizabeth Madox Roberts’s The Great Meadow (published a few years earlier, in 1930) does concern itself with the establishment of “a great house,” and Roberts’s characters, like Sutpen (albeit a bit earlier), migrate out of what was then western Virginia in search of a place to build it.1° And even though some of Berk Jarvis’s Kentucky neighbors call it “a fool house,” his “wish to have a better chimney than any other man, a taller roof and a finer sweep to the dimensions of his hall” (236) fills his wife, Diony, with a “pride” that Ellen Coldfield might recognize. But the big house doesn’t mean in Roberts’s Kentucky what it means in Faulkner’s Mississippi. For one thing, it isn’t built by slaves. There are no slaves in Roberts’s Kentucky, which is more like Faulkner’s west Virginia, where “the only colored people were Indians” ( i ~ g )than , like his Mississippi. For another thing-really, as we will see, the same thing-although Berk Jarvis’s house is and is meant to be ‘letter’’ than any other man’s, it nevertheless does not mark the difference between him and other men that not only Sutpen’s house but his entire “design” will be meant to enact. Roberts’s west Virginians dream of going to the Tidewater (and seeing “black slave-men” [27])but they go to Kentucky instead. Sutpen does go to the Tidewater, and it’s the tidewater and black slave men that teach him what Faulkner calls “the difference between white men and white men’’ (183). This difference was unavailabledidn’t exist-in the west because in the west, as Faulkner imagines it, no one owned anything (“the land belonged to anybody and to everybody” [i7g]), much less anyone. Which doesn’t mean that people didn’t have possessions: “everybody had just what he was strong enough or energetic enough to take and keep” (179); it’s just that no one had a property right in what he took or kept. His right was his ability to take and keep it. In the Tidewater, the spectacle of people having much more than they take and keep is the spectacle of property-of the emergence of a difference between white men and white men that is something more than the difference between them in strength or cunning.ll It is this difference that makes it possible for “the ones who owned the objects” to “look down on the ones who didn’t’’ (179).And the slave is the exemplary object. That’s why Sutpen’s father takes pleasure in beating “one of Pettibone’s niggers” (187),but that’s also why Sutpen himself insists, that “[the niggers] were not it, not what you wanted to hit.” Slaves are emblems of the slaveowner; he’s the one you want to hit, or he’s the one you want to become and to supplant so that no one can “look down’’ on you, so that you can do the looking down. The “design” then is to become someone on whom no one can look down. Slaves are “incidental” to it; black men are only the technology through which the difference between white men is established.

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The “design” Sutpen conceives in response to this rotation through the Tidewater is thus in crucial respects very different from the “design” of Roberts’s settlers, Berk and Diony Jarvis. They are all making something out of a wilderness, but where Roberts imagines her settlers creating a new world, Sutpen’s effort is to inscribe himself into an old world. The Jarvises’ Kentucky looks like Sutpen’s west Virginia: there are no rights of property (in response to the idea that the Indians have a property right in the land, Berk Jarvis-in the accents of Faulkner’s west Virginians-asserts that a “good country” belongs only to the “race” that is “strong” enough to “hold’ it [105]) and so there are no classes, and there are no slaves. That’s why the only colored people, the Indians, are called “red white-trash” (246),not because they are like white trash but because they take the place of white trash and, in so doing, make all the white people in Roberts’s Kentucky (like the white people in Faulkner’s west Virginia) equal. But Sutpen is looking for property, not equality; he’s perfectly willing to buy his land from Ikemotubbe, and the only colored people he needs are slaves, whose function is not to set him apart from red white-trash but to set him apart from white white-trash, above all from his white-trash self. The comparable ambition here, the comparable house, is not Berk Jarvis’s, built in a wilderness (or even Gerald O’Hara’s), but Jay Gatsby’s, built in the Hampfons.l2 Sutpen, who “rode into town out of no discernible past and acquired his land no one knew how and built his house, his mansion, apparently out of nothing” (7), is, like Gatsby-“Mr. Nobody from Nowhere”13-“a man who came from nowhere” (13).Gatsby’s house is a “mansion” (5) (Flem Snopes would be another relevant analog), “a factual imitation of some Hotel de Ville in Normandy.” The builder, Nick Carraway says, is supposed to have “agreed to pay five years’ taxes on all the neighboring cottages if the owners would have their roofs thatched with straw”; but he can’t get any takers because, Nick says, “Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry” (89).Faulkner, of course, was less skeptical about American peasants, and Sutpen’s house not only (like Gatsby’s) requires some but also (unlike Gatsby’s) obtains at least one, in the form of Wash Jones who is kept out by Clytie and who thus both commemorates and overcomes the boy Sutpen’s being sent around to the back door of the planter’s house by the planter’s slave. But even though Sutpen’s house gets its peasantry (or at least a peasant), Sutpen is no more successful than Gatsby at achieving the kind of transformation the house is meant to produce. In fact, before the house is ever built, his design has been crucially compromised by his marriage to Eulalia Bon; his desire to move into a different class has been compro-

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as a marker of his master’s status. (“Pettibone’s nigger,” beaten by Sutpen’s father because he is Pettibone’s, would no longer be Pettibone’s and would be beaten instead because he was a “nigger.”) That’s what it means for Bon to deny he is Henry’s brother (to deny, in effect, that he’s a version of Clytie) and to announce himself instead as “the nigger that’s going to sleep with your sister” (286). The “nigger that’s going to sleep with your sister” is the bugaboo of Jim Crow, not of slavery. Now that the slave has become a black man (instead of a slave) and the slaveowner has become a white man (instead of a master), the threat Bon represents is to whiteness, not to mastery. But Bon, of course, has not needed such a transformation; he has always been free, always black. This is part of the point of Absalom, Absalom!’s famous anachronism-that Sutpen in 1827 puts down a rebellion that had taken place in 1791. Faulkner’s Haiti is a place where blacks are enslaved (and hence potential mothers of Clytie) and at the same time free (hence the mother of Charles). It makes contradictory states simultaneously available and thus makes it possible for a slaveholder to make the mistake of having a child by a free black woman. The lie that Sutpen’s wife tells him-that she is white, not black-is also a version of the truth-that she is black and yet free. So Haiti is a place where a man might own slaves and still commit miscegenation, still sleep with “a nigger.” Faulkner’s Haiti, retrofitting the free to the slave, is an epitome of Absalom, Absalom!, which retrofits the social configurations of Jim Crow to the plantation. And the point of this retrofitting will be to destroy Sutpen’s class ambitions by redescribing them, to destroy his successful attempt to assert the difference between white men and white men by redescribing it as a failed attempt to enforce the difference between white men and black men. The example of Gatsby continues to be relevant here. “I can’t help Daisy tells Gatsby, admitting that she has loved Tom what’s past” (133)~ and, more crucially, repudiating Gatsby’s deepest commitment, which is precisely to helping the past. It is this ambition, as he puts it, to “correct the past” that John Irwin has suggested links Gatsby to Sutpen.l8We see it in Faulkner‘s ability to make Sutpen put down a rebellion that has already succeeded; we see the necessity for it in Gatsby’s recognition that you can make a lot of money and still be Mr. Nobody from Nowhere. For if what Sutpen wants is to “establish a dynasty,” to have “descendants,” what Gatsby needs is to be something more like the inheritor of a dynasty-he needs to be a descendant. As he says to Nick (who traces his own family to a “founder” three generations back, a Sutpen in wholesale hardware), “I am the son of some wealthy people in the Middle West . . . I was brought up in America but educated at Oxford, because all my

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while legitimating Faulkner’s own. (It gives the person who bought Rowan Oak a claim to owning it better than that of the person who built it, and it gives him a better claim to inheriting it than the person who built it could have to bequeathing it.) But the obsession with miscegenation requires an absolute commitment to the racial difference that is the condition of miscegenation’s possibility, and many recent critics have read the texts that in my view perform this obsession (not only Absalorn, Absalorn! but, of course, Light in August) as, in fact, attacks on the very idea of racial difference. In a talk given at the 1995 session of this conference, for example, Gena McKinley argued that, by “electing to leave” the “parentage” of Light in August’s Joe Christmas, “undefined,” Faulkner “lays bare the extent to which society7sdefinition of race is grounded in fiction rather than biological fact,” and both she and Kevin Railey characterize Faulkner as concerned above all to demonstrate that race is a “social construction.”22In these readings, Faulkner is a racial antiessentialist, out to demonstrate-through the white skins of Joe Christmas and Charles Bon-the “arbitrariness and irrationality of classification according to skin ~0lor.’’23 But it is, of course, of the essence of the American rule of racial identity-the one-drop rule-that blood, not skin is dispositive, and no one adheres to this rule more rigorously than Faulkner. “Is he really a nigger? He don’t look like one,” one of Bobbie’s confederates says, as they’re beating Joe Christmas, “We’ll find out. We’ll see if his blood is The question posed here-“with a short slashing blow” of the fist-is answered some two hundred and fifty pages later by the “pent black blood’ that rushes ‘‘from out the slashed garments about his hips” (465) when Percy Grimm not only kills but castrates Joe. The idea is that by striking Joe you can figure out his race, which is to say, by slashing him you can make his blood appear and tell by the color of that blood what you cannot tell by the (“parchment”) color of his skin. And, although most critics read Gavin Stevens’s extraordinary account of the battle of Christmas’s bloods as ironic (as expressing Stevens’s racial views rather than Faulkner’s), the description of the ‘black blood’ rushing from the “pale body” isn’t Gavin Stevens7s.The source of Joe’s conviction that he has “nigger blood’ (196) may remain mysterious, but Light in August enlists its narrator on his side and, more importantly, enlists him in the the blood. The project of locating racial identity-black or white-in Faulkner who creates the identity test-“We’ll see if his blood is black’-and who answers it with a slashing which does indeed produce “black blood’ is not a Faulkner who is skeptical of racial identity. Insofar, then, as racial identity in Faulkner is a matter of blood, it’s hard to see anything antiessentialist or social constructionist about it. At

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the same time, however, it’s even harder to see how relocating race from the skin to the blood can help make the racial identity of people like Joe Christmas and Charles Bon more visible. For it’s not as if Christmas’s black blood really looks any different from his or anybody else’s white blood. In fact, of course, the color of his blood is even less useful than the color of his skin in revealing his race. Rather than making your racial identity visible, what the recourse to blood seems really to do is preserve its invisibility, and it is just this invisibility (insisted upon by Faulkner) that constitutes the condtion of racial essentialism. Race in Faulkner is not a biological essence; it is a metaphysical essence. For a vision of what it would mean to think of race as truly biological, we can look at a text published the year before Light in August, the Afi-ican American writer George Schuyler’s Black No More (1931).The title of the book is the name of a medical procedure which turns black skin white (a version of the “denegrification serum” imagined by Franz Fanon twenty years later in Black Skin, White Musks) and through which, Schuyler says, “science” promised “to succeed where the Civil War had failed.”2s What Schuyler’s Civil War was about wasn’t slavery or states’ rights or Southern culture or (although he himself started out as a committed socialist and ended up a fanatical anticommunist) class warfare. The war was about what it in fact had brought into being, the “Negro problem,” and “the Black-No-More treatment” produces the solution: “if there were no Negroes, there could be no Negro problem” (54). Schuyler imagines a world in which, once all the phenotypical marks of race are removed, race itself disappears. And while this world of course is a fantasy, Schuyler’s fantasy is only a generalized version of Faulkner’s: it consists just in making every black person as white as Joe Christmas and Charles Bon. The difference is that, in Schuyler, if you’re as white as Joe Christmas and Charles Bon, you’re white. Reducing race to nothing but skin color and the relevant set of phenotypical traits, Black No More eliminates the invisible essence of blackness that Bon’s and Christmas’s white bodies conceal. In Black No More, race is like weight, a physical fact about the body rather than a determinant of identity, and it makes no more sense to think of people who look white as really black than it would make sense to think of a person who looked fat as really thin. Schuyler treats skin color, in other words, not as more or less reliably representing an intrinsically invisible racial identity but as constituting that identity and he thus imagines that if you change the color from black to white you change the person from black to white. And the only element of fantasy here really is in the analogy between skin color and weight; for in reality skin color was and continues to be a physical characteristic that is more

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like height than weight, that can’t so easily be altered. But this element of the fantastic only helps to make Schuyler’s point, which is that, if we treated skin color like height, race would lsappear just as surely as it would if we somehow made everybody into the same color. Tall people cannot commit miscegenation with short people; the child of a tall mother and a short father is not of “mixed’ height. Black No More is a thought experiment in the reduction of race to biology-which is to say, in the elimination of race by the transformation of skin color into physical fact instead of metaphysical sign. It makes Ringo’s description of Reconstruction in Yoknapatawpha-“They aint no more niggers, in Jefferson nor nowhere else” (199)-come true. Ringo’s point, of course, is just the opposite-you can eliminate the difference between free and slave but you can’t eliminate the difference between black and white; that’s why the problem of the color line is, in Du Bois’s famous formulation, the problem of the twentieth century, not the nineteenth. It is Faulkner’s contribution to this problem, not to solving it but to maintaining it, that I have been describing today. He was one of the great metaphysicians of race, able so thoroughly to intertwine it with class, money, and sex that his best novels make a world without race (Schuyler’s world since he gets rid of it, even Young’s world since he ignores it) look figuratively as well as literally pallid. Indeed, Young’s inability to intensify the world of his aristocrats by racializing the culture they defend might almost be said to predict the loss of intensity in Faulkner’s own writing about his peasantry, as that peasantry declined from Sutpens to Snopeses. Faulkner’s art needed the problem of the color line, and as long as the problem of the twentieth century continues into the twenty-first, we will be able to make good use of Faulkner’s art. Whether the problem of the twenty-first century will be the problem of the color line is, of course, another question, as is the question of what Faulkner would look like to readers who could feel neither pathos nor pleasure in the project of racial identification.

NOTES 1. Stark Young, “Not in Memoriam, but in Defense,” in 1’11 Take My Stand (1930; Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, ig77), 328. 2. Walter Benn Michaels, Our America (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). See also “Local Colors,” MLN. 3. Faulkner might, perhaps, be said to produce a kind of parody of sectional reconciliation in the relation between Quentin and Shreve, parodic if only because Shreve isn’t even American, and because instead of affirming the bonds of whiteness Absalom, Absalom! ends with Shreve predicting a black planet and declaring himself a descendant of black Jim Bond.

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22. Gena McKinley, “Light in August: A Novel of Passing?,” in Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie, eds., Faulkner in Cultural Context (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, i g g ~ ) 151; , Kevin Railey, 192. McKinley is describing Light in August, Railey is describing Absalom, Absalom!;he regards Light in August as more committed to a ‘biological, genetic and natural belief in race identity.” As the following discussion should indicate (and as the longer treatment in “Autobiography of an Ex-white Man: Why Race is Not a Social Construction,” Transition 73 [7:13, 122-43, makes clear), I regard the opposition between biological and social accounts of racial identity as a false one. In The Fragile Thread: The Meaning of Form in Faulkner’s Novels (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, ig7g), Donald Kartiganer also treats Charles Bon’s racial identity as a fiction but he means fiction in the sense of an “imaginative leap” (98) made in and through the narrative collaboration of Quentin and Shreve. 23. McKinley, in Faulkner in Cultural Context, 150. 24. William Faulkner, Light in August (1932; New York: Vintage International, 1985), 219. 25. George Schuyler, Black No More (1931; Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989)>25.

Beyond the Edge of the Map: Faulkner, Turner, and the Frontier Line

ROBERT W. HAMBLIN

1

James Cowan’s fascinating novel, A Mapmaker’s Dream, subtitled The Meditations of Fra Mauro, Cartographer to the Court of Venice,l records the lifelong efforts of a sixteenth-century monk to create an accurate and comprehensive map of the entire world. In his cloister of an island monastery Fra Mauro interviews explorers, merchants, and visitors from distant lands; reads letters and books by world travelers; and pores over maps created by other cartographers. In the process of conducting his research and mapping his findings, Fra Mauro comes to understand, and accept, the paradoxical and mysterious relationship between the known and the unknown, civilization and barbarity, culture and nature, science and myth, reality and ideality, experience and art. Ultimately, his life’s work, the map, becomes the text in which he records his impressions of life, nature, and self. Unlike Cowan, William Faulkner never wrote a philosophical novel about a mapmaker’s quest for understanding and order; yet he too was a mapmaker of sorts (both literally and figuratively) who seriously explored the intersection of geography and culture. As demonstrated by the maps he drew of his imaginary Yoknapatawpha County,2 his survey of the history of that county in Requiem for a Nun and “Mississippi,” and the political and historical essays and addresses he produced during the 1950s~ Faulkner was keenly interested in charting life and experience at the edge of the map, the frontier line-that point in the evolution of culture where wilderness and settlement meet, where nature and landscape are engaged and domesticated. Indeed, the story of Yoknapatawpha is one long chronicle of the advance of civilization, the repetitive cycle, as Faulkner expresses it in “Mississippi,” of “the obsolescent, dispossessed tomorrow by the already o b s ~ l e t e ” first ~ : the mound builders, then the Indans, then the white hunters and settlers who found Jefferson and establish a seat of government, then those like Thomas Sutpen who bring

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slaves and develop the plantations, then, during the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Northern soldiers and abolitionists and carpetbaggers, and eventually the lumbermen and bankers and industrialists who, in Faulkner’s own time, “[push] what remain[s] of the wilderness further and further southward into the V of the Big River and hills” (ESPL 24). By 1945, when Faulkner drew the second of his maps of Yoknapatawpha, only a tiny part of the original wilderness yet remained, and that some two hundred miles to the southwest deep in the Mississippi Delta. The Delta, beginning just to the west of Oxford and Lafayette County, played a significant role in William Faulkner’s life and work. His lifelong friend and one-time literary agent and editor, Ben Wasson, came from Greenville, and Faulkner often visited him there. Another Greenvillian, Hodding Carter, the founding editor of the Delta-Democrat Times, strongly influenced Faulkner’s views on race and ~ectionalism.~ As a young man, in the company of another friend, Phi1 Stone, the Oxford lawyer, Faulkner frequently traveled to Clarksdale to visit Reno’s Place, a popular nightclub and gambling spot of the 1920s. In 1952 Faulkner delivered the annual Delta Council address on the Delta State College campus in Cleveland. Sections of two of Faulkner’s finest and most significant narratives are set in the Delta: Go Down, Moses and 1.1 Forget

Thee, Jerusalem [The Wild Palms]. In both Faulkner’s personal life and his art the Mississippi Delta functions as a frontier society geographically and psychologically removed from the restraining social order of Oxford and Jefferson. The Delta is a place to explore personal freedom, to escape the censorious judgments of family and neighbors back home; it is a place to return to the primitive conditions of the wilderness, where bears and deer and squirrels outnumber humans, before the advent of plantations and lumber companies and railroads that would deplete the big woods and the animals; it is a place where individuals can test their mettle, where the worth of the individual and his place in the social order is based on integrity and personal skill and courage and effort and not on authoritative decree or aristocratic privilege. Significantly, Faulkner’s Delta begins at the westernmost edge and continues beyond the border of the maps he drew of Yoknapatawpha County, thus representing unincorporated space, virgin land as yet unsettled, uncivilized, and unspoiled. In this regard, as I shall subsequently demonstrate, Faulkner’s Delta stands as a microcosm of that larger and continually expanding American frontier that Frederick Jackson Turner, in his highly influential The Frontier in American History and other works, argued was the single most important factor in the development of American character, values, and institutions.

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To emphasize the ideal, even divine, quality of the wilderness, Faulkner compares the world of the big woods to the biblical Eden. Thus Ike links the existence of the Delta wilderness to the original creation story: “He told in the Book how He created the earth, made it and looked at it and said it was all right, and then He made man. He made the earth first and peopled it with dumb creatures, and then He created man to be His overseer on the earth and to hold suzerainty over the earth and the animals on it in His name, not to hold for himself and his descendants inviolable title forever, generation after generation, to the oblongs and squares of the earth, but to hold the earth mutual and intact in the communal anonymity of brotherhood’ (257).In the idyllic wilderness, then, there is no concern for ownership. Neither is social caste nor race a factor. In the big woods Southern aristocrats, poor whites, blacks, and Indians conjoin in mutual fellowship and brotherhood, and the worth of a man is determined by his own merits, not by artificial definitions society might impose. In the woods all men-white, black, and red-are literally and symbolically brothers. In the dialogue with his cousin Cass in section 4 of “The Bear,” Ike parallels this ideal wilderness ruled by Old Ben and Sam Fathers with the genesis of American civilization. The American continent, Ike points out, was settled in idealism and hope, a place where man could escape “the old worlds worthless twilight” and create “a new world where a nation of people could be founded in humility and pity and sufferance and pride of one to another” (258). In this brave new world man would throw off the shackles of the past and begin anew to carve out an ideal commonwealth which would shun the sins and errors of previous civilizations. The bountiful and open frontier of the wilderness that settlers found in this new world contributed to the vision of perfection: “this land . . . for which [God] had done so much with woods for game and streams for fish and deep rich soil for seed and lush springs to sprout it and long summers to mature it and serene falls to harvest it and short mild winters for men and animals.77Thus was born the American Dream, the belief that the “whole hopeful continent [was] dedicated as a refuge and sanctuary of liberty and freedom from . . . the old worlds worthless evening”

(283)-

This dream, however, had not materialized, and Ike McCaslin’s survey of the history of both the South and the nation explores some of the reasons why. For one thing there was the matter of how the white man had taken the land from the Indians. For another there was the curse of chattel slavery. America, which had been founded in freedom, had been built only in part on the noble virtues of courage, industry, and sacrifice: it was also based upon man’s inhumanity to his fellow man, and this

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by a benevolent God sympathetic to the needs and concerns of man. The characterization is decidedly Wordsworthian, a nature that with “One impulse from a vernal wood / May teach you more of man, / Of moral evil and of good, / Than all the sages can.”8Yet Faulkner well knew there was another type of nature. Post-Darwinian and schooled in the literary naturalism of Theodore Dreiser and others, he knew of a nature that is indifferent, even hostile, to man: “nature red in tooth and law,''^ ruled by natural selection and chance and the survival of the fittest. This nature resides off the edge of the map; it is the ultimate frontier, unexplored and terror-filled, beyond the known world, the place where land and water’s end falls away into chaos and darkness. Before he wrote “The Bear,” Faulkner had already presented this frightful view of nature, in the story of the tall convict in the “Old Man” section of The Wild Palms

[IfI Forget Thee, Jerusalem].

“Old Man” is set during the raging Mississippi River flood of 1927. At the height of the crisis a group of prisoners in Parchman penitentiary are commanded to assist in shoring up levees along the river and in locating and rescuing refugees who have had to abandon their homes. Two of the prisoners, the protagonist of the story identified only as “the tall convict” and a second called “the plump convict,” are given a skiff and an oar and assigned the task of rescuing a woman clinging to a cypress snag and a man sitting on the ridgepole of a cotton house. Almost immediately the quest turns into a horror-filled struggle for survival pitting frail, solitary man against the malevolent and destructive power of the river, Old Man. On the rushing sweep of the flooding current the tall convict is swept uncontrollably on an atavistic journey backward through time, back to precivilization when, seemingly, the whole universe was one untraveled frontier. As in “The Bear,” here Faulkner employs a biblical myth from Genesis, though in this case it is not the archetype of an idyllic Eden in which man communes with God but rather the image of Noah’s flood which threatens to destroy man and all his endeavors, hurling nature back into chaos. “Old Man” contains some of the most visually descriptive language in all of Faulkner’s works, and even a small sampling of this magnificent prose will demonstrate what the tall convict is up against. Quickly separated from his companion, the tall convict is left to fend for himself, solitary and defenseless. As the plump convict later recounts the incident: “Just all of a sudden the boat whirled clean around and begun to run fast backward like it was hitched to a train and it whirled around again and I happened to look up and there was a limb right over my head and I grabbed it just in time and that boat was snatched out from under me like you’d snatch off a sock and I saw it one time more upside down and

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that fellow . . . holding to it with one hand and still holding the paddle in the Finally managing to upright and reboard the sluffand then, quite accidentally, discovering the woman, who is eight months’ pregnant, the convict attempts to resume the search for the man on the cottonhouse, but the current is too strong and continues to sweep the skiff downstream: “During the next three or four hours after the thunder and lightning had spent itself the skiff ran in pitch streaming darkness upon a roiling expanse which, even if he could have seen, apparently had no boundaries [emphasis added]. Wild and invisible, it tossed and heaved about and beneath the boat, ridged with dirty phosphorescent foam and filled with a debris of destruction-objects nameless and enormous and invisible which (WP 134). Now Faulkner struck and slashed at the skiff and whirled presents the convict not only as Noah but also as Ulysses, lost on the vast water and seeking his way back home. When the woman inquires if he knows where they are, he says, “I dont even know where I used to be. Even if I knowed which way was north, I wouldn’t know if that was where I wanted to go.” “Which way you fixing to go?“ she then asks. “Ask the boat [he replies]. I been in it since breakfast and I aint never knowed, where I aimed to go or where I was going either” (128-29). Unable to deliver the woman to shore, unable even to surrender to the authorities, who mistake his circumstance as an attempted escape and fire upon him, the convict is eventually forced to serve as unwilling attendant for the birth of the child. Then, resuming the journey with a child as well as the woman, the convict is swept still farther beyond civilization and security, seemingly now beyond the boundaries marked by maps. Much later, when he tries to explain his experiences with the Louisiana Cajuns who speak no English, identifying them as “Not Americans,” the plump convict responds in amazement: “Not Americans? You was clean out of America even?’ (201). Symbolically, the region the convict has now entered is that populated by early cartographers with monsters and demons that waited to devour men who ventured too far and fell off the edge of the world. The monsters here are snakes and alligators, the first of which he fights armed only with the broken boat paddle and the second with a small knife. It is in the hand-to-hand combats of the alligator hunts that Faulkner depicts the struggle of man versus nature in its most extreme and elemental form, a vivid description of what life is like at the farthest side of fiontier: the convict “stooped straddling, the knife driving even as he grasped the near foreleg, this all in the same instant when the lashing tail struck him a terrific blow upon the back. But the knife was home, he knew that even on his back in the mud, the weight of the thrashing beast

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Harry Wilbourne do in the companion story to “Old Man”) but back East, recrossing the ocean (in this case a river), and gladly surrendering his newfound freedom to regain the secure footing of land, home, conventionality, community. But, even conceding this, we must also acknowledge that Faulkner understood the value of pioneering heroes, the need to keep alive the frontier spirit, the willingness to retain something of the wilderness mentality, to expand the map of experience by pushing the frontier line farther and farther into the unknown. (This is exactly what he did in his artistic life, of course, as he explored new forms of narrative and characterization and made his way into that unexplored territory with only his own genius and willpower as companions and without the aid of guide, mentor, institution, or government.) As I shall now seek to demonstrate, his views in this regard are remarkably similar to those of Frederick Jackson Turner.

4 Turner (1861-1932), a native of Wisconsin who became the foremost historian and theorist of the American frontier, taught history at the University of Wisconsin from 1889 to 1910 and at Harvard from 1910 to 1924. In July 1893he delivered a paper at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago entitled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” published the following year. In succeeding years Turner expanded the application of his “frontier thesis” to various regions and stages of American history, finally publishing his most significant and influential book, The Frontier in American History, in 1920. Thus the rise to preeminence of Turner’s ideas occurred during William Faulkner’s formative years, and Faulkner is almost certain to have read or heard about Turner’s thesis. What Turner sought to do in the field of history was what Mark Twain had only recently accomplished in literature: to demonstrate that the American frontier was not a barren wasteland, greatly inferior to the more sophisticated and educated East, but a vital and viable part of American, even world, culture and thought. Turner opposed both the eighteenth-century historians, who focused almost entirely on the original colonies as an extension of European (primarily English) history and culture, and the nineteenth-century historians who interpreted American history primarily as the result of the North-South split over slavery. To really understand the uniqueness of the American experiment, Turner argued, one must examine the ongoing dialectic between the Eastern establishment and the continually expanding Western and Southwestern frontiers. “The West,” Turner argued, “was a migrating region, a stage of

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tion; and a general tendency toward national conformity rather than regional distinctiveness. As Turner wrote as early as 1907: The nationalizing tendencies are at the present time clearly in evidence. The control of great industries has passed to a striking extent into the hands of corporations or trusts, operating on a national basis and centered in a few hands. Banking and transportation systems show the same tendency to consolidation. Cities are growing at a rate disproportioned to the increase of general population, and their numerical growth is only a partial index of their influence upon the thought as well as the economic life of the country. On the whole, in spite of rivalry, the business world of these cities tends to act nationally and to promote national homogeneity. The labor organizations are national in their scope and purposes. Newspapers, telegraph, post-office-all the agencies of intercourse and the formation of thought-tend toward national uniformity and national consciousness. The cooperative publication of news furnished by national agencies, the existence of common ownership and editorial conduct of chains of newspapers, all tend to produce simultaneous formation of a national public opinion. In general the forces of civilization are working toward uniformity. (Sections 31 1-12)

The final, convincing evidence of both the geographical and psychological closing of the frontier, Turner pointed out, could be seen in the region of the frontier itself, where the policy of free land that had once promoted “old individualistic principles and the Zaissex faire conception of government” has now been replaced, through the actions of the federal Reclamation Service, by government ownership and management of land and resources (310). It is these consequences of the disappearing frontier that seem most relevant to a reading of Faulkner, since Faulkner was writing at the time when the changes Turner predicted had already occurred and become entrenched in the national agenda.

5 Turner’s ideas find echo throughout Faulkner’s works, but most explicitly in the political essays and speeches like the one Faulkner presented at Delta State College in 1952. When Faulkner visited Delta State to speak to the Delta Council, an organization of planters, farmers, and businessmen, he was an internationally renowned figure who was being asked to express his views on any number of subjects, not only writing but also race relations, politics, religion, psychology, and international relations. Significantly, though, Faulkner chose to travel to Cleveland not under the persona of the world figure but under that of the common, ordinary citizen. Joseph Blotner records an interesting anecdote about Faulkner’s

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dress for the occasion. When Bob and Alice Farley arrived at Rowan Oak to drive Faulkner to Cleveland, they found him dressed in wrinkled cotton seersucker trousers, a shirt with a badly frayed collar, an old, belted jacket that was now much too small for him, and a felt hat that Farley dated from about 1915. (Faulkner‘s attire, by the way, would prove especially fortuitous for Bern Keating, the photographer from Greenville, who was destined to shoot on this day some of the most impressive photographs of Faulkner ever made.) Blotner continues the story: “You ready to go to Cleveland,” [Farley] asked. “Oh, is this the day?” Faulkner replied, his eyes glinting. “It sure is.” “Can I go like this?” “You can if you want to.” “Let’s This makes for an amusing story, but it is extremely hard to believe that anyone, even an absent-minded author, would forget the date scheduled for him to make a significant speech on an issue of grave concern at the invitation of an important organization and before a large auchence that would include the governor of the state and other important dignitaries. More likely, Faulkner deliberately chose his attire to identify with the hard-working, self-reliant Americans who were the subject of his remarks. The speech Faulkner delivered that day, May 15, 1952, in Whitfield Gymnasium contains the essence of his views on the proper relationship between the individual and government. Drawing upon ideas expressed as well as in in his fiction all the way back to the 1930s and early the book that he was completing at the time of his visit to Cleveland, A Fable, Faulkner delivered, to a standing ovation, a scathing attack upon a federal welfare system that, he argued, devalued challenge and initiative and thus encouraged personal laziness and irresponsibility. Claiming that the contemporary American had forgotten that “the premise of the rights of man’7(ESPL 127) carried with it a willingness “to be responsible for the consequences of his own acts, to pay his own score, owing nothing to any man” (129), Faulkner reviewed the historical accomplishments of “the old tough, durable, uncompromising men” (130) who “left [their] homes, the land and graves of [their] fathers and all familiar things” (128) to secure their independence from the Old World and then successively conquer wildernesses from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific Ocean, in the process creating “a land of opportunity, in which all a man needed were two legs to move to a new place on, and two hands to grasp and hold with, in order to amass to himself enough material substance to last him the rest of his days and, who knew? even something over for his and his wife’s children” (130). In words that could have been written by Frederick Jackson Turner, Faulkner celebrated these heroic actions: “Even while we were still battling the wilderness with one hand, with the other we fended and beat off the power which would have followed

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ing this-year’s automobiles sped past them on the broad plumb-ruled highways’’ (GDM 340-41). Nothing is left of the old time, Faulkner continues, but “the In&an names on the little towns and usually pertaining to water-Aluschaskuna, Tillatoba, Homochitto, Yazoo” (34.1). A corresponding change has taken place in the character and behavior of the hunters. Paralleling the changes that Turner predicted would occur with the closing of the frontier, Faulkner presents the descendants of the old hunters as moral and physical lilliputians intrudmg into the former land of giants.17 One of the hunters, in fact, Ike’s cousin Roth Edmonds, the reader learns, has been coming to the woods not primarily to hunt but to engage in a love affair (thus all the inside jokes in the story about hunting does); and he has returned to the woods this time determined to end what has become a bothersome relationship. In Faulkner’s characterization of Roth it quickly becomes clear that none of the lessons of the woods that Sam Fathers taught the young Ike McCaslin-courage, honor, responsibility-has been learned and assimilated by Roth. A hunter who indiscriminately shoots does as readily as bucks, and with a shotgun instead of a rifle, Roth refuses to meet his mistress face to face but instead leaves money and a one-word message, “No” (356),for Ike to give to her when she comes to the camp seeking Roth. “What did you promise her that you haven’t the courage to face her and retract?” Ike asks (356). When the woman shows up at the camp, Uncle Ike discovers not only that she has her and Roths child with her but also that she is part black and a cousin of him and Roth, being the granddaughter of Tennie’s Jim, one of the mulatto descendants of old L. Q. C. McCaslin. Now it is Uncle Ike who says no. “He cried, not loud, in a voice of amazement, pity, and outrage: ‘You’re a nigger!’ (361).Sadly, it would appear, even Uncle Ike in his old age has forgotten the lesson of universal brotherhood he learned under the tutelage of Sam Fathers, in whose veins ran the blood of three races. “Go back North,” Uncle Ike advises the woman. “Marry: a man in your own race. That’s the only salvation for you-for a while yet, maybe a long while yet. We wdl have to wait. Marry a black man” (363). Earlier he had thought: “Maybe in a thousand or two thousand years in America. . , . But not now! Not now!“ (361, Faulkner’s italics). The hunting horn that Uncle Ike subsequently gives to the woman for the boy, in lineage the last known surviving descendant of old Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin in Faulkner’s work, seems nothing more than a hollow gesture. The meek may have inherited in this case, if not the earth at least some symbol of familial rights, but the legacy seems merely a sop to salve an old man’s guilty conscience. In terms of the map and frontier images I have employed throughout ”

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this essay, “Delta Autumn” suggests how far modern America has fallen from the rugged individualism of the old West/Southwest. In the postfrontier America, apparently, even old pioneers who had stood strong in the wilderness in support of their convictions now grow soft and conform to the will of the timid majority. The setting of “Delta Autumn” is far west of Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, almost as far west as the tall convict7s harrowing experiences in “Old Man.” But there is something of the character of the old frontier still operative in “Old Man,” whereas the frontier of “Delta Autumn” is a diminished, tamed one, both in terms of the woods and the men who frequent them. As Turner had predicted, with the closure of an authentic frontier, the West has been assimilated into the pattern of the East, both now stanhng in uniformed and unified defense of the status quo.

7 I have sought to demonstrate that there are considerable parallels between Faulkner’s depiction of the western frontier of Yoknapatawpha County and Frederick Jackson Turner’s characterization of the broader American frontier. In conclusion, however, I would like to emphasize a couple of key distinctions in the respective treatments. Turner’s theory of the influence of the presence and now absence of the frontier in America, as indeed his overall emphasis on the importance of geography upon a national consciousness, is highly deterministic in nature. Living and writing under the growing influence of Darwinian evolution, particularly as Darwin’s ideas had been filtered and recycled by the British philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer, Turner allowed little room for human free will and choice in the development of a civilization and its values. His metaphors and ideas are drawn primarily from the sciences, particularly geography and geology, not from the traditional humanities and certainly not from the Bible. Humankind, along with its governments and institutions and values, is principally the result of environmental conditions. Logically and predictably, when those conditions change, the individuals and governments and institutions and values will likewise inevitably change. While Turner occasionally acknowledged that there are forces in human affairs other than climate and landscape, by and large he continued to advocate geographical determinism as the major factor in the development and decline of civilizations. In the final analysis, while brilliant in its conception, design, and application, it is nevertheless, as many later historians and cultural theorists have argued, a greatly oversimplified and reductionist approach to human history.’8

Index

Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner), 2, 27-28, 31,35-36,40-41,44,47,57-58> 9297, loo, 108, 117,138, 142, 145-46, 148-49, 152 Adams, Henry, 20 Agamben, Giorgio, 109-12, 115-18 Althusser, 131 Anderson, Sherwood, 170 As I Lay Dying (Faulkner), 2, 10,57-58, 108,113 Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich, 132 “Barn Burning’ (Faulkner), 11 Barthes, Roland, 4 “Bear, The” (Faulkner), 124, 156-59 Beard, Charles and Mary, 140 Beard, Virgil, 2 Beauchamp, Lucas, 22-23, 113, 120-27, 131-35 Beauchamp, Mollie Worsham (Molly), 113, 120-24, 133 Beauchamp, Samuel Worsham (Butch), 113-14, 126 Beauchamp, Terrel (Tomey’s Turl), 126, 136 Benbow, Narcissa, 2 Benjamin, Wdter, 108-09 Bergland, Renee, 79 Berry, Louis, 72-73 Bhaba, Homi, 70,77-78, 81, 132 Bible, 170 Black No More (Schuyler), 150-51 Bleikasten, Andre, 3-4 Blotner, Joseph, 164-65 Bon, Charles, 3,34-35,37-39,43-44,92, 137-39, 142, 145,149-50, 152-53 Bon, Charles Etienne de Saint-Valery (Etienne), 147 Bon, Eulalia, 144-45 Bond, Jim, 34,39-40,148 Borges, Jorges Luis, 61-62 Brooks, Cleanth, 94, 120 Brown U. Board of Education, 21, 134 Buddha, 83 Bunch, Byron, 108, 116 Bundren, Dewey Dell, 2

Burden of Southern History, The (Woodward), 20-21 Butch. See Beauchamp, Samuel Worsham (Butch) Butler, Judith, 105 Caldwell, Erskine, 138 Caribbean Discourse ( C h a n t ) , 32 Carter, Hodding, 155 Casey, Edward, 45-46 Charlotte. See Rittenmeyer, Charlotte Christmas, Joe, 95, 105, 108, 114-15, 14-9-50 Clansman, The (Dixon), 137-38 Clytemnestra (Clytie), 144-46 Cofield, J. R., 16, 18 Coldfield, Rosa, 55, 97-98 Compson, Benjy (Benjamin), 127 Compson, General Jason Lycurgus, 11, 35, 147 Compson, Jason Lycurgus, 111, 35-38, 107-08 Compson, Quentin, 2-3, 27-28, 35-38, 55,91-96, ioo-01, 104, 127, 151 Conrad, Joseph, 92-93 Cortazar, Julio, 52 Cowley, Mdcolm, 15-16, 1g-20,70, 91 Dabney, Lewis, 68-69,84 Darwin, Charles, 169 Davis, Thadious, 126, 136 “Delta Autumn” (Faulkner), 110, 124, 167-69 Dixon, Thomas, 137 Donaldson, Susan, 63, 125 Donoso, JosB, 52 Doom. See Ikkemotubbe (Du Homme) Drake, Temple, 1 Dreiser, Theodore, 159, 170 “Dry September” (Faulkner), 10 Du Bois, W. E. B., 68, 151 Du Pre, Virginia, 96 Edmonds, Carothers (Roth), 123-24, 126-27, 134, 168 Edmonds, Zachary (Zack), 120-24

175

176

INDEX

Fabk, A (Faulkner), 5,40-47, 165 Falkner, William Clark, 134 Farmer, Cecilia, 6 Fathers, Sam (Old Sam), 156-57, 167-68 Faulkner, Mississippi (Glissant),27-28 Faulkner m the Color Line (Towner), 1 Faulkner, William: on Flem Snopes, 8; on government and the individual, 164-67; on his own biography, 17; on race, 23-24 Fetterley, Judith, 13 Fiedler, Leslie, 91 “Fire and the Hearth, The” (Faulkner), 119-28, 131-35 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 147 Flags in the Dust (Faulkner), i,g6-97 Freud, Sigmund, 71, 85, 93, 104 Froehlich, Peter, 158 Fuentes, Carlos, 52-55, 57-61 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 68, 132 Glissant, Edouard, 27-28, 32,34-36, 43-46 Godden, Richard, 63, 145 Go Down, Moses (Faulkner), 7, 110-13, 119-20, 124-26, 131-33, 155, 167 Gone with the Wind (Mitchell),138, 142 Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald), 13, 144, 146-48 Great Meadow, The (Roberts), 138, 143-44 Grierson, Emily, 55-56 Grimm, Percy, 95, 115, 149 Grove, Lena, 108, 116 Haas, Robert, 8 Hamlet, The (Faulkner), 5, 12 Handley, George, 63 Harss, Luis, 53 Hawk, Drusilla, 11 Hawkshaw (the Barber), 10 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 91 Hegel, 33,46 Hightower, Reverend Gad, 55,95-97, 100,105,116 Hines, Thomas S., 107 Honnighausen, Lothar, 82 Hopkins, Sarah Winnemucca, 74 Horsford, Howard, 69-70 Howell, Elmo, 70

IfZ

Forget Thee,]ermsakm (Faulkner),7, 155 Ikkemotubbe (Du Homme), 72,84 1’11 Take My Stand, 137, 140

lndians of Yoknupatawpha, The (Dabney), 68-69 Intruder in the Dust (Faulkner), 22-25 Irwin, John, 107, 146 Issetibbeha, 72, 77 Jackson, Andrew, 78-79,82 Jefferson, Thomas, 79 Jones, Suzanne, 64 Jones, Wash, 14.4, 147 Joyce, James, 92-93 Karl, Frederick, 19 Kartiganer, Donald M., 153 Kazin, Alfred, 89 King, Ross, 131 Kinney, Arthur, 72-73 Kreyling, Michael, 91 LaCapra, Dominick, 98 Ladd, Barbara, 63 Levin, Harry, g i Lewis, R. W. B., 91, 124 Lewis, Sinclair, 60-61 L$e Among the Piutes (Hopkins),74 Light in August (Faulkner), 94-95, 108, 114-16, 14.9 Lion, 167 Llosa, Mario Vargas, 56-57 “Lo”(Faulkner),69, 76-81, 86 Louis XV, 77 McCannon, Shreve, 2-3,35,92,94,148, 151 McCaslin, Isaac (Ike), 7, 40, 110-13, 11516, 133, 156-58, 167-68 McCaslin, L. Q. C. (Lucius Quintus Carothers), 126, 133, 168 McKinley, Gina, 149 Mansion, The (Faulkner), 9-11 Marble Faun, The (Faulkner), 16 Mhrquez, Gabriel Garcia, 50-53, 56, 5860,66 Matthews, JohnT., 125, 133 Melville, Herman, 74 Mencken, H. L., 14-19 Michaels, Walter Benn, 100-01, 111-12 Millgate, Michael, 120 Mitchell, Margaret, 138 Mokketubbe, 72,83 Molly. See Beauchamp, Mollie Worsham (MOflY)

Monteith, Sharon, 64 Moore, Gene, 76 Monison, Toni, 63,68, 127, 131, 133 Mortimer, Gad, 107

INDEX

O’Bryan-Knight,Jean, 57 Odysseus, 121 Old Ben, 156-57,167 “Old Man, The” (Faulkner), 159-62 Old Sam. See Fathers, Sam (Old Sam) One Hundred Years of Solitude (MBrquez), 56,59-60,66 Onetti, Juan Carlos, 56-57 Page, Thomas Nelson, 137 Petrarch, 81 Polar, Antonio Cornejo, 62 Polk, Noel, 1 Pompadour, Madame, 77 Portable Faulkner (Cowley),15-16,ig-20 R.A.F., 16 Rahv, Philip, 89 Railey, Kevin, 149, 152 “Red Leaves” (Faulkner), 69-76,82,86 Reiuers, The (Fadher), 7-8, 11 Requiem for a Nun (Faulkner), 1, 6, 3233,154 Rider, 126 Rilke, Theodore, 5 Ringo, 145,148,151 Rittenmeyer, Charlotte, 7, 161 Roberts, Elizabeth Madox, 138 Rowe, John Carlos, 125 Rubin, Louis D., Jr., 104 Rulfo, Juan, 55, 58 Said, Edward, 4,83-84 Sanctuary (Faulkner), 17-19, 27 Sartoris (Faulkner), 2 Sartoris, Bayard, 2 Sartoris, Virginia (Aunt Jenny), 96 Sartre, Jean Paul, 107 Schuyler, George, 150-51 Schwartz, Lawrence, 54 Shakespeare, William, 25 Shreve. See McCannon, Shreve Silver, James, 23-25 Smith, Jon, 61,64 Snopes, Byron, 1-2 Snopes, Flem, 8-9 Snopes, Linda, 5 Snopes, Mink, 5,g-lo Snopes, Montgomery Ward, 9

177

Song of Solomon (Morrison), 130, 133 So Red the Rose (Young), 137-42 Sound and the Fury, The (Faulkner),2, 107 Spoot. See Rider Stevens, Gavin, 7, 22-23,25, 14.9 Stevens, Gowan, 1 Stone, Phil, 155 Styron, William, 53 Sutpen, Henry, 13739,142 Sutpen, Judith, 92, 139 Sutpen, Thornas, 31,35-39,59,92-93, 97-98, 138-39, 142-48, 152, 154 Tdiaferro, Charles, 137-39 Tate, Men, 16 Tennie, 84 Tennie’s Turl. See Beauchamp, Terrel (Tomey’sTurl) “That Evening Sun Go Down” (Faulkner), 17-18 Three Basket, Herman, 72-73,82 Tomey’s Turl. See Beauchamp, Terrel (Tomey’s Turl) “Town, The” (Faulkner), 5, 9, 12 Towner, Theresa, 131-33 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 155, 161-65, 168-70 Typee (Melville),74 Uncle Ash, 126 Unuanquished, The (Faulkner), 1 ~ 6 1 , 142 Volpe, Edmund, 75 Wasson, Ben, 1, 17, 155 Watlans, Floyd, 75 Weinstein, Philip, 63, 127-31, 133 What Eke But h u e ? The Ordeal of Race in Faulkner and Morrison (Weinstein), 127-30 Wilbourne, Harry, 162 Wild Palm, The (Fadher), 159 William Faulkner and Southern History (Williamson),134 Williamson, Joel, 134, 145 Woodward, C. Vann, 20-21, 104 Young, Stark, 137-42, 151