Remember that we’re meeting on the 3rd Floor of HW tomorrow in the newly renovated space adjacent to the cafeteria at the regular time, with the film to follow at 7pm for those who can stay.

Also, you’re only responsible for the end of AA! for tomorrow.  We’ll spend the final two sessions on GDM, or a somewhat abridged reading thereof.  Here’s a peek at what we’ll officially read, though of course you’re welcomed/encouraged to read more:

“Was,” “Fire and the Hearth,” “The Bear” (for 12/3)**

“Delta Autumn,” “Go Down, Moses” (for 12/10)

**yes, I realize this is a ridiculous amount of reading.  All the more reason to get a jump over Thanksgiving. There’s just not a good way to divvy up this book, so it’s very front-loaded and gives us a break for the final session.

Just a reminder that we’ll be screening the new Franco AILD on Tuesday from about 7-9:30 pm in the newly renovated space in HW (to your left as you move from HW towards HN via the overpass).  The President will supply us with pizza and drinks.  Auditors are most welcome.  Would you please leave a comment below if you’re planning to attend, so I can get a rough head count?

As Faulkner pushed his aesthetic beyond the early modernist experimentation of As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury to the epic, rambling myths of Light in August and Absalom, Absalom!, he began to tackle a wider expanse of themes. Where in the earlier phase he attempts to create a pair of families that in some way stand in for the South, in the later phase it is the South itself — and all its history — that is made to speak for itself. Among the most important of these themes in these latter tales of a fallen, denuded South is that of miscegenation.

A few initial thoughts based on research (and for now I’m citing specific parts of novels from memory here, so please forgive problems with specifics) about how miscegenation works in Faulkner, who himself had “ ‘shadow’ kin” of mixed race, whom he never publicly acknowledged (Argiro 111) — which I will definitely be looking into:

1) Miscegenation as threat to Southern society. In Faulkner, miscegenation threatens to upend everything for which antebellum Southern society stands, particularly the superiority of the white male, and therefore his ability to lay claim to pure whiteness, but it also registered a more significant threat: That of management and labor subsuming one another, leaving a capitalist society in chaos. Also notable that during early 20^th century a popular belief among Southerners that “mulattoes were a dying breed,” and therefore “the sins of the antebellum fathers were fading from view.” (Tredell 122) Miscegenation also therefore seems to denote in Southern society the persistence of slavery’s legacy.

2) Degrees of miscegenation to visually mark the fall of prominent white families. The most obvious example of this comes with Charles Bon, Sutpen’s son from a Haitian “octoroon.” Sutpen’s early hope fades and is replaced by increasingly black generations, until all that is left in Sutpen’s Hundred is Bon’s grandson Charles Bond. As Ben Railton notes of Sutpen’s story in Absalom, Absalom!, “What Quentin … comes to stand, finally, is the role that race, or more exactly, miscegenation, has played in the history of the South.” (49) Faulkner also notes that Sutpen was going to name his daughter Cassandra — in myth she can tell the future — Clytemnestra — murderer of Agamemnon. The nameplay here collapses two myths to portend Sutpen’s eventual fall.

3) Miscegenation and incest. The Shreve-Quentin and Henry-Charles doubling invites readers to view their unfolding dramas as complementary. Where Quentin’s main fear is for his sister’s purity, which drives him to fantasize about incest, Faulkner leaves it unclear whether Henry’s biggest concern — and the reason why Henry kills Charles — is incest or miscegenation. Williamson (384) notes in William Faulkner and Southern History that prominent white and black families had a long history of shared blood, which may help begin to unpack this complicated coupling of two seemingly divergent sex-act categories, both entailing “suicidal failure” of white families to preserve their purity. (Tredell 122)

4) Miscegenation as mystery. Joe Christmas and Charles Bon have little to say, and rarely speak for themselves. Faulkner deprives his mixed characters the chance to speak. This may speak to what Toni Morrison describes as Southern writer’s tendency to use black (or in this case mixed-race characters) to characterize white society. Here I might look at perhaps the ultimate example of miscegenation in Faulkner’s work: Joe Christmas, who says that in he has wasted his life (wasting his life) if he finds that is not, in fact, black. As in, his parchment-colored skin has fated him to a certain kind of life. The closest Faulkner gets to telling us whether Christmas is black is when  he tells the story of his grandfather murdering Christmas’ biological mother’s lover — called a Mexican. His inability to stake a claim on either whiteness or blackness makes him live as neither, really, despite his attempts to live as a black man.

SOURCES

Argiro, Thomas. “As Though We Were Kin”: Faulkner’s Black-Italian Chiasmus MELUS , Vol. 28, No. 3, Italian American Literature (Autumn, 2003), pp. 111-132 Oxford University Press. Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3595263

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1992. Print. Book in Hunter library call no. PS173 .N4 M67 1993

Railton, Ben. “What Else Could a Southern Gentleman Do?”: Quentin Compson, Rhett Butler, and Miscegenation. The Southern Literary Journal , Vol. 35, No. 2 (Spring, 2003), pp. 41-63. University of North Carolina Press Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20078366

Tredell, Nicolas. William Faulkner : The Sound and the Fury ; As I Lay Dying. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. chapter 4: Division, Death and Desire: Race and Form in Faulkner in the 1980s (p 122, Google Scholar)

Williamson, Joel. William Faulkner and Southern History. New York : Oxford University Press, 1995.

Just a friendly note to remind you to make sure to “claim” entries on the “entry ideas” page prior to writing/posting.  Most of you are doing this most of the time, but we’ve had a couple of instances of duplication.

It is ironic that Christmas spends the entirety of the novel (as well as his life ) cursing the “black blood” he attributes to his mixed ancestry. In fact, as the story of Christmas’s parentage and early days of existence ultimately reveals, if anyone passed this shamed and vengeful fury down to Joe it was his (very white), very unstable grandfather, “Uncle Doc” Hines. An extremely violent and angry man, like McEachern, Hines’ vision is blinded by his religious fanaticism and in attempt to enforce his own beliefs and subsequently justified (in his opinion) authority, he single-handedly destroys his own family. Revolted by his grandson’s mixed blood, it is Hines who crafts the initial negative space within which Joe is to build his identity by denying him a family, a history, as well as a home.

In no other moment are the crippling affects of the sort of medieval ideals that the South’s society was built upon so apparent than within the conversations Hines believes he had has with God, claiming that He told him, “I have put the mark on him (Joe) and now I am going to put the knowledge. And I have set you there to watch and guard My will. It will be yours to tend to it and oversee” (371). Hines, so convinced in what he perceives to be the duty God has chosen him for, is blind to the absurdity of accusing an innocent baby of bringing “the black curse of God Almighty” (374) into the world. In one of the most chilling scenes I think I have ever read, Hines reveals that he placed Joe in the Memphis orphanage where he worked as a janitor. There, in the confines of the furnace room, he watched Joe everyday for five years and readied his grandson for a life of misery. “You don’t know what you are,” he tells the child, “And more than that, you won’t ever know” (384), effectively leading Joe to the start of his never-ending search for what is ultimately an unattainable sense of self and identity. Thus, the magnitude of the negativity from which Joe attempted to carve an identity is suddenly understood. Not only did he take away his parents, Hines also made sure Joe was never given the chance to experience any kind of loving, nurturing relationship or environment. It was Hines, Joe’s own grandfather, that encouraged the other children in the orphanage to call Joe a “nigger” and it was Hines who quietly taunted Joe over the fact and it was Hines who watched Joe day in and day out to make sure he become aware of some unseen but threatening difference which set him apart from everyone else, instilling the great shame in Joe’s blood that was to dominate every experience, every relationship, within Joe’s life. While Joe is, of course, fully responsible for the atrocities he later commits, it was Hines who carefully shaped Joe into a person so troubled, confused, and desperate as to commit them.

Although he remains paralyzed within that negative space, unable to move his mind beyond its festering, stagnant state, it is this dark, shamed blood which drive’s Joe, which urges him to keep trekking on down the road. What exactly it seeks is only made clear upon the death of the very body which houses this uneasy blood – escape. When Joe is finally struck down, the “pent black blood” which pours from his body seems to rush out with a great sigh of relief. Faulkner compares it to “the rush of sparks from a rising rocket” (465), as the blood rushes out in triumphant abandonment of the cage in which it was trapped for so long. The shame which has driven Joe to run for over half his life is expelled from his limbs and finally he collapses to the ground. Free of the black blood which coursed through and corrupted it veins, Joe’s body can rest in peace at last.

In Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! Jason Compson’s telling of the story, he frequently brings up the notions of solvency, or “spiritual solvency” in specific. Solvency by definition is the state of being able to pay debts. Faulkner employs the notion not only in monetary ways through Sutpen, but expands it into a broader theme of the white man’s guilt in Southern society through Mr. Coldfield.

The “spiritual solvency” of Sutpen involves around materialistic and monetary judgments. When “his guests would bring whiskey out with them but he drank of this with a sort of sparing calculation as though keeping mentally, General Compson said, a sort of balance of spiritual solvency between the amount of whiskey he accepted and the amount of running meat which he supplied of the guns.” (AA, 30) As General Compson reveals, the reason why Sutpen had never ordered a drink at the tavern in his first appearance in town, was not because he wasn’t a man fond of drinks as the townspeople presumed, but because he did not have the money to pay for it. Sutpen is very aware of exactly how much he gives and how much is given – this monetary calculation of spiritual solvency is very reminiscent to that of Joe Christmas who Bunch realizes hasn’t been eating lunch for three days because he does not yet have the money to afford it.

Jason Compson describes Mr. Coldfield as upright puritan man, who “seems to have intended to use the church into what he had invested a certain amount of sacrifice and doubtless self-denial and certainly actual labor and money for the sake of what might be called a demand balance of spiritual solvency.” (AA, 38) Furthermore, when the Yankees come and loot his store — his last remaining supplies that he had refused to sell to his confederate town, Jason Compson speculates, that Coldfield “had to sacrifice the hoarding, the symbol of fortitude and abnegation, to keep intact the spiritual solvency which he believed that he had already established and secured.” (AA, 66)  The sense of spiritual solvency for Coldfield is twofold. One, it is the spiritual solvency of the church, in order to obtain religious solvency his Christian faith obligates “a certain amount of sacrifice and doubtless self-denial.” Not only is this sense of spiritual solvency reminiscent of Mr. McEachern’s religious beliefs of inflicting physical pain as an act of self-denial, but more specifically to Hightower’s sense of spiritual solvency.

Both Mr. Coldfield and Hightower are abolitionists and men of religious faith who feel a deep sense of burden and guilt for the virtue of being white men in a horrifically violent white supremacist society. Each of their sense of spiritual solvency regards paying his dues to the church and finding an alternative way to each pay for his own burden of being a white man, and thereby in their minds in part being responsibly for the institution of slavery. Hightower, when asked by Bunch to give Christmas an alibi, initially refuses, and becomes transfixed on this moral dilemma. He thinks to himself, “I wont I wont I have bought immunity I have paid I have paid.” (LIA, 309) Similar to Coldfield’s belief “that he had already established and secured” his spiritual solvency, Hightower is entranced by his “reiterative, patient, justificative [words]: ‘I paid for it. I didn’t quibble about the price … I just wanted peace; I paid them their rice without quibbling.’”(AA, 66/LIA, 311)

As Coldfield’s abolitionist payment for spiritual solvency, he refuses to support or fight for the Confederate Army and frees two “Negresses” as soon as he is able to purchase them. Additionally, it is yet unclear, but it seems likely that the marriage of Ellen and Sutpen may have been a matter of settling a debt and obtaining spiritual solvency for Coldfield, opening up a whole different notion of spiritual solvency wherein women and more provocatively, virginity are being objectified as payments for the spiritual solvency of men.

Check Blackboard for your midterm grades.  I’ve just posted numbers and am happy to discuss particular trouble spots or questions with anyone during office hours.  We’ll also review the exam in general on Tuesday, so that’s a good time to ask for clarification as well.