In Joe Christmas’ death scene he is resurrected and transcends out of his body and manifests himself in the mind of the townspeople. “The pent black blood seemed to rush out of his pale body like the rush of sparks from a rising rocket; upon that black blast the man seemed to to rise soaring into their memories forever and ever.” In Christmas’ final scene he is able to finally shed the ambiguous color that has plagued him his entire life. He physically loses his racial identity as he becomes pale and the black separates from him. His biracial identity is literally ripped out of him by Grimm.

Faulkner’s Christ-figure misfit isn’t given the final say in the novel. I find this to be a bold choice and a direct commentary on the Christ-figure. Throughout this novel, there have been biblical allusions. Lena Grove mildly representing Virgin Mary, Joanna Burden representing John the Baptist, and Christmas representing Jesus Christ. The choice for Faulkner to twist and contort these characters into less than holy representations of these biblical figures is intriguing.

Focusing on Christmas, the sexist, possibly murderous, irredeemable character in this novel takes on this Christ role. Faulkner using someone who is the complete opposite of Christ pushes the death Christmas to be more controversial. Are we are the reader supposed to feel sorrow for Christmas? His murder at the hands of a white supremacist pushes the reader to feel bad for a character that maybe we shouldn’t feel bad for. Ultimately, Christmas’ murder is driven by hate, and in true Faulkner fashion, he flips the resurrection on its head.

Biblically, Jesus died for people’s sins, and those sins were absolved. Joe Christmas’ death does not absolve the town of their sins. His death instead instills the memory of Joe Christmas that will not fade from their memory. Christmas’ death serves to hold a mirror up to the town. His corpse, with the black and white in him physically separated is a visual representation of the racial divide that inhabits the town.

In “Pantaloon in Black,” Faulkner critiques indifference to racial violence by giving readers two iterations of Rider’s story which vary in how and how much they say about the man. From the moment he buries his wife until he kills Birdsong, the story is focalized through him and it is very detailed. It faithfully reports everything from his movement through the landscape to the unique physical sensation of the alcohol he imbibed. Readers should pity him because of his addiction and inability to cope with loss, both interconnected symptoms of his problematic understanding of self and masculinity. Through this sympathy he is thoroughly humanized as the story’s protagonist and as an African American male.  In the second part of “Pantaloon in Black,” his suffering and inability to cope are minimized by indifference as the story is shortened and told through by the white deputy to his wife. Everything that humanizes Rider to the reader is reinterpreted as evidence of the inhumanity of all African Americans, “but when it comes to the normal human feelings and sentiments of human beings, they might just as well be a damn herd of wild buffaloes. Now you take this one today–” (147). Here, he proceeds to tell a condensed version of the story in he really only recounts and emphasizes the parts of Rider’s last days that fully support his claim. As evidence of his claim that Rider might as well be a wild animal, he is sure to stress Rider’s brute strength in lifting the logs, ripping open the cell, and brawling with the prisoners. And how could he overlook Rider’s apparent lack of feelings and respect in picking up a shovel at the funeral and returning to work the next day. This is a dramatic reduction of Rider’s true story to a convenient narrative for a racist deputy to believe.

Upon finishing his account, he asks his wife what she thinks of it all to which she replies, “I think if you eat any supper in this house you’ll do it in the next five minutes…I’m going to clear this table then and I’m going to the picture show” (152). Her response is so routine, so ordinary that it is as if she had not just heard the violently tragic tale that her husband just told her, like she had not even listened to the twisted version he spun. It is the response of someone who is so desensitized to racial violence and is so convinced of the inhumanity of African-Americans that it effectively takes what was already a shortened account of Rider’s most traumatic hours and erases it from the world. Save for the fact that this fictional account of build up to a lynching has been recorded by Faulkner and included in this collection, the community that allows the response of deputy’s wife’s response will itself never hear his story again story again. 

Greg Forter discusses trauma at great length in  “Freud, Faulkner, Caruth: Trauma and the Politics of Literary Form” particularly in regards to traumatic effects that stem from indirect relationships to a specific traumatic event. Working from Caruth, Forter explores “trauma’s capacity to be represented or ‘known’ (by those who haven’t directly experienced it)” (262) in relation to Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!. Working through Forter’s analysis, I am interested in the role trauma plays in a particular moment in Absalom, Absalom! where certain characters engage with each other in an seemingly impossible way that transcends time and space. Near the end of Faulkner’s novel, we see the convergence of two sets of young men in a mystic, specific way that seems to be engendered through their parallel characteristics and a kind of frenzied blurring of knowing. Readers have been following the conversational storytelling between Quentin and Shreve for much of the novel, their story’s main characters being Charles and Henry, among others. Around the time of the metaphysical convergence, there is a shift in the storyteller’s discussion, from Quentin speaking to Shreve, in a way that elucidates the blurry way in which they had begun to be wrapped up in the story itself, and / or in their retelling of it: “Shreve ceased. That is, for all the two of them, Shreve and Quentin, knew he had stopped, since for all the two of them knew he had never begun, since it did not matter (and possibly neither of them conscious of the distinction) which one had been doing the talking” (267). We can tell from this passage that the clearness of their conversation is moving into a more fluid, shape-shifting format in their engagement. The convergence that transcends time and space in a physical-seeming way occurs shortly after Shreve takes the stage in the conversation (however shifty this stage may be): Faulkner writes, “So that now it was not two but four of them riding the two horses through the dark over the frozen December ruts of that Christmas eve: four of them and then just two — Charles-Shreve and Quentin-Henry” (267). Pairing the young men up for us, based on their similarities in relation to one another, Faulkner takes a near metaphysical turn where the frame story, of Quentin and Shreve, converges with the narrative retelling of the additional story, of Charles and Henry. There is this repetitive picture being painted of the four men, Quentin, Shreve, Charles, and Henry, together during this time. Faulkner writes, “Four of them there, in that room in New Orleans in 1860, just as in a sense there were four of them here in this tomblike room in Massachusetts in 1910” (268) and again, “– four of them who sat in that drawing room of baroque and fusty magnificence which Shreve had invented and which was probably true enough…” (268). In these passages, there is vivid descriptions regarding the physical surroundings of the men, signifying the physicality in which this newfound party of four inhabits. In the earlier passage, there is a note of equality in this double-narrative-crossing where we know that the four not only inhabit New Orleans, but also Massachusetts, which shows that both locations are equally inhabitable by this mysterious foursome. Forter writes on convergences of worlds in the illustration of pools which ripple into one another: “Even more, the passage insists that the trauma of historical events affects those who do not live through them with the same force as those who do… The “ripples” produced by any event radiate outward in concentric ringlets, reverberating beyond their initial occurrence to affect those who were neither geographically nor temporally present when the stone first disturbed the waters of consciousness” (277). He notes that it is not necessary for a person to be geographically present for a rippling of connectivity to affect a person of a different time, and I believe that the double-narrative-crossing that occurs is a physical, perhaps playfully literal manifestation of this type of rippling effect that transcends time.

Race and blood seem to be a reoccurring theme in all of Faulkner’s works we have read, as it was in the south. For the most part all the racial tension has been between black and white, but in Go Down Moses we are given a third group of people- the Native Americans. In “Old People” we are introduced to the character Sam Fathers. Sam is the son of Indian Chief Ikkemotubbe of the Chickasaw tribe and a quadroon slave from New Orleans. Though Sam is the son of a chief he is not raised in the Native American Community. His father married off Sam’s mom to another slave and sold all three of them to McCaslin, leaving the part white-part black-part Chickasaw Sam to be raised among the slaves. Even though his father did not raise him he still holds on to his Native American identity, being noticeably different from the other blacks and having a deep connection to nature.

Sam’s mixed race identity places him in a “cage he has been in all his life” (161). This cage is not that of his bondage as a slave, but of his mixed identity and tainted blood:

“He was the direct son not only by a warrior but of a chief. Then he grew up and began to learn things, and all of a sudden one day he found out that he had been betrayed the blood of the warriors and chiefs had been betrayed. Not by his father…He probably never held it against old Doom for selling him and his mother into slavery, because he probably believed the damage was already done before then and it was the same warriors’ and chiefs’ blood in him and Doom both that was betrayed through the black blood which his mother gave him. Not betrayed by the black blood and not willfully betrayed by his mother, but betrayed by her all the same, who had bequeathed him not only the blood of slaves but even a little of the very blood which had enslaved it; himself his own battleground, the scene of his own vanquishment and the mausoleum of his defeat” (162)

Blood is a significant feature in this passage. Sam Fathers is the direct child of both royalty and a slave, placing him not only in 2-3 different races but also social classes. With the laws in the south at the time it only takes a single drop of black blood to be considered black. Though Sam’s father sold him and his mother it is his mother that he has to blame. With Sam’s mother being part black and part white she has the tainted blood of what is presumably a black slave and a white master, with the black blood in her ruining the white. This same blood rests in Sam, who’s understanding of his fathers decision to sell him and his mother, because what else was he supposed to do? With all this tainted blood inside him he is always at war with himself, even if we do not get to hear it from him.

This battle within ones self over racial identity is something we have seen before, specifically in Joe Christmas in Light in August. Christmas battled over his racial identity and his “black blood” throughout the novel. The difference between him and Sam is that Christmas didn’t know what his racial makeup actually was, which added to his internal struggles. Both these men abandoned by a parent had to find a way to live with the cage of tainted blood they were doomed to live in, though in Christmas’s case there was no escaping it.

[Blog 6]