Tag Archives: AA

Lost Cause in the news

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Check out Brent Staples’s piece on the long aftermath of Lost Cause ideology, the idea that all Americans can get behind the noble intent and courage of Southerners who waged civil war even if the slavery system they defended was an abomination.

As a native of Jackson, MS and a child of very right-wing parents and extended family, I’m all-too-familiar with the revisionist ideas that were still dominant among Southern whites in my childhood in the 70s and 80s and have emerged with horrific force in the past ten years or so, predominantly under the sign of Trumpism but in no way limited to Trump’s personal appeal or whatever passes for his policy agenda. Just as I grew up with the idea that the Civil War was the “War Between the States” or even “The War of Northern Aggression” (the latter usually delivered with tongue in cheek a bit, but hardly disavowed); that the War was “not over slavery” but was about tariff policy (!) the abstractions of federalism (!!) or even more outlandish pseudo-causes; the attempts to enforce, at the state level, watered-down courses on “Mississippi history” that white-washed the bloody history of the state, so much so that the pretty corny and white-centered film Mississippi Burning shocked so many of us into reading up on SNCC, the Summer of 2963, and the killings of Schwerner, Cheney, and Goodman. And to ask our parents … uhh … what they were up to at that particular moment. Their answers were instructive. They were comfortably enmeshed in a Jim Crow fantasy world enabled by the fracturing, isolating force of residential segregation, segregated school (de jure) and workplaces (de facto), and assured the segregation represented the Best of All Possible Worlds.

I’ll pause the confessional mode now: confessions have a way of generating value that slips into the pocket of the teller, and I don’t mean to let myself, my old friends and family, or anyone else off the hook. More important is to read Staples, which narrates the peak of Lost Cause ideology in the 1910s (symptomatically the year of the “frame story” of Absalom and of Quentin’s suicide) and a sense of the stakes as we undergo furious battles on the local/state/federal levels, especially in libraries and classrooms, as we wage war over what we might have thought were settled liberal-democratic principles of teaching the work of the best, most informed and imaginative historians (and critics and sociologists and philosophers…) and allowing the widest possible access to the widest possible range of materials.

While I’m shilling for great work of others, Jamelle Bouie of the NYT is a freedom-fighter who has somehow figured out how to let the rather stodgy and latte-liberal NYT let him drop so much knowledge on the legal and civil rights history of the US, grounded in Du Bois’s later work, especially Black Reconstruction in the US, which is itself a must-read to hear the echoes of the “nadir” phase of the history of civil rights for African Americans in our own moment.

I’ll also mention the brand-new book of my dear friend Jeff Sharlet, a journalist and professor at Dartmouth whose The Undertow: Scenes from a Civil War weaves together a wide range of pieces that tell the “inner story” of our moment, the kind of stuff that the who/what/where/when mode of normal journalism often leaves out. He’s a white dude like myself (don’t know whether you’ve noticed), but he leverages that “unmarked” aspect to attend Trump marches, talk to militia members, slip into megachurches, and, in a spy/counterspy mode pioneered by the great James Agee and Walker Evans, reads the symptoms of what he experiences richly and broadly, in analyses firmly grounded in a leftist reading of culture, history, and economics but open to the affective tug of aspects of right-wing culture (guns, the Prosperity Gospel, border politics, Trump’s “charisma,” etc.) in ways that allow us to understand it more deeply and hence, perhaps, how to combat its violence and forge differently affect-rich cultural forms that speak to parts of the body beneath the frontal cortex. Here’s an interview as well, from the Guardian.

Finally, if you don’t know already, as CUNY folk you can get free digital access to the NYT (including via iOS or Android app) via the Library. So do it and avoid having your news quite as algorithmically tailored as it is on most social media platforms.

AA!, Walter Benjamin, and the Angel of History

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I kept thinking about this famous bit from Weimar-era cultural critic Walter Benjamin while reading Faulkner reading Quentin reading Jason reading Rosa reading Sutpen this time around:

There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair [verweilen: a reference to Goethe’s Faust], to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.

The quote comes from Benjamin’s Theses on History, available here via the invaluable Marxists Archive, and it reflects on the dilemma that faces anyone who would, like Quentin and Shreve in the frame or Faulkner (and us readers) outside of it. The past isn’t over. It isn’t even past. But it comes to us mortals in the reified form of a “chain of events,” with a bogus causality and biased POV, whereas the truer state of things (as seen by the Angel here) is more like a hurricane whirling about pieces of “rubble” that can only be ordered in a contingent and evanescent way. Faulkner’s brief in this novel is to reveal the contingencies in this process and, along the way, have us think more capaciously about historiography and fiction as mutually constituting literary modes.

Here’s the picture that Benjamin references, by Paul Klee:

.Coll IMJ,. photo (c) IMJ

New Orleans, the Confederacy, and Hating It

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I didn’t make nearly enough of the stirring story of toppling monuments to the Confederacy in New Orleans this month. After reading GDM and AA in particular, we should have a keen sense of the depth of historical resonance as Mayor Landrieu has overseen the removal of monuments to Confederate leaders such as Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. The removals have been accompanied by protests and counter-protests, often with valences of fascism (e.g., burning torches and heavy arms) as well as more reasoned reactions by writers from right to left meditating on what it means to remember and/or memorialize the past.

For us, we should think of certain aspects of Faulkner’s legacy. For example, we might remember how large the War looms in the imagination of Quentin Compson, so much so that he feels emptied out in the present, “his very body an … empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names.” We might also reflect on two contrary vectors in Faulkner’s work that are highly relevant. On the one hand, we have Faulkner’s strenuous effort, amid the resurgence of nativism and white supremacy, to reveal the absurdity of racial ideologies (especially in LIA and AA via Christmas and Bon), and to attempt, however awkwardly at times, to inhabit black subjectivities and imagine black desires (especially via Lucas and Molly in GDM).

In similar fashion, Landrieu and other white elites, who very much still dominate the city and state governments and control a vast share of capital and influence, nonetheless have made a courageous effort to chip away at the toxic legacy of white supremacy with this act. On the other hand, we should remember that Faulkner shares with his liberal Southern counterparts an antipathy to some aspect of antiracist progressivism of his era and a strong preference for the kind of “going slow” on racial issues that King later mocked as meaning “never.” The very existence of these monuments in 2017 speaks to the equivalence of “later” and “never” in many minds up to this point, and the push to remove them now represents, one hopes, a growing will on the part of a substantial majority of the nation to reckon with this painful past. We need to replace what Landrieu calls “a fictional, sanitized Confederacy” in our official modes of memory with a more complex narrative in which white supremacy and the violent subjugation of indigenous peoples and members of minority groups is central to the formation and maintenance of “The South.” Here’s Landrieu’s speech, which is well worth a read: .

Abrogating Structure

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When Wash Jones comes to Rosa Coldfield with the news that her nephew, Henry Sutpen had killed his sister’s fiance at the gates to Sutpen’s Hundred, Rosa knows that she must set off for Sutpen’s because she promised her deceased sister that, although her niece [Judith]  was years older than her, she would look after Judith. Upon reaching the home, Clytie tries to prevent Rosa from going up the stairs first by calling her by name [different than how she said her name in the past] and then by touching – grabbing- Rosa by her arm. This was monumental.

Clytie having addressed Rosa by her first name was not as shocking as one might think; Clytie called Rosa by her name since their childhood and to most people in Jefferson County, Rosa was still a child. However, Clytie grabbing Rosa’s arm was an act of defiance that their social structure could not abide. In grabbing Rosa’s flesh, Clytie declared herself an equal. In grabbing her arm, Clytie shook the rigid structure of social hierarchy and in flesh touching flesh, affirmed that race indeed, is only a rumor, not a fact. There is no superiority of one over the other, there is only flesh, “…that black arresting and untimorous hand on my white woman’s flesh…there is something in the touch of flesh which abrogates…I crying out to her…because of the shock which was not yet outrage because it would be terror soon…” [AA, 111-112]. When Rosa spoke, her narration declares that she spoke not to Clytie, but to “it,” it being the rigid, racial structure of society which Clytie had defied with that grab.

Rosa’s terror sprang not only from this defiance, which could change Rosa’s way of life forever, but from what she was. Rosa recalled with equal parts horror, disgust, and a sprinkle of awe how Clytie and Judith not only played with the same toys, but on occasion, slept in the same bed [Judith’s] or pallet [Clytie’s] together. Based on Rosa’s fixation with Clytie and Judith’s childhood and their indecorous nocturnal placements, this moment of Black flesh making contact with White flesh as equals will stay with Rosa for all the days of her life. She will carry with her this unease / anxiety that Clytie’s flesh can make contact with Rosa’s flesh again.

 

Uneasy at the Thought of Thinking

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Faulkner fashioned Henry Sutpen as more of a feeling man than thinking man with the words, “Henry, the provincial, the clown almost, given to instinctive and violent action rather than to thinking…” [AA, 76] and I think Henry was subconsciously aware of it. Henry is a strange sort of man; although he feels, he is a something of a brute. Prior to leaving for University of Mississippi, Henry had never seen the world beyond his nose. Once at Mississippi, he meets and becomes completely enraptured by the older, mysterious, and cosmopolitan Charles Bon.

Everything about Charles Bon fascinates Henry Sutpen; his manner of speech and dress, his way with women, and even his mysterious past, which he wants to know. Henry Sutpen had never been as interested or devoted to anything as he was to being Charles Bon’s comrade. This is why he wanted a marital connection between Bon and his sister, Judith; it would permanently unite the two men in an acceptable fashion, as brothers. Henry could never be Charles and if Henry never learned all of Bon’s history, then he would at least help shape and always be a part of Bon’s elegant future. If only Charles had heeded the unconscious decree Henry demanded during that four year engagement probation period, but Charles did not; the contract of his first marriage remained.

According to Faulkner, Henry’s fixation with Bon and  his sister’s virginity was, “the pure and perfect incest: the brother realizing that the sister’s virginity must be destoryed in order to have existed at all, taking that virginity in the person of the brother-in-law, the man whom he would be if he could become, metamorphose into, the lover, the husband…perhaps that is what went on, not in Henry’s mind but in his soul. Because he never thought. He felt, and acted immediately”[AA, 77]. Henry was not a thinking man, he was a feeling man. Around Charles and to an extent, around his sister, Henry felt despair; he could never be with Bon nor he could he become Bon. If Bon lived, then Henry Sutpen would have to spend all his days thinking about this.

I am curious about several things, the first being, how different would life have been for Henry Sutpen if he had not disavowed his inheritance and run off with Charles Bon to help the Southern cause? What would have become of Thomas Sutpen’s legacy and his land? The second source for errant thoughts is, could Henry have reconciled the possibility of his half-brother, who may have had Black ancestry, married to his White sister if no one else would ever know? Would Judith have married him anyway? Why did the possibility of this ancestry all but eradicate Henry’s longing for and despair of Charles Bon?

Unsettling Masks

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Faulkner plays with the concept of hiding – particularly part of one’s face by having something, whether it be Sutpen’s beard or powder on Ellen’s face to mask how that character is feeling.

On the day of Ellen’s wedding to Sutpen, Ellen wore 2 masks. The first when her face was made up with powder, “the aunt had even forced or nagged [not cajoled: that would not have done it] Mr. Coldfield into allowing Ellen to wear powder on her face for the occasion. The powder was to hide the marks of tears. But before the wedding was over the powder was streaked again, caked and channelled” [AA, 37]. The streaked, caked, and channelled face was the mask of the newly minted Mrs. Ellen Sutpen [nee Coldfield].  That second mask would come to represent Ellen’s life as a married woman. All of  Yonknapatawpha County, Ellen’s spinster aunt, Mr. Coldfield, and perhaps even Ellen herself realized that a union between she and Sutpen served only to hide Sutpen behind the cloak of respectability.

When Sutpen first came to Yoknapatawpha County, his “short reddish beard was thought to resemble a disguise” [AA 24], and when he returned to Yoknapatawpha a third time, with all manner of fine goods with him and the townsfolk that wanted to arrest him were unsure what to do with him, it was partly because of Sutpen’s beard that increased their uneasiness. “It might have been a good thing that he had that beard and they could not see his mouth…it was in his face; that was where his [Sutpen’s] power lay…anyone could look at him and say Given the occasion and the need, this man can and will do anything” [AA 34-35]. Sutpen’s eyes were hard and depending on who you were and what Sutpen was up to, he could look at someone with contempt in his eyes and the receiver of such a look may not understand why he is receiving such a look, but Sutpen’s mouth could have betrayed him. His mouth could have counteracted whatever hardness his eyes conveyed, or his mouth could have indicated some sort of welcome or inquiry. The reddish beard was off-putting; it helped strengthen the mystery surrounding Sutpen, because observers could not tell what his mouth, like the rest of Sutpen was thinking.

In chapter 3, Mr. Compson tells Quentin of Ms. Rosa and how she was trained by the same spinster aunt [who had been both mother and father to Ellen and later, Rosa] to view Sutpen with that “blind irrational fury of a shedding snake and who had come to look upon her sister as a woman who had vanished not only out of the family and the house but out of life too, into an edifice like Bluebeard’s and there transmogrified into a mask looking back with passive and hopeless grief upon the irrevocable world…” [AA 47]. This is what became of Ellen’s caked, streaked, and channelled mask of years ago.

Black Blood Annotated Bibliography

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Plenty has been written about Faulkner, race, how his characters are created, so it was not too difficult to find articles, mostly through CUNY+, Zotero [first time user!], Project Muse, Jstor, our Yonknapedia page for the sources used in the blood/miscegenation/racism entries, and google scholar. What was a bit difficult was finding [mostly] articles that were either specific to my topic or considering how its main points fit my central idea. I found it more challenging to find books that I could appropriately use as sources; I thought about considering some that focused on race, but I struggled to find a strong enough connection between my proposal and other Faulkner works such as Soldier’s Pay.  I wonder if I may have been too specific in my search. Overall, the process was not daunting and I’m grateful for the zotero site Prof. Allred built because it lead to some thought-provoking articles.

Works Cited:

  • Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! New York: Vintage, 1936.
    An analysis of Henry’s anxiety with blackness and Sutpen’s seeming lack of anxiety and how both respond to Charles Bon’s lineage. I am fascinated with where and how this knowledge is revealed or hidden, and where it is used as a tool for power or destruction.
  • Entzminger, Betina. “Passing as Miscegenation: Whiteness and Homoeroticism in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!.” Faulkner Journal 22.1/2 (2007): 90.

In depth study of the Southern taboo of mixing blood [hemophobia] as well as the anxiety that it caused in society. This essay considers the parallels of “passing” [for white] with miscegenation and homoeroticism. Although my paper won’t focus on the homoeroticism of AA, it will focus on why Faulkner’s characters strived for clear and strict social and racial boundaries, as well as great anxiety blurring of these boundaries or lack of boundaries created within the characters.

 

  • Ladd, Barbara. “‘The Direction of the Howling’: Nationalism and the Color Line in Absalom, Absalom!” American Literature, vol. 66, no. 3, 1994, pp. 525–551., www.jstor.org/stable/2927603.

Ladd explores the octoroon identity as both a collage of others and an uncertainty of belonging. I want to use this article to explore how the structure of the  Yoknapatawpha cultural identity included race as well as how ‘the other’ [such as Black] was both embedded into it and threatened by it.

 

  • Masami Sugimori.“Racial Mixture, Racial Passing, and White Subjectivity in Absalom, Absalom!”  The Faulkner Journal. Mar. 1, 2008. P 3-22

This essay explores the correlation of Blackness and Whiteness and how they are perceived and why it matters in Yoknapatawpha County. The trouble with these perspectives is the ambiguity of Bon – where he fits in and how his mind is “limited and trapped by a body.”

 

  • Kartiganer, Donald. “The Blackness of Absalom, Absalom!” Faulkner and Mystery. Trefzer, Annette, and Ann J. Abadie, eds. JACKSON: U of Mississippi, 2014. 19-48. Web.

This article focuses on the language the four narrators use to describe, speak about, and grapple with Black. Based on their perspectives, we get subtle to very different responses and they all demonstrate some of that cultural anxiety of blurred boundaries, mixing labels, or a disregard for labels and borders.

  • Puxan-Oliva, Marta. “A Mysterious Heart: ‘Passing’ and the Narrative Enigma in Faulkner’s ‘Light in August’ and ‘Absalom, Absalom!”.” Amerikastudien / American Studies, vol. 58, no. 1, 2013, pp. 51–78. www.jstor.org/stable/43485859.

This article focuses on a “narrative enigma of the characters who are able to pass for White, and because that narrative enigma is not resolved and it remains unclear if the characters passing, need to do so or if it is just paranoia.  Faulkner focuses more so on the fear that white Southerners have towards characters who can pass, than the actual passing.

 

  • Snead, James A. “Light in August and the Rhetorics of Racial Division.” Faulkner and Race: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha (1986): 152-169. Print.

This chapter focuses on the fracturing that a society imposes on itself because of the rigid divisions and racial rhetoric it creates and upholds. As stated, “The futility of applying these strictly binary categories to human affairs is the main lesson in Faulkner’s novels” is demonstrated with characters such as Charles Bon, Joe Christmas, and to an extent, Thomas Sutpen.

 

  • Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes.” “Race,” Writing, and Difference. Ed. Gates. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986.1-20. Print.

This essay also focuses on author’s rhetoric on race and how it transforms characters and the world they inhabit. I am not entirely sure if I will use this source, however, I want to give myself a few more days to read it again and make a decision.

Black Blood Rumors

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For my final paper, I would like to explore the concept of speaking calumny into existence through the use of the “one drop” rule regarding Black ancestry.

Speaking aloud the perception that someone could be Black becomes a fact [they must be Black because it was a thought and so they are] which then becomes that character’s doom. In the case of Joe Christmas [LIA] and Charles Bon [AA], their fates are doomed when someone whispers “black blood.” Joe Christmas’s ancestral lineage remained a mystery throughout most of his life and yet, when someone whispered or shouted about Joe’s potential black blood, Joe was a pariah and was either removed or he fled to a new unknown. In AA, Sutpen confronts the arrival of Charles Bon at his Hundred by revealing to his son Henry Bon’s paternal lineage – Sutpen was his father [from a previous marriage which, Sutpen walked out on upon discovering that his wife also had negro blood] and thus, Charles was unfit to be betrothed to Judith -their – sister. Potential incest, though jarring, had a solution – keep the lovers apart. However, when Sutpen later reveals that Bon has black blood, the disgust and betrayal proves too much for Henry, who kills Bon right in front of his sister-bride at the gates to Sutpen’s Hundred.

There is great but damning power in revealing if someone has “black blood,” however, there were times in Joe Christmas’s life in which he took that damning power and made it his whenever he chose to reveal that possibility about his lineage. He would use it as a taunt, such as when he taunted his adopted father with the possibility that he [McEachern] had raised, clothed, and fed a negro. To the people, such as McEachern who were suddenly faced with the calumnity of association to “black blood,” it would mean to be tainted.

 

Sutpen and “innocence”

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I’ve been reading Richard Godden’s amazing meditation on Absalom, Absalom!, race, and labor. Godden discusses what Jason Compson refers to as Sutpen’s main problem: his “innocence.” That is, Compson believes that Sutpen is an arriviste who lacks the comprehensive, sophisticated worldview of the established plantocracy; thus, he sows the seeds of his own defeat. Godden correctly states that Compson is “wrong” to call it innocence and that it’s more accurate to call his innocence a “solution” to the persistent veil of self-deception the entire plantocracy must draw over itself in order to convince itself of its own solidity and mastery, surrounded as they are by the agents and the products of black labor that they, the planters, did not create.

I’m getting ahead of ourselves here, obviously, but I wanted to share an image, shot by one Waldo Jacquith in Virginia in 2006 (CC license here), of a bumper sticker that succinctly captures this “innocence” and testifies to its persistence in the political unconscious of today’s South:

It’s a disgusting representation of a disgusting sentiment, and I remember seeing it on t-shirts, caps, and bumpers growing up. It testifies to precisely the kinds of amnesia and occlusion of the transhistorical flows of bodies, capital, and narratives that Faulkner’s novel is at such pains to recover.