It’s not about Faulkner, per se, but a student in another course sent me this poem from the contemporary African American poet Claudia Rankine. If Jason is a Trumpist before such a thing existed, I think we can see echoes of themes in Faulkner’s novel at work in Rankine’s moving meditation on the barriers to self-reflection that seem to be built into whiteness in the US:
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: http://bit.ly/2qSAv6Q .
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.
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 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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the wake of our reading of LIA and anticipating our first stab at AA, check out this fascinating post from the excellent Pop South blog. It details “Mammy’s Cupboard,” a cafe located near Natchez, MS (my mom’s hometown: I’ve seen it many times) that’s in the shape of a tray-bearing woman. Not to steal the post’s thunder, but this object captures a lot of the grotesque aspects of race and gender in the South, especially when considering the history Prof. Cox outlines in the mini-essay.
