Faulkner and Black-White Relations. a Psychoanalytic Approach 9780231882118

Citation preview

FAULKNER AND BLACK-WHITE RELATIONS A Psychoanalytic

Approach

F A U L K N E R AND BLACK-WHITE R E L A T I O N S A Psychoanalytic Approach Lee Jenkins

ÇG? COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS New York 1981

A portion of this work appeared in a different form under the title "Faulkner, the Mythic Mind, and the Blacks," in Literature and Psychology, 27, no. 2 (1977). Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editor of Literature and Psychology for permission to reprint copyrighted material. Grateful acknowledgment is made to Random House, Inc., Chatto and Windus Ltd., and Curtis Brown Ltd., for permission to quote from the following copyrighted works of William Faulkner: Intruder in the Dust; Light in August; Go Down, Moses; The Sound and the Fury; Absalom, Absalom!; The Unvanquished.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Jenkins, Lee, 1942Faulkner and Black-White relations.

3.

Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Faulkner, William, 1897-1962—Political and social views. 2. Race relations in literature. Afro-Americans in literature. 4. Southern States in literature. 5. Psychoanalysis and literature. I. Title. PS3511.A86Z8585 813'.52 80-21937 ISBN 0-231-04744-4

Columbia University Press New York Guildford, Surrey Copyright © 1981 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America

Contents Introduction I. Light in August II. The Uvanquished III. The Sound and the Fury IV. Absalom, Absalom! V. Go Down, Moses VI. Intruder in the Dust Epilogue Notes Selected Bibliography Index

V

1 61 107 135 177 221 261 281 283 291 295

FAULKNER AND BLACK-WHITE RELATIONS A Psychoanalytic

Approach

Introduction

William Faulkner, to a greater degree than any other white novelist, has shown an abiding interest in the life of black Americans, the historical and social forces conditioning that life, and the larger American destiny of which it is a part. Some of the major conflicts and tensions of Faulkner's art are based on two contrasting patterns of life, one existing before and one after the Civil War. The war constitutes the crucial event wherein the best of antebellum life, its commitment to certain ideals of integrity and humane behavior, is destroyed or enters upon a period of inevitable decline. But this social upheaval is viewed from a larger perspective in which it constitutes an injustice as much imposed upon the Southerners, a proud and defiant people, as it is deserved by them. It serves as retribution for their own sins and those of their ancestors—"violating the conditions of God's confidence in them'"—in their heedless rape of the land, their aggression and selfregard, and their perpetuation of slavery, the "curse upon the land." Charles H. Nilon, in his study Faulkner and the Negro, one of the first full-length treatments of the subject, elaborates on this situation: Throughout the body of Faulkner's stories, there is found a very definite social theory predicated upon certain clearly articulated moral assumptions about the land and the people of his fictional world. The theory is one which seeks to understand the present through a detailed knowledge of the past and which tests the hypothesis that present evils grew from past evils. The theory is of necessity historical because the evils which beset the present grew from man's attempts to possess the land, a violation, according to Faulkner, of God's intention. 2

2

Introduction

Faulkner has Isaac McCaslin speculate on this matter when he undertakes to repudiate the land that has come down to him as his patrimony: "Because He told in the Book how He created the earth . . . and then He made 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 oblongs and squares of the earth but to hold the earth mutual and intact in the communal anonymity of brotherhood, and all the fee He asked was pity and humility and sufferance and endurance and sweat of his face for bread." 3

Ownership of the land was therefore an evil, a violation of God's intention. The white man's bringing of slaves to till the land only compounded the evil. Slavery was a denial of the "communal anonymity of brotherhood," while at the same time it was a perversion that, like the attendant forms of class discrimination, permitted one group to deny the humanity of others and to exploit them for material gain. Slavery, therefore, as Nilon points out, denied the white man the opportunity for "pity and humility and sufferance and endurance and sweat of his face for bread." These are the evils that have brought about the curse upon the land. Paramount in such a consideration is Faulkner's view of the necessity of personal responsibility for the consequences of one's actions, with respect to the way the evils spoken of affect relations in society. To assume responsibility is to affirm one's humanity, and such an affirmation, among many of the antebellum forebears, was not forthcoming. Evil, as Ike McCaslin's example indicates, must be recognized and confronted. The consequences of the South's dilemma are revealed in the perversion of human and social relations. The Indians, who sold the land when they could, and had it taken away from them when they wouldn't, have passed from the face of it. The aristocratic families, such as the Compsons, Sartorises, and McCaslins, have failed in

Introduction

3

their responsibilities to take corrective action and have been superseded by the Snopeses and the new order of materialistic aggrandizement. The institutionalization of rigid social and racial codes has abolished natural human relations and created antagonistic responses among men. The advance of modern commercial technology, in Faulkner's eyes, has created a spiritual vacuum in which men have become uprooted and brutalized. The natural communal values of a homogeneous and rooted society, which teach men to be compassionate and solicitous of the common good, are in retreat. The white man has created his own destruction and is now the victim of it. The blacks, even more extreme victims, continue to endure. There are, therefore, not only the corrupting consequences of slavery which condition the nature of Faulkner's art. There are also those of caste, social andd racial, abolishing the possibilities of natural human fraternity. It is a situation made poignant by the establishment of illegitimate lines of descent which separate kinsman from kinsman. Such is the human material from which recurrent themes are drawn in Faulkner's novels, reflecting not only upon the tragedy of black-white relations but upon a consideration of man's capacity for betrayal of trust in general. Faulkner's tale is one of the anguish of time and the tension of change. Since he is not a traditional moralist, because of his ambivalence and instability in relation to his own beliefs, his conception of history both invokes and debunks the myth of the Old South. Allen Tate sees the myth this way: "The South, afflicted with the curse of slavery—a curse like that of Original Sin, for which no person is responsible—had to be destroyed, the good along with the evil." 4 The South fought valiantly in defense of its ideals, even though defeat was inevitable. Misery, humiliation, and exploitation, at the hands of natives and outsiders, followed, with loss of faith among the descendants of the defeated. The blacks were catapulted into a freedom for which they were unprepared and

4

Introduction

of which they were subsequently deprived. There occurred the ascendancy of a new social order which was far worse than the one which went before, with a consequent loss of the indigenous character of the region which had always made it unique. The Southern view of the past is a vision of an attempt to establish a community which would affirm human worth and brotherhood in a way abdicated by the outside world, but at the very core of this vision were the evils which violated it. Thus was generated in the South that pervasive defiance and preoccupation with the code of honor. This was at once an expression of an ambivalence toward the Tightness of the South's cause and an expression of that pride in defeat which characterizes the psychology of the lost cause. This situation itself, of course, constitutes an important feature in the traditionally intense ambivalence the South has always had toward blacks. On the deepest levels of imaginative life, it is possible that, in the minds of non-Southern Americans, the Southerners may have assumed the identity the blacks have always had in Western culture of victim and defiler, with the Southerners now appearing as the ones who, by their defiance, recalcitrance, and unassimilability, persist in constituting a threat to wholeness and unity. On this level they assume an ironic identity with the blacks, with whom they share a common culture and even bloodline, with whom they share an earthy, folksy, elementally expressive language that provoked the boys Quentin Compson found near the fishing pond to say that he spoke like a "colored m a n . " Faulkner's views of the Civil War may be substantially close to those of Ike McCaslin when he has him say that God had decreed defeat for the South, not because he had turned his face from it, but because he "still intended to save" the South, which was able to "learn nothing save through suffering." We do not, in Faulkner's work, get a direct presentation of the traditional and ideal Southern society. Robert Penn Warren thinks

Introduction

5

this is so because Faulkner knows that no such society ever literally existed. Warren thinks that in the South in the "society that did exist such a vision of human possibility—such a 'truth'—was cherished, and sometimes, by individuals, acted upon." 5 Such a truth is that given expression to by Ike McCaslin when he speaks of the "verities of the heart," the integrity of all life and the eternal commitment of man to the fulfillment of his ideals. The Southern myth is a voicing of the Collective Imagination, not of factual history; it is a dramatic projecting of an idea upon the common life of the people such that the myth becomes the reality. One can appreciate the tendencies toward the mythic apotheosizing of the event, since it tragically put to the test the collective ethos of a people and passed judgment upon its efficacy. Viewed another way, in relation to some of Faulkner's more persistent themes, one can see that no more glorious test of manhood and of the values underlying the conception of the self can be imagined, on the most superficial as well as profound levels, than that of the Civil War. In this connection, a curious anecdote about Faulkner, related by Robert Cantwell in an interview with him, is of interest. In the interview, an initially remote and taciturn Faulkner became animated when the subject of his forebear Colonel William C. Falkner was broached: Faulkner's "principal interest seemed to be in Colonel Falkner and the Civil War, and he spoke about the independence of Civil War soldiers, their resistance to the regimentation of modern warfare—the war itself to him represented resistance to the regimentation of modern life." 8 Not only is the modern ethos revealed in the new social order that rose to ascendancy after the fall of the homeland—as embodied, for example, in the Snopeses—but it is mainly conceived of as an attitude toward life strictly antithetical to the old order. It is cheaply mechanized, alienated from nature, and lacking in piety or reverence for life. Such a view of life is dramatized in Popeye, whom Faulkner characterized, in the famous description, "by that

6

Introduction

vicious depthless quality of stamped tin." And such a view is in opposition to the filial values of community and family, the continuity of a life striving to achieve that mutual well-being and social welfare that are features of a harmoniously functioning and autonomous society. Men come together, under the auspices of modernity, says Warren, in " a mere agglomeration of individuals related by . . mechanics of self-interest or competition—a non-society, an anticommunity." 7 N o more vivid example of this can be seen than that of the society of Max and M a m e in Light in August. These are the violators and exploiters who love no one and no thing except selfgain. These are the cynics who, like Dalton Ames, say of women that they are "all bitches." Like the Snopeses, they have no traditions or commitment to moral reality in the present because they had no such experience in the past. This is why, against this view of modernity, many of Faulkner's characters look backward toward traditions of the past. In the past they seek honor and individual responsibility, a concept of community and a fruitful relation to nature. In this tendency to look backward is also the overidealization of the past, perfectly exemplified in Gail Hightower, that exempts the character from meaningful participation in the present. Further, in their distorted expression of reverence for the past, such characters call into question the validity of those ideals they seek to preserve. Such ideals are embodied in the lives of legendary forebears as revealed in their heroic pursuits. On the one hand, they have bequeathed an image of triumphant action impossible for the latterday descendants to live up to, as seen in Hightower's example. On the other, they have handed down a sense of the perpetualness of the past, in a situation in which their descendants are doomed to repeat their actions in an attempt to validate their lives in the present. This is the manner in which Bayard Sartoris is afflicted in Sartoris.

Introduction

7

General Compson's genteel snobbery, cynical idealism, and defeatism seem to have been passed on to Mr. Compson and from him to his son Quentin, with the addition of Mr. Compson's own wilting and smug false pride. In a similar manner, Carothers McCaslin began a cycle of inhumanely using his fellow man by the exercise of absolute authority and masculine prerogatives. Carothers McCaslin's repudiation of any sense of responsibility for wrongdoing finds its completion in Roth Edmonds' behavior toward his mulatto sweetheart in "Delta Autumn," in spite of Ike McCaslin's attempt to break the cycle. Quentin Compson, unconsciously attempting to account for and justify to himself his own idealizing tendencies, gives an account that is an expression simultaneously of the glory and doom of the past: It used to be I thought of death as a man something like Grandfather a friend of his a kind of private and particular friend like we used to think of Grandfather's desk not to touch it not even to talk loud in the room where it was I always thought of them as being together somewhere all the time waiting for old Colonel Sartoris to come down and sit with them waiting on a high place beyond cedar trees Colonel Sartoris was on a still higher place looking out across at something and they were waiting for him to get done looking at it and come down Grandfather wore his uniform and we could hear the murmur of their voices from beyond the cedars they were always talking and Grandfather was always right. 8

One can begin to see a kind of metaphysic underlying the actions of the men of the past that, when it is applied as a measure of the efficacy of the possibilities of action in the present, causes the present to be ineffectual and diminished. The men of the past reacted to the sense of their own insignificance by blindly asserting themselves in the face of it, creating their own meaning and values. They lived in a time, however, that allowed them the opportunity to do these things. To offset fate's indifference, they must be largesized, heroic, defiant men. They were therefore compelled to

8

Introduction

demonstrate the extremes of human nature, both good and bad, and the evil oftentimes destroyed them. But in the context in which they acted, vigorous assertive action was sanctioned if a man wished to carve a place for himself out of time's anonymity. Value seemed to be placed upon self-actualization, a realization of possibilities, and such action was, in an existential sense, amoral. Self-actualization, in this sense, might almost be the measure of the achieving of human integrity. The opposing values to this, of course, were those concerned with justice and fair play in human dealings. In effect, one must curb one's ambitions

and

temper

one's

pride

and

self-importance,

for,

in

Faulkner's world, such sentiments inevitabley lead to acts of injustice. This point of view is rather movingly revealed in Sartoris, in the quiescent and nostalgic scene where Miss Jenny and Old Bayard, with his old setter at his feet, sit together before the fire recollecting the past. The legendary shadow of John Sartoris, the great amoral self-actualizer, falls upon and preempts their present-day concerns almost with the force of a physical presence. Faulkner ingeniously writes from the point of view of Bayard's old setter, but the reader appreciates that it is Old Bayard, as well as his dog, who is "reminiscing of his young doghood," remembering a time "when the world was full of scents that maddened the blood in him and pride had not taught him self-restraint." 9 Here, paradoxically enough, it is his pride, as revealed in his conception of himself as a morally responsible individual of sensibility, which causes him to curb his actions. But he also lives in a time when the old fierceness of blood is not as strong in him as it was in his ancestors. He cannot act upon and change the world the way his ancestors had done; the world is no longer the same. I believe that Faulkner would subscribe to the idea that to be responsible, in any case, is to be restrained by moral precepts and by an identification with the rest of humanity, who must observe

Introduction

9

the constraints of circumstance and human limitation. To be moral in this sense, I think, seems to mean that one must run the risk of appearing humble, unheroic, and sad, regardless of the manifest force of one's moral courage. It is to run the risk of appearing to have knuckled under, to have acquiesced to the circumstances of life, rather than to have taken charge of them. The negativity of Ike's repudiation can be seen in this light. Often, in the lives of the white men, when they are confronted in a kind of crisis situation with an awareness of their wrongdoing or that of their forebears for which they wish to make atonement, Faulkner places them in a situation where the Christian virtue of humility and the sense of responsibility are conjoined. The scene is often conducted under the auspices of a Christian holiday, such as Easter or Christmas, and sometimes direct reference to Christ's example is made. The simple faith and the humble condition of the blacks are also often given a place in the scene. This is not surprising, since the blacks are the quintessential exemplars of humility and suffering humanity in Faulkner's work. They lack both the resources and the strength to act out aggressive fantasies and attempt a reordering of circumstances and the daring thrust of the individual against fate. On the contrary, their lot is to accept circumstance and fate. Such a view of the underlying metaphysic of Faulkner's work presupposes that the human enterprise is comparable to the state of nature when the strong rule through the inevitable exercise of superior strength, resourcefulness, and fortuitous adaptability to circumstance. In this conception the only possibility of the egalitarian securing of the common good must result from the voluntary decision of the strong to enter into partnership with the weak to promote social welfare. Because man possesses a moral nature, such a pursuit is always a possibility, indeed a cherished ideal, since mankind is one in its recognition of the limitations of mortality and wishes to secure defenses against them. But man's capacity for ethical idealism must contend with his ability equally to corrupt

10

Introduction

and misuse it. On this issue, the black critic Addison Gayle, is instructive. In an essay that seeks to place the cultural and social ethos of the Old South into an historical framework, Gayle finds that the underlying basis of social injustice upon which that society was founded is an indigenous feature of Western thinking. The philosopher-statesman John C. Calhoun, to whose political theorizing, Gayle believes, American cultural thought is more indebted than we like to realize, is quoted from his A Disquisition of Government: It is a great and dangerous error to suppose that all people are equally entitled t o liberty. It is a reward to be earned, not a blessing to be gratuitously lavished on all alike—a reward reserved for the intelligent, the patriotic, the virtuous and deserving—and not a boon to be bestowed on a people t o o ignorant, degraded and vicious, to be capable either of appreciating or enjoying it. . . . N o r is it any disparagement to liberty that such is and ought to be the case. On the contrary, its greatest praise—its proudest distinction is, that an all-wise providence has reserved it, as the noblest and highest reward for the development of our faculties, moral and intellectual. 1 0

One can see how sentiments such as these are more in keeping with and give credence to our conventional notions of the functioning of plantation society, where the hierarchical structures of the great chain of being governed one's position and expectations in life. John Gould Fletcher, a modern-day supporter of the plantation system and a subscriber to the reactionary stance of the Southern ril Take My Stand agrarians of the 1930s, justifies the existence of the slaves on the lowest rung of the ladder in this passage echoing Calhoun: The inferior, whether in life or in education, should exist only for the sake of the superior. W e feed and clothe and exercise our bodies, for example, in order to be able to do something with our minds. W e employ our minds in order to achieve character, to b e c o m e the balanced personalities, the "superior m e n " of Confucius text, the "Gentlemen" of the Old S o u t h . "

Introduction

11

We have seen these superior men often in Southern literature—men, as Gayle points out, "whose most important characteristics are devotion to region, duty, and loved ones." And the most compelling image of these superior men is embodied in the figure of the plantation master—"bold, generous and philanthropic, bending man and beast to his will with cajolery if possible, with the whip if necessary." 1 2 Faulkner gives us an image of him in Thomas Sutpen, in his dealings with his slaves and the forceful conducting of his plantation business. One imagines his example is more naked and ruthless than, say, that of Colonel Sartoris, precisely because he is a latter-day interloper and in his urgency has not had time to cultivate the manners or social finesse by which a Sartoris might temper or mediate an equally ruthless will. The ruthlessness and the inhumanity, however, are evident in Faulkner's depiction of Carothers McCaslin. Gayle strives to demonstrate that the Southern mythology could be justified by its apologists only if it rested on a high plane of morality; the inferiors had to be treated humanely or proved deserving of harsh treatment: Rewarding instead of abusing those who 'stayed in their places' was an unwritten law of the ideal republic which, when violated, introduced chaos into the system. N o slave was more conscious of his position than [Uncle] Tom, none accepted so readily the 'place' to which providence and ill fortune had doomed him, and none was more obedient, loving or submissive. 13

Indeed, Mrs. Stowe's critique of the plantation system was as much addressed to its inherent injustice as to the discrepancy between ideal and practice, since individuals like Uncle Tom, rather than being abused, should have been rewarded for their accommodating acceptance of their position. The deceptive logic of the human mind, as revealed in our appraisal of history, is often linked to a conception of necessity, in

12

Introduction

which occurrences are viewed as inevitable because of the fact that they have happened. Accordingly, the act of slavery itself can be a confirmation of the superiority of the enslavers since, by definition, the enslaved exist as inferiors. As a speculative matter, such a situation could have lent a unique depth to the experience of Southerners that Northerners, perhaps, have not been sufficiently able to appreciate. The fact of slavery must certainly have conferred upon the Southerners a self-justifying sense of elevation which did not initially have to depend only upon a conception of inherent superiority. It might also have depended simply upon the fact that the practice of slavery itself confirmed the putative recognition of superiority. A society with such views must have felt itself special and chosen, and perhaps such a view is expressed in the mythic conception of the Southern gentleman and gentlewoman, in their commitment to the cultivation of the mind and leisurely civilized pursuits. Tradition meant for them what it meant for the plantation writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: " a theory of society which goes back to the founding fathers of the Old South, one based on the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle; a tradition wherein the great Chain of Being stands as the metaphor of man's hopes and strivings, and where the aristocrat, the farmer, and especially the black man know their places." 14 In Faulkner's world, the crime against the blacks, from slavery to the present, is unending. The war fought to free them has simply converted hostility and resistance toward them into a more visible form, hardened now into a bleak and defensive reaction that has achieved the official sanction of social decorum. The defeat and humiliation of the South had the threatening potential of turning all relations, between white and white and black and white alike, into bitterness and bile. No more vivid suggestion of this can be offered than the image Faulkner offers of the "indelible mark of ten thousand Southern deputy sheriffs, urban and suburban—the snapped hat brim, the sadist's eyes, the slightly and unmistakably bulged

Introduction

13

coat, the air not swaggering exactly but that of a formally preabsolved brutality." Black people are forever in the background of a Faulkner novel, and often play major roles in it. Faulkner had an abundance of observed material from which to draw his images of them. I agree with Irving Howe that it is perhaps a measure of Faulkner's integrity that, though his attitude toward blacks is marked by a strong ambivalence, he has nevertheless proved incapable of being content with traditional preconceptions. Although throughout his work he has made ample use of such preconceptions, he has nevertheless restlessly created new images which attempt to accommodate an expanding vision of the reality which originally gave rise to a stereotype. Howe thinks that there is " n o singleness or steadiness in Faulkner's more conscious depiction of the Negro. One finds, instead, a progression from Southern stereotype to personal vision, interrupted by occasional retreats to inherited phobias and to an ideology that is morally inadequate to the vision." These shifting attitudes may be broken into three stages, each symbolized by a major black character—Dilsey, Joe Christmas, and Lucas Beauchamp. 1 5 In examining this development, four useful if rather loosely defined headings can be extracted under which, perhaps, black life as it appears in Faulkner's work can be considered from vantage points of greatest relevance and schematic imediacy, since these headings seem vitally related to the working out of the Faulknerian ideology and vision. The first of these is Faulkner's concern with modern man's capacity for endurance in a world where the efficacy of religious or humane values is perpetually under assault. And, integrally allied with the problem of the inefficacy of traditional values is Faulkner's concern with what, for lack of a better term, one must call the primitive mind, with states of elemental being in which naturally inhere the human virtues of love and compassion and

14

Introduction

wholeness. This interest is reflected in the treatment of characters' recollections of the idyllic quality of childhood scenes, of country folk, black people, idiots, etc. The third heading is that of Faulkner's obsession with the mulatto or with persons of obvious black-white mixture. Here is the individual who most immediately dramatizes the inhumanity of the caste hierarchy and the inherited racial phobias that govern the behavior of the races, and who reflects the intricacy and mystery of the psychosexual constructs of the unconscious mind. Such an individual suffers great torment and anguish in Faulkner's work, even as Faulkner attempts to understand the injustice he suffers and tries to cope with his own ambivalences toward such a person. This effort leads to the fourth heading, which comprises a consideration of stereotypes, masks, and the reality behind the masks. Many of the important black people in Faulkner's novels are those who serve or are connected with the elite families, and of these, Dilsey, who serves the Compsons, is a preeminent example. In The Sound and the Fury, only Dilsey is capable of the deeds of ethical significance for which each of the children and the adults finds some substitute or destructive self-indulgence that relieves them of responsibility. Here is a recurrent image of the black person in Faulkner, viewed sympathetically: the black as morally finer, because he is capable of the virtues dear to Faulkner—love and patience and endurance and self-sacrifice. Such a conception has been utilized by Faulkner to view blacks in ways both offensive and salutary. On the other hand, the simple, hard-working white country folk are endowed with similar qualities. Faulkner seems to be "implicitly setting up a scale of values in which people who follow the simple primal drive of primitive societal life are more likely to survive than those people who have been corrupted by the false and debilitating stimuli of modern society.'" 6 As Cleanth Brooks so aptly puts it, Faulkner, like Wordsworth, displays " a special concern . . . for the power of na-

Introduction

15

ture to shape and mold human character and therefore tends to attribute to his children and peasants and idiots a special access to its beneficent and gracious influence." 17 The blacks can exist in such a manner because of historical circumstances and also, it appears, because of the special susceptibilities of their natures; if their susceptibilities are not in fact innate, there nevertheless is a collective attempt on the part of many whites to view the matter as such. Faulkner's women share some of the natural virtues of the blacks. For women to deny the capacity to give expression to such virtues is rendered by Faulkner as a denial of their female natures. Like the idiot Benjy, women are represented as having the instinctive and intuitive power to differentiate between objects or actions which are life-encouraging and others which are life-injuring, and these are used by Faulkner to symbolize the antithesis between good and evil.18 Cleanth Brooks thinks that when we speak of primitivism in Faulkner we must use the term advisedly to mean Faulkner's admiration of characters who are "simple in mind and spirit and have managed to maintain the kind of wholeness and integrity that we associate with childlike sincerity and lack of duplicity." We are not to equate it with a "reliance upon the instincts and a disparagement of discipline." 19 He finds that some of Faulkner's noblest black characters, such as Dilsey and Lucas Beanchamp, are not noble through any "mystique of race." Dilsey is no "noble savage" and though her religion is simple and she is warm-hearted, Christianity for her is a "religion which involves discipline and self-sacrifice and not simply a cultivation of the spontaneous impulses of the heart." 2 0 Similarly, it is not from the impulsive and immature partIndian Boon Hogganbeck that Isaac learns anything, but from the mature, disciplined, and reserved Sam Fathers, who imparts to Isaac the wisdom of his long association with nature and initiates Isaac to a mature and responsible manhood. I agree in general with this view. There is no necessary or inevitable connection between

16

Introduction

the "primitive" mind and a lack of maturity, discipline, or ratiocination, except as the contrary is thought to be the case in the popular imagination. It seems to me that Faulkner wishes to accentuate and preserve something of the dignity of the human personality and its commitment to respect for life. He wishes to reveal this in the way such dignity and respect are subject to human limitation as well as historical circumstance. It is such circumstance that is revealed, for example, in the "false and debilitating stimuli of modern society." But Faulkner's view of life is a tragic one. M a n is not innocent; he is already a fallen creature, condemned to prey upon nature and to compromise and undermine his reason in the service of his own selfish interests. He is of nature yet alienated from it; he must accept his destructive capacities without concluding that the exercise of them is inevitable. Isaac says that God created the world for men to live in; he created the kind of man and world he would have wanted for himself. God didn't put man's predatory nature in him, but he knew that it was going to be there. But God also gave man his chance to choose: " I will give him warning and foreknowledge too, along with the desire to follow and the power to stay. The woods and fields he ravages and the game he devastates will be the consequence and signature of his crime and guilt, and his punishment" 2 1 The question of the degree and nature of Faulkner's commitment to Christian morality needs to be raised, for though he is critical of the hypocrisy of much of Christian practice, the impetus of hs critique seems to stem from a genuinely "Christian disturbance"; 2 2 yet his emphasis upon the Christian virtues of aggressive and redeeming love also seems to involve stoical elements of resignation and submission, without complaint, to unavoidable necessity. He believes in Original Sin and he thinks that it is man's obligation, if he would save himself, to acknowledge guilt and sinfulness. Through the application of man's own courage and endurance and desire for

Introduction

17

justice, he attempts a redemption of himself that is a function of his own will. Yet throughout Faulkner the willed atonement, perfectly symbolized in Isaac's example, is always deficient when not conjoined with the spirit of love. Such love is a beneficent and transcendent state which cannot be summoned at will, but which is yet within man's reach, as embodied in his acceptance of divine (Christian) love, or as revealed in a kind of humanism. In such a humanism the ideal of the divine is experienced as a natural human attribute and desire for transcendence, an expression of the something in man that Faulkner speaks of as an "immortal spirit." It is this "immortal spirit" that Faulkner refers to when he says that " m a n will prevail, will endure because he is capable of compassion and honor and pride and endurance." 2 3 The assertion of these virtues affirms the human spirit and forever provides an image of man's capacity to be triumphant and "immortal," so long as he is capable of affirming them. These are the "verities of the heart" that coexist with but counteract the other, destructive qualities in man's nature. Faulkner has said, speaking in a student seminar at the University of Virginia, that man must, or tries to, practice these virtues simply "because they are the edifice on which the whole history of man has [been] founded and by means of which . . . he as a race has endured this long. That without these verities he would have vanished. . . . Man has endured despite his frailty because he accepts and believes in these verities. That one must be honest not because it's virtuous but because that's the only way to get along." 2 4 Faulkner advances no theological sanctions for his views. The verities are inherent in man, and he exercises them as a natural capacity just as he does his capacity for evil. Yet, in Faulkner's work, the presence of Christianity pervades the human scene, both in the power of its idealism and the spirit of its decay as exemplified in doctrinal practice. Adherents of formal religious denominations are often revealed by Faulkner as practitioners of rigid, life-denying,

18

Introduction

and artifical strictures of no true ethical substance. The humanity of such people is often distorted, especially as revealed in Doc Hines and McEachern, and they frequently combine religious beliefs with compulsive social prescriptions that lead them to perform acts of violent and destructive fanaticism. Characters committed to false or distorted idealistic formulations, such as Quentin Compson, are shown in an equally destructive capacity. What all of these characters have in common are the afflictions and abuses of their Puritan heritage. Guilt, personal inadequacy, the sinfulness of others, the application of the will to achieve an impossible perfection are all features of the heritage. But this emphasis upon the striving of the will is also a feature of the Puritan heritage that Faulkner accepts as a general expression of the human function. M a n must resist stasis and actualize himself in a state of becoming. The hunt in the woods, a meaningful human enterprise to Faulkner, is in one way a symbol of the pursuit that is life. Faulkner has said that "most of anyone's life is a pursuit of something. That is, the only alternative to life is immobility, which is death. [The stalking, for example, of the bear Ben] was a symbolization of the pursuit which is a normal part of everyone's life, while he stays alive, told in terms which were familiar to me and dramatic to me." 2 5 In reference to this, I think, we encounter a view of the blacks in Faulkner as rendered from a mythic perspective of limitation; for the blacks do not strive—they are being, not becoming, except in a negative sense of waiting, enduring. Endurance equals stasis and acceptance of what life brings, an abiding by and being in harmony with the elemental life process and the unfolding pattern of human events; it also means a recognition of man's imperfect nature and life's imperfections without desire for perfection, simply a desire to live. C o m p a r e this with Faulkner's recurring depiction of the vision of life embodied in Keats's urn figure. It is a vision in which all that exists is subsumed into the motion of life, and past, present, and fu-

Introduction

19

ture have achieved the fluid harmony of an uninterrupted continuum. In Faulkner's work, such a vision might be a metaphor of the idealized continuity of life in society. The stasis of the black condition is a negative reflection of this striving for perfection. The blacks' hopes for perfection are perpetually arrested; fulfillment is beyond their ken. Yet life is always the pursuit of something, as Faulkner says, the alternative to which is death. And, of course, the final vision of the urn is a kind of death if one imitates its perfection—as, for instance, Bayard Sartoris does in his attempts to live up to the perceived perfection of the Sartoris Legend. The blacks know, presumably, the conflicts of life, but are seldom presented by Faulkner in that direct and personal confrontation of those who seek to secure and validate the integrity of their own individual identity, at whatever cost of pain and suffering. Rather, the blacks are gathered up into the nexus of life that does not constitute to them a personal challenge or affront. N o t to be personally challenged, also, is the procedure that can save the whites, if they are lucky or perceptive, from the vision of the perfection, the stasis of the urn, however powerfully they are drawn toward it. Accordingly, the whites are presented with the possibility of achieving a meaningful identity through a responsible grappling with the forces of their fate. But the stasis of the blacks, not merely circumstantial, is endemic. They are the ones in Faulkner serving as a negative reminder of entrapment, not in the vision of ideality and transcendence, but of the dull backward pull of inertia. They are the negative image of the urn suspended, action forestalled, which they accept without fear or alarm, as the creatures of the night move through their element. If there is a mystique of blacks in Faulkner, it is exemplified in their conforming to this principle of negativity, in which they are revealed as the ones who cannot assert a meaningful identity commanding the same respect and integrity as that of whites. The blacks are the ones who exist not for themselves but in service to

20

Introduction

others, the ones who accept their limitations and draw upon their "nobility of spirit," in acts of self-denial, to serve as redemptive agents on a literal as well as symbolic level. In the novel The Town, the black begger woman Het provides ironic confirmation of the conception of the black as victim who performs a service, the very humor of the situation reflecting its seriousness, since Het herself seeks to justify her function by viewing it as self-serving. In regard to this, one critic finds that "the beggar is that necessary lowest rung on the ladder of charity. Since he is poorer than anybody else, his presence allows even the very poor to achieve the happiness of being 'dealers-out' of blessings." 26 Her function allows others to bestow upon themselves a state of grace, and since she works in all kinds of weather, she is ever available to perform this service. When Gavin Stevens gives her the quarter instead of the dime she asks for, she compares his generosity to the ministrations of "quality" over against white "trash." In doing this she acknowledges, in an act of reverse snobbery, her identification with the system which perpetuates the inequities that make her function possible, and she discriminates among individuals, as to their human worth, according to false social criteria. Through her powers of discrimination, she presents herself as worthy of Stevens' respect by indicating her acceptance and understanding of social views to which she thinks he would subscribe. Through these presentations of the higher subtleties of beggary, she attempts to achieve self-respect and a kind of reverse justification of her function. In a similar manner plantation blacks, and the servants of the elite families in Faulkner, attempt to achieve a sense of identity and importance through their identification with their masters and the preservation—among others, notable examples are Simon in Sartoris and Clytie in Absalom, Absalom! —of their ideals. Often, however, blacks are used to demonstrate the efficacy of the traditional Christian conventions and practices. There are many scences in Faulkner's work depicting the genuine fellowship and ap-

Introduction

21

parent spiritual fulfillment that attends black worship, often with accompanying vignettes of whites outside looking in upon a type of communion they do not have in their lives. In this capacity as a reminder of the spiritual deprivation the whites have come to know, the blacks also serve as a reminder of the dream of violated fraternity and of the self-inflicted curse upon the land. It is not surprising that this dream of longing seems to stem from a memory fed by guilt. It is significant that Faulkner habitually imagines the possibilities of unviolated fraternity in a life removed from the immediate strictures of society, in a setting of pastoral simplicity or in childhood. The pathos accompanying its recollection is sufficiently tense and touching to suggest, as Irving Howe does, that it is a "plea to be forgiven for what is and perhaps—but here Faulkner is uncertain—must be." 27 In the story "The Fire and the Hearth," the young white boy, Roth, having at last arrived at the moment of racial pride, refuses to share his bed any longer with Henry, his black childhood friend, and lies alone, "in a rigid fury of the grief he could not explain, the shame he would not admit." Afterwards, he knew that "it was grief and was ready to admit it was shame also, wanted to admit it only it was too late then, forever and forever" (Go Down Moses, p. 112). The curious thing about this is that the black boy is never shown as having been capable of anticipating the event, of having been hurt and offended by it, covertly or overtly. He is simply rendered as having already assumed what the reader has to imagine is, for him, the mask of submission. Faulkner does not attempt to convey an impression of what was happening inside of him—the inner turmoil, self-hatred, hatred of whites, of life, the legacy of bitterness and anger and sullen resentment of which this most recent insult is only another increment in an ongoing process. It would be an experience of the accumulated weight of all the things that presumably Faulkner is referring to when he declares that "the white man has forced the Negro to be always a Negro rather than another human being." 28 Indeed, this is exactly

22

Introduction

the way the black boy appears, not as a human but as a nonhuman, a thing, without rights or feelings, an object, like Joe Christmas, to whom things are done. Here, I think, and in similar instances like it elsewhere, the problem is not one of holding Faulkner to a mimetic representation of reality when such is not his intention. The problem for me is an accurate determination of what can be said about his intention, his narrative technique, and the kind of knowledge it yields. In the situation involving Roth and Henry, Faulkner pays sufficient attention to realistic details to justify his presentation of it as one conceivably taken from life; yet the situation itself is emblematic. It symbolizes the manner and effect of the two boys' initiation into their heritages. It symbolizes the manner in which they must henceforth experience and define each other and themselves. Faulkner provides us with stylized images of a situation to produce an effect. I think that Faulkner always wishes to m a k e such symbolic or mythic projections credible by making them comply, at the same time, with convincing conceptions of psychological verisimilitude. The point to be made here is that the author's presentation of the " t r u t h " of the situation will always be only an interpretation of it that reflects the emphases and priorities of his own view of reality as orchestrated in his art. For me it is not sufficient to say that the attributes of blacks are symbolic or figurative. Just as the habitual or stereotyped manner of presentation of character in Faulkner reveals as much about the idiosyncratic workings of the author's mind as it does a credible assessment of the possibilities of life, so figurative renderings of the nature of the relations between the races ought to be appraised as much with respect to what is said as why it is said; it ought to be of interest to us why it is possible that such things have been conceived of in the first place, and conceived of with such urgency, necessity, and inevitability. We " k n o w " (though we never really confront) what black "signifies" in our culture. The question is why it should

Introduction

23

do so, and do so on a common level of acceptability in our psychic life, such that metaphorical reference is thereby granted the culturally sanctioned ring of objective truth. The " t r u t h " of such matters requires scrutiny, in the same way as would, for instance, the figurative presentation of "Jewishness" in the hands of antiSemites, or of anyone whose representation of "Jewishness," or of "blackness," is based on the distortions of unconscious dynamics and the self-justifying priorities of the group historical imagination in which he participates. My purpose here is not to chide Faulkner for making blacks and whites symbolic, but to reveal what the underlying view is of their identity as rendered symbolically. It is not my intention to require that Faulkner render black life "respectfully," only to point out the reality and the meaning, wherever applicable, of his inability to conceive of blacks as the human equals of whites. Faulkner himself has a vision of decency and humanity that presides over all his work. That he himself wished to be worthy of and to fulfill such a vision is revealed in his attempts, particularly in his later work, to rectify, insofar as he was able, the distortions and the false images of the lives of black people, appearing in the earlier work, that were "morally inadequate to the vision." In short, Faulkner gradually revealed himself, on racial matters, to be an artist of more humane and enlightened views. If the later works that embody such views are not as artistically compelling as we would like, the point needs only to be made that such works nevertheless exist as integral parts of the whole, just as do the earlier ones; and I think that there are relevant and appropriate criteria to be applied to each instance in the final assessment of their respective integrity and value. The image of memory and longing that Faulkner often presents on the part of the white for his estranged black friend, which involves the time when the white man (or woman) existed in comradeship with his black friend, invokes also the time when he existed in harmonious acceptance of that part of himself which

24

Introduction

made the comradeship possible. Accordingly, in losing his black comrade, the white loses part of himself. In a similar way, the loss of the comrade is equated with the loss of the ideals that govern the possibility of such comradeship. Other, stronger ideals must be instigated to justify the course of action which brought about the repudiation. These latter ideals put one in conflict with the egalitarian pull of the heart, ideals which produce guilt and make one aware of the burden of one's whiteness, the role which must be played and continually justified. On the other hand, and especially in Faulkner's early work, perhaps in response to his deeply underlying and fierce sense of fair play, he can be seen, I think, truthfully, as Howe suggests, adumbrating the notion that "fraternity is morally finer than equality." 2 9 Faulkner may have been doing so out of a sense of despair at the impossibility of ever achieving true equality between the races. In any case, fraternity presents the possibility of communion between the races that exempts such communion from the burden of history, from the psychosexual categories that create conflict among men, in contrast to equality, which would serve more to exacerbate such conflict. Fraternity represents man in the pubescent state, still innocently preserved, before being shocked into the burden and conflict of mature relations. The act of repudiation has not yet come, nor the legacy of the racial heritage, nor, as a result, the guilt. It is, in this sense, asexual, except where it might present the possibilities, as expressed in Leslie Fiedler's controversial and interesting formulation, of a complex expression of homoeroticism. Such an expression is assumed to be "innocent in the boy's sense," as it pertains to the pervasive and culturally sanctioned rituals of masculine activity, in an assertion of masculinity and of retreat from the complications of mature heterosexuality. Fiedler thinks that such a phenomenon is expressed in "our regressiveness and nostalgia for the infantile in general, which marks American sensibility and appears in our writing." 30 Fiedler goes on to suggest that

Introduction

25

"just as the pure love of man and man is in general set off against the ignoble passion of man for woman in [American literature], so more specifically (and more vividly) the dark desire which leads to miscegenation is contrasted with the ennobling love of a white man and a colored one." 3 1 Fiedler finds this situation in some way applicable to the relations between Charles Mallison and Lucas Beauchamp in Intruder in the Dust, if I understand him correctly. I do not think Faulkner anywhere in his work explicitly gives expression to such attitudes. Yet I do believe that the emphasis he does place upon the efficacy of fraternity, and especially the innocence with which he endows it in relations between black and white characters of both sexes, is the expression of psychosexual determinants that reflect the dimensions of our cultural imagination. I must therefore agree with Fiedler in thinking that there is certainly an outrageous naivete in this vision of lost fraternity, as if the white man could but turn to his black childhood companion once again to find in undiminished purity the love destroyed by caste. As Fiedler suggests, the white man " d r e a m s of his acceptance at the breast he has most utterly offended. It is a dream so sentimental, so outrageous, so desperate that it redeems our concept of boyhood from nostalgia to tragedy." 3 2 The compulsive behavioral patterns that produce this estrangement are pervasive. In the story "Delta A u t u m n " of Go Down, Moses, Faulkner portrays Roth Edmonds as a grown man confronted again with a situation that tests the strength of his humanity against the claims of his racial inheritance. After having lived with and loved the mulatto woman and had a child by her, he abandons her, leaving money for her which he requests Isaac McCaslin to give to her when she comes to seek him at the site of the hunting camp where the men are stationed. Isaac has long ago performed his deed of expiation in an attempt to break the cycle of wrongdoing initiated by Carothers, or at least to exempt himself from it; yet Faulkner demonstrates how strong still is the hold of

26

Introduction

the ancestral phobia upon him. When he finds out who the woman is, with respect to the possibility of marriage between her and Roth, he thinks in despair; " M a y b e in a thousand or two thousand years in America, he thought. But not now! Not now! He cried out loud, in a voice of amazement, pity, and outrage. 'You're a nigger!'" ("Delta Autumn," p. 361). Faulkner has said that Isaac's thousandyear figures are expressions of his despair in the face of his recognition of a continuing injustice, an intolerable situation that can't be allowed to continue but about which Isaac was "too old" and not "strong enough" to do anything. Faulkner said that "a condition like that is intolerable, not so much intolerable to a man's sense of justice, but maybe intolerable to the condition, that any country has reached the point where if it is to endure, it must have no inner conflicts based on a wrong, a basic human wrong." 33 From this statement, it seems Faulkner thinks of his concern for consolidating the political sovereignty and moral integrity of the country, which may be threatened by inner conflict as a result of injustice toward the black man, as more important than a consideration of the violation of the abstract principle of justice as it applies to the same black man; "not so much intolerable to a man's sense of justice," he says, as it is unacceptable to our sense of national unity and purpose. Perhaps he means that solidifying such a sense of national unity and purpose is the only way, as he suggests in Intruder in the Dust, that injustice toward the blacks can be eliminated. Such a unity would constitute, by definition, the absence of conflict with and injustice toward the blacks. But truth, as Faulkner has Isaac say, is one; injustice is injustice, which forever offends the conscientious individual's sense of the principle, the ideal, of justice, which abides forever. Viewed from another perspective, Isaac's despairing thousandyear figures could be an expression of the archetype of antithetical relations between white and black. As such, the only solution is miscegenation, which means the disappearance of both white and

Introduction

27

black races and also of the Western dichotomy. Isaac, in fact, thinks it is because Roth is white that the woman loves him. Accordingly, he tells her to marry a black man who would see in her near-whiteness "what it was you saw in him [Roth], who would ask nothing of you and expect less and get even still less than that, if it's revenge you want" (Delta Autumn," 363). Thus Isaac gives direct expression to the idea of defilement, in the guise of black women and black men wishing to marry into the white race in order to achieve revenge. In response the woman says, "old man, have you lived so long and forgotten so much that you don't remember anything you ever knew or even heard about love" ("Delta Autumn," 363). Isaac cannot, of course, answer her. He thinks of the land he loves and the men in it and no longer knows what will become of either: This Delta, he thought: This Delta. This land which man has deswamped and denuded and derivered in two generations so that white men can own plantations and commute every night to Memphis and black men own plantations and ride in jim crow cars to Chicago to live in millionaires'' mansions on Lake-shore Drive, where white men rent farms and live like niggers and niggers crop on shares and live like animals, where cotton is planted and grows man-tall in the very cracks of the sidewalks, and usury and mortgage and bankruptcy and measureless wealth, Chinese and African and Aryan and Jew, all breed and spawn together until no man has time to say which one is which nor cares. . . . N o wonder the ruined woods I used to know don't cry for retribution! he thought: The people who have destroyed it will accomplish its revenge. ("Delta Autumn," 363)

Here he presents the very image of the fruits of miscegenation, a universal comingling of the races, which will come about as a result of the actions of the violators and exploiters, who have misused nature and have abused and defiled the integrity of human relations. One feature of this development is Isaac's conjoining of the revenge accomplished against the violators, in the form of the creation of a raceless family, with the idea that such a family, in which there will

28

Introduction

no longer be racial distinctions, is an unfortunate thing—the signature, in fact, of the accomplished revenge. It is almost to suggest that if, for instance, the original Carothers had not made a fetish of his white distinctiveness in relation to the blacks (or in relation to lower-born whites), but had simply viewed it as a natural distinction, among others, that carried no inherent value or worth, all individuals could have been allowed to exist in harmony and mutual respect, and natural racial differences could have been allowed to survive intact, or could have become obliterated long ago without conflict. Isaac's apocalyptic vision is of the forced comingling as a last resort, or of the merging occurring under such depraved conditions of modernity—"usury and mortgage and bankruptcy and measureless wealth"—that the participants have all become so dehumanized into one collective image that they are already the same; they "breed and spawn together" as an expression of the common fate which they deserve. One of the most explicit presentations of the idea of the black as a social creation occurs in Go Down, Moses in the debate between Isaac and his cousin McCaslin Edmonds. Isaac is quivering upon the brink of his decision, within the context of his new and expanding social awareness that has come about through his association with Sam

Fathers—"Sam

Fathers set me free," he tells Ed-

monds—and his contemplation of the particulars of his family history and the Southern heritage in general. O f the blacks he says: " T h e i r vices are aped f r o m w h i t e men or that w h i t e men and b o n d a g e have t a u g h t them: i m p r o v i d e n c e and intemperance and e v a s i o n — n o t laziness: evasion; of what white men had set them to, not for their aggrandizement or even c o m f o r t but his o w n — " and M c C a s l i n : " A l l right g o on: P r o m i s c u i t y . Violence. Instability and lack of control. Inability to distinguish between m i n e and t h i n e — " and [Isaac again]: " H o w distinguish, when for t w o hundred years mine did even exist for t h e m ? " and M c C a s l i n : " A l l right, g o on. A n d their v i r t u e s — " and [Isaac]:

Introduction

29

"Yes. Their own. Endurance—" and McCaslin: " S o have mules:" and [Isaac]: " — a n d pity and tolerance and forbearance and children—" and McCaslin: S o have dogs:" and [Isaac]: "—whether their own or not or black or not."

fidelity

and love of

("The Bear," 295)

T h e sincerity of Isaac's statements cannot be doubted, and Faulkner presents them in opposition to a realistic, if contemptible, recital of the defects of the blacks as they are held in the collective white consciousness. This discussion is pivotal in Faulkner as an expression of the determining features of historical circumstance and of an a t t e m p t to understand their deleterious influence, although the a u r a of a self-righteously j u d g m e n t a l and contemptible paternalism still looms heavily over the discussion, especially as evidenced in E d m o n d s ' devil's-advocate resistance. Still, here are the beginnings of the view that the blacks may finally be unknowable. Faulkner has said at the University of Virginia that the races can never really like and trust each other, "because the white m a n can never really know the Negro, because the white m a n has found the N e g r o to be always a N e g r o rather than another h u m a n being . . . and therefore the N e g r o cannot afford, does not dare, to be open with the white m a n and let the white m a n know what he, the Negro, thinks." 3 4 Faulkner does not speak of the white m a n ' s complicity in this collective social deception, of the way the white m a n is equally guilty of acting like a white m a n rather than a h u m a n e being! Quentin C o m p s o n speaks directly of the role the S o u t h e r n white can play when, outside the South, as at H a r v a r d , he finds, as R o b e r t Penn W a r r e n confirms, that the "assertion of the social role becomes a way of asserting the personal role—of asserting identity." 3 5 The point is that this assertion of identity by m e a n s of the social role is constantly at work in the embattered and embit-

30

Introduction

tered relations between the races in the South—and, in moments of urgent self-revelation, in the rest of the country. To acknowledge, as Faulkner does, that whites do not know how the black "feels" does not necessarily soften the traditional arrogance of whites claiming to know what he is, what he is capable of, and what his position must be in relation to whites. It does not mean that whites have embraced a sense of humility before the mystery and majesty of all human creation. In this regard, Faulkner has said further that the whites must teach the black person that "in order to be free and equal, he must first be worthy of it, and then forever after work to hold and keep and defend it. He must cease forever more thinking like a Negro and acting like a Negro." 3 6 The black, therefore, must overcome history's judgment against him, and in doing so acknowledge the truth of that judgment. The whites will help teach him "the responsibility of personal morality and rectitude. . . . What he must learn are the hard things—self-restraint, honesty, dependability, purity; to act not even as well as just any white man, but to act as well as the best of white men." 3 7 To cease being a black person means that he must comply with a notion of humanity that elevates him to an equal sharing of the benefits ad shouldering of the burdens of the estate of man, an idea that is violated by the whites when they impose upon him the very impediments that prevent him from doing so. To cease being a " N e g o , " from another, negative point of view, means that he deny his black heritage and the fundamental affirmation of his human equality as a black person, no matter how despised by whites, no matter how unfortunate the momentary workings of historical circumstance. The burden of proof is upon him, since the whites are not similarly importuned to cease displaying their inhumanity against him. Yet, paradoxically, this civilized image of the blacks within the bounds of freedom and equality achieved bears close parallel, in a fundamental respect, to the way "good niggers" have always appeared in Faulkner. Would not Dilsey teach the very qualities

Introduction

31

Faulkner finds lacking in blacks? One could say that the raison if être of the Dilsey character is to exemplify such virtues—virtues that she, and others like her, certainly wouldn't have learned from the whites around them. And the Dilseys of the world, in their function as black mammies, have often been, ironically and not unwittingly, as much as the biological mothers, the shapers and molders of the manners and morals of their white charges. Here is Faulkner's conception of a "first-rate" person: "I would say that a first-rate man is one . . . that did the best he could with what talents he had to make something which wasn't here yesterday . . . that never hurt an inferior, never harmed the weak, practiced honesty and courtesy, and tried to be as brave as he wanted to be whether he always was that brave or not." 38 It would seem to me that the despised and long-suffering Dilsey has greater claim upon having fulfilled such a conception than any of the white people in the whole of Faulkner's work. Finally, I believe, Faulkner's assumptions of black endurance are predicated upon a metaphysical position that asserts their elemental primacy. Blacks endure the way the earth and its processes do, through the brute fact of their elemental nature, stubborn, mindless, irreducible, pertinaciously clinging to and at once the expression of the life-urge to persist. They took the long view, as Faulkner has said, when there was nothing to hope for at the other end except the satisfaction of continued existence. This does not suggest a teleological striving toward a goal, for that would entail the underlying presence of abstracting and mediating intelligence. They reveal, rather, the manifest fact of the life process pursuing its course from time immemorial, as the earth, subjected to myriad conflagrations in the course of its development, persists. The life force endures, and that is the final measure of its efficacy and its significance. The blacks are an embodiment of this urge, just as are Faulkner's women, and the example of each is a reflection of mankind's capacities of endurance against the destructive nature of

32

Introduction

history. Such endurance is also an assurance of man's continuance—through the blacks symbolically, through woman literally. If this presentation of the metaphysics of blackness is accurate, it can put into perspective the arrogance and assurance with which Isaac and Edmonds universalize what is presumably their own experience with blacks. Faulkner obviously presents them as speaking not merely about characters in a story, which are his creations alone, but about the objective reality of the lives of black people, with the presumption of having comprehended and interpreted the complexity of that reality and of having objectively presented it. Isaac and Edmonds could themselves be subjected to a similar arrogance at the hands of others even more smugly confident in their sense of supremacy. They could be viewed as pretentious, crude, half-educated, provincial Southerners. The underlying awareness of such a charge, one supposes, is one of the factors motivating Faulkner's fierce and occasionally defensive presentation of the integrity, resourcefulness, and beauty of his native Southerners, no matter how deprived their life circumstances. Also, it may be responsible for the urgency with which he persistently, almost selfconsciously, finds himself enumerating Gavin Stevens' academic credentials. I say this even as I recognize that in the presentation of Stevens as an intellectual, Faulkner uses Stevens to round out his imagined community. Faulkner in his early work displays a distaste for the educated black person and for any attemt by a black to advance his interests through intellectual assertion. In "The Bear," Faulkner draws a tragic and foolish picture of the educated black man who marries Fonsiba, Lucas Beauchamp's sister, and takes her away to live in poverty on a farm in Arkansas. Though educated, though rendered as a highly intelligent man, he has not bothered to learn how to grow crops and manage a farm, thinking it beneath his dignity. His intelligence, along with the effects of discrimination in society,

33

Introduction

which deny him the opportunity to function at his level since he can no longer fit into any traditionally black subservient position, have made him a tragic figure. The reader sees him sitting at a table in the freezing cold, reading the Bible through lensless spectacles. These are the fruits of emancipation. His political shortsightedness and a tragically delusory sense of self-importance exempt him from responsibility for his own well-being and that of his family. His error is in thinking that the war freed him from the curse of history. Faulkner seems to believe that no man can free him from it. Thus his intelligence and dignity, which allow him, defensively, insolently, to view himself the equal of a white, are shown to be ludicrous, even antithetical to his best interests, because it is not intelligence or self-respect that can free him from a curse which, in the minds of men, is not subject to the ministrations of reason. Faulkner initially presents the efforts of blacks to acquire formal education as comic. In the early novel Soldier's

Pay,

Faulkner

describes the black children on their way to school "carrying lunch pails of ex-molasses and lard tins. Some of them also carried books. The lunch was usually eaten on the way to school, which was conducted by a foolish Negro in a lawn tie and alpaca coat." 3 9 The children and their instructor are presented as objects of contempt and derision. The children's hunger is somehow made to appear as their own fault, as if they should have had more restraint and ability to abide by propriety, and they are said to show no particular interest in school or "compulsion" for learning. All of Faulkner's black characters of major significance are problematically revealed to be the possessors of superior endowments, but they are usually portrayed as uneducated and, with the possible exception of Lucas Beauchamp, subservient to and victimized by the roles prescribed for them by the Southern racial codes. Charles Nilon

does not think

that

Faulkner

intends white blood

to

contribute superior intelligence. In regard to this, Nilon

says

Faulkner suggests that racial differences are superficial,

"that

34

Introduction

largely they are social and economic differences or psychological differences which derive from mental states produced by these." 40 As the basic thrust of my essay indicates, I am not in complete agreement with this assertion, since I think that Faulkner's final view of blacks comes from a complex and inchoate sense of fundamental limitation. Faulkner, while at the University of Virginia, said the following: "Perhaps the Negro is not yet capable of more than second-class citizenship. His tragedy may be that so far he is competent for equality only in the ratio of his white blood." He goes on to suppose, for the sake of argument, "that as yet the Negro is incapable of equality for the reason that he could not hold and keep it even if it were forced on him . . . [because] the first smart and ruthless man, black or white, who came along would take it away from him, because he, the Negro, is not yet capable of, or refuses to accept, the responsibility of equality." 41 Now it would appear that Faulkner is referring to the history of degradation to which the blacks have been subjected which accounts for their inability to assume the responsibilities of social equality. The statement about their mixed blood making them more capable complies with this view if we further assume that the white blood confers benefits and allows for the adoption of certain white behavioral traits that make the mixed-blooded individual, not more inherently capable, but more acceptable to white expectations. This could mean either that the blacks are inherently inferior, and that increased intermixing will make them more capable, or else that as tensions relax and blacks become more integrated they will begin to acquire the responsibility that will qualify them for equality—a more likely projection of Faulkner's meaning. An admirable example of the breaking down of the psychological barriers between the races occurs in Absalom, Absalom! when Miss Rosa is restrained by Clytie in her efforts to go up the stairs to dis-

Introduction

35

cover who or what is hidden in the rooms above. When Clytie puts her hand upon Miss Rosa, R o s a is arrested: I know only that my entire being seemed to run at blind full tilt into something monstrous and immoble, with a shocking impact too soon and too quick to be mere amazement and outrage at that black arresting and untimorous hand on my white woman's flesh. Because there is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering. . . . Let flesh touch with flesh, and watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too.*2 This passage expresses R o s a ' s sense of the primacy of the human organism and what happens to it when intruded upon by another. Such an intrusion throws into relief the fundamental sense of self that is experienced as a common possession. Y e t , paradoxically, it is precisely this private, distinctive sense of identity—"the citadel of the central I - A m ' s private o w n " — w h i c h forever exists in opposition to the other. It is the thing which, in fact, establishes the identity of the other as different from oneself, the thing "which enemies as well as lovers know because it makes them both." This is a metapsychological perception for Rosa, a moment of illumination, which unfortunately does not carry over into her life, since she does not view Clytie as an equal sharer in the possession of a "central Iam's private o w n , " but as an embodiment of the Sutpen heritage speaking through her: R o s a speaks to Clytie "receiving no answer because we both knew it was not to her I s p o k e , " and finally Rosa discharges the outrage building in her with, " T a k e your hand off me, nigger!" It has often been remarked of this novel that it presents the whole range of responses to miscegenation and the tragic complications of racial conflict, and it is hard to determine where Faulkner's final sympathies lie. Irving H o w e points out that the treatment of these subjects, as indicated in the passages cited above and espe-

36

Introduction

d a i l y in the consideration of miscegenation in Light

in

August,

"occasions some of Faulkner's most intense, involuted and hysterical writing. A s a victim the mulatto must be shown in all his suffering, and as a reminder of the ancestral phobia, made to suffer once

or

twice

extravagantly.

But

he

also

arouses

Faulkner's

greatest pity, a pity so extreme as often to break past the limits of speech." 4 3 Robert Penn W a r r e n thinks that H o w e must be careful not to impute to Faulkner the views and attitudes of his characters, since it is society that avenges itself upon a character like Joe Christmas, not Faulkner personally. 4 4 Y e t W a r r e n says that it is hard not to believe that G r i m m , " w h o missed W o r l d W a r I and w h o lives in a dream of sadistic violence masked by military rigor, and Hightower, who, with his romantic dream of the Civil W a r , counterpoints him in that novel, are not p r o j e c t i o n s — a n d purgat i o n s — o f potentials in Faulkner himself." 4 5 I believe that, in a similar manner, it follows that Joe Christmas is a projection and purgation of the imagined possibilities of mixed blood, and of the attending conflict which Faulkner imagines in his own mind to be so extreme, inevitable, and terrible. If this is true, it is hard not to imagine that Faulkner's treatment o f Joe does give expression to his own biases and obsessions, especially since Faulkner is immured in, and is the self-appointed representative of, that part of the country in which can be found the most virulent and profound articulation of such views. T h a t society's heritage, after all, is Faulkner's own, caught nevertheless as he is between his fierce love and hatred of it.

M u c h has been written about Faulkner's narrative technique as the necessary vehicle for his unique and complex vision of life and for the special immediacy and characteristic ambience with which his vision assumes expression in the lives of his characters.

Warren

Beck, writing on Faulkner's style, summarizes what I take to be some of its essential features:

Introduction

37

In his most characteristic writing Faulkner is trying to render the transcedent life of the mind, the crowded composite of association and analytical consciousness which expands the vibrant moment into the reaches of all time, simultaneously observing, remembering, interpreting, and modifying the object of its awareness. To this end the sentence as a rhetorical unit (however strained) is made to hold diverse yet related elements in a sort of saturated solution, which is perhaps the nearest that language as the instrument of fiction can come to the instantaneous complexities of consciousness itself. Faulkner really seems to be trying to give narrative prose another dimension."

Enlarging upon this view, one might say that such a dimension involves the simultaneous meshing of past and present awareness. Here the interpretative power of the rational mind has no primacy in locating "objective reality," because the rational mind is at once united with and an expression of the timeless, irrational, subjective, primitive data of the unconscious psyche. In a statement about his own conception of the nature of time, Faulkner offers confirmation of this view: The fact that I have moved my characters around in time successfully, at least in my own estimation, proves to me my own theory that time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was—only is. If was existed there would be no grief or sorrow."

What Faulkner seems to be saying here is that in order to preserve the emotional value of past experiences, the events or circumstances that produced the emotive effect cannot be relinquished in the usual way as matter consigned to memory to be recalled at a later date; these events and circumstances, on the contrary, must be held in an ever-present state of readiness, lest their emotive value fade during the passage of time as they exist in the memory to be recalled. Further, it would appear that the emotive value of the experiences cannot continue to exist unless it becomes an omnipresent reality, a given, not governed by the auspices of recollection or the passage of time. Additionally, memory itself ceases to be a process in which

38

Introduction

present events serve to evoke past events and their affective value. Memory becomes instead an embodiment of consciousness itself, in which all that occurs is registered and timelessly persists in the present. Not satisfied with the usual process of recollection, Faulkner seems to wish to obliterate time in order to preserve the past. Our normal conception of this situation is that events which have already occurred exist in the past tense. Such events have already transpired and, in terms of a temporal sequence, can no longer be occurring. We do not look upon events which have already occurred as having become obliterated or as no longer existing in the mind, because such events can still be remembered, be recalled back into the present—but as the past which is being recalled. Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Pouillon have offered commentary on Faulkner's conception of time, with special regard to the unique sense of entrapment in which his characters find themselves, and I will make use of some of their observations later. In Absalom, Absalom!, Miss Rosa makes a revealing statement about memory and the sense of entrapment. She has been speaking about her obsession with the Sutpen legacy and her perception of its evil influence holding her life in its grip: "That is the substance of remembering—sense, sight, smell: the muscles with which we see and hear and feel—not mind, not thought: there is no such thing as memory: the brain recalls just what the muscles grope for: no more, no less: and its resultant sum is usually incorrect and false and worthy only of the name of dream" (Absalom, 48). She seems to be saying that the mind reacts to experience in such a way that indelible memory patterns are produced which are activated precisely as they first occurred whenever presented again with the same or similar experience. The data of experience, as she says elsewhere in the quoted passage, "distills" itself as it "penetrates" the mind; and the reactivation of the data, in response to experience, is determined not by thought or choice but by the ac-

Introduction

39

tion of a predetermined and circular mechanism—a response that appears to be essentially mechanistic. Significant also is the primacy of the senses in triggering the distilled mental data. One is struck often by the many references to smell in Faulkner; the smell of a thing serves to produce an idea or conception of it which defines it. There are many examples of this with regard to black people, who are presented as having a distinct and defining odor: Joe Christmas lying in rigid fury trying to breathe into himself the "dark and inscrutable" odor of the thinking and being of blacks; Charles Mallison wrapped in the quilt in Lucas' house, smelling the odor, and subsequently discovering that he would always smell it, of the being of black people, even when there was no longer a physical source present to produce it, because it was the odor of an idea. Faulkner speaks often of the stale odor of an old woman's flesh, as defining idea of the physical as well as spiritual condition of such a female, and even of the odor of courage, as the young Bayard contemplates Colonel Sartoris, on the steps before Granny, returned from the Civil War. It should be pointed out that Rosa's description of the mind functioning within a closed system parallels the functioning of the obsessive-compulsive state of mind, which characterizes the thinking of many of Faulkner's characters. The persistence of the data of experience in the mind has a general application, I think, to Faulkner's rendering of the old South, in the romanticizing of its mythic and legendary properties in the face of its defeat, and in the preoccupation thereafter with the loss of an ideal. What has been romanticized and what has been lost are continually evoked, in the present, by the persisting " a u r a " of the South as a region self-consciously aware of the special nature of its conflicts, the distinctiveness of its history. It is a place where, by means of a violent conflagration, history had been fulfilled, in the form, subsequently, of a beautiful and static perfection, to be distilled in the mind and contemplated; and, as Miss Rosa says, "its resultant sum is usually incorrect and false and worthy only of

40

Introduction

the name of dream." The South has been perfectly described by Warren as an "image of massive immobility in all ways, an image, if one was romantic, of the unchangeableness of the human condition, beautiful, sad, painful, tragic—sunlight slanting over a mellow autumn field, a field more precious for the fact that its yield had been meagre." 48 Consider the intense identification with the hope and sense of possibility that was, before the inevitable despair of what was to be. Holding on to the past had so infiltrated the mind as to subsist as a conventional behavior pattern. Faulkner has shown how in the life of every Southern boy there is that luminous moment before the contending forces had amassed and Vicksburg had fallen. In the boys' reenactment of the event in their war games, all still hangs in the balance. In the pathetic images of old ladies still waiting for news from the "slow telegraph" of battles fought long ago, there reigns still that tragic defiance which may yet achieve vindication, because, in the waiting, time has stopped and can never again be resumed. This collective sense of the suspension of events in time, in which the mind of a whole society is involved in the contemplation of its past and of its future destiny, has been taken by some writers as a symbolic reflection of man's involvement in the mythic unfolding of his fate in history. Insofar as the mythic reflects a collective sense of identity and destiny, it unites all men. From this point of view, some of the features of Faulkner's style can be said to evoke the mythic: the agitated lyricism and emphasis upon the intuitive, subjective components of sensory perception; the primitive imagery that erupts into the waking mind and unites it with inanimate objects and natural processes; the situations in which the concrete and real comingle with the abstract and fantastic; the situations in which the power of the rational mind to make discriminations among the rational and irrational, the real and imaginary, no longer holds sway, since things in their essences are no longer separated but united. The mythic creates its own categories and is

Introduction

41

itself its own mode of reference, plunging the human mind down into the sources of its beginning and generating a responsive chord of acceptance. Thus man lives in the archaic present, exposing himself to the irreducible determinants of destiny. The future is now and the present reflects the future; Faulkner's powerful presentation of this situation has been compared to the cleansing grappling with fate that characterizes Greek tragedy. Giinter Blocker, an exponent of the mythic consciousness in Faulkner as I have described it, suggests a further and finalizing application of it: "man is made responsible not only for the single deeds he himself commits but for everything committed since his beginnings. Hence the continual descent into the shadow of the primordial, into the fear which is the beginning of all human recording, and, at the same time, the beginning of every purification." 49 Accepting this position, one can say that the mythic presents the view of the constancy of the determining features of man's psychic life, the features which impel his behavior and of which his behavior is an inevitable expression. In this way, for example, Oedipus speaks of the fate of man. Man's pride and vanity, as well as his courage and integrity, will always be impelling features of his behavior. Self-deception, and insight, are always possibilities. Interestingly, one might begin to see further how the mythic consciousness, in its relevation of a situation in which man is totally responsible for his actions, affirms also the pain and burden of consciousness itself, which he is condemned to bear. This parallels Faulkner's sense of "that agony of naked unanesthetisable nerveends which for lack of a better word men call being alive. . . ," 60 Consciousness, in its necessary and instantaneous exposure to the totality of its domain, is at once its pain and burden. Without the permanence of the past, Faulkner has said, "there would be no grief or sorrow." But one must add that neither would there be freedom in the future. Destiny is at the source of life. Nothing is ever lost. This view may be related to Faulkner's fond-

42

Introduction

ness for Keats's Urn, in which the possibilities of human behavior, in a suspended state of enactment, are perpetually arrested in time. Whatever happens is related to everything else. All actions are offered up as inheritance of the group consciousness, in which each individual participates and for which each is responsible. This, one might say, is the real beauty of consciousness, the transcendent power of its accumulated heritage in its realization of truth and perfection, as well as its curse, the collective, irreversible, and unredeemable weight of its capacity for wrongdoing. Guilt, from this point of view, is forever and unending. Acts of appeasement cannot eradicate the guilt-producing determinants of consciousness, since the compromising of moral nature in man is an inevitable feature of his human nature. The act of sacrificial appeasement, in Joe Christmas' case, for example, confirms the basic imperfection of human functioning. It is an act presided over by Percy Grimm, a knife-wielding sadist, which is guilt-producing all over again. As this applies to the lives of characters in Faulkner, Blocker sees the application of the mythic consciousness as a rebuke to Jean-Paul Sartre's view that Faulkner's characters are trapped in a "barred future" where "there is never any progression, nothing which can come from the future" and "everything is in suspension." 61 For Sartre, Faulkner denies life its possibilities and potential for fulfillment, by denying that choices can be made which move one out of the grip of the past and into the future. Without such choice, life is absurd, which is the way Sartre views Faulkner's "metaphysic," although he likes his "art." Yet the art itself expresses, as Sartre notes, the idea of suspension, in things themselves. The opening passages in Light in August, in which Lena sees the approaching wagon, reveal for Sartre the motion arrested "at the very heart of things." It appears to Sartre that "moments erupt and freeze, then fade, recede and diminish, still motionless," while for Blocker this scene is the very expression of the mythic. Lena has made her progress through a "long monotonous

Introduction

43

succession of peaceful and undeviating changes from day to dark to day again, through which she advanced in identical and anonymous and deliberate wagons as though through a succession of creekwheeled and limpeared avatars, like something moving forever and without progress across an urn," and the wagon she is watching approach, as if hypnotized, seems to "hang suspended in the middle distance forever and forever." 62 I have explored these matters at some length to establish a basis for the consideration of the irreversible personal destiny experienced by many of Faulkner's characters. They are entrapped within prior life experiences which must be repetitively reenacted in the present. I have spoken of how memory is not data recalled out of the past into the present, but is rather the past subsisting, unaltered by time, in the present. Such a process constitutes not only memory but the very mode of consciousness. Events in the present, therefore, are absorbed into and activate the omnipresent past, which is the sole reality in consciousness. For example, Quentin Compson's fight with Gerald Bland is not rendered by Faulkner as an event occurring in the present. Quentin himself is only aware of it as an expression of his prior conflict with Dalton Ames in regard to vindicating Caddy's honor. The actual quarrel with Bland is rendered by Faulkner only after it has occurred and become history. When occurring, it was an obscure and shadowy event in Quentin's mind, 63 as well as in the reader's. Faulkner's opening chapter on Joe Christmas' childhood captures the whole idea of the deterministic quality of the past, not subject to conscious deliberation or alteration, with the famous equation, "memory believes before knowing remembers." This apparently means that experience exists in the mind as that which is meaningful and as that which the mind accepts, because it has been "distilled," without the mind knowing or understanding what it accepts. This is so because no process of rational mediation has come into play in consideration of the data of experience that has been

44

Introduction

accepted. In Christmas' case, it also seems to me that no such process of understanding ever occurs. As Jean Pouillon points out, this is not a matter of an individual being the sum of his experiences in the conventional sense, or of the idea that "a man is what his past had made him," 54 because when we ordinarily speak of such a case, we do not think of the present as losing its importance because of the primacy of the past. Rather, it is from the point of view of the present that we determine the existence and significance of the past. But in Faulkner's conception of it, the past is extratemporal; the "past, therefore, not only was but is and will be; it is the unfolding of destiny." 65 The past subsists. What happens in the present is absorbed into it. Benjy, for example, in The Sound and the Fury, is the perfect example of the past never being lost; he is his past. The things that happen to Joe are an expression of inner compulsion that cause him to act in the same way toward each experience in life; indeed, he seeks out experiences that cause him to perpetuate his compulsiveness. He does not have knowledge or understanding of his actions or of why he must act, only a sense of the inevitable necessity of doing so. It is this sense of inner necessity which he feels as destiny. Joanna's murder has already occurred when the novel opens, and the course of events, subsequently revealed, is not a registering of a necessary sequence of events. It is a registering of the inner compulsion which must be fulfilled, in response to the unalterable dictates of the accumulated past, which are not recalled but are relived in the present. And these dictates act as if they were the present in the form of the conscious mind being aware of itself. Pouillon comments on this matter by suggesting that Faulkner distinguishes between consciousness and knowledge and has his characters function on the level of the former: "Consciousness is inevitable, knowledge only a possibility. . . . Chronology, being a posterior organization of life, belongs to the domain of knowledge.

Introduction

45

It is a kind of intellectual liberation from destiny; it assures us that the past is indeed past even if we feel its pressure on our present." 56 One would imagine that Pouillon would agree that the liberation he speaks of parallels an emotional and intellectual liberation from the debilitating effects of unresolved conflicts generated out of past experiences, which psychoanalysis, for instance, seeks to provide for its patients. Hence Christmas is not so much determined by his past as he is his past, in the same way that Benjy is, and escape is impossible: "But there was too much running with him, stride for stride with him. Not pursuers: but himself: years, acts, deeds omitted and committed, keeping pace with him stride for stride" {Light in August, p. 393). Driven in this way, Christmas must ever feel responsible for himself, for the actions which erupt unwittingly our of his consciousness, in response to the dictates of the past. Since the past is untouchable and expresses itself as consciousness in the present, Joe must also demonstrate clairvoyant knowledge of the future and of what awaits him, from which he knows he cannot escape. McEachern, similarly, indicates this facility in the form of the compulsive, translunary assurance which leads him straight to the dance hall.57 How does this apply to a consideration of Joe's racial conflict, the motivating factor of his dilemma? In his most lucid moments, when he speaks of his desire to make of himself what he chooses to be, I think that what he is referring to is an integrity of being, without reference to race. It must be remembered that, insofar as he thinks of himself as a black person, there will always be that part of him which seeks self-respect, no matter how degraded the opposed white part views the black part and wishes to escape from it. In presenting black xenophobia, Faulkner adequately renders the obsessional quality, from the white point of view, in Joe's mind; but he does not graps sufficiently the defiant presentation of the yearning for integrity of being that exists in the black part of Joe's mind.

46

Introduction

I think Joe, in those lucid moments, is referring to that condition, to paraphrase Sartre's formula, when existence precedes essence, when being itself is the highest value in life, and is inviolable in the way that Lena, for instance, is secure in her being, without reference to artificial classification. But the fierce racial conflict in Joe's mind will not allow him to conceive of himself without reference to racial identity. At least he reacts as if this were the case. As I have tried to indicate, I do not believe that he thinks, because if he did, the articulation of a race-free identity would not, as the narrative indicates, be an impossibility, nor would he have to live outside of humanity to escape its coercion, because he would know within himself the value of his own personhood. Faulkner does not grant to Joe the capability for rational analysis; thus Joe does not understand his schizoidlike nature. He conforms always, as one critic says, " t o that bitter conception of himself which makes him a mental and emotional white in a Negro world, a secret Negro in the white world." 6 8 This is the pattern he sustains until the confrontation with Joanna, when he commits the deed that casts him in the final role of victim, the sacrifical Black Other who must suffer to expiate the guilt of all. This is not a conscious decision on his part, for he does not think. It is, rather, a mythic acquiescence to his function as victim and pariah. Consider, on a psychological level, the whole idea of the immutability of the past, its dynamic suspension, and the interpenetrability of the past and the present. Does not this idea parallel the form and functioning of the unconscious mind? I mean, does it not parallel it insofar as the unconscious exists in an eternally present condition in which time does not exist, and insofar as it can exert irresistibly determining and damaging influence upon the grasp of present reality in those of unstable mental constitution? I am referring to individuals whose behavior in the present is not autonomous, according to our conventional conceptions of mental health. Rather, their behavior is determined by unresolved conflicts out of

Introduction

47

the past, which persist because the ego or conscious mediating mind in the present is impoverished a n d / o r unable to make use of possibilities that enhance life in the present, in order to carry the individual forward to a view of freedom and engagement in the future. John T. Irwin, in a boldly speculative and imaginative study of certain recurring psychological themes in Faulkner, many of which I will discuss further in this essay, relates such themes to the findings of Freud and Otto R a n k . Here are some of the psychological factors Irwin is concerned with in Faulkner's work: Spatial and temporal doubling, spatial and temporal incest, narcissism, the Oedipus Complex, the castration complex, repetition, sameness and difference, recollection, repression, revenge, substitution, reversal, sacrifice and mediation. And it is not simply that every element is simultaneously present to and interacting with every other element, it is that every ele-

ment, considered in its relationship to every other element in the structure, is simultaneously present to and interacting with every other element."

I think that this formulation contributes to our understanding of why Faulkner habitually presents actions from the point of view of their finality, their completion, their complex but orderly wholeness as finished events, where all elements are "simultaneously present to and interacting with every other element." When Quentin Compson narraties the events of that last day in The Sound and the Fury, his suicide is already determined, or indeed has already occurred, and one gets the feeling, uncannily, that the situation described comprised the last thought in his mind before it was extinguished. Stranger still, it may appear that he is already dead as the events are being narrated, and that the source of the narration in his disembodied mentality, impervious to the progression of time, returned to forever linger over the scene in an eternal and anguished meditation. Consequently, the telling of the story will never come to an end. I cite this as an illustration of what I take Irwin to mean when he says that Faulkner's method of narration is one of " t h e sense of the meaningful as always deferred. . . . One might almost say that this

48

Introduction

sense of the always deferred, this sense of a before and after that has never been, and can never be, here and now is precisely what Freud meant, on the deepest level, by the Unconscious." 60 Irwin finds the utilization of unconscious structures—incest, the Oedipus Complex, narcissism, doubling—pervasive in Faulkner. Consider the persistent reappearance of these structures as they are narratively reenacted and interrelated in the family stories of the Compsons, Sartorises, Sutpens, and McCaslins. Critics have long noted the connection between miscegenation and incest in Absalom., Absalom! There is the threat posed by Bon to Judith, brother to sister, black son to white daughter, which is opposed by another brother, Henry. Irwin sees this situation as the expression of the "archetype of the brother who must kill to protect or avenge the honor of his sister. . . . Which occurs, first of all, in the very title of the novel. In the Old Testament (2 Sam. 13), Absalom, one of David's sons, kills his brother Amnon for raping their sister Tamar." 6 1 The archetype presents itself again in Quentin's attempts to avenge his sister's honor in The Sound and the Fury. The unity of theme links these two novels, and insofar as the similarity of events has a focus in Quentin, the events of the two novels are not incidental and have a mutuality of reference. Henry and Bon represent opposing aspects of Quentin's personality, Bon the incestuous desire for his sister Caddy, unconsciously revealed, and Henry the expression of the punishment of such desire, insofar as conscious awareness of it compelled the necessity of repressing it. This is the doubling between Bon and Henry, and also between Bon and Quentin, in which Bon plays the role of the "shadow self." This equation is supported by the fact that Bon, in the narrative, is constantly referred to as a shadow and a phantom, with the dimensions of his personality obscure and his final motivations unknown, except as they are interpreted by others such as Henry and Quentin. They ascribe to him motives colored by the dictates of the doubling process.

Introduction

49

Further, and appropriately, it is Mr. Compson who first comments upon the vicarious satisfaction of desire for Henry's sister that Henry achieves through identification with Bon. We must assume that the same applies to Quentin, and Mr. Compson goes on to suggest that the marriage between Bon and Judith would represent a consummation of the love between Henry and Bon. Further, to such a consummation, Quentin would make a fascinated identification, reacting to the shadow self in Bon, the feminized element, and the masculine, self-assertive, punitive ego in Henry. Also, he would do so perhaps not the least because of the veiled homoeroticism that colors the whole situation. In doubling, therefore, there is the expected antagonism and ambivalence toward, but also love for, the image of the self in the other, as expressed in the opportunity the other provides the narcissistic self to love something other than itself, even if only vicariously. Irwin quotes Otto Rank as locating doubling in narcissism: In this case the ego's self-love and consequent over-estimation of its own worth leads to the guilty rejection of all instincts and desires that don't fit its ideal image of itself. The rejected instincts and desires are cast out of the self, repressed internally only to return externally personified in the double, where they can be at once vicariously satisfied and punished. The double evokes the ego's love because it is a copy of the ego, but it evokes the ego's fear and hatred as well because it is a copy with a difference. It is this element of sameness with a difference that gives the figure of the double that quality of the uncanny. . . . The difference that the ego senses in the double is the implicit presence of thé unconscious and particularly that form of the unconscious which the narcissistic ego finds most offensive to its self-esteem—death. 92

I believe that this statement illuminates, incidentally, the narcissistic component in so many of Faulkner's characters, and maybe, therefore, in his imagination itself, in the way that the approach of intimacy habitually signals a threat to autonomy, a sense of impending attack upon and loss of the self. But, more darkly, I also look upon Rank's formulation as offering an explanation in

50

Introduction

general for the antagonism in relations between the white and black races. The whites are the personification of the narcissistic selfperfection that must be defended against the threat of defilement as represented in the blacks, with all the attending ambivalence and guilt. It would follow, as Irwin points out, that the image in which the ego sees the double would constantly be one of dissolution and death, because of the negative and refractory image of the shelf, the "sameness with a difference," that the double presents to the self. This idea can be compared, in the classical myth, to Narcissus viewing the obscure and insubstantial image of himself in the water. 63 It would also follow that any attempt by the ego to defend itself against the threat posed by the double by suppressing or killing it constitutes the ego's own self-mutiliation. This may indeed be the explanation of what we mean when we say that white hatred of blacks, in the form of white projection of unacceptable qualities upon the blacks, as the shadow self, injures the hater as much as the hated. It seems to me that an appropriate and fascinating application of this general idea is found in Joe Christmas, in whom both the self and the double are combined, as expressions of his warring black-white mentalities. The white part condemns the black part; yet the black part is the shadow reflection of the white part, the other half of the ego which wishes to think of itself as entirely "white." To kill or suppress the black part is therefore akin to a literal act of self-destruction. Quentin Compson makes literal reference to the functioning of doubling between the races when, in the North at Harvard, he speaks of his concern about how he and the Northerners would get along with regard to the traditional attitudes of Southerners toward the black people. He has resolved, therefore, to remember to no longer think of them as "niggers" but as "colored people." Continuing in this vein of self-appraisal, he congratulates himself on having arrived at a point of accepting people as individuals: " I

Introduction

51

learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone. That was when I realized that a nigger is not a person so much as a form of behavior; a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives among" {Sound, p. 105). The "obverse reflection" is, of course, the shadow self, with which he is trying to come to grips. Throughout Quentin's section in the novel he has been trying to "trick" and avoid his shadow, which persists, however, in pursuing him. The shadow is the expression of the instinctual life in him that his false and misguided idealizing tendencies have caused him to distort and deny. Such failures produce the guilt which he also wishes to deny, and which he will finally attempt to cancel through drowning. The shadow self is also the instinctive drive for life which he perceives as trying to "trick" him, since it persists in its claim for the continued existence he has already denied. He must, therefore, in retaliation, continue to try to trick it. Applying metaphorical application to his literal statements above, he would no longer continue to think of the shadow as a "nigger" but as a "colored person," in an attempt, symbolically, to neutralize its hold upon him. He would like to take people for what they are and "leave them alone." But he can no more leave his shadow self alone than it can leave him alone; and the encounter he has with the black factotum Deacon, and the sight of the lone black man on the mule at the crossroads as he passes him on the train, evoke the black-white ego-shadow-self doubling process in which he acts out the delusory sense of superiority he feels from being preserved from the chaotic pressures of the instinctual life within him. Throughout this entire section, Faulkner has brilliantly employed the motifs of trickery and deceit, as Quentin employs them in his dealings with the outside world, to reflect his own inner deceit and the trick he has played upon himself in compromising and denying his own nature. The fear of one's own instincts, the difficulty of reconciling the contradictory claims of one's inheritances, are problems that al-

52

Introduction

most all of Faulkner's characters face. It is a theme, as Irwin says, that Faulkner never tires of reiterating. I quote Irwin in full: By courageously facing the fear of death, the fear of castration, the fear of one's own worst instincts, one slays the fear; by taking the risk of being feminized, by accepting the feminine elements in the self, one establishes one's masculinity. And it is by allowing the fear of death, of castration, of one's own instincts, of being feminized, to dominate the ego that one is paralyzed, rendered impotent, unmanned, as in the case of Quentin. 6 4

I think that this reflects significantly upon the psychological dimensions of what Faulkner meant when, in the Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he spoke of the modern writer's task: H e must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and d o o m e d — l o v e and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. 65

The racial dilemma, as I have tried to show, from the perspective of doubling and the other psychological categories, is but one— though surely compelling—manifestation of our ongoing capacity for betrayal of the human ideal. To curse another is, unwittingly, to place a curse upon all life. Faulkner's own courageous personal exposure to the curse testifies both to his supreme strengths and inevitable limitations as a man and artist. The sources of his imaginative engagement with the curse condemn and reveal it for what it is as well as throw into relief the compromising order of the accumulated personal, racial, and conceptual inheritance from which he could not escape. From the special vantage point of this discussion, a conception of the convergence of artist and man in Faulkner is commented upon by Irwin: "clearly, for Faulkner, writing is a kind of doubling in which the author's self is reconstituted within the realm of language as the Other, a narcissistic mirroring of the self to which the author's own reaction is at once a fascinated self-love and an equally fascinated self-hatred." 66

Introduction

53

Certainly it was the case, in Faulkner's world, that the mythic apparition of the black man as the one who was cursed, the unredeemable Other in whom was personified the stain on life, could be seen on every street corner. The preeminent example of the curse was slavery: "The curse is slavery, which is an intolerable condition—no man shall be enslaved—and the South has got to work that curse out and it will, if it's let alone." 67 This is what Faulkner has said. But the South and the white man denied, and continue to deny, the black man's humanity. Thus the black on the corner is a continual reminder of the guilt of that denial; he is that guilt manifested, and as such, so long as he is the human being who is at the same time exempted from humanity, the life and the humanity in all are compromised, and guilt is endless. As Joanna Burden's father says of the black race: "A race doomed and cursed to be forever and ever a part of the white race's doom and curse for its sins." He continues: "The curse of the black race is God's curse. But the curse of the white race is the black man who will be forever God's chosen own because He once cursed Him." (Light, pp. 339-40). This provides a kind of theological confirmation of the perpetualness of man's capacity for sin. Here God recognizes this capacity and takes vengence against it in the form of its enactment in the eternal antagonism between black and white. In this sense, God could have "chosen" the blacks as a metaphor of the intractability of the human mind. Or man, recognizing his intractability, his fundamental inner division, absolves himself of responsibility by viewing the dilemma as a condition sanctioned by God. In any case, the black is the pariah seen to fit into the unfolding of a divine plan. Thus, on the literal level, to the fanatic preservers of racial purity, such as Doc Hines and Percy Grimm, for instance, "no one of them," as Alfred Kazin has observed, "can really distingusih the hate they feel for others from self-accusation, so no one can say with whom guilt began, where the ultimate crime was committed." 68 The black man, the white woman, sexuality, guilt, and life are therefore all forced into a hateful combination. R. G. Collins has rendered this

54

Introduction

combination in a discussion of Light in August that focuses upon the sources of the obsessional violence directed against blacks and women—in a compelling, if rather too conveniently serviceable, formula: " T h e equation, then, is: Negro equals Guilt; Guilt induces Hatred of Life; therefore, Sex and the Sexual Object, which compel the act of Life creation are essentially vile and must be debased violently, since they by their nature corrupt. The sexual object, womanhood, must be violated; the sexual opponent, the Negro, must be castrated." 6 9 Guilt is a manifestation of the denial of all the irrational, contradictory, threatening desires and feelings and half-formulated mental constructions that have always been the suitable material of repression. These are the forbidden thoughts which seem to support an assault against what is rationally perceived as one's own best interest. Given the dark, brooding quality of the black, as he is traditionally seen—abject yet threatening, sullen and sluggish, yet vital, completely cut off from the redeeming power of rational mediation, yet sinister, cunning, rapacious, and quick, contradictory in every way—is he not to be taken as a metaphor for the unconscious mind and the repressed impulses and thoughts residing there? Guilt also stems from the existentially unaccountable and accidential fact of having been born white and thereby preserved from the stigma of defilement that attaches to the black. The fact of whiteness is not something which has been earned, but is something conferred upon one by the accident of birth. But forever after one must be held accountable and proved worthy of the boon of this inheritance and privileged status in reference to the black. Such a position cannot be maintained or justified unless continual violence is exercised against the claim the black has upon an equitable participation in the estate of man. This claim must finally be denied him, since, by definition, he cannot be black and at the same time enjoy the benefits of that " c o m m u n a l anonymity of brotherhood" already tacitly understood to be applicable only in relations among whites,

Introduction

55

for whom the image of humanity is reflected in the image of whiteness. The black's humanity must therefore be denied, as a consequence of the self-justifying concept of the virtue of whiteness. But the idea of the mutuality of human nature persists, the idea of black and white being made in God's image persists, the idea that one has affronted and debased the very idea of the sanctity of human life persists—and guilt is ongoing and inevitable. Thus we can begin to see more clearly the bases of the tacit, or explicit, assumption of the sexual superiority of the black: his seeming lack of shame and the abandon with which he approaches the act; the conception of his prodigious sexual equipment and appetite. The black is the embodiment of impulses which are repressed in the whites. But the repressed always returns. A curious feature of this situation is the insistence, found in much white thought, with a kind of envy and disgusted fascination, upon the profligate nature of the black. If the black is a personification of those cast-off impulses and desires of whites, then he is the dark other self of the whites, conceived of as capable of freely enacting the forbidden impulses that, in the whites, are constrained by the superego or other agencies or repression. Thus the black's fabulous endowment and insatiable appetites are necessary to the white fantasy life, providing it with an image of the possibility of the enactment of its own forbidden desires and the opportunity to continue to proscribe them. The white is wedded to his dark other self in a tragic and unrelenting embrace. Almost all of the men in Faulkner have great difficulty achieving satisfying and mutually fulfilling sexual relations with women. Often viewing sex itself as degrading, they may view woman as a fundamentally immoral or dishonest or dishonorable creature who is nevertheless secure in her being and sexuality in a way they never are and in a way they almost envy. Only as a result of difficult passages through rites of initiation, do these men achieve understanding and acceptance of mature sexuality and the masculine function, if at all.

56

Introduction

They must be reborn, while they seem to think that the female has been secure in her passage through the world all along. One paramount feature of the mythic view of Southern culture is the desexing of the female in the figure of the virginal and genteel Southern lady, charming and inviting in a conventional way, but far removed, according to the myth, from the sweaty physical claims of sexual reality. This romanticized view removes from possibility the aspect of woman's sexuality threatening to the male. It induces in her a false concept of purity that preserves her from corruption, as a result of her own desires or as a result of assault from outside, i.e., from the black or any other unacceptable male. Thus the Southern white male defends himself against his own secret view of woman's sexual readiness and susceptibilities with an artificial concept that must be maintained with great psychic energy. The dark elemental part of the personality is again stifled, consciously denied and unconsciously incorporated as an eternal threat. This part that has been stifled is personified in, for example, the elemental and licentious black woman, who knows only the pleasurable satisfaction of her instincts, and in the prodigious and insatiable black man, identified with the phallus. He is thus marked as the eternal violator, the one who, lest he is stopped, penetrates all life and leaves behind his stain. To engage in sex, therefore, on one level, is to claim as one's own those properties to which the mythic black forever has prior claim—to become, that is, synonomous with him in his darkness, because the act as a natural function is inextricably bound up to and colored by the contingent perception of as degrading. This is precisely the experience of the dietitian in Light in August, caught in that act, the degrading quality of which is confirmed by the presence of a "nigger" hiding in her closet. Mythic constructs view the black as the embodiment of desires which are repressed and denied. He is the one in whom the threat of such desires must be punished so that life can again, momentarily, achieve its sanctity. It is no wonder that the universal prohibition

Introduction

57

against incest, as a threat to the sanctity of the bloodline and the integrity of life in the context of an orderly social and biological continuum, is analogous to the fear of miscegenation, the fear of the corrupting and disrupting influence of the dark Other. The intensity and urgency with which the wives and daughters must be protected from the defilement of the brutes can only be a projection of the white male's fear of his own bestial nature, against which he wishes to protect his women. His is a defensive expression of the resistance to and repression of the acting out of incestuous desires and thoughts, and is an attempt, symbolically, to proscribe them. The difficulty here, if this equation is correct, is that the abhorrence toward the supposed defilement of race-mixing will forever be fed by the ambivalent, unresolved conflict and guilt fused around suppressed incestuous desires. From this point of view, one can understand the fatal appeal of the black's supersexuality and of his supposed desire for white women. One can further understand the intense interest in and abhorrence of, on the part of so many whites, the black's act of consummation with the white woman. With regard to the fear many of Faulkner's characters have toward woman, and the viewing of her as betrayer, corrupter, and corrupted, one must bear in mind that she is frequently seen as the bearer of qualities gentle, loving, and passive (the way Joe sees Mrs. McEachern). Such qualities represent the inferior part of the personality as viewed by many of Faulkner's characters, especially the villains. W o m a n also represents the possibilities of corruption and betrayal, as a result of what the men see as her inherent moral and physical weakness. She is ready to betray the masculine ideal because she is the antithesis of it and, like the black, must engage in subterfuge. She is this way because of her nature, because of, paradoxically, her great inner strength, her loving kindness, and, as it were, her amoral concern for the propagation and continuation of life in all its fullness. Ideally, she accepts what exists without distinctions. These are feminine aspects of the personality which, so often,

58

Introduction

in the males, we see shunted off into the unconscious. These are the aspects which we see the masculine ego defending itself against in the fear of being unmanned: that part of the unconscious that Jung calls a man's anima, which he must confront and become integrated with if he wishes to achieve wholeness and what Jung calls true individuation. What, finally, is the Biblical source of that curse upon the blacks, which Joanna's father alludes to, and which has had so unfortunate and powerful an influence upon Western thinking? The familiar passages in Genesis (9:20-27) relate the story of Noah, who, after having become "drunken" with wine, the fruit of his vineyard, after he had decided to become "an husbandman," lay "uncovered within this tent." "And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without," Shem and Japheth, who "took a garment and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness." Noah, upon awakening, "knew what his younger son [Ham] had done upon him." As a result, he cursed Ham's son Canaan: "a servant o,f servants shall he be unto his brethern"; but he blessed Shem and Japheth, whom Canaan would serve. What is the threat Ham posed to Noah, that is described as Noah's knowing "what his younger son had done unto him?" Might we not think that it was a symbolic expression of the threat posed to the progenitor's authority by desiring or compromising his prerogatives?—the Oedipus Complex, with its desire to castrate the father, overthrow him, and claim his rights and privileges? Or this, conjoined with an expression of the father's fantasies of such a design on the part of his son? (Noah, after all, is in a drunken sleep, ideal for the venting of instinctual pressures and conflicts.) It is not the son himself, Ham, who is cursed, but Ham's son, Canaan—and all subsequent progeny—who, as servants, will be denied the exercise of authority forever. Thus the father recognized the permanency of the

Introduction

59

Oedipal threat and, symbolically, permanently protects his authority against it. Ham's other brothers, refusing to look upon Noah's phallus, keep faith with the patriarchal line of descent, relinquishing their claim upon the father's authority and rights, in what we would today call the sublimation of instinctual desires and resolution of the Oedipal conflict. Ham, through his sons, was cursed because of the implied challenge to the authority of the father, the patriarchal figure, with implied reference to the resulting corruption of life which, in the father's eyes, would be the consequence of union between son and mother, should the father's position be overthrown. The perfect metaphor, in a literal and mythic sense, for the corrupting threat is the black person, the perpetual other, perpetually in opposition to the white in his unalterable physical appearance and in the mythic perception of his contrariness and difference. Ham looked upon the phallus and was punished. Implied is his transmogrification into blackness. Obviously Ham himself was not a black person; but what he did, and what his act represented, were later taken to be symbolic manifestations of the mythic definition of such a person, as he is defined in relation to whites. Thus, in the subsequent elaboration of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the blacks are identified in terms of their erotic propensity and the threat they pose to the integrity of the progeny, since some corrupting influence is imagined in the proximity of Ham's person to Noah's phallus. Ham is indeed there, in the tent, with Noah, in violation of whatever propriety. What Ham did is the very thing his brothers defended themselves against through denial. Yet, because they were sons themselves, we can appreciate the possibility of their vicariously experiencing, at the same time that they condemned, the actions of their brother. The example of Noah and Ham in reference to the blacks reveals how symbolic and literal meanings merge and reinforce each other and demonstrate the powerful effect that unconscious processes have

60

Introduction

upon our waking lives. N o t only is the black rendered as the bearer of a fatal fault with regard to his physical differences from whites. In the minds of whites he is also the embodiment of the very idea of contamination and of the idea that the mind is divided against itself. He is the harbinger of the idea that the dark, irrational, and instinctual dimension persists in its threatening potential as a force which overcomes reason and light or infiltrates and compromises them. This antithesis at the very heart of mental functioning is precisely its unique and tragic nature.

I Light in August

The psychohistorical and connotative meanings of the words "nigger" and Negro, and what it means to be black, are the subjects of investigation for Faulkner in Light in August. The whites do not react to the black as a person; they react to him rather as to a concept, to the psychohistorical value of what black has come to imply in their minds, which is primarily experienced as the principle of negativity, limitation, and defilement. The blacks, because of the irreversibility of their color, their vulnerability throughout adverse historical circumstance, and the mythic inheritance of their conditioning as victims eternally wedded to their white executioners, offer confirmation of the roles specified for them by white expectations. One's identity by race, then, confers upon one a social, psychological, and psychohistorical value that transcends mere racial difference and projects a mythic archetypal antipathy. We know how the Civil War served as a kind of crucial historical climax in the development and articulation of this antipathy between the races in the South. Additionally, in Faulkner's depiction of the situation, the war and its aftermath arrested the minds of its sons and daughters in meditation upon the event, in their pursuit of private despair, and in their abdication of the moral responsibility of addressing remedial action to pressing social ills. In the novel, Hightower is a prime example of this loss of faith and principle. The black, seen to be the cause of the white man's guilt, finds himself now, because of the continuing conflict, transformed into the very image of guilt. Thus Joanna Burden and Doc Himes, ostensibly polar opposites in their attitudes toward the blacks, are

62

Light in August

joined in the sharing of the white man's burden of him. The blacks are the unredeemable guiltly ones in whom is objectified the curse on life. The conflict between the races is, of course, internalized and personified within the person of Joe Christmas himself. His conflict is an analogue, surely, to the bleak, despairing, destructive racial battle that continues to rend apart Southern society at large. Selfhatred, guilt, obsession wth racial purity in the face of its perennial threat, debasement of relations between individuals, and an inability to utilize life's possibilities, are its internalized features. If life is corrupt, then woman, the vessel of life and agent of its defilement, is the source of its corruption; the debased images of woman and of the disgusting impurity of the sex act fill the novel. Faulkner brilliantly demonstrates how this loss of the sanctity of life leads to a sense of the corruption of life at its source. Faulkner has always admired the individual over against the social being whose life is ruled by an abstract, artificial, or destructive devotion to the approved strictures of conventional behavior. But the individual must not turn against or separate himself from the ongoing nurturing life of the community as such. Lucas Beauchamp is an example of the individual—and mulatto—who pursues his own way in hostile surroundings, when the community is at odds with his well-being, and specifies, as it does for Joe Christmas, roles for him to play that are contradictory and inimical. Yet Lucas achieves integrity within the confines of society; it is as an individualist and human being that he insists on being defined, responsible for his humanity. But Joe Christmas is a spectre or phantasm who has no place in society, because of its bigoted and compulsive opposition to him. He has no respectful or defining self-conception, because of his own internal division which reflects the irreconcilable racial conflict in life about him. He avoids humanity, because he sees within himself the stigma that he thinks humanity sees, personified within indi-

Light in August

63

viduals such as himself. Thus he hates himself and hates society, because it makes him think of himself as a kind of falsification of humanness. In his fierce, violent, internalization of his conflict, he sinks into that stillness of nonbeing of which Alfred Kazin speaks. This reflects one of the perennial aspects of the way blacks are viewed in Faulkner's novels. They have been cursed by God. They must submit and endure, incapable of self-definition that commands respect. That violence that exudes from Christmas even when he is seen sitting still like a man in prayer reflects the impotent will in its frustration and inability to seek a self-respecting identity. All Christmas can do is violently project his inability to reject what he sees as the circumstantial necessity of being either white or black. His determining mentality is, of course, his white mind viewing his black contaminating part with hatred. But in a general sense, Christmas' struggles metaphorically reflect the nonbeing of blackness, as seen by the whites and as sometimes felt by the blacks themselves. It is the metaphor of the inability of the black person—since, if Christmas thinks of himself as black, then he is so—ever to be, in the white world, something. It is the metaphor of the white person viewing the black in a kind of pity and commiserating contempt, trying to imagine the fear and outrage of the despised and degraded ones, who can never achieve an identity that counts. Faulkner, speaking of Joe's situation, says: I think that was his tragedy—he didn't know what he was, and so he was nothing. He deliberately evicted himself from the human race because he didn't know which he was. That was his tragedy, that to me was the tragic, central idea of the story—that he didn't know what he was, and there was no way possible in life for him to find out, which to me is the most tragic condition a man could find himself in—not to know what he is and to know that he will never know. 1

This certainly reveals Faulkner's conception of the anguish with which he has invested Christmas' creation, and, further, his implied conception of the necessary anguish which he imagines would be

64

Light in August

the experience of individuals of mixed blood in general, who would not know to which race they belonged. Christmas does not know his parentage, his family background, but it is not the lack of knowledge of his parentage which constitutes his identity crisis in the novel. It is his lack of knowledge of his racial composition. Yet even here he has a very definite attitude toward himself: he is the white man who feels contaminated by an infusion of alien blood. Within Joe this situation is tragic; but it is not, as Faulkner implies, necessarily a tragic situation within itself. The tragic situation seems to be that Joe finds that, as a white man, even to think of himself as black means that he is black. In the end he accepts his black identity. His example demonstrates that the putative possession of black blood is tantamount to "biological" possession, and I think this idea explains the inclusion of Gavin Stevens' finalizing summation at the end of the novel. In any case, the classification of blackness, in the minds of many whites, has always meant designation in terms of the mythic propensities of negativity, limitation, and defilement, of which the color difference is a metaphor. Since Joe is exempt from any biologically defining characteristics of blackness, it follows that his classification is in terms of the mythic designation. It is this definition which has always been for many whites the "real" designation of blackness. The mythic designation contains within itself the actual biological difference as a particularized expression of the "true" mythic one. This idea is expressed, as I have said earlier, in the manner in which the myth of Noah and Ham was put to use in the subsequent elaboration of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Noah cursed Ham through his son, Canaan. Ham (and all his descendants) later becomes transmogrified into a "black" person (in color), because he demonstrated the mythic propensities of blackness, in that his actions toward Noah were subsequently interpreted as emblematic of blackness in the unconscious mind.

Light in August

65

Indeed, the fear of defilement is so strong—the white fear of the mythic black opposite—that, as the ironic and conventionally amusing phrase has it, one drop of black blood has always "made you whole": wholly black, even if, against all logic, one were indistinguishable in appearance and behavior from a "white" person. I believe, therefore, that any discussion of whether or not Joe actually possesses black blood is immaterial, since he believes, and thus behaves, as if he did. Thus if it is true, as Faulkner says, that Christmas evicted himself from the human race because he didn't know what he was, it is even more true that the human race evicted him. Joe Christmas does not come into the world a human being. He comes into the world an abstraction, a phantom, subject not only to the inevitable classification by race, but also to a whole system of fanatical racial and religious beliefs that, through their functioning in society, make of him a scapegoat and prevent his coming into any kind of mature awareness of his personal identity. These forms of social conditioning become his heritage. They create the climate of his mental functioning, so that the very thoughts that he thinks about himself have already been determined. He has no knowledge or understanding of these factors. What remains his is his will—the will to opposition, the will to sustain and contain the conflict and prevent it from literally overwhelming him. The will is his autonomous human capability, but it is still fed and directed and determined by his internalized conflicts, and this is the true tragedy of his situation, his self-delusion. His willed resistance provides no knowledge ("He was the volitionless servant of that fatality in which he believed that he did not believe"). I cannot agree with John Longley, Jr.'s conception of Joe as the existential hero bearing the dreadful burden of his freedom, since, as Longley says, "with total freedom comes total responsibility." Longley says that "Faulkner takes pains to make Joe's freedom absolute," and Longley grants Joe's conditioning, but sees him as

66

Light in August

refusing to surrender to it, and sees his rootlessness and freedom from customary social restraints as reflecting that freedom: "Straw hat on head and razor in pocket, he is ready for a journey of one mile or a thousand." 2 This confers a kind of dignity and heroism upon Joe's struggle that I think is his due. But Faulkner makes clear in the novel that Joe's readiness for travel only reflects his readiness to escape from himself, to flee any attempted reconciliation of his irreconcilable conflicts. His rootlessness allows him to escape the human involvement that inevitably brings to the surface the pain of his conflicts and the impossibility of conducting relations under the conventional norms of society which he holds responsible for his conflict in the first place. I believe that his freedom is an illusion. When he speaks of making himself into what he chooses to be, I think he is referring to an inchoate awareness of what ought to be taken as the inviolability of his individual personhood, which exists as an irreducible fact of being prior to the imposition of any alien definitions. Ordinarily, we might say, it is this sense of original personhood which expresses itself through, and is modified by, social and racial classifications which the individual inherits and accepts as his own, without necessary conflict. This is is the usual and natural mode of role playing that the entire human race engages in. But such an engagement is impossible for Joe, because the obsessional and destructive particulars of his social and racial circumstances have already exempted him from the original awareness of the inviolability of personhood. He has nothing left to himself, nothing that is his, but the conflict between the opposing roles, here conceived of as the original and essential defining characteristics of humanness. Agony of exploration and genuine mortification of the spirit are obvious in Faulkner's treatment of Joe Christmas. The extremity of feeling out of which the conditions of this novel have been conceived is perhaps not only due to the special nature of the protagonist, but is also surely the result of the particular urgency

Light in August

67

which treatment of the protagonist brought to the whole complex of Faulkner's themes. Christmas' alienation is simply the preeminent example of the alienation experienced by the major characters in question. All live in a distorted relation with the past. Joe especially demonstrates how the pressure of the denial of the past is precisely what keeps it with him. Though Faulkner is using Christmas symbolically to indicate the antagonism that exists between the two opposing racial ideas, it seems to me that Faulkner is also just beginning to distrust his preconceptions, though still recognizing their hold on him. He seems to feel that he can make his conception of Christmas believable through the sheer force of his will. Fortunately, Faulkner's obsessional interest in his subject is also matched by the depth, anguish, and sincerity of his exploration and the imaginative genius of his artistry. Christmas has now entered the literary imagination of our time, as an image of the conflicts experienced by the mulatto. He projects his own reality, but the reader is not obliged to credit Faulkner's presentation of this reality. Christmas' struggle is a confused attempt to create personal identity. He must overcome the counteracting forces of society, the conflicting black and white identities as they exist in his own mind, which create a role for him. Faulkner, of course, interprets the role for himself, then creates the mentality and the mechanisms by means of which the character sees the conditions imposed by this role and the social reality which governs the role. Added to this is the given confusion in Christmas' mind about his selfhood, his identity, that stems from the mere fact that his conception presents the image of a psychologically disturbed and regressive personality, apparently even a psychopathic personality. Indeed, I have often wondered whether, as a result of Faulkner's brilliant intuitive grasp of the conflicts raging in such a mind, he did not intend for Christmas' "voices of the blood" to be actual contradictory and accusing voices in the mind, like the delusions of schizophrenics. He

68

Light in August

rebels against playing a role he does not accept, not sufficiently understanding that the nature of his rebellion is shaped by the dictates of that role, as he tries not to be black by trying to be the white person that his internalized experience keeps reiterating is an impossibility. It is an intensely internalized and defaced portrayal that the reader is presented with, which itself is cloaked within the aura of stereotype. I do not believe that the conception of Christmas allows him to do what he does, suffer what he suffers, through free choice. The entire basis of his conflict is predicated upon the assumption of his imagined possession of mixed blood, the signature of defilement. The possibility of having mixed blood has always been tantamount to possessing it. What can be the biological or psychological value, in terms of functioning or behavior, of the minute infusion of black blood in his veins, over against the self-representation and state of mind that would be induced, and the treatment accorded one, in the event that it was thought that one's blood was mixed? Joe knows that to give in to blackness means to call down upon himself all the despised mythic attributes of the racial designation—to become the ultimately despised and victimized one. He has the choice, if choice it is—and I do not conceive of it as choice—not to bring down such opprobrium upon himself. I believe that it is the true measure of his integrity—and the source of his conflict—to wish to look upon the putative possession of black blood as not a sinful or degrading thing in itself, but as merely a particularized racial expression of a common humanity. But to assert such a view is to meet opposition and calumny at every point, to compromise himself in the eyes of society as well as within his own mind, pervaded as it is by accusatory white dictates. He cannot, as it were, be a human being and a black person at the same time. I think that this might be said to be his essential discovery. When he at last accepts his humanity as a black, he also accepts the negative judgment upon blackness. This is so regardless of

Light in August

69

its being said that, at the time of his capture, he acted neither like a white man nor a black man. He goes forth to meet his fate as the one who is to be crucified in atonement for the contamination that is in life, in the psyche, of which the unfortunate black is at once embodiment and scapegoat. In Joe's disastrous encounter with the dietitian, in which sex, blackness, and guilt are all united in a collective image of disgust and defilement, is also an initial source of his insecurity, ambivalence, and hatred, toward women and toward himself, that will be characteristic of his behavior for the rest of his life. The dietitian does not necessarily believe that Joe is black, but she knows what his fate will be if he is designated as such. In her misunderstanding of his child's inability to comprehend the compromising situation in which he has seen her in her room, she waits anxiously to see if he will inform on her, while he waits anxiously to be punished for his child's transgression. In her vindictiveness, her lack of perception and judgment, she ascribes to the child the attitudes and frame of mind of an adult. But her behavior is inexplicable to the child; she alternately offers him money in appeasement of an act he only regards with revulsion, and then curses him, calling him a "little nigger bastard"—without absolving him, releasing him of the feelings of guilt at having been caught in her room, which feelings, for him, center only upon having eaten the toothpaste and having vomited. He does not become nauseated, as Sally Page suggests, as a result of witnessing the dietitian's sex act, but rather because he ate too much of the toothpaste. 3 However, the very fact of his being in the closet, eating the toothpaste and, because of the anxiety generated in him at the sounds of the sexual activity outside, eating more than he normally would, signifies, from one point of view, his original guilt. The dietitian, the foodgiver, plump, fresh, and white, who always had pleasurable associations in his mind, is now the object of his guilty desire which he satisfies in the closet, "among the womansmelling

70

Light in August

garments," by eating the toothpaste—white, antiseptic, pure. Metaphorically, he is already the defiler; metaphorically, he could also have been seeking redemption, in the form of the assuaging of the anxiety generated in him a being constantly watched by the malevolent Hines and taunted by the children. He could have been seeking such redemption by incorporating into his body, through the eating of the toothpaste, the calming, accepting nurturance of the dietitian-mother figure. Thus, at some deep level beneath rational thought, she drastically contradicts and devaluates, in the child's mind, any sense of the mother—or woman—as one to be trusted or as one who can meet human needs. The thing that he is guilty of is the childhood transgression which provokes a contradictory and destructive response. He is punished by having the reason for his inquisitiveness, one might say, no longer seen as a normal and natural human venture, but as a special and sinful attribute of his nature—subsequently to be accounted for by his blackness and, as a consequence, his illegitimacy. It comes to be this black thing in him that is the object of revulsion, not the specific act he performed. Had he, for instance, been an untainted white boy, then he could have been absolved, in the way that he would have been a bad boy for doing it, but not inherently bad. Thus comes about confirmation of the feeling, spawned by Doc Hines's constant surveillance, that his is a sinful nature and can only do what people take to be bad. He can no longer be allowed to have the normal weaknesses and limitations of human nature, the natural vulnerabilities that others are guilty of and can be excused of and not judged for, knowing—contrary to the way Joe is made to feel—that such features are not special and unique attributes of themselves alone. He cannot help but accept himself under these terms of limitation, because it would appear to him that this is the way human nature is, and he has no basis of comparison to judge otherwise. He accepts things as they are. And, as I have earlier suggested, I think Faulkner's celebrated equation

Light in August

71

"memory believes before knowing remembers" reflects this situation: acceptance of the data of experience without knowing or understanding what one accepts. As for the dietitian, the extremity of her sin can only be appreciated from the point of view of the wretched Christmas being her accuser. That he should have been the one who caught her reinforces the sinfulness of her act, with reference to the psychic equation of the degradation of blackness and the sinfulness, the perversion even, of sexual desire and activity. It must always be seen as illicit and degrading, and these are exactly the terms under which she conducts it—as a loveless assignation. Here we can see, as I have said earlier, how the whites' engaging in sex itself identifies them with the mythic black and all that he signifies. The rich metaphor of the "nigger" hiding in the closet confirms the degradation of the act. As a result, the dietitian's self-esteem is completely undermined; she falls from grace. (In the black person, the corollary, to the dietitian's fall, is the falling from the grace of an equitable participation in the human estate and his consequent devaluation, ascribed to his blackness. From this point of view, to be black is, in the minds of many whites, to fall from humanity.) For the dietitian, to have been caught by the black Christmas confirms her depravity. This is the psychic equation of guilt and degradation; perhaps it explains or contributes to the strange and infantile necessity the dietitian has to treat the "nigger" child as an equal. "'Tell!' she said. 'Tell, then! You little nigger bastard!'" 4 To be dragged down so low, to have been forced to acknowledge the reality of her sexuality, has quite literally driven the dietitian mad. She must defend and vindicate herself, lest she become a "nigger" too. She is one of Faulkner's most drastically limited and unsympathic images of perverted womanhood. Doc Hines propounds her point of view: "I knowed he would be there to catch you when God's time came. I knowed. I knowed who set him there, a sign and a damnation for bitchery" {Light, 111).

72

Light in August

Woman is the corrupt vessel of life. If she will not preserve her female purity, which in any case is impossible because she is already corrupt in her susceptibility to the ever-present black threat and her vulnerability through the menstrual flow, at once the signature of the promise and corrupting dissolution of life, then it follows that racial purity is obviously impossible. Her impurity is God's curse upon her and a warning to man to be ever vigilant. Hines says, reflecting this, that his sin is even greater than hers: "I know evil. Aint I made evil to get up and walk God's world? A walking pollution. . ." {Light, 115). As progenitor, through his wayward daughter Milly, of the walking pollution, he has confirmed God's judgment upon woman and provided the occasion for his fulfilling of God's expectations of man by keeping watch over the evil that has to be. Of course, from the point of view of psychological doubling, he has cast out of himself the guilty attitudes and desires that he sees embodied in Joe, and all other blacks, so that he can forever be engaged in exercising upon them an unrelenting and purgative vengeance. Therefore, Doc Hines, Joe's grandfather, has allowed his religious fanaticism and racial bigotry to carry him over the brink into insanity. In an exaggerated form, Hines represents the waste of resources and energies of the South, in its absorption with a threat that exists, not in reality, but only in the mind. It is from Hines that Joe's vague, but initial, sense of the contamination of blackness comes. And in terms of its virulence, Joe remains faithful, as expressed with regard to the intensity of his racial conflict, for the rest of his life. For Hines, the soft, unmanlike female nature invites seduction itself. As proof of this, identifying himself with God, he says that if God himself came into the dietitian's room, she'd think he'd come in bitchery. This allows him to give full expression to the bestiality of his own nature when he forces himself into her room as if he intended to rape her. Of course, this action causes her to feel violated, even as it reflects her capacity as an actual seductress. It is

Light in August

73

the natural outcome of her fall from grace and of her having been caught giving expression to the dark sexual aspect of her nature, which she imagines now is inexplicably visible to the scrutinizing eye, and obviously so to the visionary Hines. When he asks her if she's told the matron yet about Joe's blackness, she thinks he's referring to her assignation. Thus she will not only get Joe transferred, but will have him "punished for having given her terror and worry." As soon as she's thought of a solution to her dilemma, she becomes sensually and animally relaxed. She goes to bed naked, masturbates, and, afterwards, her body lies waiting for sleep, "open to accept sleep as though sleep were a man." It is she and Hines who are the true parents of Christmas, and what more appropriate metaphorical source of defilement can there be than the union of these two disturbed and disturbing individuals! In these images of woman in the novel, one must note, incidentally, the force of the female principle in its plenitude and its power to corrupt woman's nature (even as Hines suggests, though not in the way he means) when not allowed, as Lena's example demonstrates, an appropriate and natural means of expression. (Allied with Lena are the anonymous furniture dealer's wife and also, in some provisional way, Mrs. Armstead.) In this respect, all the other women are in contrast to Lena: the dietitian's animalistic, loveless, egocentric sensuality; Joanna's repressed sexuality, which finally overwhelms the forces of denial in an insatiable and putrescent flood that is evoked by the concept of the defilement of blackness; the pathetic example of Hightower's wife, driven, because of the denial of conjugal relations that were her right, to a perverse and degrading satisfaction of her sexual needs in anonymous hotel rooms, and finally to suicide; the black girl, procured by the boys, in the shed, who devaluates the very image of femaleness in her abysmal, mindless, abject, shameless readiness of surrender; and finally Bobbie, stunted, deformed, degenerate—a pro-

74

Light in August

stitute who exploits sex, a natural human need, for profit. To this dark elaboration one hardly needs to add the examples of Mrs. McEachern, Mrs. Hines, and her daughter Milly, whose frustrations are so much more conventionally understandable. Faulkner is driven to a pitch of frenzy and nausea in his recognition and description of these things, however sympathetic is his awareness of their casues. Some of Joe's earliest recollections are of Doc Hines sitting in the door of the furnace room staring hostilely at him. Joe thought: "He hates and fears me. So much so that he cannot let me out of his sight. With more vocabulary but not more age he might have thought That is why I am different from the others: because he is watching me all the time.,, Faulkner says of the five-year-old child. " H e accepted it" {Light, 120-21). This indicates more than Joe's incipient fatalism, the acceptance of his supposed difference without supplying himself with a reason for it. The burden of his nature is placed upon the child: he is already different, and Hines's looking at him confirms it. But this is not the same as the idea that he wasn't different beforehand until Hines's looking at him made him think that he was. It is a delicate point to prove, but not, I think an inconsequential or irrelevant one. To achieve this idea, simply turn the sentence around: Because he is looking at me all the time, I conclude that I am different. This means that the child's essence is still free and remains undefined until circumstances cause him to think of himself in a certain way, and not that his difference is a function of, or produces, the circumstances in which he finds himself. The latter would indicate a predisposition on the author's part governing this conception. It is with factors of this kind in mind that I am led to think that the children's calling Joe a "nigger" is not incidental, does not occur at the prompting, as R. G. Collins thinks, of a "random whim." 6 What reason would they have for their taunting of Joe? The reader is made to feel that their doing so is no more significant

Light in August

75

than the usual taunting and name-calling that children engage in. Of course, the difference that is already a feature of Joe's endowment can account for this. It causes him to be treated differently, produces anxiety in him which isolates him from the others, and can be metaphorically taken as the sign of his blackness. This allows Doc Hines to take it as the sign of his actual difference: "Why dont you play with them other children like you used to?" and he didn't say nothing and old Doc Hines said, "Is it because they call you a nigger?" and he didn't say nothing and old Doc Hines said, "Do you think you are a nigger because God has marked your face?" and he said "Is God a nigger too?" and old Doc Hines said "He is the Lord God of wrathful hosts, His will be done. Not yours and not mine, because you and me are both a part of His purpose and his vengeance."

CLight, 335-36) Joe is beginning to become aware of the derogatory meanings of the word, though he cannot guess the full implications. The narrative presents him as still innocent, but now curious, and he follows the black workman around the yards. When the workman asks him why he is following him, Joe replies: "How come you are a nigger?" and the nigger said, "Who tole you I am a nigger, you little white trash bastard?" and he says "I aint a nigger," and the nigger says "You are worse than that. You don't know what you are. And more than that, you wont never know," and he says "God aint no nigger," and the nigger says "I reckon you ought to know what God is, because dont nobody but God know what you is." {Light, 336)

The child, examining himself, is obviously not the color of the man who is a "nigger." Yet it is his color which is the only thing the child can see which could account for his being so called, which could account for his difference. There must therefore be some other meaning which accrues to the color of which the child is unaware. The workman, of course, knows what this meaning is and can only react antagonistically to it. In reply, he calls Joe a "white"

76

Light in August

bastard. This means that his "whiteness" has been "bastardized"; it also, of course, carries the conventional meaning. To the child this must have been supremely contradictory. The dark man calls him white when the whites around him call him "black," which by definition he cannot be. He does not, therefore, know what he is. When the dietitian convinces the matron of Joe's mixed blood, the matron decides that they must place Christmas with adoptive parents "at once." Ostensibly, this is to prevent sending him to a black orphanage. But is not this precisely what they would have felt compelled to do? Compare this with the situation of Christmas' capture. When Lucas Birch/Brown introduces, in final desperation at the prospect of losing the reward money, the idea that Christmas is black, the sheriff is so taken aback that he pauses a moment to warn Birch of the gravity of his allegations. For he cares less about the crime itself than the possibility of Birch falsely accusing a white man of being black. Yet when McEachern asks about Joe's background, the matron deliberately tells him that they know nothing further about his parentage than the facts already given, that he was found on the doorstep of the orphanage, and that McEachern ought not to adopt if he's concerned about such things. Mrs. McEachern, attempting personal communication, makes an appeal to Joe's humanity. He rejects her, lest his inner conflict be brought out into the open. Mr. McEachern, laboring so strenuously to change Joe's behavior, fails, changing him not at all. His egotism, bigotry, and unwaveringly doctrinaire views make him utterly predictable to Joe. Because McEachern is incapable of interpersonal relations, his example probably serves only to reinforce Joe's own psychological rigidity. When Doc Hines took him away from the orphanage, he was not surprised. Very little surprises him. Nor was he disturbed by, or inclined to resist, McEachern's decreee that his name be changed from the "heathenish" Christmas, thinking that he needn't even bother to resist the adoption of the new name, McEachern, even though he himself acknowledges it as an alien

Light in August

77

identity. Nor does he, at any given point after a suitable passage of time, remember things: Alice, the child at the orphanage who befriended him; the dietitian herself and the drama of having eaten the toothpaste; where he went with Hines and why, etc. The "memory believes before knowing remembers"; the acceptance of experience as mere data, with no awareness of the reverberating impact that touches all depths of the personality, and shapes and forms it, makes him appear curiously inhuman. We must think that he cannot afford to know, to expose himself in awareness to his accumulated psychic reservoir, which absorbs and retains all experience as he makes his way through life, since any given memory or experience is colored by the pain and anger of the originally suppressed conflict. Joe's resistance to performing McEachern's desires becomes associated in his mind, through the agency of McEachern's Calvinistic obsession with the elect and hopeless sinfulness of others, with the idea of his own innate inadequacy. It leaves an indelible impression on Joe's mind. When Joe, at eight years, refuses to learn the Presbyterian catechism, he is brutally whipped until he faints. Afterwards, McEachern forces his foster child to kneel with him in prayer: He asked that he be forgiven for trespass against the Sabbath and for lifting his hand against a child, an orphan, who was dear to God. He asked that the child's stubborn heart be softened and that the sin of disobedience be forgiven him also, through the advocacy of the man whom he had flouted and disobeyed, requesting that Almighty be as magnanimous as himself, and by and through and because of conscious grace.

{Light, 40) Compare McEachern with the strong-willed aristocratic heroes (Carothers McCaslin, for instance), or with Sutpen making his proposition to Miss Rosa or contemptuously dismissing the girl Milly who's just borne his child. McEachern is a man whose "voice was not unkind. It was not human, personal at all. It was just cold,

78

Light in August

implacable, like written or printed words" {Light, 130). In McEachern one gets the absolute evil apotheosis of that monstrous singleminded self-sufficiency of purpose. N o t e also, the dispassionate, grotesquely humorous and jesting quality of Faulkner's writing during these scenes. Consider the monstrousness of McEachern, his psychopathic calmness in the execution of his gruesome deeds. A characteristic quality of Faulkner's characters is their penchant for immediate and sharp repartee, the displaying of their rapiers of wit, always as if they are in a defensive position, ready against any coming assault. They stab, thrust, and parry. It is as if life were a battle, and he who would acquit himself successfully must always have at the readiness an aggressive defense mechanism, colored by a kind of adolescent urgency. The quality of so much of the human intercourse in Faulkner seems to be couched in a pervasive yet unspecified aura of submerged sadism. R. G. Collins thinks that much of Faulkner criticism is wrong in viewing McEachern as a villain. Collins finds that McEachern is not prejudiced against blacks as a race, that he treats Joe as a white child, and that in one way he is fair-minded in his treatment of Joe and Joe says so. Collins believes that McEachern's significance in the novel is "simply one more instance of Joe's unconscious hatred against white and black alike. The more significant relation is the one that [Joe] has with Mrs. McEachern, in contrast to whom the husband frequently represents the same cleansing violence as does the gang fighter." 6 It seems to me that Collins greatly underestimates the negative expectations McEachern has of Joe and the effect of this upon Joe's conflict. I think that McEachern's implicit attitude toward Joe is of the degenerate illegitimate whose sinful nature must come out. Joe's illegitimacy, because it has nothing to do with him, ought not to inherently mark him in any way, just as the " t a i n t " of blackness, having nothing to do with him, ought not to determine his essence in the eyes of others—but they do. And illegitimacy can constitute

Light in August

79

the same kind of threat, albeit at a lesser degree of opprobrium or defilement, as miscegenation. In any case, in Faulkner's culture, racially mixed children must by definition be illegitimate, legitimate offspring of such unions being unthinkable. Joe is viewed by McEachern as the inferior and sinful one—irresponsible, untrustworthy and lecherous, stubborn, resentful, sullen, prideful, and uncooperative. Joe is the very embodiment of those qualities which stigmatize the offspring of unions that flout the conventions of society and the morality of the church. McEachern's praying over Joe is in recognition of such inadequacies. Further, I read these failings as metaphorically signifying some sort of human lack in Joe, as the latter sees it, that McEachern asks forgiveness for. But all human beings are subject to the limitations of human nature; McEachern and Joe are human equals. Yet I think it is precisely this human equality that McEachern doesn't recognize, so that he, in his superiority, can always hold Joe accountable for some failing, which to Joe can only mean his racial failing. This conflict, of course, was revived in Joe when Joanna Burden began praying over him. There was no question in Joe's mind that she was specifically referring to his "Negroness." In McEachern's case, the reference is to a more generalized limitation, as perceived by Joe, though it finally induces in him the violence of the characteristically racially motivated response. McEachern, acting out of his distorted religious convictions, does as much harm to Joe as if he'd actually treated him as a "nigger," which he in fact does, though he does not think of him as such. Yet the tasks that they set themselves to, and the relationship they have, are impersonal. The things required of Joe are the same things McEachern would require of any other child, just as it is probable that any other child would finally be found lacking by McEachern, no matter how perfect was his performance, though Joe cannot realize this. The two of them, in their pursuit of their hard, violent, masculine rituals, are preserved from the soft, seduc-

80

Light in August

tive guile of the woman. McEachern, in his stern Calvinism, which implies a natural fear and distrust of woman, has already so oppressed and stifled his wife's feminine nature that she has become "sexless." This Joe can appreciate, being himself a faithful representative of his own stern Calvinist heritage, which makes him hunger for justice rather than mercy. Yet it is precisely McEachern's actions against his wife which have prompted the urgency with which her female nature expresses itself in her actions toward Joe. In her limitation, she seems to Joe to wish to draw him into a conspiracy of the victimized ones against the superior masculine principle. He, as a white male, would be led into self-betrayal, in a confirmation of his limited- "Negroness." In a similar manner, her conspiratorial acceptance of his sexual activity would be viewed, from the point of view of his Calvinist judgment of himself, as repugnant. Just as McEachern, from the point of view of bigotry and religious obsession, is the extreme of masculine aggression, so is Mrs. McEachern the extreme of passivity and victimization. With respect to this situation, compare Doc Hines' relationship to his wife, from the point of view of the extreme expression of bigotry and racial obsession. Lying in his bed after the whipping and McEachern's praying over him, Joe listens as Mrs. McEachern mounts the stairs to his attic bedroom, in McEachern's absence. Starved for affection, she reaches out to him. He rejects her by taking the tray of food she has bought and dumping it in a corner, then returning to lie stoneyeyed on his bed. But an hour later, after she has left, "he rose from the bed and went and knelt in the corner . . . and above the outraged food kneeling, with his hands ate, like a savage, like a dog" (Light, 136). The text is revealing. His own emotive capabilities are so deeply repressed that he has ceased to feel. The outrage he feels has become projected upon the food. For Joe, the meaning of normal human relations is reversed. He thought of Mrs. McEachern as a woman who had a "woman's affinity and in-

Light in August

81

stinct for secrecy for casting a faint taint of evil about the most trivial and innocent actions. . . . It was the woman; that soft kindness which he believed himself doomed to be forever victim of and which he hated worse than he did the hard ruthless justice of men. 'She is trying to make me cry,' he thought. . ." (Light, 146-47). She was trying to make him feel; and, of course, had he done that, he should indeed have cried. His conflict with women achieves its first violent elaboration in his encounter with the black girl that he and his boyhood friends procure for sexual intercourse. Joe's turn comes and he enters the shed, "smelling the woman . . . enclosed by the womanshenegro and the haste, driven, having to wait until she spoke. . . . Leaning, he seemed to look down into a black well and at the bottom saw two glints like reflection of dead stars" {Light, 137). He reacts immediately by viciously striking and kicking her, until her screams bring the other boys in, with whom he continues to fight, weeping now, until finally subdued. All the things that Joe fears are combined in the womanshenegro—a concept, a threat. One of the most interesting factors motivating his reaction to the girl is his revulsion at the impersonality of the act. The girl makes no personal appeal to him and, in consequence, elicits a very personal, though distorted, reaction from him. I would like to try to consider the full implications of Joe's encounter with the "womanshenegro." For Joe, the girl herself is simply the antilife, the principle of negativity. He punishes her, for devaluing womankind, and for having no respect for her black person, which can only call to mind his own negative self-esteem as a black person. It is, of course, this conception of the amoral black woman who could most abjectly indicate the hopeless futility of his condition as a black person, and the futility of his ever being able to redeem it. The girl, as a female, is also a threat to the integrity of being, since Joe's first encounter with the dietitian caused him to enter into that relation with humans in which the concept of the

82

Light in August

mutuality of human relations was violated, in which the unpredictable and amoral w o m a n neither respected nor recognized or understood the integrity of his person. It w a s a situation where, after his encounter with the dietitian, he was consigned to treatment as a nonperson. F r o m this he learned not to respect the integrity of other people's motives, nor to expect humane treatment from them. Thus the black girl reminds him of the threat of nonbeing, as it reflects his blackness, and as it reflects the threat all w o m e n can present to the masculine ego in the form of absorbing and incorporating it back into w h a t the men perceive as the abyss of the female self. Further, and as a profound indication of the mystery of w o m a n ' s unpredictability, she can be, as was the dietitian and as will be the case with Bobbie, so defiant, vindictive, and retaliatory in her resistance or determination to do something, yet so abject and weak in her self-surrender and victimization, as revealed in the black girl and Mrs. M c E a c h e r n . In either case, though, she can be equally destructive to the masculine ego, as Joanna, who combines both of these aspects in her personality, demonstrates. He, like these women, combines within himself two opposing aspects of one beleaguered personality. Even Joe, like all the other young men, must g o through that crisis in adolescence when he awakens to the experience of love and femaleness,

only

to have

his trust and love destroyed

by

his

idealized expectations. T h e irony here is the disparity between the purity of Joe's intentions and the unworthiness of the object. His disgust with Bobbie is warranted, and it is not only a feature of his masculine idealizing tendencies that prevents him from accepting the reality of m a l e - f e m a l e difference. T h e reader appreciates what Joe cannot see, that Bobbie represents perhaps an even greater corruption of w o m a n h o o d than the black girl in the shed. That Bobbie should be a suitable object upon which Joe should project all his budding tender sentiments is, I take it, a function of the dark and unredeemable futility that dogs his destiny in the novel.

Light in August

83

It appears that the masculine disgust the men experience is a direct reaction to the physiological differences between men and women and the cycle through which the female goes. As Joe discusses it with the boys: "It moved them: the temporary and abject helplessness of that which tantalized and frustrated desire; the smooth and superior shape in which volition dwelled doomed to be at stated and inescapable intervals victims of periodic filth." Joe goes so far as to confirm this by killing the sheep: "All right. It is so, then. But not for me. Not in my life and my love" {Light, 161). It seems to me that in some way the men think that the physiological difference of women from men makes them, because they are not men, also nonhuman. The physiological difference is a metaphor for their almost absolute intractability, their moral and spiritual insufficiency. The men are most repelled by that very difference in woman that makes possible in the first place the thing in her and the relations with her that the men desire. They see themselves as entering alien territory. But this refusal to accept the difference between men and women betrays not only a desperate psychological immaturity, but also, perhaps as its cause, a kind of homoeroticism, or a chauvinistic masculine self-love. There is a hatred of sexual differentiation expressed here, an incapacity for mature sexual relations, a hatred of sex itself, seen either as dark, fatal and corrupting, or else as frenetic, antierotic, and lifethreatening. It is as if what the male really desired were an impossibility, a female of the same sex as himself. Compare this with the situation in Absalom, Absalom!, of Henry's identifying with Bon in order to possess his sister, on the one hand, and of his identifying with his sister in the act of possession in order to have Bon. When McEachern assaults and embarrasses Bobbie at the dance, she turns upon him as well as upon Joe; but in the violence of the excitement, Joe does not hear her. He has struck and killed McEachern and is an obsessed person. He has freed himself from all restraints of the "thou shalt not," of the forever being held

84

Light in August

responsible for what others keep making him see as his inherent difference and inadequacy. He is in rebellion now, an outlaw, and will defiantly act out his opposition to the racial coercion of the society he hates, even as the forces of his racial inheritance contend within him upon an internal battleground. Percy Grimm and Miss Burden, though polar opposites in their approach to the blacks, nevertheless display attitudes that are equally socially determined, in their negative assessment of blacks, and equally removed from brotherhood. They are united in the way that their unconscious racism motivates their obsessional commitment to their causes. Their actions are determined by the connotative meanings of "Negroness." Joanna Burden is the descendent of New England abolitionist forebears who had come to the South to help the blacks. Faulkner has said of her: "Maybe she had begun to assume the attitudes of so many Southern people in that [slavery and the condition of the blacks] couldn't be changed and altered because the Negro would be incapable of change, and she must have hated herself for going against the tradition, the beliefs of her father.'" She was, however, preserving the beliefs of her father that stemmed from his own sense of failure and compromise. While proselytizing for the cause of the blacks, her grandfather and brother had been killed by Colonel Sartoris. Standing as a child with her father, looking at their graves, her father had told her: "Your grandfather and brother are lying there, murdered not by one white man but by the curse which God put on a whole race . . . a race doomed and cursed to be forever and ever a part of the white race's doom and curse for its sins." (Light, 221)

This grandfather is Calvin Burden, a lusty, fire-breathing abolitionist who marries a dark-skinned Huguenot woman. Not a "proselyter, missionary," he had killed a man over the question of slavery, and would come home to his family still full of "straight whiskey" declaring that he would teach his one son (Nathaniel, who was dark like his mother) and three daughters to "hate two

85

Light in August

things . . . hell and slaveholders," or he would " f l a i l the t a r " out of them (Light, 212). Nathaniel, a small dark man, marries a M e x i c a n w o m a n w h o m the father thinks exactly resembles his Huguenot mother, who died when the child was so young that he could not have remembered her. Calvin looks upon the M e x i c a n w o m a n in a " k i n d of violently slumbering contemplativeness and bewildered outrage": " A n o t h e r d a m n black Burden . . . folks will think I bred to a d a m n slaver. A n d now he's got to breed to one t o o . " T h e son listened quietly, not even a t t e m p t i n g to tell his father that the w o m a n w a s Spanish and not Rebel. " D a m n , lowbuilt black folks: low built because of the weight of the w r a t h of G o d , black because of the sin of h u m a n b o n d a g e staining their blood and f l e s h . " His g a z e w a s vague, fanatical, and convinced.

{Light, 217) N o t e the curious similarity of the grandfather, in his manner and the expression of his views, to Hines. T h e grandfather

dislikes

slavery, or m o r e precisely, slaveholders, with a fanatical intensity. In every other respect about the sinfulness and degradation

of

blackness, he is in agreement with Hines. O n e might almost be tempted to read this Northern family drama of the guilt and obsessional

concern

with

racial

intermixing

as an allegory

of

Southern society, where these m o r e characteristic and legitimate concerns are displaced upon another culture. It is the curse of the blacks with which we are particularly concerned here, characteristically a Southern rather than a Northern obsession. T h e grandson Calvin, Joanna's half-brother who is also half-Mexican, is killed along with the grandfather. Both are martyrs, and their example has portentous bearing upon Joanna's later predicament. Thus, in addition to Joanna's sexual duality, she also has an ambiguous sense of her racial composition.

Since this reflects Joe's

own

duality, each constitutes a fatal appeal to the other. R . G . Collins, in his fine study of Light

in August,

carries the

suggestion of Faulkner's projecting upon another culture the views of the South in his perception, with which I wholly agree, of Joanna

86

Light in August

as really a Southern woman in disguise. With regard to the symbolic attempt at integration as it occurs between Joe and Joanna, Collins says: " T h e experiment in merging of the races, conceived as based upon corruptibility, guilt, and life-rejection, has to be abstracted somehow away from direct relation to the Southern community. Joanna Burden is really a Southern woman, superficially disguised as a Northern. . . ." Collins thinks this is so because of Faulkner's temperament, "his emotional refusal to use a 'native' white." 8 Faulkner can present sexual depravity, as seen in Temple Drake, but he cannot show her consorting, for example, with a black man. Yet a black man, from the point of view of the Southern racial obsession, is precisely the most fitting candidate as threat to her virginity and agent of her defilement. 9 1 think this may explain why, in the rejection of the more readily available and ever more threatfully imagined tumescent black phallus, Faulkner has to resort to even more extreme measures in the conception of the corncob-wielding Popeye. As Joanna continues the recital of details to Joe concerning her heritage, she tells how she was a afraid as a child. When she asked her father if the curse fell upon her too, he answered that it did, upon all whites, upon every white child that was born and will ever be born. She tells Joe: "I had seen and known N e g r o e s since I could remember. I just looked at them as I did at rain, or furniture, or food or sleep. But after that I seemed to see them for the first time not as people but as a thing, a shadow in which I lived, we lived, all white people, all other people. I thought of all the children coming forever and ever into the world, white, with the black shadow already falling upon them before they drew breath. And I seemed to see the black shadow in the shape of a cross. And it seemed like the white babies were struggling, even before they drew breath, to escape from the shadow that was not only upon them but beneath them too, flung out like their arms were flung out, as if they were nailed to the cross." (Light, 221)

She did not know whether she actually saw or dreamed this. She only knew at the time, as she tells Joe, that she was afraid and

Light in August

87

wanted to escape. " Y o u cannot," her father told her. " Y o u must struggle, rise. But in order to rise, you must raise the shadow with you. But you can never lift it to your level. I see that now, which I did not see until I came down here. But escape it you cannot. The curse of the black race is God's curse. But the curse of the white race is the black man who will be forever God's chosen own because He once cursed H i m . " {Light, 222). It is to this sense of the inevitability of the curse, from which there is no escape, that she has been faithful, bearing her cross in exile. N o love is expressed for black people nor any genuine solicitation in the service of their cause. These passages express the initiation into the racist white inheritance, the viewing of the blacks under their mythic personification as the cursed and defiling ones. Her burden is the eternal recognition of the inevitability of the curse, just as Joe's is the recognition of the inevitable bearing of it within his own body. In Joanna's father's description of the burden of the cross, what a pity it is that the natural and awakening humanitarian sympathy of the child, and its possibilities, are immediately cancelled and corrupted in an overwhelming sense of fright, in a false perception of the object so worthy of help, the blacks, as being the source of evil itself. It is doubtless symbolic, as so many other instances in Faulkner show us, of the way Southern whites are brought up, seeing the blacks without judgment as neutral objects in the surrounding terrain—as food, sleep, or furniture—until the obsessional dictates of their culture destroy their humane sensitivities and distort their natures as well as those of the blacks. For the blacks to function as scapegoats and have the ability to expiate collective sins, it is necessary for Faulkner to show the Northern Burdens as believers in the defilement of the blacks and as themselves possessors of guilt. It is the Northerners, in comparison to Hines, who add the special theological dogma according to which the blacks are the original cursed ones of God, as if the Burdens were not personally involved (as is Hines), and as if the

88

Light in August

Burdens assert an impersonal truth about the blacks that no white person can escape. T h e ideology of white supremacy is therefore intertwined with the religious and fanatical fervor of the abolitionist. This notion of white supremacy is introduced into a Northern outsider after

first-hand

experience, presumably with blacks at the

scene. In this w a y the attitude of racial exclusiveness is presented as a phenomenon not limited to the South but as something to which all whites collectively are susceptible. In this way they can share an allegiance in principle with overt segregationists, insofar as they share a racial particularity different from that of the blacks. A s I have said, the extremity of Joanna's response can be compared to that of Percy G r i m m . G r i m m , whose name, like Joanna's, is obviously evocative, is a kind of guardian of the South's pattern of racial relations. H e will maintain law and order in the town after Christmas has been captured. There will be no lynching. T h e orderly process, the ritualized nature of orderly proceedings, must hold sway. His chauvinism and white supremacy are servants to this conviction. But once C h r i s t m a s breaks away, the perfect logic of G r i m m ' s convictions necessitates that he capture and punish C h r i s t m a s according to the license allowed him by the escape, which was a departure from decorum. In killing and castrating Christmas, he merely performs a duty to which he is obligated by the racial conventions. Similarly, once Joanna recognizes her belief in the guilt of the blacks as the corrupters and defilers of life, she reverts to a position of white supremacy no less complete than Grimm's. T h e first phase of Joe's relation with Joanna is initiated in his attempt to violate her. His actions in this first phase are symbolic of black-white relations as they are conceived of in society. T h e black entry into society is rejected; the black assault upon white purity is repulsed. C o m p a r e this to the second phase, when the black assault upon society, in the guise o f the corruption of the vulnerable white w o m a n , is successful, issuing in contamination and vileness. N e x t

Light in August

89

follows the inevitable retaliation, the casting out of the black and his punishment, and the establishing again of the order of decorum. The black is castrated and his example has served as confirmation of original fears. It is a metaphorical extrapolation of details which complies exactly with Faulkner's understanding of the white imagination. During the first phase, Joanna's resistance to Joe is not, as he imagines, a calculated assault against him as a black person, although it may be an expression of class prejudice, of her viewing Joe as a lower-class and inferior white man. When Joe refers to the food waiting for him on the kitchen table as "set out for the nigger" {Light, 208), it is significant to note that Joe had not yet told Joanna of his suspected mixed blood. Furthermore, one imagines that Faulkner might also wish to indicate here that Joanna's personal response to any man would be equally distorted or inadequate. Having had to care for herself all her life, she has had to develop characteristics for self-preservation which are traditionally masculine. It seems to me that Faulkner sympathizes with the harsh conditions of life she has had to contend with. She does have remarkable strength of character and the ability to endure her plight without complaint. It is because she is masculinized that she appeals to Joe's latent homosexuality. When she has precipitated the conflict within him that leads him to kill her, he avoids her and goes to the stables: "Why in hell do I want to smell horses? It's because they are not women. Even a mare horse is a kind of man" {Light, 95). Faulkner has, furthermore, as I have indicated, played upon the stereotyped idea of the unavailability of a white woman as a sexual partner to a black man. In developing the circumstances that make for the impossibility of reciprocal relations between Joe and Miss Burden, Faulkner also uses the situation as a metaphor for the impossibility of reciprocal relations between white women and black men. Later, when she gives way to Joe and freely expresses her

90

Light in August

sexual longings and fantasies, she is a split personality. Her body is fecund, plump, and animal-like in its insatiability, freely offered for Joe's possession. Yet her head is rendered as austere, as if belonging to another body, her mental functioning private and remote. In her thoughts Joe cannot participate. Faulkner makes much of her activities in behalf of the blacks. Though what she did was well-intentioned, the reader cannot avoid appraising these activities in an unfavorable light consistent with the view of her character revealed by Faulkner. Because of her character flaws, the competence of her work is by implication called in question. She is said by Faulkner to receive business and private documents with fifty different postmarks. In return she sends replies: "advice, business, financial and religious, to the presidents and faculties and trustees, advice personal and practical to young girl students and even alumnae, of a dozen Negro schools and colleges throughout the S o u t h " {Light, 204). She is the "outsider" come to help the blacks, and according to Faulknerian ideology, the blacks will always be victimized in the hands of such people. His handling of Miss Burden in this way is a critique of what she represents and a warning to the blacks. It might also be said that this critique implies a contemptuous attitude toward the efforts of the blacks to conduct their affairs and to choose judiciously those who will constructively benefit their interests. Miss Burden gives "advice" to the young as well as the old, to young girls and college presidents. Faulkner presents her, as seen through Joe's eyes, tranquilly sitting at her desk giving the "practical advice of a combined priest and banker and trained nurse" {Light, 226). Faulkner does not specify how she has become qualified to offer these services. The black women in the town come to visit her for advice and also to bring her food. Yet, when she suspects she is pregnant, she cannot even be certain, although she is said by Faulkner to be a "trained nurse." She is able to confirm whether or not she is pregnant only by the knowledge she has ac-

Light in August

91

quired from the black women. Ignorance of this kind is, at the least, inconsistent with her supposed competence in her position as Faulkner reveals it. When Joanna visits Joe and tells him of her history, as she sat on his bed, she perhaps recognizes the destructive nature of her long years of self-denial. She gives way now, in the second phase, to the most extravagant display of sexual license and degeneracy. Faulkner seems obsessed with rendering her in all her frightful detail, conjuring up the portrait of her ravaged and ravenous form with such antilife and antierotic images as a "Beardsley in the time of Petronius might have drawn" (Light, 227). She is now the active agent and Joe, insofar as he is " N e g r o , " is the object of her release. Her expressing of these feelings and her simultaneous desire to m a k e them legitimate and romantic is truly poignant, if somewhat stereotyped and absurd, as she begins to act out the conventional feminine role of a woman in love. Yet one sees, through this distorted enactment, what must have been the true romantic promise and capability of her nature, desperately compressed now into its dying moment. The telling of the details of the day, the jealousy in which even she doesn't believe, is convincingly acted out; the letters, the intrigue and coquettishness, the nymphomania, the abject self-abasement in the bushes; her sexual consummation with a " N e g r o " — a l l these things seem to be a kind of revenge that her female nature is exacting upon her for the long years of denial and neglect. It is as if the female nature will out—can never be denied—and that, corrupted, it really does consist of that amoral degeneracy and affinity for evil so often spoken of by Faulkner's men. Joanna is a monster of depravity, precisely evocative of the "hot wet lightless progenitive Female" who will suck the male down into an abyss. She cannot, as Faulkner says, account for her corruption. She cannot because we have seen how it is her female nature itself—corrupted and evoked by the mythic black—which accounts for her behavior. She begins to grow fat; she beings to

92

Light in August

think that she is with child; she begins to sink back into an amoral sensuality exactly as if prompted by some "atavistic" instinct— until the onset of the third phase draws her back out of it. Joanna's example might also symbolically represent the pent-up sexual tension of the Southern white woman that is the constant price for sexual repression in the face of the imagined black threat, or similar threat posed by any "unsuitable" white male. Such sexual tension might generally be the feared result of adherence to the ideal of virginity. Temple Drake's fall from grace is a case in point. Because of the intensity of represssion to which the white female is subjected and the prodigious potency ascribed to the black, perhaps Faulkner has given us an apocalyptic vision of precisely what the white fear is of the actual outcome of such a union, in the imagined white woman's sexual willingness and submission in desire for the black man. This idea is reflected in the numerous false accusations brought by white women against black men accused as their sexual molestors. Compare the story "Dry September" in this respect. The barber in the shop in which the men are assembled even admits that the white woman's charge was, without much doubt, false. When Joanna mentions the possibility of marriage and of having a child to Joe, he thinks, "Why not? It would mean ease, security for the rest of your life. You would never have to move again. And you might as well be married to her as this thinking, 'No. If I give in now, I will deny all the thirty years that I have lived to make me what I chose to be'" {Light, 232). This is a functional statement relating to the development of the plot, but the reader has yet to see Joe articulate any conception of himself with the clairty and selfawareness that his statement indicates. Further, the verb is in the past tense, indicating his possession of a definite conception that he has already chosen; and it relates, at the least, to the necessity of remaining on the run, or remaining rootless, since in abandoning such rootlessness by marrying Joanna, he would never have to

Light in August

93

move again. But we must always remember that the conflict remains within himself. Since Joanna has not yet asked him to be a black person, his not marrying her means that he rejects the prospect of living with her as white, since it would falsify the continuing choice he has made of remaining racially ambiguous. On the other hand, we must assume that if he pretended to be white, his white sense of guilt at being "tainted" would not change anything from the way it was before. Yet it is not to any such sense of guilt that he refers, since he already accepts the fact of his living with her as man and wife, without qualms. The upshot is that he refuses Joanna because, he tells himself, what she asks of him is merely a trick to get him to marry her and that she no more wants a child than he does. This action precipitates the third phase of their relationship. His understanding of her, as a woman, is so conventional that he cannot conceive of the crisis at which she has arrived. The next time he sees her, after having beem summoned to the house, she confronts him with her statement about his having wasted his life. He listens in mounting rage as she, reverting to the religious counselor and black advisor, recites her plans for him, and he at last begins to comprehend her meaning. He will serve the salvation of both of them by assuming the identity of a " N e g r o . " She has made him aware of the impossibility of escaping the racial categories and of the necessity of making a choice. If he has spent thirty years of his life making himself into what he chooses to be, then one must assume that this conception still necessitates the conflict between his two opposing selves. It is almost as if he does not seek resolution of the conflict, but rather assurance that the two opposing principles are still operative. It might be said that he derives his sense of selfhood from the tension the two opposing principles continue to generate; in the absence of this conflict, he would cease to exist entirely, unless some more fundamental conception is arrived at. This is the final lesson that he

94

Light in August

learns from Joanna and from his flight after killing her. The irrevocable acts he has committed by that time, however, will forever prevent him from enjoying the fruits of his new-found salvation. When he receives Joanna's note, he doesn't read it but proceeds directly to the house. His confrontation with Joanna follows upon his prior encounter, however, with Brown, who had insulted him, in a manner in which Joe had been forced to consider the connotative value of " N e g r o " and the inescapable stamp of it upon his consciousness. He will obliterate not the conflict but those who remind him of it, and he goes to Joanna thinking " I am going to do something. Going to do something." {Light, 241). But her confrontation with him has not been completely futile, since he finds himself, that night, instinctively drawn to Freedman's Town. He would submit himself to any comforting and accepting gestures from the blacks and to any mutual sense of belonging. This, I think, is as far as any conception of the truly black in him, untainted by white conceptualizing, goes; because, immediately, the white part of his mind begins to operate, seeing all life about him as degraded and threatening, and if he remains a second longer he will be sucked down into the lightless black abyss, personified in the womanshenegro. He runs up the street to the white section, where he sees the cool white faces on verandas, "civilized" and at ease: ' " T h a t ' s all I wanted,' he thought. 'That dont seem like a whole lot to a s k ' " (Light, 100). This passge has been taken by many readers to be out of character and an unfortunate lapse into realism, since Joe himself has always acted instinctively and symbolically. 10 If this is all he wanted, the reader asks himself, then there is no reason why there should be conflict in his mind about how to get it. His conception of this would specify exactly the social attitudes he would have to adopt to obtain it, which, as a white person, are already part of his inheritance. His physical appearance is already white. All he need do is assume the connotative aspects of being so, unless Faulkner is belatedly suggesting that there is in Joe some al-

Light in August

95

most "perverse" sense of integrity that prevents him from abandoning his black inheritance. But he did not cite this as a reason for his refusal to marry Joanna. Yet, if there is such a sense in Joe, this same "integrity" should have been at work in a positive form on those occasions when he, in "outrage and spiritual denial," abandoned his white inheritance in an attempt to be black. What I think he really means is that he desires the integrity of being and security of selfhood that is free of any racial determinants. This is what he would choose to make himself into. But in the society in which he lives, this very idea is synonymous with whiteness. Only by being white can one be a person at all, the proof of which is reflected in the white presences of the veranda. But he cannot be white because he is also black, a nonperson. And when he meets the black people on the road, they do not recognize him as one of their kind; yet, in Christmas' mind, they are the ones responsible for his condition. They themselves are nonpersons, and he will always be cut off from true personhood so long as they exist. Thus he is a man who truly has no race and no home, and it is Joanna who has been responsible for bringing his awareness out into the open. To relieve this kind of tension and pain, he knows only that something is going to happen to me." He knows that he is going to kill Joanna. He says to himself " / had to do it already in the past tense; I had to do it. She said so herself' [Light, 245). This is the rigor of Joe's psychological internalization of the conflict, which causes him always to strike at the agent which reminds him of his wretchedness and to be unable to pause to seek self-understanding; and so when Joanna asks him to kneel with her to ask forgiveness, saying that it is not she who asks but some higher agency which requires that they do so, he must strike out, not merely at her, but at the circumstances of his existence. During Joe's last week of flight, or his "Passion" week, he undergoes that process which will culminate in his acceptance of his role as black sacrificial victim and agent of redemption of collective

96

Light in August

sins. The black, in his sense of himself as sacrificial victim, accepts the mythic judgment of his own defilement. Joe accepts the fatality and inevitable menace of blackness. Obviously, the irrevocable acts he's committed confirm this judgment and insist upon the necessity of atonement. It is not possible, and never has been possible during the course of his life in the novel, for Joe to have embraced his blackness as an act of courage and real integrity. I do not see Joe as consciously accepting his blackness so much as acquiescing to a mythic conception of it. This is what life in the community requires of him as the defiling black one, insofar as such life reflects the operation of psychohistorical determinants that govern black-white behavior in society. Joe's acceptance of blackness is also presented as the discovery of the security and peace of individuality. This is presented as bringing about responsible and mutually respectful relations with the community and the awareness of and participation in nature. He is presented as experiencing a sense of tranquility at last and of being back in time, in the here and now of life lived in the conventional sense, and also in the sense of the time of eternity. This sense of time is reflected in Hightower's visions of the tragic nature of life where all men are guilty, and the moment of the individual sufferer is redemptive for all. The eternal opposition between the rational and the irrational dimensions in man inevitably produces the conflict that attends his grappling with his bestiality, his compromise of moral principle, his simultaneous love and hate for his fellows, and his nearness to violence and death in the satisfaction of his secret desires. The eternal conflict produces his unaccountable animosities, insecurities, and fears, such as that of miscegenation, for example, and the very fact of the black-white antipathy. Joe represents, from the point of view of the mythic mind, the sense of the constancy of these conflicts and our sense of identification with the sufferer who embodies them and, through his appropriate fate, discharges them.

Light in August

97

John Longley says that "when there are guilt and filth in the human psyche, the only possible remedy is to cast them out." 1 1 This must clearly be the case, but it seems to me that he confuses the given content of the unconscious, the instinctual forces and formulations, with their rational means of mediation, interpretation, and control. There is guilt, yes, because we look upon some of the data, the content, of the psyche as filth; but such content itself is merely our accumulated psychic inheritance. Tragically, it is we who regard it as filth, as is demonstrated in our view of miscegenation itself, which is still popularly viewed by so many people as defilement. If there is an unconscious archetype of defilement, miscegenation may comply with it only because of the accidental particulars of historical circumstance, not because the archetype specifies black-white irreconcilability. The mind of man is one, neither black nor white, raceless. If by filth Longley means the necessity that leads Percy Grimm to castrate Christmas, then the filth is not really purged, only momentarily cast out, precisely in accord with a procedure which ensures the necessary repetition of his act over and over again. This is why Hightower sees in his vision the faces of Christmas and Grimm merged together, the executioner and victim locked in fatal embrace. In order to fulfill his mythic apotheosis, Faulkner recognizes the necessity of having Joe escape so that, at the hands of Grimm, almost impersonally and so completely is he the agent of the forces of his inheritance, the blood rite can be performed which brings into being in society, again, a momentary sense of "sanctity." So during Joe's seven-day period of flight, the individual he has become is presented as having assumed responsibility for his actions, and, his struggles now over, he walks directly into Mottstown and waits to be captured. Faulkner wishes to stress Joe's conception of himself as an individual by having the townfolk say that when Joe was captured, he acted neither like a white nor a black. When, after his fight at the Negro church, he hears the sound

98

Light in August

of a mule departing, he says aloud to the darkness, "Bound for town with the good news" (Light, 284). This constitutes one more instance of the numerous Christ-parallels Faulkner has orchestrated throughout the novel. Joe's name itself is evocative of the Christ-parallel; a large part of his life is anonymous, and he is found on the steps of the orphanage on Christmas day. Mrs. McEachern washes Joe's feet and Joe's grandfather thinks of himself not only as God's vicegerent but as God himself. Joe's three years with Joanna might be thought to parallel the period in Christ's life that begins with Good Friday. Joe desecrates the Negro Church while Christ cleanses the temple. Joe's death, so graphically described by Faulkner, might be taken as a metaphorical parallel—despairing, unredeeming, perverse—to Christ's redemptive shedding of his blood for mankind. These comparisons and contrasts give, perhaps, a certain tone to the novel and confer a certain stature upon Joe. Like Christ's, Joe's plight is extreme, unrelenting, and inevitable. It is a Joe wearing the crude shapeless Negro brogans that the sheriff must seek now. These are the badge of his acceptance of blackness. With acceptance of blackness is also supposed to come acceptance of self. At one point in his flight, Joe awakens after a night spent in the underbrush to an acute awareness of the peacefulness and beauty of nature. The dawn refreshes him: He breathes deep and slow, feeling with each breath himself diffuse in the neutral grayness, becoming one with loveliness and quiet that has never known fury or despair. "That was all I wanted," he thinks, in a quiet and slow amazement. "That was all, for thirty years. That didn't seem to be a whole lot to ask in thirty years." (Light,

284)

This statement is reminiscent of the yearning Joe expresses for the life of the white people on the veranda, and again I take it as an expression of that raceless conception of selfhood which has always been his desire but beyond his means of comprehension. The whole-

Light in August

99

ness, peace, and integrity of the natural scene exactly parallel the sense of the wholeness and integrity of true individuation, before which racial classification would be irrelevant. Joe's obsession now with food directly contrasts with his earlier rejection of it—in his experience with Mrs. McEachern; when he flung Joanna's dishes against the wall; when he would not, in communal fellowhip, share Byron Bunch's "muck" at the saw mill. This rejection of life contrasts now with his acceptance of it and of women, intimately associated with it, in the way that one remembers the relish with which Lena ate to sustain her own life and that of the child's and her ability to fit herself appropriately into any communal setting. Joe remembers a meal he had in a Negro cabin. ' " I t was a cabin that time,' he thought. 'And they were afraid, of their brother afraid'" (Light, 293). It is a scene that could not have been more brilliantly done by Faulkner. What they are afraid of, being black before a white menace, is what Joe has been afraid of, being white before a black menace, and what joins their fears is the mutual sense of defenselessness, the hapless and unaccountable predicament of blackness. They see a white menace, and because they are black and vulnerable, they are afraid. He understands their fear because he shares it, the vulnerability of blackness. He is their brother, and it is the white in him that had always been the source of the menace with which he has always had to present himself in opposition to blackness—the whiteness, therefore, of which he has always been afraid, lest he fail it. This represents the turning point of his crisis and the resolution of his identity crisis, since he expresses direct acceptance of his blackness. With the idea now of giving himself up, he shaves with his razor—the stereotyped Negro weapon of assault and self-defense—by a stream and, so to speak, strides into the daylight. He stops a black driving a wagon to Mottstown and hitches a ride, as he wears the brogans: "that mark on his ankles the gauge definite and ineradicable of the black tide

100

Light in August

creeping up his legs, moving from his feet upward as death moves" (Light, 297). This conception of blackness is not consistent, of course, with my interpretation of Joe's idea of what he had earlier wished to make of his life—what he chose to be, namely, someone with a raceless conception of personhood. He has failed in its achievement, and his sense of himself now reflects the negativity and sacrificial role of blackness. This is the only meaning of blackness that the novel makes possible for Joe. In accepting it, he relieves himself of the racial conflict, but he achieves no corresponding self-respect as black, only an awareness and acceptance of the victimized condition of blacks in society. Yet there is a kind of integrity with which Joe bears this knowledge. He has committed his murderous deeds, and now he intends to assume responsibility for them. Accepting himself as a murderer is synonymous with accepting himself as black. We have seen Joe's white self, however, as being responsible for his self-hatred as a black. But the black part in him is also shown as submitting to its image of self-abasement, so that when the white part is purged in Joe and he symbolically "accepts" his blackness, he can accept only death. His flight is interpreted by Gavin Stevens as a final and definitive flaring up of the conflict in his blood. Stevens appears to give it an outright, offensively racist interpretation, since, as described by Stevens, the conflict between the two bloodlines can hardly be sufficiently explained as a manifestation of the antagonism between psychological and social attitudes that have been internalized. What is being referred to appears, rather, as something more profound, and relates to the quality of the bloodlines, the biological differences between them. It ought to be pointed out that there is no narrative justification for Stevens' views, unless one recognizes that Faulkner has not allowed the reader himself to see Joe enacting what Stevens "recreates." Then it follows that Stevens' views become more than an interpretation.

Light in August

101

They are the source by means of which the reader acquires knowledge of actions he hasn't seen. Stevens' discourse is a substitution for narrative description, and seems to be Faulkner's presentation of a final summation of Joe's situation. I think that Faulkner shares a personal complicity in its creation, no matter how many disclaimers he makes of Stevens being his mouthpiece. One recognizes the irony and objectivity of Faulkner's portraits of Stevens on other occasions, yet here, as in Intruder in the Dust, it is hard not to feel the kinship between the two and to look upon Stevens as a direct reflection of Faulkner's own ambivalence. The mythic, religious aspects of Joe's flight and Grimm's pursuit are clearly indicated by Faulkner. When Hightower makes his feeble gesture of help to Joe, Grimm, his "voice clear and outraged like that of a young priest," cries out, '"Jesus Christ! Has every preacher and old maid in Jefferson taken their pants down to the yellowbellied son of a bitch?'" In Grimm's contest with Christmas, as he runs with the "blunt, cold rake of the automatic" in his hands, "his face had that serene, unearthly luminousness of angels in church windows. He was moving . . . with that lean, swift, blind obedience to whatever Player moved him on the Board" (Light, pp. 404-6). It is a contest between the eternal and mythic Opposites, conducted as if under supernatural sanction, although Faulkner contrasts the savage brutality and inhumanity which motivate Grimm with the true spiritual imagery that his example parodies and desecrates. But Grimm's is the performance of a blood rite, slaying the enemy and robbing him of his power. Therefore, after having emptied his automatic into Christmas' body, he still is not finished: "But the Player was not done yet." He must go and castrate Christmas, and though this action fills the individuals men around him with nausea and disgust, it is nevertheless symbolically in compliance with communal expectations—a perversion that is the necessary means of casting the ancient enemy from their midst. Grimm says: "Now you'll let white women alone, even in hell."

102

Light in August

This represents at once both the recognition of what the threat is and the necessary attempt to forever render it powerless. Christmas lies "with his eyes open and empty of everything save consciousness, and with something, a shadow, about his m o u t h " {Light, 407). I think that the powerfully synthesizing depths of Faulkner's imagination achieve no more finer expression than in the inclusion, not incidental, of the " s h a d o w " about the mouth. There is nothing left in Christmas but consciousness and the shadow. This is the black identity: with consciousness inevitably comes the shadow, the shadow of negativity, limitation, and defilement, and with it also comes the shadow self of the white person, who has cast all of that which is unacceptable out of himself and placed it upon the black; and, by investing it in the black, the white can then bring to bear suitable punishment upon it. For a long moment he looked up at them with peaceful and unfathomable and unbearable eyes. Then his face, body, all, seemed to collapse, to fall in upon itself, and from out the slashed garments about his hips and loins the pent black blood seemed to rush like a released breath. It 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 rise soaring into their memories forever and ever. They are not to lose it, in whatever peaceful valleys, beside whatever placid and reassuring streams of old age, in the mirroring faces of whatever children they will contemplate old disasters and newer hopes. It will be there, musingly quiet, steadfast, not fading and not particularly threatful, but of itself alone serene, of itself alone triumphant. (Light, 407)

What are the meanings of Faulkner's intentions as revaled in this soaring passage, particularly with respect to the last sentence? Does Faulkner mean that the powerful effect of Joe's immolation—the manner of its accomplishment—as a transfiguring human event remains intact in the minds of the observers, "musingly quiet, s t e a d f a s t . . . not particularly threatful, but of itself alone serene, of itself alone triumphant," almost as if it had the beauty and the

Light in August

103

power of evocation of a remembered and revered artifact? Does he mean that it is an irreducible experience, that speaks of the constancy of the fact of man's extinction, that throws the life-death relationship, a permanent feature of his concern as a living being, into violent relief beyond his comprehension? Does he mean that the event is triumphant in its power of statement about these things, and that, insofar as this is the case, Joe, its agent of accomplishment, is an almost impersonal embodiment of its fulfillment? As I have tried to show, it is as if Joe's white self finally makes him see the necessity of accepting a black identity, and the black self defers to the judgment, accepting a sacrificial role. This is another way of putting that curious and age-old assumption on the part of many whites about the readiness and inevitability of black forgiveness, no matter how injurious has been the suffering of the blacks at the hands of the whites. This is why, I think, the meaning of the event, in the minds of the whites who observe it, is "not particularly threatful, but of itself alone serene," almost as if it bestowed an aura of absolving and beneficent forgetfulness over the horror that had to be. This readiness to expect the blacks' forgiveness involves the conception of the guilt and defilement of the black, for which he must atone—an "archetype," for example, as Leslie Fielder has described it: " A coherent pattern of beliefs and feelings so widely shared at a level beneath consciousness that there exists no abstract vocabulary for representing it, and so 'sacred' that unexamined, irrational restraints inhibit any explicit analysis." 12 The injury done the black is meaningless in the face of the love the whites will confer upon him, and the love they will find immanent in life again, if he accepts his role as sacrificial offering. Fiedler reflects this idea: " T h e archetype makes no attempt to deny our outrage [the evil done to the blacks by the whites] as fact; it portrays it as meaningless in the face of love." 13 I take this to be the case because the essential thinking of many

104

Light in August

whites, historically, traditionally, has been such as to render the whites incapable of conceiving of the blacks in terms of the integrity and autonomy that they reserve for themselves. The two have been historically wedded as contending opposites, reflecting the situation that gave John Longley, Jr. pause in considering the significance of Joe's acceptance of the brogans and the death they symbolized: " A t first, the obvious meaning seems brutal and shocking, but it must be recalled that for thirty centuries or so the blackwhite, light-dark, Appollonian-Dionysian, rational-irrational opposition has existed in Western civilization." 14 This does not, unfortunately, mitigate the shocking and brutal quality of the situation. While the whites can readily imagine the blacks wishing to cast themselves in the whites' image, they have been unable to put themselves in the blacks' place. (Isaac McCaslin tried, but his life in the end proved his failure.) Thus many whites do not see that their black opposite, no matter how brutalized and despised, still retains a grasp upon the sense of the integrity of their own being. The whites violate it but cannot destroy it. But there is, on the contrary, an imagining on the part of many whites that this black sense of integrity counts for nothing and that the blacks acquire reality, not in themselves, but only with reference to the utility with which they stand in relation to the whites, and that the raison d'etre of their blackness is to offer apology for the offense that this constitutes to the whites. R. G. Collins asserts that Joe is not merely a "social martyr in the pathetic sense, but a sacrifice that sanctifies life. Because of the common identity of mankind, that man who dies as the victim of society throws into symbolic relief the life and death relationship of mankind. It is, indeed, death which gives life its meaning and value." 15 This is always a possibility in life and art, literally and symbolically, when men view their humanity as an inheritance genuinely, mutually shared. This creates a true sense of identity

Light in August

105

with the victim as human sufferer who speaks for all, the way Oedipus does. I do not think that that identity obtains here between black and white. The racial dimension legislates, in the Western mind, a fundamental opposition to mutuality and equality. Joe Christmas' example can only be an affirmation of white redemption and a betrayal of black integrity.

II The Unvanquished

In The Unvanquished, the war and its aftermath present the occasion for the enactment of events relating to the concept of honor, in both men and women, as it involves the pride and defiance that inform a communal sense of identity, and as it involves blind adherence to a code of behavior that fosters injustice and warps the personality. Faulkner does not render in the novel a graphic sense of the gruesomeness and horror of the war. Rosa Millard's quest for the return of her property, her encounter with Colonel Dick and the dispensing of the blacks, mules, and horses are all treated comically. Drusilla's romantic commitment to honor and her adoption of masculine behavioral traits constitute only one more instance of the destructive follies of man, which her example serves to trivialize even further. She imitates actions in defense of a cause that Faulkner does not attempt to explore with the gravity and moral complexity that a rendering of the Southern homeland might realistically require, either in its agony, or in the defiant defense and vindication of its cause. Instead, there is a comforting sense of confederate self-gratification that illumines the novel, and a rhetoricalizing of the Southern "stance" that is almost picturesque. One contributing factor to this indulgence in sentiment is the use of the young Bayard as narrator. Like the women, he too, as a child, has been called upon to abandon youthful activities and assume the responsibilities of a man. The reader sees his growing maturity and objectivity, and his initiation into an appropriate conception of manhood. But the narrative is nevertheless informed by

108

The

Unvanquished

adolescent nostalgia—especially in the romanticizing of the RingoBayard relationship—that gives the novel its characteristic ambience. Faulkner himself has acknowledged in fondness his own experiences of having grown up with a black boy such as Ringo with whom he played Civil War games. 1 Bayard's confrontation with the claims of honor ("the deed done not for the end but for the sake of doing") versus what Howe refers to as "the attempt to validate himself as a human being" 2 reflects in an abbreviated yet prototypal form the tensions of the main conflict that Faulkner's major characters experience in the Yoknapatawpha saga. They experience the necessity of identification with the past which is conceived of as a matter of honor. It is a fierce and ambivalent identification, that compels loyalty to one's own kind and heritage. At the same time, the characters become aware, as maturity increases, of the injustice, the moral compromise, the egotism, the concern with the gesture rather than the substance of action, which characterized their heritage. The identification with the heritage, which is a matter of honor, or even the basis upon which any conception of honor is possible, is precisely the thing that prevents them from achieving integrity and moral responsibility in the present. Bayard sees these things, and he becomes an individual responsible to his conscience in its concern for justice and humanitarian treatment. He is a free man, no longer the captive of any prescribed code of behavior; and thus, as integrity implies, he can bear the burden of his experience in genuine self-pride, because he has the capacity to see and act upon things as they really are. I think that Faulkner's romanticized portrait of the South in The Unvanquished, in its enactment of the code and demonstration of its heritage, is in accord with his depictions of the South as is generally revealed in the rest of his work. The past cannot, in actual fact, stand against the romance of its re-creation, as Gail High-

The Unvanquished

109

tower suggests, lest "paradoxical truth outrage itself." Further, Faulkner's main concern is not the life of the old order, as such, but the effects of its fall, the aftermath, the obsession with what has already occurred. He is concerned with the irrevocable past and the manner in which it virtually preempts the possibility of life in the present. In regard to this, a special insight into the vulnerabilities of the men as contrasted with the women is provided by Faulkner when he says that "the women were the ones that could bear it because they had never surrendered. The men had given up and in a sense were dead and even generations later were seeking death." 3 What of Colonel Sartoris, the legendary prototypal figure of masculine self-assertion and self-realization in the Yoknapatawpha saga? We encounter him through the boy Bayard's eyes as solicitous father and authoritative man of the world, sure of his position yet not abusive of it. He is a man of intelligence, insight, and self-awareness, intimately involved in the life of the plantation, sensitive to the needs of all those under his care, like a scrupulous and well-intentioned patriarch. Making no special provisions for himself, he submits himself with a singleminded commitment to the performance of any task. Working in physical labor alongside his slaves, he neither commands nor cajoles them, nor necessarily works, as Bayard says, "faster and harder" than they or anyone else did. Yet the dedication and singleminded commitment of his example causes him to appear to have done much with little effort, and in fact to have accomplished more. He serves as a persuasive model of achievement, the acknowledged superior of all others. As Bayard says, it was not so much what he did but "the way he did it," as an expression of the style and inner force of a defining individuality. He is, then, the perfect image of the aristocratic plantation master, decisive but considerate in the execution of his purpose; and stripped of the veneer of gentility, he reminds one of Thomas Sutpen

110

The

Unvanquished

laboring in the mud with his slaves, carrying forth his project through the psychology of his example and the superior and unrelenting force of his will. Thus Bayard's perception of Colonel Sartoris at once divests him of his mythic aura while at the same time it enlarges his stature, in a romanticizing of him that has a personal reference. He is the comforting and transcendent father figure whose example validates one's heritage and confirms and upholds one's own self-esteem. He is the man who stops two steps below Granny Millard so that she can kiss him, rather than stopping on the same level with her, an action which makes him grand to Bayard: "his doing bigger things than he was." 4 He is the man who says of his own son that the slave Ringo was "smarter" than he was, as if his objectivity placed him beyond chauvinistic commitments of race or class and allowed him to make statements of fact that were free of the complications of emotional involvement. He is not even large in physical size, but a figure looming in the power and depth of his suggestiveness. Bayard smells "that odor in his clothes and beard and flesh too which [he] believed was the smell of powder and glory, the elected victorious but know better now: know now to have been only the will to endure, a sardonic and even humorous declining of self-delusion" (Unvanguished, p. 11). I take this realistic yet admiring appraisal as a reflection of Faulkner's own distance and detachment from the subject, that allows him to present the growing indifference and corruption that settle upon the Colonel in his later years, and to condemn this development, through Bayard's reaction to it, without directly confronting the tragic possibilities of the virtues and the vices of the old order that the Colonel's example implies. We know that Faulkner's presentation of Colonel Sartoris is based upon the life of his own grandfather Colonel W. C. Falkner, a man of energy and arrogance, Faulkner has said, an overbearing man who wanted to be best in everything he did, a looming and contradictory presence even after his death. " ' H e rode through that

The Unvanquished

111

country like a living force,'" said Faulkner. 5 Faulkner obviously admired him the way Bayard does his fictional surrogate, and I think the ambivalence of Faulkner's attitude accounts here for his disinclination to directly confront the real contradictions that existed in his grandfather's life as they are transposed into the Sartoris legend. Robert Cantwell, in conversation with Faulkner about his great grandfather, experienced a sense of incompleteness in Faulkner's recital that led him to do further research into the grandfather's life. Cantwell finds that, curiously, the real Colonel Falkner always "stood as an exponent of common sense against the extravagant and artificial conventions of the old South." 6 Though it was thought that he had a charmed life, surviving two attempts upon his life, and talking himself out of another, he was nevertheless not the kind of man who, like Sartoris, for instance, would have shot the abolitionists, an old man and a child, regardless of whether he would have "let them fire first." The real Colonel Falkner was a man who "maintained his sanity under the almost intolerable pressure of a social code he refused to follow." Colonel Sartoris embodies the myth of the traditional Southern aristocrat and the patterns of Southern life to which Cantwell finds that Colonel Falkner "lived in almost direct opposition." 7 He was a representative—in opposition to the code of the aristocrats, the landowners, the military heroes that the Sartorises embody—of " t h e enterprising and peaceful element of the old S o u t h , " and even an exponent of "the ethical standards of the businessmen and industrialists" against whom the codes of the Sartorises are in opposition. 8 The real Falkner apparently had the energy and inner force and dedication of Sartoris without his chauvinistic commitment to the sentiments of the homeland that are expressed in the code of honor. Yet Sartoris does have many things in common with Colonel Falkner, namely his high-mindedness, his enterprising concern with southern economics, and his espousal, along with Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy, of the ideas of belonging to the land

112

The Unvanquished

and not possessing it; the freeing of the slaves through work; land reform; and populism with plantation owners, blacks, and poor whites working together. In these things he perhaps expresses something of the character of Colonel Falkner. It seems to me that the power and the force of Colonel Falkner are inextricably intertwined with Faulkner's conception of the power and the force of the Sartorises, or of Carothers McCaslin, or of Hightower's father, or of any image of masculine assertion that must inevitably court disaster, corruption, injustice, or distortion of the personality. On Cantwell's visit with Faulkner, he was taken on a visit to Faulkner's farm, where he met Uncle Ned, an old black man who had been Colonel Falkner's servant and'had cared for three generations of Faulkners. Of Uncle Ned, Faulkner is quoted as having said: " H e is a cantankerous old man who approves of nothing I do." 9 When one thinks of Simon and Joby and the other black servants whose quarrelsome contentiousness in relations with the whites is no less fondly tolerated and expected than their fierce loyalty, one begins to appreciate how much Faulkner draws upon his personal experience with the blacks without examining it at any real depth from the point of view of the complications it holds for the blacks. When Faulkner and Cantwell tried to get Uncle Ned to speak about Colonel Falkner, he grew silent, as if "the thought seemed to m a k e Ned older." Cantwell continues: " I know now that the tragedy of Colonel Falkner's life brooded almost oppressively over that cabin in the woods, but then I felt that I had intruded enough; I sensed its reality, not so much to Faulkner as to the old man. . . ," 1 0 The ease and intimacy of relations between the slaves and the members of the Sartoris household are rendered so naturally and with such an unquestioned sense of verisimilitude that the reader is almost persuaded that the factual or historical particulars of Faulkner's conception correspond exactly to those of his imaginative re-creaction. Romantic distortion gets translated into real life

The Unvanquished

113

images. The ease and assurance with which master and slave relate seem inevitable. There is no question of the master having to impose the authority of his command upon recalcitrant human property, since the slaves are presented, with the exception of Loosh, as either having no wish to challenge such authority or seeing no possibility of doing so. They do not, moreover, see themselves as property, but as members of the household whose special status, whatever their awareness of it, only seems to intensify their loyalty. The racial difference, the evils of slavery as an institution, the distortions of the personality that result from these situations, especially as this applies to the blacks, are not even presented as possibilities by Faulkner. Nowhere is this situation more strongly maintained than in the relations between Ringo and Bayard. Ringo's father is Loosh's brother Simon, who is being "raised and trained" by his father Joby to become the Colonel's " b o y , " his body servant, when Joby becomes too old for the position. In a similar manner, Ringo will becomes Bayard's " b o y " when they reach maturity, through a subtle but inevitable process that Bayard will not consciously or deliberately impose, nor that Ringo, consciously aware of what will be expected of him, will contest. The parents of Simon and Loosh are Joby and Louvinia, who do not object to their servitude, and Philadelphy is Loosh's wife. In their playing of the war games, Bayard must alternate victorious and defeated generals with Ringo; otherwise, Ringo won't play. Loosh, knowing that the South has lost, expresses his defiance by fiercely scattering the boys' makeshift city of Vicksburg. It is a small gesture, yet a deeply expressive one, indicative of the greater destructive retribution which he hopes will be levelled against the South. Ringo and Bayard are aware of their positions in relation to each other, but with a difference that the crisis of the moment throws into relief and clarifies. Bayard must alternate generals with Ringo not because of any prompting toward identification on

114

The

Unvanquished

Ringo's part with the black cause and any desire for freedom as expressed by Loosh, but because of Bayard's sensitive perception of the increased need for human fairness in his dealings with Ringo. Ringo demands such fairness. But the reason he demands such fairness is an expression of his perception of the inherent inferiority of his position, which he will not acknowledge and which his relationship with Bayard presents as insignificant or nonexistent. Bayard reflects on the necessity of alternating generals: But now it was that urgent even though Ringo was a nigger too, because Ringo and I had been born in the same month and had both fed at the same breast and had slept together and eaten together for so long that Ringo called Granny "Granny" just like I did, until m a y b e he wasn't a nigger anymore or maybe I wasn't a white boy anymore, the two of us neither, not even people any longer: the two supreme undefeated like two moths, t w o feathers riding above a hurricane. (Unvanquished, pp. 7 - 8 )

This indicates, as Faulkner well knows, the powerful compulsive force of the racial categories. They are so strong that they preempt humanity. One must be either black or white or live in a dream world, as Joe Christmas discovered, where one ceases even to be human. Here the life beyond the racial categories is positively conceived, but still a dream. One factor which contributes to the establishing of this raceless dream world is that Ringo is conceived of as having achieved his individuality from identification with the whites and refusing to acknowledge any identification with blackness, the way Loosh understands such identification. Further, he is as much a Southerner as Bayard. This is not strange, since he shares a common heritage with him. What is strange is that he, like Louvinia, his grandmother, is just as protective of that heritage, and for the same reasons, as any white person would be. He shoots at the Yankee soldier along with Bayard, yelling "kill the bastard!" He hides along with the white boy under the white woman's skirts.

The Vnvanquished

115

Each is equally censured by the white woman Granny and the black Louvinia for lying and cursing. The racial decorum remains intact, yet it does not seem to matter; Ringo and Bayard treat each other as equals, yet they are not. Joby, "too old to have been caught short of tobacco just by a war," lends some from his store to Colonel Sartoris at the fireside. Yankee officers respect Southern gentlewomen and do not look under their skirts for little boys who shoot horses, and Granny is thankful that only a horse was shot, in a comic melodrama of this, the most destructive, devisive, and embittered event in American history. When Bayard suggests to Ringo that the Yankees are supposed to be coming to set the blacks free, he notices that "Ringo was afraid to come up in the bed with me, so I got down on the pallet with him" (Unvanguished, p. 27). It cannot be Ringo's fear of betraying his friendship with Bayard by expressing hostile feeling that restrains him, since when Bayard gets the gun and asks Ringo, "Do you want to be free?" Ringo's response is the gleeful stalking of the lone Yankee soldier yelling '"shoot the bastard! shoot him!'" (Unvanquished, pp. 27-29). Louvinia, charged to keep watch over her own son Loosh, is told by Sartoris that, in doing so, "she would have to be white a little longer" (U nvanquished, p. 23). Louvinia is fiercely protective and is against this threat to her way of life. Though Faulkner's treatment of Loosh is ambivalent, reflecting a mixture of ridicule and objective appreciation of the benighted slave's genuine grievance, he nevertheless presents the powerfully moving force with which the idea of freedom grips the slaves. He does this even though he unsympathetically makes clear that theirs is a futile and hopeless pursuit of a chimera. Loosh had "that look on his face again which resemble drunkenness but was not, as if he had not slept in a long time and did not want to sleep now, and Joby and Philadelphy leaning into the firelight and looking at him and Philadelphy's mouth open too and the same look on her face." When Loosh proclaims to them that General Sherman is going to

116

The

Unvanquished

sweep the South and free all of the blacks, "Louvinia crossed the floor in two steps and hit Loosh across the head hard with her flat hand. 'You black fool!' she cried. 'Do you think there's enough Yankees in the whole world to whip the white folk?'" (Unvanquished, p. 25). One is struck by the comparative literacy and clarity of her language in contrast to Loosh's dialect, as if it were emotionally necessary for Faulkner to have reserved such a privilege for her. It is as if Faulkner can grant Loosh his due only if he has people like Louvinia and Ringo to stand in opposition to him; their refusal to identify with their own kind makes Loosh's identification possible. Why does Louvinia strike Loosh? As a distorted but protective maneuver the intensity of the blow of which is precisely expressive of the intensity of her feelings and desire to protect him from harm? As an expression of her own unconscious frustrations, her sense of betrayal of the cause and anger at herself at the deep and unaccountable resistance she has to acceptance of or belief in its possibilities? Is it also possibly the case that she, as one of Faulkner's women, will accept the possibility of the security of continued endurance at any price, rather than risk insecurity, dissolution, and death, though it may provide, if only momentarily, the longed-for possibility of self-determination and genuine self-respect? Certainly some of these factors are intensely involved in her predicament. Some measure of understanding is provided, however, in the great scene that attends the discovery of Loosh's having revealed to the Yankees where the family silver was buried. (As an expression of Faulkner's ambivalence, we get a different rendition of this story in Sartoris, when Joby then becomes Simon's grandfather, and it is Joby, faithful to the end, who buried the family silver "beneath the ammonic barn floor" while 3-year-old Simon, "in a single filthy garment, had looked on with a child's grave interest in the curious game." 1 1 Here Loosh's fierce longings for freedom and his defiance of spirit have completely disappeared, except as they recur in Cas-

The Unvanquished

117

pey, a figure of far less dignity than Loosh, whose example has truly degenerated into that of the trifling "bad nigger" whom Faulkner only ridicules and treats with contempt.) But in The Unvanquished Loosh is allowed his transcendent moment of bearing witness, and poor Philadelphy, his wife, feels compelled to join him out of loyalty, a rare occurrence in Faulkner, though she knows her following him can only lead to disaster. Again, it is almost as if the psychological mechanism operative in Faulkner can allow for this expression of independence, of loyalty on the part of blacks to each other, in opposition to whites, only because it must lead to inevitable disaster. Granny Millard's sympathetic appraisal of the situation cannot be separated from her paternalism. She does not denigrate the powerful movement of the blacks toward freedom so much as she views it, from a lofty and impersonal position of higher understanding, as a sad and mistaken idea which will only lead these benighted pilgrims astray. Here she reflects the views of the other whites. This massive movement of blacks is only a more profound instance of that continuing series of events which reiterate the white man's burden, of which ironically the whites are now called upon to assume even greater responsibility. Drusilla sees the Yankees, the supposed saviors of the blacks, preparing to rid themselves of the obligation of their care by blowing up the bridge over the river in a military maneuver, once the Union troops and equipment have passed over. Drusilla says to her mother, despite the sad insubordination of the blacks that has been induced by the Yankees, that "those Negroes are not Yankees," and that they must help them. The kind of help they have been in need of all along has never been recognized by Drusilla, and what help she offers now is too little too late. The great scene with Loosh exactly demonstrates this idea: "Loosh," Granny said, "are you going too?" "Yes," Loosh said. "I going. I done been freed. God's own angel pro-

118

The

Unvanquished

clamated me free and gonter general me to Jordan. I don't belong to John Sartoris now; I belongs to me and God." "But the silver belongs to John Sartoris," Granny said. "Who are you to give it away?" You ax me that?" Loosh said. "Where John Sartoris? Whyn't he come and ax me that? Let God ax John Sartoris who the man name that give me to him. Let the man that buried me in the black dark ax that of the man that dug me free." He wasn't looking at us; I don't think he could even see us. He went on. "Fore God, Miss Rosa," Philadelphy said, "I tried to stop him. I done tried." Don't go, Philadelphy," Granny said. "Don't you know he's leading you into misery and starvation?" Philadelphy began to cry. "I knows hit. I knows what they told him can't be true. But he my husband. I reckon I got to go with him." (Unvanquished, pp. 85-86)

They watch them leave and join the others, a massive crowd, in exodus down the dusty road. Bayard, viewing this, says: "The bastards, Granny!. . . . The bastards!" (Unvanquished, p. 86). Then all three of them, Granny, Bayard, and Ringo, were saying it in an echoing chorus. Now obviously "bastards" is intended, as a reiteration and culmination of the theme previously presented of the destruction the Yankees have imposed upon the homeland, to refer to the Yankees, in reference to the immediate consequence of their actions—the exodus of the black pilgrims. Of course, it is also the blacks who are being referred to more obliquely for being such gullible dupes of the Yankees—the sentiments of Granny and Bayard as well as of Louvinia and Ringo. One interesting feature of Loosh's declaration, and one which is characteristic of Faulkner's presentation of blacks in moments of intense emotional transport, is their abstract and otherworldly quality of abandon, as if they were removed from the very crisis of the moment to which they give expression. Loosh does not look at nor even see those around him. One is reminded of Lucas Beauchamp in his conflict with Edmonds, with the white man

The Unvanquished

119

thinking that the black, though looking directly at him, cannot see him, so intense is his abstracting inner vision. And, again, Lucas in the store as he is about to be savagely attacked by the poor white, so calm in his abstraction that he does not even appear to recognize the imminent danger, sucking a tooth, after the eating of gingersnaps, as a man might who had been eating them "in the middle of a hundredmile solitude. . . ." 12 I take such abstraction to be the emotional equivalent of the character's desire to refrain from posing a threat to white authority and to the entire order of things as it is controlled by that authority. But some part of him is still withheld, as if in conflict with itself, from the complete expression and enactment of the threat; and that part, surely, represents the accumulated weight of his social conditioning that demands passivity. I would like to contrast Louvinia's presence in The Unvanquished to that of the large body of black retainers in Faulkner whose function is more directly the performance of the menial task required for physical survival—their own and that of the household they serve. Sally Page, in her book (p. 183), speaks of such women. There is an Aunt Callie in Soldier's Pay much like Dilsey, and another by the same name in The Reivers. It seems to me that all of Faulkner's portraits of such women, especially as they approach the status of maturity, share the features of one collective image, which draws its life, I think, from that of an actual person, Aunt Caroline Barr, Faulkner's own nurse and the admitted model for his character Dilsey. Page says that in order to preserve the stability of the social order, Louvinia in The Unvanquished remains loyal to the Sartorises despite the increasing disloyalty of the younger generation of blacks, as does Elnora in Sartoris. These women, she says, are deeply loved and respected by the whites they serve. In The Unvanquished there is no increasing disloyalty of the younger generation, except that of Loosh's, and his behavior is viewed as untypical of the Sartoris blacks. Ringo, the real promise

120

The

Unvanquished

of the younger generation, and a true reactionary, can hardly be thought of as disloyal. In Sartoris Caspey's disloyalty is presented as a ridiculous and contemptible joke; and even his limited example is untypical and is condemned in fear and even derision by the other blacks. Elnora, a far less forceful personality than Louvinia, cheerfully pursues her household duties, singing her expressive and morally evocative black songs, in a kind of backdrop that ensures the permanency and security of the social order into which she fits and expresses no desire to oppose. These women do not object to their subjugate status; on the contrary, they are presented as defenders of it as they pursue their functions and submit to a destiny which they seem to accept. I wish merely to point out that the historical fact that they labored under such circumstances is one thing; the manner in which they are presented as accepting such circumstances is Faulkner's own distorting addition in the working out of his conceptual scheme. Even the most extreme instance of Uncle Tomism was a more complex thing than would be evidenced in a Faulknerian view of it, despite Faulkner's images of blacks posing and paying lip service to convention and hiding behind masks of "stupid impassivity like an odor." Faulkner knows precisely the destructive consequences encountered by whites in identifying with images of strength out of the past. It is not his purpose to consider the same destructive potential for the blacks in their identifying with whites in the present. It is no wonder that the blacks are loved and respected by the whites they serve. How else could the whites live with them at all unless the blacks are presented as accepting and submissive—which in the final analysis only means that they are forgiving? By being presented as accepting the burden and the evils of servitude, the blacks absolve the whites of guilt, and allow for the continued enactment of inequity in white relations with the blacks. Page thinks that what Cleanth Brooks says, speaking of Minnie,

The Unvanquished

121

Miss Reba's maid, and the other black characters in The Reivers, holds true in general of Faulkner's black female servants, and most of the other black characters whose conception is supposed to solicit our admiration and respect: With regard to the world at large, Faulkner's Negro characters face problems unknown to the white characters. What particularly distinguishes men like Ned and Uncle Parsham—and, we might add, men like Lucas Beauchamp—is their ability to carry the special burden imposed on them by a caste society. They succeed in maintaining their dignity though they are denied the usual resources of pride and the ordinary protections that men use to guard their self-respect. To hold on to good humor and good sense and yet avoid cringing and truckling servility calls for sanity, imagination, and moral courage. 13

It is certainly the case that their ability to survive in a caste society requires that they possess humor, sanity, imagination, and moral courage; but it is also the case, in Faulkner's presentation of the situation, that the manner in which they employ these virtues to achieve dignity and self-respect nevertheless involves a conception of self-limitation, in which they do not recognize their right to absolute equality with the whites, as human beings. I am not speaking of the denial of this right through social sanctions, but of the belief in it on the part of the blacks, no matter how many times it is denied. Such belief is the essence of humanity, and it ensures the survival of the sense of inherent human worth and spiritual freedom against great and profound opposition, even as was demonstrated to be the case in the Nazi death camps. 14 The lack of such a belief makes the behavior of a Louvinia or a Ringo possible, and even a Lucas Beauchamp, whose sense of human worth derives not from respect for himself as a black person—he even views other blacks with contempt—but from identification with his white ancestors. Here is Louvinia at the side of Granny's wagon, holding on to the wheel, speaking to her before it departs: '"Don't waste no time on Colonels or nothing!' she hollered. 'You tell them niggers to

122

The

Unvanquished

send Loosh to you, and you tell him to get that chest and them mules, and then you whup him!'" (Unvanquished, p. 90). Witness Ringo holding the parasol over Granny's head on the wagon, indifferent to the plight of his black brothers swarming around them, employing his sharp and witty intelligence in derisive commentary upon them. Riding in the wagon, they come upon a woman left behind with an infant. She's been sick and couldn't keep up with the others. She says: "Hit's Jordan we coming to. Jesus gonter see me that far." They put her in the wagon. When she arrives where she thinks the others are, they let her off and Granny gives her food. Ringo comments: "She done found um. Reckon she gonter lose um again tonight though" (Unvanquished, pp. 95-96). Without his intelligent resourcefulness Granny's expedition could not have succeeded. Indeed, it is his cleverness which causes Granny's desire for the return of her personal property to result in the grotesque and exaggerated overpayment. His self-conscious appropriation of the privileges of his status, as putative member of the family, almost makes his role a parody of the sycophant and lacky. Certainly he performs such a service. He calls to the Yankees, as they begin negotiations for the return of the property: "'Hey! Granny say come here,' he hollered" (Unvanquished, p. 131). Since the Union Army is mounted on captured confederate horses, they must dismount if they wish to return them to Granny. When a message is sent by one of the many blacks Granny has just acquired, Ringo says: '"That's one more mouth to feed we got shed o f " (Unvanquished, p. 132). He had been wondering "whut we gonter do with all these niggers." Bayard comments upon the way Ringo and Granny use the map, as evidence of authentic military maneuvering and positioning, which accompanies their requisitioning of the horses: "Ringo had drawn it (Father was right; he was smarter than me; he had even learned to draw, who had declined even to try to learn to print his name when Loosh was teaching me; who had learned to draw immediately by

The Unvanquished

123

merely taking up the pen, who had no affinity for it and never denied he had not but who learned to draw simply because somebody had to)" (Unvanquished, p. 142). I don't know what Faulkner intends by the absurdity of presenting the illiterate Loosh as Bayard's grammar teacher. Ringo outstrips Bayard in other ways too, growing taller than he during the summer of their activities and beginning to treat Bayard as Granny did, as if he and Granny were the same age instead of he and Bayard. Like Alex Sander in Intruder in the Dust, Ringo is able to hear and see things in the dark far in advance of the whites, and can distinguish the tracks of animals on the ground with sufficient clarity to identify them, tell where they are going and in what manner and what burden they are carrying. One recalls Sam Father's ability to do the same, and with greater justification. This is a consistent feature of Faulkner's characterization of the blacks, almost to suggest their superiority in matters of perception in the natural world, in direct contrast to the abstract reasoning of the whites. And, again, as is always the case in black-white relations, Ringo seems to fall asleep more readily than Bayard, be they equally exhausted. When Edmonds in "The Fire and the Hearth" refuses to allow the black boy to sleep in his bed any longer, he lies sleepless in a rigid fury while the black boy, consigned now and forever to the pallet on the floor at the side of the bed, is seen to sleep soundlessly and immediately as if nothing had happened. Ringo's performance is in keeping with the melodramatic, exaggerated quality of the action of the novel. When the lieutenant finds out about the forgeries that allowed Granny to receive and sell the horses, he confronts her in exasperation: "'Defenseless!' he shouted. 'Defenseless! God help the North if Davis and Lee had ever thought of the idea of forming a brigade of grandmothers and nigger orphans, and invading us with it!'" (Unvanquished, p. 163). The blacks and the women, those most victimized in Faulkner's world, hereby accomplish a symbolic retribution. Ringo and

124

The

Unvanquished

Granny's collaboration is thematically prescribed as they involve themselves in the destructive white m a l e world; but they have only been offered the opportunity to play-act in a potentially dangerous game. Only Bayard is allowed the opportunity to confront circumstances out of which c o m e actions of true moral significance. A developing

maturity

is required for Bayard's achievement

fulfillment of responsible m a n h o o d which Ringo,

and

in the static

execution of his precocity, can never realize. The white boy is not as smart, but he is, as it were, brighter, and will always be ahead of the black boy. (It is an extraordinary reversal of s o m e of the features of the conventional view of the comparative abilities of blacks and whites, with regard to the sentimentalized insistence upon the salutary effect that suffering is supposed to have upon the formation of character.) Faulkner plays upon the idea of black-white difference, transposing it into the realm of normal competitive rivalry as it might be enacted in the lives of two b o y s of the s a m e color: We were almost the same age, and Father always said that Ringo was a little smarter than I was, but that didn't count with us, anymore than the difference in the color of our skins counted. What counted was, what one of us had done or seen that the other hadn't, and ever since that Christmas I had been ahead of Ringo because I had seen a railroad, a locomotive. Only I know now it was more than that with Ringo, though neither of us were to see the proof of my belief for some time yet and we were not to recognize it as such even then. It was as if Ringo felt it too and that the railroad, the rushing locomotive which he had hoped to see symbolized it—the motion, the impulse to move which had already seethed to a head among his people, darker than themselves, reasonless, following and seeking a delusion, a dream, a bright shape which they could not know since there was nothing in their heritage, nothing in the memory even of the old men to tell the others, 'This is what we will find'; he nor they could not have known what it was yet it was there—one of those impulses inexplicable yet invincible which appear among races of people at intervals and drive them to pick up and leave all security and familiarity of earth and home and start out,

The Un vanquished

125

they don't know where, emptyhanded, blind to everything but a hope and a doom.

(Unvanquished,

pp. 91-92)

Faulkner's stress upon the exodus of the blacks as sharing the features of an historical mass movement of a people certainly enlarges upon the mythic proportions of the event, but also hopelessly and deliberately obscures its meaning. His impersonal and objective elaboration of the event nevertheless betrays something of his sense of resistance to it and a feeling of regret, coupled with the demeaning suggestion that the limitations borne by the blacks are their own fault, that somehow they fall short in their claims upon the full force of that integrity which is the animating principle of their movement. But to put the matter simply, one is compelled only to say that the blacks wanted to escape slavery and oppression, and their ignorance of the means through which this would be achieved does not lessen the integrity of their desire for such liberation. The situation with Ringo and Bayard, in regard to the locomotive, transposes one set of categories into another. The locomotive symbolizes the manner in which Bayard is ahead of Ringo, and this situation indicates the urgency of Ringo's awareness of the fact that Bayard is ahead, as it involves his awakening awareness of his blackness. This means that the competitive measure of superiority can no longer be the outcome of a game of boyhood rivalry; it reflects now the categories of superiority-inferiority as they apply to race. The first thing he wants to see when they arrive at Hawkhurst is the locomotive. When told he'll have to wait, he replies: "Seems like I been waiting on hit all my life. I reckon you'll tell me next the Yankees done moved hit too," (Unvanquished, p. 98). When asked whether he wouldn't like instead to hear about the great migration of his people, he replies: "I been having to hear about niggers all my life. I got to hear about that railroad" (Unvanquished, p. 103).

126

The

Unvanquished

The knowledge of the railroad will determine how he will henceforth see his blackness, and will consolidate his notions of what the possibilities of blackness are over against whiteness. The engine, recaptured from the Yankees, is a symbol of Southern pride and honor in defeat. The Southerners have it but no longer have a track to run it on. It is inoperative, yet symbolic of the ongoing life of the homeland. They have proved themselves. The Yankees "could tear the track up but they couldn't take back the fact that we had done it. They couldn't take that from us" (Unvanquished, p. 112). Ringo cannot see the engine, therefore, and presumably cannot gain parity with Bayard. Having listened to Drusilla's recital of its recapture, the deed done for principle, "done not for the end but for the sake of the doing," Ringo and Bayard debate the question of who is ahead, since each has been an equal auditor to the telling of the story and now has equal knowledge, which ought to allow them to call it quits. When Bayard says, however, that he saw the track before the Yankees tore it up, he means to imply that he is still ahead of Ringo. He had seen "where it was going to happen." Ringo's reply is: "But you didn't know hit was fixing to happen when you seed the track. So nemmine that. I heard: and I reckon they aint gonter git that away from me, neither" (Unvanquished, p. 112). What cannot be taken away from the whites is the same thing that Ringo implies cannot be taken away from him as a black person—honor in defeat, in being a black person. But the basis of his identification with the whites is predicated wholly upon their being the representatives of that honor which is not perceived as existing among the blacks. As long as he is one with them, they will hold his symbolic engine in trust. The principle that motivates the movement of the blacks, however, the truly honorable one, is, so far as the testimony of Ringo's own eyes indicates, the truly defeated one. Throughout this novel Ringo's intelligence is used to make perceptive observations and to pass accurate judgments upon events,

The Unvanquished

127

as if he were an impersonal critic and appraisor of life with no basis for personal involvement in the events he's witnessing, except insofar as he is a representative of what the Sartorises stand for. But since, in regard to the blacks, the events Ringo is witnessing involve the deepest and most compelling expression of the hopes of his people, in a mass movement, presented in a situation in which the destiny of his people hangs in balance, one can hardly imagine how he can remain emotionally unaffected by what he sees, or how it is possible for him not to express some measure of direct identification with these black pilgrims. But he is presented as a neutral, disinterested commentator, as if his identification with the Sartorises is such that, allowed to share a spiritual and emotional community with them at some proximate level of equality, he seems to imagine himself as one with them, as one of them, in a way that the mass of the other blacks can never be. That is, he imagines himself as white, for all practical purposes, and shares the destiny of the whites, not that of the blacks. It seems to me that the distinguishing characteristic of his similarity to the whites, and the basis of Faulkner's presentation of his emotional attachment to the whites, is his intelligence. The same applies to a character like Louvinia. It appears to me that Ringo's intelligence assures him that the only way to get on is through identifying with whiteness; or it may be that the fact that he has intelligence would mean that he would identify with whiteness. Being intelligent, he cannot, therefore, be black, or use that intelligence in the interest of blacks—which means, therefore, in his own interest. On the contrary, he uses his intelligence here to ridicule them, or at the least to make light of the seriousness of their quest. As we have seen, the blacks are always presented as identifying, on some level, with the whites, especially as this is enacted by the women and the older men servants. (Roskus, Dilsey's husband, is one outstanding exception, while Dilsey herself is perfectly consistent with the pattern.) This identification on Ringo's

128

The

Unvanquished

part—not so much the fact of it as the manner in which it is presented—seems especially unnatural because his superior intelligence ought to make him, self-conflicted, self-accusingly, more sensitive to issues of inequality (issues which, for this very reason, have not been authentically presented by Faulkner in this novel). Ringo's is the kind of ironic self-delusion that normally would be of interest and a subject of investigation to Faulkner. Ringo grows up faster than Bayard but doesn't achieve moral growth, and certainly not the fulfillment of his potential. He becomes arrested, a suitably tragic subject of treatment of no interest to Faulkner in this context. He can become Bayard's "boy" because he has been presented as not being able to conceive of any other destiny for himself, and he sees no contradiction, feels no hurt or outrage at this situation, or desire for another kind of life. The intelligence he has would have made him see the bitter irony of his entrapment, but the point is that Faulkner himself is emotionally inured in such a manner that his own awareness of it cannot be entertained. The closest Faulkner comes to presenting his awareness of the possibilities of such an idea occurs when Bayard reflects that though Ringo has unofficially become his servant, Bayard nevertheless, now that his father has died, "would never be the Sartoris to him." Bayard goes on to acknowledge that now, even though he and Ringo are twenty-four years old, Ringo "had changed even less than I had since that day when we nailed Grumby's body to the door of the old compress. Maybe it was because he had outgrown me, had changed so much that summer while he and Granny traded mules with the Yankees that since then I had had to do most of the changing just to catch up with him" (Unvanquished, p. 248). Ringo has come on a 40-mile ride to summon Bayard back for the performance of the inevitable retribution against his father's murderer, while Bayard is already thinking of how he can accomplish this end while at the same time observing the more responsible

The Unvanquished

129

dictate of "thou shalt not kill." Even Bayard reflects, almost ironically, how he might not have caught up with Ringo after all, when he compares his more complex entanglement of purpose to the singleminded energy and dedication of Ringo, who now sits slumped in the chair, red-eyed, spent after his long ride, yet ready to immediately assume the return journey. Ringo does not achieve the self-awareness that lets him know who and what he is, as does Bayard. When Ringo announces to Bayard one day that "I ain't a nigger any more. I done been abolished," he speaks more truthfully than he knows. When Bayard asks what he is if he isn't a "nigger," he shows Bayard a new dollar bill he's received that has been "drawn on the United States President Treasurer . . . and signed 'Cassius Q. Benhow, Acting Marshal' in a neat clerk's hand, with a big sprawling X under it" (Unvanquished, pp. 228-29). The treasurer, as Ringo says, is a black who had driven the "Benbow carriage twell he run off with the Yankees two years ago. He back now and he gonter be elected Marshal of Jefferson." To Bayard's disbelief that "a nigger" would be elected marshal, Ringo replies: "No. They ain't no more niggers, in Jefferson nor nowhere else" (Unvanquished, p. 229). Ringo means that blacks, under their demeaning designations as "niggers," as slaves, as individuals who are controlled by whites, no longer exist; and on the authority of the black resident treasurer and acting marshal, he has the proof of this in his hand. Yet he appreciates the fact of the resistance of Colonel Sartoris and the other white men to this new regime, and says himself that "This war ain't over. Hit just started good" (Unvanquished, p. 279). What then is his understanding of the position of blacks in society? The "niggerness" from which they've just been freed is certainly threatened, and clearly will be imposed upon them all over again. Yet Ringo acts as if he believes in the marshal's authenticity. The "niggerness" from which he has been liberated is the same as that to

130

The

Vnvanquished

which the marshal was subject, insofar as they both are black people. But Ringo's conception of himself as a black person is one in which he is to be excluded from the literal and psychological subjugation imposed upon and borne by the marshal and the mass of blacks in the way that they were viewed as true "niggers." Yet Ringo must know that the marshal's position is spurious and will soon be taken over by the whites. The marshal will be a "nigger" again. But Ringo has always been, without knowing it, a psychological "nigger," while someone like the marshal, in complete self-awareness, has always known himself to be a literal "nigger" in fact. In order for Ringo to maintain his position, he therefore— perhaps unwittingly, perhaps unkowningly—requires the continuation of white society according to the previous status quo, in order to maintain his psychological dependence upon it and draw from it his strengths. And the continuing control of white society is evidenced in the figurehead marshal in whose legitimacy Ringo himself doesn't really believe. Thus, if "niggerness" really did cease to exist, Ringo's reality would truly be abolished. Bayard himself recognizes and acknowledges Ringo's identification with whiteness as the source of his individual distinctiveness and prowess, but he does not appreciate the destructive effect this identification has had upon Ringo's possibilities for autonomous action as a black person. To carry this conception to its logical conclusion, one can see that the benefits of his association with white people are one thing, while the use to which he could have put them is quite another. On their return journey, Bayard considers how Ringo had been able to persuade the livery stable agent to provide them with such good horses. Had it been the reddened eyes, the tears that had formed the channels of dried mud down his face? Bayard thinks not: "But I rather think it was that same quality which used to enable him to replenish his and Granny's supply of United States Army letterheads during that time—some outrageous assurance gained from too long and too close association with white people:

The Unvanquished

131

the one whom he called Granny, the other with whom he had slept from the time we were born until Father rebuilt the house" (Unvanquished, p. 250). He has, from the beginning, been completely the white people's "boy." His individual distinctiveness and prowess are not a function of the complications and complexities of his own development, not something he has earned so much as they are things conferred upon him through imitation. We assume that Faulkner means that his intelligence is his own, but that it is expressed through the agency of an alien construct created and imposed upon it by means of exposure to whiteness. It is a situation similar to that of Lucas Beauchamp, who presents not only a psychological but an hereditary identification with the white blood which flows in his veins. While Ringo can make a literal identification with white people in the flesh, Lucas must do so, in the absence of suitable living models, spiritually. They both are compelling individual personalities, but they are not presented as having gained such inner strength from their black heritage. The only difference between them is that Lucas is more self-consciously aware of himself as a black man in a white society. There are other significant changes in Faulkner's attitudes, but the distance Faulkner has traveled in the creation of these two portraits is not very great. And it must be stressed that the changes that do occur reflect Faulkner's own attempt to make amends for his earlier offenses. Lucas sees himself, in a time of the decline of the white men in his family, as the prime bearer and representative of the old hereditary code of honor. In a similar manner, I believe it is not true that Ringo stands outside of the code, in reference to Bayard, but is rather a purer representative of it than Bayard. He requires direct satisfaction in the vindication of his honor, while Bayard's method is far more complex, though in the end it proves to have had more "style" than Ringo's suggestion of bushwhacking the Colonel's assassin. Bayard's method is therefore more typically a

132

The

Unvanquished

Sartoris act, while at the same time it departs from the true spirit of blind adherence to the defiant and vindictive satisfaction of the honor code itself, which Ringo represents. One of the most striking instances of the thing that Ringo most admires in the whites—the assertive, triumphant, self-justifying sense of the self in its dealings with the world—is revealed in Granny Millard's prayer in the church as she kneels in acknowledgement of the sin committed in the trading of the mules and horses. This defiant prayer, which itself almost seems a kind of sacrilege, appears to me to be perfectly consistent with the arrogance, the righteous and narcissistic self-justification that is a characteristic feature of Faulkner's depiction of the Southern stance. There is no piety in it, no submitting of the vulnerable or sinful self before the judgment of a just or merciful transcendent God. A true recognition of responsibility for individual action is avoided, since Granny has already justified her actions to herself. "I did not sin for gain or for greed," says Granny to God. "I did not sin for revenge. I defy You or anyone to say I did. I sinned first for justice. And after that first time, I sinned for more than justice; I sinned for the sake of food and clothes for Your own creatures who could not help themselves . . ." (Unvanquished, p. 167). Granny names her sins and herself offers justification for and absolution of them, in that they serve the needs of the defenseless and the helpless. Their moral expediency she assumes God must accept and their moral efficacy she reserves for herself to judge. Ringo's perception of this situation, with regard to Granny, is accurate; but he cannot see its moral deficiencies, because the basis of his admiration of white people is the identification with the assertive will which gives his own life meaning. He says: "Don't yawl worry about Granny. She 'cide what she want and then she kneel down about ten seconds and tell God what she aim to do, and then she git up and do hit. And them that don't like hit can git outen the

The Unvanquished

133

way or git trampled. But that railroad . . ." (Unvanquished, pp. 105-6). The recitation breaks off this way in the original, and it is significant that this statement of admiration of white behavioral traits is associated in his mind with the railroad, the symbol of triumph in defeat, the thing he has in common with the whites.

Ill The Sound and the Fury

The tension between the destructive and life-denying attitudes toward life, and the affirmative and life-enhancing attitudes, as they are exemplified in various characters, is everywhere prevalent in The Sound and the Fury, and serves to symbolize Faulkner's conception of the antithesis between good and evil. The novel is a powerful indictment of the idealizing tendencies that spring from the distorted dynamics of the instinctual life, as especially indicated in the boy Quentin's case. It is also an indictment of the narcissistic self-absorption and self-justifying actions of those who use and abuse others in satisfaction of their own needs. Such perversions of human relations and distortions of the inner nature are revealed as functions of self-love or inability to love which have become an ongoing and malignant force in the lives of the Compsons. In comparison to her brothers, Caddy's personality is the more vigorous and assertive. She has a feminine assurance and self-confidence that is a function of the role she performs. She is open and responsive to experience, willing to face the misfortunes of her lot in life, and free of the false pride and hypocrisy of Mrs. Compson, for example, who views Benjy's idiocy as a personal affront. In contrast to Mrs. Compson, Caddy in her resourcefulness has found ways to appeal to and satisfy Benjy's limited capacities for response and interaction. She ministers to his unreasoning and inarticulate needs for order and security through the loving force and constancy of her presence. She herself is associated or identified, in Benjy's mind, with the agents in the external world that provide such satisfaction, as evidenced in the fire, the smooth bright shapes, the

136

The Sound and the Fury

cushion, and the slipper Benjy clings to as a fetish long after Caddy has departed. Just as is the case with Dilsey, the demands made upon Caddy are an heroic test of her courage and moral stamina. They test her ability to maintain a sympathetic, judicious, and unselfish perspective under the most trying of circumstances, since her own mother openly allows her to fulfill the capacities she has relinquished. In one instance, we see Mrs. Compson, with her aristocratic pretensions about decorum and upbringing, persisting in trying to train Benjy to mind, through discipline. When he proves unable to act accordingly, she bursts into tears, and Caddy ends up comforting both her and Benjy: '"Hush, mother,' Caddy said. 'You go upstairs and lay down, so you can be sick. I'll get Dilsey.'" 1 Like Dilsey, Caddy is a positive, life-affirming force in the household, an initiator and sustainer of the possibilities of love. Unlike Dilsey, she is appreciated for her efforts, possessing an acknowledged value for the members of the family that can never be bestowed upon Dilsey. And, again, though she suffers for her efforts, like Dilsey, and her torment is unappreciated, she is caused to suffer as a result of the conflicts created in her through the desperate, and acknowledged, need others have of her, while Dilsey's steadfast and lonely dedication is rewarded with unrelenting contempt. It is not sexual desire for Caddy that motivates Quentin so much as it is the forbidden desire for incest. He thinks that the satisfaction of such desire would condemn them both to an eternal and timeless isolation out of the torment of the present. Speaking to his father he says, "but if I could tell you we did it would have been so and then the others wouldn't be so and then the world would roar away" {Sound, 195). Good Puritan that Quentin is, he feels the prohibition and allure of the forbidden act so strongly that the admission of it as a possibility constitutes its enactment, and, incidentally cancels out all Caddy's previous sexual experience, restoring her to him intact again. He does not explicitly make such a

The Sound and the Fury

137

proposition to Caddy because of his fear of her acceptance. And just as his idealization of her is also an expression of his fear, jealousy, and physical desire for her, so the actual prospect of physical union can only present him with the even greater threat of his emasculation and lack of psychological potency, since it is clear that a reversal of roles has occurred between him and Caddy. In her potency of character and sexual experience, she is an embodiment of that which he loathes, fears, and intensely desires in himself. Thus his conception of himself as the brother who would avenge the sister's violated honor and at the same time preserve it through an act of seduction represents his own guilty recognition of intense and contradictory desires and his inability to resolve them through the weakness of his own character. In this way he is more concerned with the ritualistic display of the enactment of the claims of honor than with the determination and conviction that would ensure their efficacy. When Benjy discovers Caddy with one of her visitors, and reacts to the perfume she wears on another occasion, Caddy feels guilty and vows to conduct her life in such a way that Benjy will no longer be affronted by her actions. Man's need for woman to preserve her virginity is given extreme form in Benjy. The woman's loss of virginity becomes this time a loss of her person. She is literally lost to Benjy by growing up, and what Benjy loses is his own self-recognition, the confirmation of his existence as a person, since it is in the presence of Caddy's loving person that his being is mirrored. In both the literal and metaphorical sense, Benjy represents in the most extreme form man's need of the nurturing, self-sacrificing mother. If Dilsey testifies to the reality of certain positive and humane values that, however assailed, are an enduring inheritance of the human spirit, so Benjy is an embodiment of man's deepest and most essential needs, as exemplified in his instinctive and intuitive reactions. His is the formless, and even timeless, expression of the

138

The Sound and the Fury

necessity for love, order, and security in life. His inarticulate moans, unending and uncompromising, suggest the struggles of the personality, surging up out of its deepest recesses, to achieve selfdefinition, wholeness, and meaning. It is the secular complement to that search for integrity, meaning, and belonging to which Dilsey gives a more explicitly religious application. As a result, the humanity of the various characters can be assessed in accordance with the nature of their reactions to Benjy and Dilsey, and the vision of human need and capability that these two characters exemplify encloses the other two sections of the novel, which present perversions of the capacity and need for love and integrity of being. Benjy's intuitive and instinctive powers of perception provide him with an acute sensitivity to the data of experience. He senses the harmful or threatening capacity of natural phenomena and individuals, just as he senses and is impelled toward participation in their capacity to support and affirm life and to provide pleasure. As a result, he responds to changes in mood and attitude in characters, and to the subtleties of behavior that express the shifting effects of their ongoing experience. His response is intensely egoistic, an immediate assessment of the effect a character's actions can have upon the nature of his relationship to him and upon his own wellbeing. At the same time his response also reflects upon and accentuates the human value and potential of a character's actions. Thus Benjy senses immediately Caddy's loss of virginity and tries to annual its occurrence by drawing her toward the bathroom in order to wash off the effects. Her loss of virginity signals her independence and the threat that he will lose her. It also signals his recognition of the tragedy of her circumstances, here revealed in her promiscuity. His power to sense death and tragedy is attributed to his heightened sense of smell, since he could literally have smelled the effects of Caddy's loss of virginity. Also, there are repeated synesthetic references to his ability to see with his nose.

The Sound and the Fury

139

It is interesting to note here Faulkner's conferring of this ability upon Benjy, in view of statements in Faulkner in the University (p. 253) that he has made about his own inordinately acute sense of smell, a "sharper sense with [him] than maybe sight or hearing." Though Caddy, alone among the whites, recognizes Benjy's unusual powers of perception, it is mostly the blacks, with whom Benjy spends a great deal of time, who appreciate his peculiar powers and view them sympathetically as the natural and rightful substitutes for the usual perceptive apparatus which has been denied him. Because they are blacks and, within Faulkner's scheme of values, participate in a more elemental sphere of being to which Benjy has been consigned by chance of fate, it is only appropriate that they share a mutual understanding with Benjy. Lying in T.P.'s bed, Benjy likes the odor of it—the "unmistakable smell of Negroes"—a complete reversal of that attitude of fear and loathing with which all the other whites in Faulkner confront this much-referred-to phenomenon. One might think also that the loving and nurturing image that attends Benjy's recollection of Caddy, the beauty and serenity surrounding her presence that has beome distilled, in Benjy's mind, into an essence, might also characterize his attitude toward Dilsey. Dilsey has loved him and met his needs as Caddy has; and in terms of the urgency and depth of his needs, and her ability to understand and satisfy them, she ought certainly to have established herself in relation to Benjy with a power as compelling as Caddy's. But this is not the case. One sees Dilsey persistently and futilely attempting to repair the damage the Compson's have done to themselves. One sees her attempting, in the latter sections of the novel, to console Benjy in his loss of Caddy, but there is little appreciation of Dilsey as herself an object worthy of love. She is perceived only as the one who must be in perpetual readiness to offer love and any other service requested of her.

140

The Sound and the Fury

With the exception of Caddy, and of Mr. Compson in his own way, all the other white members of the family view Benjy as a menace and disgrace whose idiocy constitutes a stigmatizing and contaminating influence that must be avoided and against which their own self-esteem must be preserved and defended. He is viewed as both a cause and a manifestation of their downfall. Dilsey accepts him as her own child; and though there are those among the blacks who object to his presence, it is not the fact of his idiocy itself to which they object so much as it is certain extraordinary and even demonic powers that they superstitiously attribute to it. He moves freely among them, and as Roskus says, "he knows lot more than folks think." When Jason discovers the missing money and goes menacingly out the door in search of Quentin, Benjy begins to wail. Here, I think, what Benjy has sensed is man's propensity for tragic suffering, of which Benjy is a symbolic embodiment. Faulkner describes Benjy's reaction: "Then Ben wailed again, hopeless and prolonged. It was nothing. Just sound. It might have been all time and injustice and sorrow become vocal for an instant by a conjunction of planets" (Sound, 303-4). It is among the blacks, the typical agents of vulnerability in Faulkner, that Benjy's complaint is registered. It speaks of the suffering that characterizes their collective condition, the burden of which Dilsey now offers personal testimonial to and seeks relief from in the Easter sermon. It is the pain of living which cannot be avoided, but must be confronted in all its humbling and irresolvable force. Her view of time is from the aspect of eternity, in which human actions must be accepted as the necessary consequences of the complexities and imperfections of human behavior. All these things will ultimately be resolved in that apocalyptic vision dictated by her simple Christian faith. It is a faith which offers a meaning to human events and a rationale for suffering which, contemplated in the vision of its alleviation in eternity, can provide momentary solace. This is in keeping with her recognition of the secular constraints under which she must func-

The Sound and the Fury

141

tion in life as a black person, which she accepts, since she is presented as seeing no hope for her and her kind in the here and now. Viewing life in this way, she makes appropriate adjustments for the manmade distortions in time, as symbolically revealed in her ability to interpret the malfunctioning kitchen clock. By comparison, Benjy is locked in a timeless dimension, in which the past, the present, and the future exist simultaneously. In terms of the presentation of Faulknerian themes, he is the most perfect instance of the persistence of the past as the determining reality upon the present. In contrast, the anguish of the present for Quentin, which again is a direct function of the past as it intrudes upon the present, is so great that he wishes to exempt himself from time in an attempt not only to assuage his pain but to deny the occurrence of what has already irrevocably transpired. Jason, perpetually committed to the future, would like to escape the effects of both the past and the present. But his frenetic and mechanistic obsession defeats him. He wastes time in his frenzy and, as Job says, outsmarts himself. The sense of being the innocent victims of circumstances beyond their control afflicts all the characters. Mr. and Mrs. Compson, though unlike in their capacity to love and engage in interpersonal relations, are nevertheless alike in their weakness of character and refusal or inability to accept, or even acknowledge, the reality of their circumstances. Mrs. Compson's self-pitying excuses, her defensive self-justification, can be compared to Mr. Compson's defeatism, as exemplified by his alcoholism, which went from bad to worse, and by his cynicism or failed idealism. Being unable to take an assertive, manly, or corrective stand against the forces of disintegration which threaten his family, he can only retreat from them; and it is a retreat, like Mrs. Compson's, that is also motivated by a delusory sense of superiority and self-importance. Because such a conception betrays an underlying idealistic commitment, Mr.

142

The Sound and the Fury

Compson deflates such idealism through a constant irony of selfdeprecation; yet he believes in the high claims of honor and of a gentleman's obligations to himself, though he no longer believes such claims can be successfully acted upon in the present-day world. Anything that happens, as for instance Caddy's loss of virginity, though it has its human causes is still only a natural phenomenon about which one cannot moralize, Mr. Compson tells Quentin. But he knows that the idealist cannot resist imposing his notions upon reality in an attempt to assign value to human actions; and the idealist's assessment of human folly, though his judgments may no longer have any efficacy, are a measure of the necessity of his own vision of truth. As Mr. Compson tells Quentin, "We must just stay awake and see evil done for a little while its not always . . ." {Sound, 195). So Mr. Compson pretends to an intellectual understanding and acceptance of Caddy's predicament. But his emotional attitude toward Caddy's behavior is revealed in his progressive deterioration and the cynical remarks he makes about women and virginity to Quentin in an attempt to ameliorate the pain and despair of his acknowledgment of Caddy's decline. Mr. Compson's views have had a profound effect upon Quentin. Though Quentin wishes to resist his father's teachings, and finds himself in opposition to them as they conduct their dialogues, the two of them are finally too much alike to be in any real disagreement. It is finally the love of the self which prompts the idealistic investment. This despair before the defeat of idealism, the defeatist attitude which counsels the belief that life is not worth any battle, is Faulkner's final ironic commentary upon the looming image of heroic idealism. Such idealism, typically exemplified in the Sartorises, has been the ongoing preoccupation of Faulkner's men. Quentin kills himself to escape the torment of his failure to avenge his sister's violated honor, which amounts to a failure of potency as a man. His failure as an idealist means his failure as the man who

The Sound and the Fury

143

defines, shapes, and controls reality through masculine will, and suggests his greater failure as a human being. The failure of all his idealistic pursuits is nicely summed up in the phrase which torments him, "we will sell Benjy's pasture for a fine dead sound"—his going to Harvard, and the idealized echoing reverberation of what this has meant to numerous generations of young men. Yet, paradoxically enough, his death is both an expression of his failure and an attempt to redeem it. Mr. Compson tells him that life is not worth living because idealism is meaningless. There is nothing worth believing in because "the sequence of natural events and their causes which shadows every mans brow even Benjys" will see to it that the meaning assigned to an occurrence by humans is not an inherent property of it, and that all things change, even grief and remorse, anger and belief. All notions of good and evil are simply concepts without inherent meaning. Even Caddy may not be worth his despair, and he will kill himself only when he has reached the point where he dares to entertain this idea as a real possibility. It is precisely this possibility that he prevents by killing himself and arresting the movement of time. Caddy's initial attempt at securing a life of her own with Dalton Ames does not appear in itself to have been disreputable. Not a conspicuously bad or vicious person, Dalton seems to have genuinely cared for Caddy, and to have been tolerant and understanding to an appreciable extent of the resistance of Quentin and the family's discourtesy. But her family causes her to lose the man she loves, and her subsequent promiscuity is a direct reflection of the despair of that loss. The loving and responsive capacity of her childhood is now expressed in her involvement in an endless series of assignations. The hypocrisy of her marriage to Herbert Head is the final humiliation and punishment exacted upon herself, the logical outcome of the series of events initiated when she first began to take on her lovers. This is all the more to the point when she realizes that the family

144

The Sound and the Fury

begins to hold her, almost as much as it does Benjy, responsible for its decline. She and Benjy have become scapegoats. Apart from Mr. Compson's weakness, one must look to the limitations of Mrs. Compson as the underlying cause of the distorted and arrested development of the Compson children. Cold, self-centered, unloving, hypocritical, she uses all those around her to satisfy her hypochondriacal needs and paralyzes and corrupts normal family relations. Her prostestations of her duty and her pretense at fulfilling the motherly role actually represent a distorted commitment to an idealized notion of the fulfillment of the role. That is, she observes the conventional forms of mothering as befit a lady of quality. She narcissistically reflects upon herself in the act of attempting to fulfill the role. She is completely unaware of the efficacy of its fulfillment and the human involvement that is its basis. Unable to love anyone, Mrs. Compson disowns both her children and rejects her husband, and though she spoils Jason, no bond of affection exists between them, as evidenced in the utter contempt he has for her. She is like a malignant force that stifles life at its source, the very antithesis of mothering. Benjy's condition symbolically represents her corruption, and Quentin's despairing cry is to the point: "If Td just had a mother so I could say Mother Mother." The intensity of his need for such a loving and comforting figure in his life explains the intensity, hopelessness, and distortion of his investment in Caddy. Faulkner contrasts Quentin's abject need of a mother and Mrs. Compson's failure with the assurance Gerald Bland has of the constant attention and devotion of a mother figure. But Mrs. Bland, in her obtrusive, possessive and narcissistic ministrations, is as much a travesty of true motherly solicitation in her own way as Mrs. Compson is in hers. The offspring of each is an appropriate product and creation of the mother's character and influence. In compliance with this situation, the girl Quentin, the last of the

The Sound and the Fury

145

motherless Compsons, is literally without a mother or father, and Jason, who serves as parental substitute, has directly wrought in her much of the sadistic and sinister effect of his own character. In the decline of the families in the Faulknerian saga, Faulkner presents individual case histories without seeming to offer them as the basis for a generalized explanation of the decline of the old South. Yet the disintegration and degeneration of the family, with children bereft of both mothers and fathers, obviously presents convincing evidence for a consideration of the larger issues of social and cultural disruption. It seems to me that though, in each instance, Faulkner confines his interest to the details of a particular story, the compulsive similarity and repetition of effects and their causes seem to spring from a collective source of guilt. It is as if the South were, as many of the characters say, afflicted with a curse and guilty of some unspecified crime, for which it must be made to suffer eternally. Parenthetically, here, I can think of a particular perversion of relations which, though condoned by social mores, must nevertheless have had far-reaching psychological effects upon those involved. Aside from the general question of slavery and racism, one thinks of the black mammies, substituting for ineffectual or absent mothers, as the cause of a pervasive sense of guilt on the part of young white males. The guilt occurred when they became aware of the constraints imposed by their heritage which required that they spurn and repudiate, or at least detach themselves from, the bonds of natural affection that must have existed between them and their black mammies. This is not a possibility for Benjy, and Faulkner reveals Quentin's and Jason's attitude toward Dilsey to be one only of contempt. However, it is the very fact of such contempt, for one who had responsibily loved and cared for them, which itself indicates psychological imbalance and a perversion of normal feelings. The character Roth in "The Fire and the Hearth" demonstrates a

146

The Sound and the Fury

conscious awareness of this perversion of feelings as he grapples with his ambivalence toward Molly Beauchamp, who had served as his actual mother in his upbringing. The longing for the mother and its relations to man's idealist strivings have been extensively treated by the critic Sally Page. Page, employing Jungian theory, says that "the intense longing for ideality is an expression of the archetypal search for the mother, a yearning which, because of the nature of man, can be paradoxically either creative or destructive." 2 Page offers a very skillful and interesting interpretation of the psychological implications of Quentin's search for a mother, in Jungian terms. 3 I would like to elaborate upon Jung's idea of the libido seeking the unattainable goal, which in the unconscious can be taken to mean the mother. In Benjy, for instance, one sees that any idea he has of the good or the beautiful, or any expression of longing he has to obtain or regain an unknown and unspecified condition of wholeness free of threat, is usually associated with some original sense of love, security, and self-definition that can only have been fostered by Caddy. It is through Caddy that he learns the reality of his person, and it is therefore Caddy who provides the basis for his conceptualization of the possibilities of life. The theorizing of contemporary ego psychoanalysts indicates that it is through the mother's ministrations to the infant, her caressing of his body and physical handling of him, that the infant's sense of himself as a living entity is fostered. His identity, so much of which is centered in his body-ego, is actualized through the agency of physical handling. His mother's attitude toward him and actions executed upon him represent both his own sense of developing possibilities and those of the world in its relationship to him, filled as it is with infinite potential behind the looming presence of his mother's smiling face. Therefore, before the child begins to embark upon that path of separation from his mother in pursuit of his own individuation and fulfillment of possibilities, he has first existed in a symbiotic state

The Sound and the Fury

147

with his mother in which her reality was identified with and was an extension of his own. But his strength and security in pursuing his independence are a function of the quality of the relationship in which he existed with his mother. His integrity as an object worthy of love, and therefore of autonomous development, has been affirmed. He loves himself because he has been loved, and the confidence and security fostered by the mother, which exist always as reflected invages of the mother, have now become internalized as determining features of his psychological inheritance. The original state of perfection cannot, of course, ever be regained, but its residual and elusive memory persists and exerts its effects in the perpetual striving for the good and the beautiful. One sees that Faulkner's characters are filled with the yearning for immortality, rebirth, and the achieving of some condition of perfect self-actualization. In Faulkner such strivings almost always betray a deep inner impoverishment, a defensive self-justification, and a desperate, distorted, and destructive channeling of energies. His characters all bear the stamp of narcissistic self-absorption that suggests some deep psychic wound. If it is true that one expression of the yearning for ideality in its most primitive and instinctive forms is the desire for incest, the frequency of occurrence of this phenomenon among Faulkner's characters is not surprising. Carrying this line of thinking further, it has often seemed to me that Faulkner's fondness for Keats's Urn image has significance here. The Urn image depicts the paradox of the perfectly realized, perpetually enacted, yet insubstantial action. It could be taken as an expression of the desire to re-create oneself, not only through union with the mother, but by means of a return to the womb. Such a return re-creates the elusive sense of pure being, of the self still undifferentiated, utterly whole, in a state of dynamic equilibrium—in which the possibilities inherent in life remain infinite in their potential and externally exempted from translation into fact. Perhaps Faulkner is after all rendering a psychohistorical investi-

148

The Sound and the Fury

gation of the dilemma of the South. His intuitive perception of the depth and character of mental aberration and the various modes of mental functioning—as they appear in his characters—may be a deeply revealing psychological profile of his region, and of his own mind. As is the case with The Sound and the Fury, one encounters repeatedly in his characters self-love, the inability to love, and narcissistic self-absorption. And though these negative images are countered by their positive counterparts—characters with the ability to confront, accept, and live life with a humorous, vigorous, caring, and respectful solicitation for others, their effort is difficult at best and their satisfactions meager. The ambivalence toward the homeland in so many of Faulkner's characters has obvious roots in the defeat and humiliation suffered as a result of the Civil War, with the subsequent defiant refusal to accept the reality of the situation. Characters suffer from a negative self-image for which there is a constant need to overcompensate in heroic exploits, and they reveal an impoverished and distorted capacity to give and receive affection. The ambivalence toward the homeland is analogous to the ambivalence toward the self, and both are suggestive of the narcissistic state of mind. The Compson children are all afflicted with narcissistic identification. I am referring to a situation where love is withdrawn from the mother while, at the same time, an identification has been made with the mother, or the primary caretaker, who has been psychologically lost or destroyed. Such a condition is precipitated by a blow to the ego's self-esteem, usually resulting from disillusion in relations with a primal love object, where the ego's sense of its own value is still dependent upon and a function of the reinforcement it receives from the primal love object. To lose the love object is to lose the self and the sense of the self as being worthy of being loved. In such a situation, the child experiences love perverted in the hands of the caretaker or mother, and experiences himself as an entity used only for the satisfaction of the needs of the mother in her own attempts

The Sound and the Fury

149

at self-justification, as was the case with Mrs. Compson. A child who experiences such a situation ceases to believe in the integrity of relations and henceforth uses others as he has been used himself, as an object to be manipulated in the satisfaction of one's own needs. Such needs, of course, are desperate and unrelenting; they are representative of the pain of not having been loved and the continual desire, now distorted, to be loved and to be worthy of love. They represent an attempt to validate the self. And in the narcissistic individual, the reaction to the blow of disillusionment in the love object or mother, which also means disillusionment in the self, and the reaction to not having been loved and to having been injuriously and humiliatingly treated, can result in a massive overcompensation, in which inverted pride and grandiosity exist along side of feelings of worthlessness. The natural human desire and need to express love and connectedness, denied access to the love object, becomes, instead, invested in the self. This is the narcissistic self-love that seeks others only to the extent that they can be used to fortify the ego against its sense of underlying vulnerability, satisfy its self-justifying needs, and stave off the threat of its own dissolution. The self as love object becomes idealized and perfect, as a defense against the underlying sense of worthlessness, and the desire for true connectedness and love with others now becomes resisted and distorted, since such legitimate relations would bring to consciousness the pain of the original rejection and disillusionment. Stripped of its defenses, the ego would recognize its vulnerability and the abject helplessness of its needs. Furthermore, the awareness of its vulnerability and need would awaken the rage and anger that have become its inheritance as a result of the original narcissistic wound, rage and anger that could not be expressed against the desired love object, the mother, for instance, for fear of forfeiting altogether any remaining possibility of her love. These violent and self-destructive feelings have instead been turned upon the self. The

150

The Sound and the Fury

idealized, the strong and good part of the self, can now punish the bad, the vulnerable and hateful and unlovable part of the self for its failings, since the ego has always thought that its failure to have been loved is as much its own fault as its mother's. Since this latter bad part of the self is in large measure composed of identifications with the love object which have caused one to be bad and weak, a vicarious punishment can be exacted against it through the unconscious condemnation or punishment of the self. Thus Quentin, for example, fulfills his desire for his mother's love by remaining faithful to her pride, egoism, hypocrisy, self-deception, and coldhearted inability to love, while at the same time he punishes her for these things by punishing himself. Jason too complies with this procedure, in his sadomasochistic delight in viewing himself as the victim, just as does his mother—and father. He torments and punishes himself in the bearing of his burden, his duty to his family and tradition which he deceptively believes he has disavowed and from whose influence he believes he has freed himself. The simultaneously idealized and diminished view of the self relates to psychological doubling. The internal polarities in the self get translated into mythic polarities in relations between blacks and whites. It should be stressed here that this psychoanalytic treatment of character is not intended to make characters into patients or case studies—no more so than is consistent with the author's own conception and presentation of them. My intent, rather, is to explore Faulkner's conception of character from a psychoanalytic perspective in order to provide insight into the workings of Faulkner's mind and into the way his fictional personages take shape. Consider how one of the prime causes of Jason's bitterness and arrested development is his idealistic investment in Caddy, upon whom his promised job and life prospects depend. Caddy's collapse is therefore the cause of his failure in life; he views himself as exempt from responsibility. This denial of responsibility extends

The Sound and the Fury

151

outward in a self-righteous and scathing condemnation of everyone who can possibly serve as a scapegoat: the slovenly and insolent blacks; the niggardly and ignorant poor whites; the unscrupulous commercialism of the Jews; the corrupt town officials; the respectable, cautious, and unimaginative bourgeoisie, as represented by Earl; the hypocrisy, sterility, and pretentiousness of the aristocracy, as exemplified in his mother and all other such conventionally "good" women. Everyone is at fault and nothing can work right, a notion which is clearly only a displacement and projection upon others of Jason's own inner chaos. Understanding his dilemma, one sees that it is as poignant a tragedy as Quentin's. The metaphor of the strong hand of tradition upon him is surely revealed in his allergic reaction to gasoline, so that the automobile, the symbol of his commitment to modernism and of his attempt to turn his back upon the claims of tradition, is a direct agent of his self-destruction. On the other hand, insofar as he is a product of the historical forces at work in his region, Jason, like the rest of the Compsons, is a real victim of circumstance. To this extent the novel, in a general way, and Jason's section in particular, can be taken as an allegory of the South, tortured and tormenting itself in its sense of defeat, bitterness, self-reproach, and self-deception, following upon the breakdown of its principles and traditions. As many critics have remarked, Jason's section contains some of Faulkner's most brilliant writing, as revealed in the objective presentation and realization of a character and his surroundings. It might also be said, however, that the great distance, the stance of objectivity from which Faulkner renders human actions, however immediate, urgent, or momentous, always seems to situate them within the context of a larger scheme of things. Often man's selfconscious awareness of his existence and the value he assigns to his concerns are contrasted with the indifference of the overarching world of nature, in which human reality is only one feature of an

152

The Sound and the Fury

organism of multitudinous aspects and processes. Faulkner consistently applies such a conception to ironic effect especially in moment of crisis. As Jason studies the broken lock and empty strongbox in his moment of tragic reckoning, Faulkner adds, as if to provide appropriate commentary upon it: "Outside the window he heard some jaybirds swirl shrieking past, and away, their cries whipping away along the wind, and an automobile passed somewhere and died away also" (Sound, 299-300). And Quentin, in his encounter with Dalton Ames on the bridge, says: I hit him with my open hand beat the impulse to shut it to his face his hand moved as fast as mine the cigarette went over the rail I swung with the other hand he held both my wrists in the same hand his other hand flicked to his armpit under his coat behind him the sun slanted and a bird singing somewhere beyond the sun we looked at one another while the bird singing he turned my hands loose.

(Sound, 179) Consistently Faulkner's male characters, as essentially unalike as Horace Benbow and Joe Christmas, commonly experience, in their moments of crisis, the irony of failed expectations. The girl Quentin, in her shallowness and her contempt for others, reflects the climate in which she has lived; and her disreputable acting out expresses not only her desire to punish those who have tormented her, but also her inverted sense of the importance of being a Compson, which she demonstrates through the only means available to her. She is a "bitch," the opposite of a lady. Jason's nasty prostestation "Once a bitch, always a bitch" indicates the depth of his idealized and conventional assessment of behavior. For him, the fact that a woman can fall from grace indicates her lack of quality; otherwise, she wouldn't fall. To fall means that she can never be reinstated. If she has not been sufficiently socialized from the outset, there is little she can do subsequently to rectify the situation. But the fact that Caddy fell indicates woman's natural amorality, which, for Jason, no amount of socialization can overcome.

The Sound and the Fury

153

In recognition of this, he therefore prefers a natural or "honest whore." In this light, we see that "Once a bitch, always a bitch" means for Jason what "Did you ever have a sister" means for Quentin. In regard to the narcissistic propensities of many of Faulkner's characters. I have already spoken of the connection narcissism has to psychological doubling, in which one character projects upon and unconsciously perceives aspects of himself reflected in another character—aspects which, as embodied in the other character, become objectified enactments of qualities present in the original character which must be condemned. The double objectifies the original character's ambivalence toward himself and his feelings, allowing for the original character the vicarious expression of his own intensely appealing but threatening ideas. Such ideas, as expressed by the double, allow the original character, through his unconscious identification with the double, the opportunity to both participate in and condemn. The etiology of this condition in the original character is traced to the guilty rejection of all instincts and desires which don't fit the ego's ideal image of itself. The ego casts them out, that is to say, represses them, only to have them return in some other manifestation, a return which, for our purposes here, is personified in the double. The double evokes the ego's love because it is a copy of itself, insofar as the ego sees in the double the guilty manifestation of its ever-forbidden desires; as such, therefore, it is a copy with a difference, a thing like the self which is not the self because of its threatful embodiment of that which the self both loves and despises. The double therefore has a feared, hated, and uncanny quality. As I have indicated earlier, this phenomenon can be referred to black-white relations, in which the blacks are embodiments of those qualities the whites repudiate in themselves. But the relation of the whites to the blacks is such that the latter have had the full

154

The Sound and the Fury

spectrum of white psychic vulnerability projected upon them, so that they have literally and mythically become the embodiments of the ideas of negativity, limitation, and defilement. This means that when the processes of mental functioning produce contradictory, threatening, and unacceptable ideas, these processes also provide for the possibilities of self-deception and avoidance and denial of those features of one's own psychic experience that are viewed as objectionable. The rejection of such features, as applied to blackwhite relations, involves the mechanism of the scapegoat. Here the scapegoat is the victim upon whom can be exacted punishment for one's own sense of deficiency, the victim who is the embodiment, like Joe Christmas, of deficiency, contradiction, and the inner malevolent workings of the mind. Against these things, in the complicity of its guilty representation as the double, the ego must bring to bear appropriate condemnation which promotes a defensive vindication of the self. As I have said earlier, Quentin Compson makes direct reference to this situation when he refers to blacks as the "obverse reflection" of white people. In his conception, blacks negatively mirror what it means to be white and, therefore, in this context, what it means to be human. This conception is immediately confirmed when he sees, from the window of the train, the black sharecropper at the crossing. The sense of black deficiency, of its lack of autonomy, of the perception of black life having a reality only to the extent that it is accommodated and actualized through the white perception of it, are all immediately brought into play. Furthermore, the black man, in his ignorance, victimization, and subserviance to racial decorum, calls forth Quentin's paternalistic benevolence in final confirmation of the requisite manner of conduct between Quentin and this object of his attention. That stasis in which the blacks are perceived, striking examples of which appear in Sartoris and elsewhere, is a defining feature of the sharecropper, of the significance he bears for Quentin, and is emblematic of the common heritage they share:

The Sound and the Fury

155

"His head was wrapped in a piece of blanket, and [he and his mule looked] as if they had been built there with the fence and the road, or with the hill, carved out of the hill itself, like a sign saying you are home again." The passage ends with the image of the black's shabbiness and limitation: " H e didn't have a saddle and his feet dangled almost to the ground. The mule looked like a rabbit" (Sound, 106). The passage projects the characteristic features of relations between white and black in Faulkner, the one assertive, confident, positive in his image of himself, the other helpless, deficient, acknowledging his own negativity. The blacks serve as the means through which the very ideas of helplessness, deficiency, and negativity can be quelled in the white self and accordingly allow it to be divested of any possibility of taint through the perception and designation of the blacks as the most appropriate and suitable representatives of such ideas. Thus the blacks are obverse reflections of the whites; but they represent that part of the white self which, though it has been repudiated, is still unconsciously recognized as having been lost, and for which there will always remain an ambivalent longing. As Quentin says, " I didn't know that I really had missed Roskus and Dilsey and [the rest of] them until that morning in Virginia" when he saw the sharecropper at the crossing. The figure at the crossing represents his return home not only to a geographic locale but a psychic one as well, and I think that white ambivalence is directly expressed in Quentin's view of the sharecropper as the train departs: They passed smoothly from sight. . . with that quality about them of shabby and timeless patience, of static serenity: that blending of childlike and ready incompetence and paradoxical reliability that tends and protects them it loves out of all reason and robs them steadily and evades responsibility and obligations by means too barefaced to be called subterfuge even and is taken in theft or evasion with only a frank and spontaneous admiration for the victor which a gentleman feels for anyone who beats him in a

156

The Sound and the Fury

fair contest, and withal a fond and unflagging tolerance for white folks' vagaries like that of a grandparent for unpredictable and troublesome children, which I had forgotten. (Sound, 107)

On the day of his death, Quentin seeks the black person, Deacon, factotum at Harvard, in order to make to him a gift of his own clothing, reinforcing the paternalism which alone can prescribe for Quenting the mode of relations between the two of them. Deacon is the hustler and opportunist who demeans himself in service to the Southern students in order to exploit them, and is a loudmouth and hypocrite. Quentin is uneasy with the seemingly voluble and selfassured Deacon; he must conceive of him in a subservient position, and in their conservation he gets a smug satisfaction out of unmasking Deacon at last: He was looking at me now, the envelope white in his black hand, in the sun. His eyes were soft and irisless and brown, and suddenly I saw Roskus watching me from behind all his whitefolks' claptrap of uniforms and politics and Harvard manner, diffident, secret, inarticulate and sad. "You aint playing a joke on the old nigger, is you?" "You know I'm not. Did any Southerner ever play a joke on you?" "You're right. They're fine folks. But you cant live with them." "Did you ever try?" I said. But Roskus was gone. Once more he was that self he had long since taught himself to wear in the world's eye, pompous, spurious, not quite gross. (Sound, 118-19)

Here Faulkner allows Quentin, from his position of taking people for what they think they are, then leaving them alone, to demonstrate the essentially fraudulent quality of any black assertion of integrity, since the conception of Deacon necessitates that he must discredit himself through his own actions. His "whitefolks' claptrap of uniforms and politics and Harvard manner" can only be a veneer through which he seeks to define himself. Even the successful performance of his factitious identity involves the demeaning of himself, and he reminds one of Simon in Sartoris in his

The Sound and the Fury

157

performance of what Faulkner terms "the fine capacity for potential theatrics of his race." Yet there is something spurious about the ease with which Quentin so readily unmasks Deacon, suggestive of the suspicion that, though Deacon may certainly be a bogus character, Faulkner is nevertheless not playing fair in his conception of him. Faulkner himself had earlier expressed Quentin's admiring appreciation of Deacon's shrewdness and ability to judge character in the conducting of his disreputable dealings: "That was Deacon, all over. Talk about your natural psychologists. They said he hadn't missed a train at the beginning of school in forty years, and that he could pick out a Southerner with one glance. He never missed, and once he had heard you speak, he could name your state." If he was so good, as it was further said, at judging the strengths and weaknesses of people, exploiting them and insinuating himself into their good graces, it must follow that he was a man of some resourcefulness who would hardly have been so vulnerable, in the manner suggested, to Quentin's scrutiny. Furthermore, the exchange they have about Southerners and blacks living together evades and disguises rather than addresses the real issues. Quentin's assertion, "Did a Southerner ever play a joke on you?"—which is precisely what Quentin is doing to Deacon!—is only a pretended denial of what he knows to be the truth. Faulkner has Deacon assent: "You're right. They're fine folks. But you cant live with them." This only obscures the real difficulties of relations and pretends they are of no consequence, which is why Quentin's rejoinder of "Did you ever try?" is left unanswered. It ought to be pointed out also that it is not Roskus—one of Faulkner's few common laboring black men who at the same time is self-respectful and independent of mind—that Deacon reminds the reader of, but Simon; and of course it is the very things which Quentin accuses Deacon of that he is secretly guilty of himself. The blacks as the obverse reflections of whites, the shadow selves, not only reflect the guilty repudiation of unacceptable in-

158

The Sound and the Fury

stincts and desires on the part of the whites, but also participate in and exemplify certain basic emotional states, and demonstrate the capacity for the untrammeled or uninhibited expression of certain feelings now lost to the whites. This capacity for the expression of certain kinds of feelings also involves, paradoxically, ascribing to the blacks a certain balanced perspective on life, in their possession of common sense on the one hand, and the capacity for making moral judgments on the other. In denying the dark dimension of the self, the whites also stifle and distort the emotive capacity, and repress it in response to the conflicts they experience in the expression of it, only to have it reappear again in the person of the black. There it can be viewed either positively or negatively. In a particularly interesting negative instance, consider what Jason thinks when he discovers that Quentin and the man with the red tie, whom he has been chasing, have let the air out of his tire. The pump is not in the car because, Jason likes to think, it was given to Benjy to play with. He imagines the situation: "Dilsey says, Aint nobody teched yo car. What we want to fool with hit fer? And I says You're a nigger. You're lucky, do you know it? I says I'll swap with you any day because it takes a white man not to have anymore sense than to worry about what a little slut of a girl does" (Sound, 260). On the other hand, the only time Quentin seems to experience guilt, with respect to his intention of committing suicide and his consideration of the way in which such an act might be judged by another, occurs in connection with Dilsey: "What a sinful waste Dilsey would say," he thinks. And again, if ambivalently expressed, it is Dilsey who illuminates for Quentin the issue of Benjy's idiocy and the name change: Dilsey said it was because Mother was too proud for him. They [the blacks] came into white people's lives like that in sudden sharp black trickles that isolate white facts for an instant in unarguable truth like under a microscope; the rest of the time just voices that laugh when you see nothing to laugh at, tears when no reason for tears. They will bet on the odd or

The Sound and the Fury

159

even number of mourners at a funeral. A brothel full of them in Memphis went into a religious trance ran naked into the street. It took three policemen to subdue one of them. Yes Jesus O good man Jesus O that good man.

(,Sound, 189) The blacks have reality and meaning only with regard to the significance they assume as agents in the interpretation of "white" phenomena, and the phenomena in question here are precisely the data of the psychic inheritance that the whites have distorted and denied, which in the blacks becomes "objectified" so that such data might be "seen." The instinctive sources of the denial, and the contradictory elements of what is denied, are revealed in the references to a brothel and a funeral, a perverse and threatful indication of the capricious manner in which life and death elements indiscriminately commingle in the unconscious mind. It is no wonder either that the references to Jesus occur in the way they do, since man's moral life, his idealistic capacity, also has its roots in the depths of the unconscious life, in the nature of its ideational content and the manner in which it undergoes psychic transformation; and the final analogue to the white denial of instinctual conflicts, and to the energies that must be brought to bear to maintain that denial, is directly revealed in the explosive violence of the blacks in a religious trance that the policemen are hard put to contain. With regard to the passage quoted above, there is one other matter of minor and one might almost say incidental significance which nevertheless reveals the depth, persistence, and idiosyncratic perversity of Faulkner's distorted view of blacks. Quentin has said that the blacks are seen shedding tears when the whites see no reason for doing so. In contrast to this, Faulkner says in The Unvanquished, written after The Sound and the Fury but involving a time period prior to the latter novel, that blacks were even incapable of shedding tears. When Colonel Sartoris is killed and the reader sees Simon sitting next to the dead man in mourning, Faulkner assures

160

The Sound and the Fury

us he is "not crying, not weeping the facile tears which are the white man's futile trait and which Negroes know nothing a b o u t " (The Unvanquished, p. 277). This is to be compared, on the other hand, with Dilsey's tears of "immolation and abnegation and time" (tears not even for the burden of her own mortality so much as for that of the Compsons, in their decline). The blacks as the obverse reflections, as the shadow selves, are revealed in Quentin's obsession with his shadow on the day he kills himself. He tries to avoid and trick his shadow, which persists in following him, almost stalking him, as a symbol of the return of the repressed. The shadow can also be seen here as an aspect of the Calvinist mind-versus-body antithesis, as other critics have pointed out, with the shadow representing the instinctual claims of the body in its insistence upon life, in opposition to the death wish of Quentin's mind. The blacks, representative of the body in all the gross and blatant aspects of its physicality, "endure," because they submit to and live in association with the brute force of its life-urge. Thus, giving this idea a different application, it is the black playmate Versh who unbuttoms Caddy's wet dress; and Quentin slaps not Versh, who has only done what Quentin unconsciously desires to do himself, but Caddy, for inviting and submitting to an act which Quentin's guilty desires can only cause him to condemn. Similarly, in reference to the girl Quentin, it is Luster, looking for his lost quarter, who finds the discarded condom cover that reveals to the circus performer Quentin's prior sexual activity. The irony of the boy Quentin's obsession with the shadow is even indicated through his contact with others. The three boys at the pond interpret his Southern drawl as the speech of a "colored m a n , " and Quentin himself says that "niggers say a drowned man's shadow was watching for him in the water all the time. . . ." The situation in which Quentin is accused of dishonorable intentions toward the Italian girl is the crowning instance of the irony of his failure as both brother avenger and seducer. It is also a nice

The Sound and the Fury

161

rendering of psychological doubling. Julio, in defending the honor of his sister, immediately demonstrates those qualities which Quentin desires and fears—the conviction of purpose as translated into brute force, physical action, and unmannerly conduct. But these are attributes and a mode of behavior which Quentin, as a gentleman, would scorn. Additionally, an aura of sex surrounds the incident: Julio is half-dressed and there is even the brief appearance of one "stark naked" person. Julio accuses Quentin, who is about to take his life in despair at not having been able to save his own sister, of stealing his "seester." For this he will kill Quentin, and he tells the little girl to "Git on home, I beat hell outa you." Quentin's response, naturally, can only be hysterical laughter: he is about to forfeit his life in despairing recognition of his inability to have prevented others from committing certain actions, and now he is accused of committing those very actions. Yet, on the other hand, the situation constitutes the final ironic insult, in a reverse emasculation, since sexual potency is at last attributed to him in circumstances completely antithetical to his conception of either his actual or ideal possession of it. The false image of himself, and of his idealistic conceits, has been exposed, and a really curious feature of the situation is the question Spoade asks the constable in reference to Quentin: "What's he done, Cap? Robbed a hen house?" (Sound, 160). It is a direct echo of the deflated idealism of the elder Gail Hightower, one of the heroic figures who will subsequently appear in Light in August, literally cut down in the act of robbing a hen house! When Quentin finally does fight, against Gerald, he's in a trance, as if the action were committed by a double, his alter ego, upon whom has been displaced the necessary physical prowess normally lacking in Quentin. However forcefully Dilsey may stand as a symbolic embodiment of humanity, one still notes her acquiescence to her subservient position. She accepts being a "nigger." Social decorum remains intact:

162

The Sound and the Fury

she is treated with traditional condescension, and she accepts the role of the self-sacrificing Mammy as her natural function. Nevertheless, within such a context, Dilsey serves as an articulate moral critic who provides the ethical dimension within which the action of the novel can assume, as a result, its particular depth and amplitude. She is at once both the old darky in the kitchen grumbling about the vagaries of the white folks and a disciplined and high-minded moralist. Yet she expresses no criticisms of social inequity or racial discrimination, almost as if to suggest that in her view of life, from the aspect of its promised resolution in eternity and her belief in God rather than in man, life's injustices and disparities are inevitable and insurmountable. She evaluates the whites in terms of their own proclaimed values, criticizing them not for their mistreatment of blacks but for their mistreatment of each other and for their failure as human beings. She has a principled respect for the integrity of the human person. She is representative of the life-urge, in all its potential for civilized elaboration, that must endure, in conflict with the forces of denial, negativity, and death. She is therefore life's servant; and among others she is a selfless human servant, literally and figuratively, striving to reclaim for all a vision of responsibility and humanity. Irving Howe dissents from viewing Dilsey as an embodiment of Christian resignation and endurance, and suggests that the terms in which Dilsey is conceived are thoroughly historical, and by their nature become increasingly unavailable to us: " A fact which, if it does not lessen our admiration for her as a figure in a novel, does limit our capacity to regard her as a moral archetype or model." 4 Cleanth Brooks, however, takes Howe to task for these statements and others like them in the section of Howe's book entitled "Faulkner and the Negroes." Brooks finds that Howe "is concerned lest the reader get the impression that Negroes today would want to go on enduring or that resignation and endurance are at the present time really admirable." Brooks continues: " I think on the

The Sound and the Fury

163

whole, however, that it might be better to let the matter rest on our admiration for Dilsey as a figure in a novel, if she is truly admirable in it, and not try to protect the reader from himself. I dare say that few readers are likely to take her as a 'moral archetype or model.' In any case, this is not a concern with which we have a right to burden the author." 6 This is a complex matter that involves, as I have tried to show, the mythic and psychohistorical attitudes, beliefs, and formulations that are at work in Faulkner's concept of blacks. The life-nurturing power of her humanity in itself can hardly be questioned. What can be questioned is the integrity of the context out of which Dilsey's creation arises. I am referring to Faulkner's distortion of the reality of black life. He misrepresents the meaning and significance of black life, in relation to that of the whites, and diminishes and demeans the blacks in comparison. This is the case even though the blacks, in the person of Dilsey, appear to exemplify a dignity and an endurance lacking in the whites. It is the dignity and endurance, according to the terms of her creation, of a victim who conspires in her own victimization; but the terms of her creation are not her own, the assessment of her character and circumstances is not her own, and neither is Faulkner's projection of her life prospects: they endured. What I am getting at is the tension and disjunction between the truth of an imaginative creation and its faithfulness to social and historical reality. I think that these are the very real concerns with which we are to burden the author. If no Dilsey ever existed in fact, she does exist now in the collective consciousness of all her readers and therefore becomes history. The conditions of her existence are racial and historical—she could not be what she is if she weren't a black and had not been a descendant of slaves, living as she does in her particular milieu. The reader learns what it was like, therefore, for her to be the kind of character, the kind of black, and the kind of person she is. She is rendered as factual, or is taken that way. By contrast,

164

The Sound and the Fury

Mrs. Compson is taken to be an imaginative construction. Mrs. Compson does not reflect upon the self-destruction and inhumanity of white people insofar as they are white people; she rather reflects upon the possibilities inherent in all human beings for the particular kind of behavior she displays. She is not the way she is because she is white. This is not the case with Dilsey, however, who is in large measure what she is because of her color. I think that the racism of our culture is sufficiently potent, explicit, unexcused, subtle, and unconscious to cause people sensitive to these issues to wish to protect the reader—and authors too—from an unthinking acceptance of the distortions inherent in our collective mode of perception in racial matters. This presents special problems, not only because of Faulkner's racism, but also because of his tendency to heighten reality to the level of the symbolic and mythic, and to distort the reality of black life for his own aesthetic effects. Dilsey identifies herself with the Compsons and feels she shares in their history and family tradition, in a way quite similar to the manner in which an actual slave might have measured his selfesteem in the old days on the basis of the influence and position of the master's family in the community. Indeed, she is used by Faulkner to exemplify, in however ironic a fashion, the aristocratic virtues of Antebellum society which the members of the family itself distort, betray, or deride. She does this in the novel in addition to upholding in her own humble, dignified way the Christian virtues of love and sacrifice and forgiveness. The compelling force of the black Mammy upon the minds of Faulknerian male protagonists has been present throughout the body of Faulkner's work. So compelling is the image that one is not surprised to discover a biographical basis for it in Faulkner's own life. Robert Vale, visiting Faulkner's home in Oxford, writes of this matter. Vale has been examining the pictures in the library: Third in the library's gallery of portraits is Callie, the ex-slave who was a second mother to Faulkner and his three brothers and the inspiration for

The Sound and the Fury

165

Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury. Callie could neither read nor write, but she was a grand storyteller and, from her own chair in the family parlor, regaled the Faulkners with the tales of the Old South. When Faulkner moved into Rowan Oak [the mansion he bought] he built a cabin behind the main house for her. When she died at the age of 104, he insisted that the funeral be held in the parlor and delivered the eulogy himself. "I've seed de first an de last," Dilsey said. "Never you mind me." "First en last whut? " Frony said. "Never you mind," Dilsey said. "I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin." It was one of the few times anyone ever saw William Faulkner cry. 8

This Callie is the Caroline Barr to whom Faulkner dedicated Go Down, Moses. How curious it is that Roth Edmonds' relation to Molly Beauchamp, as described in the story, "The Fire and the Heart," parallels the relationship one has come to know existed between Faulkner and Callie. But the really curious thing here is Faulkner's insistence on using the sentiments expressed by Dilsey, his own fictional creation, in her act of bearing witness to the blighted fortunes of the Compsons, as an appropriate means of paying what can only be his highest tribute to Mammy Caroline, in appreciation of her service and the peculiar intimacy of her relationship to the Faulkners. She belongs to the Faulkners as Dilsey belonged to the Compsons. One sees the arrogant self-indulgence of Faulkner's application of the dicta of his private obsessions, as revealed in his creation of Dilsey, in honorable commendation of the life of Mammy Caroline and as the pronouncement of a suitable benediction upon it. Faulkner himself appears to be lamenting his own recognition of having seen the first and the last of the selfsacrificing black Mammies. Dilsey will even sacrifice her family to the Compsons. She will not allow Luster to chafe under the burden of the care of Benjy. When he protests and complains, she chastizes him, not so much

166

The Sound and the Fury

for failing his duty as for questioning it at all: "You going to do just what he want you to do, nigger boy" (Sound, 75). In an earlier childhood scene when the boy Quentin takes her son T.P.'s bottle of lightening bugs, she replies, "I reckon T.P. can get along without it." She criticizes her daughter Frony for protesting about letting the boy Benjy sleep in the same bed with her child Luster. She never allows her children to step out of their expected place. They must not enquire into the strange behavior of the family; they must keep their minds "out of white folks' business." She even interjects her own body between Jason and Miss Quentin to receive the blows Jason would serve upon Quentin. It is the same in her relationship to her own husband. When Roskus complains that "Twaint no luck on this place," what with Benjy's condition and the grandmother's death, Mr. Compson's alcoholism, Caddy's disgrace, and Quentin's suicide—in spite of all this she summons the fortitude to consider the matter from a humane objectivity. She explains to Roskus that things happen and one must bear them, and in any case none of the misfortune has touched his family. But that these things have happened nevertheless to the family of which they are servants is a reflection upon their own self-esteem. It is an expression of the same sin of pride of which the Compson family is guilty. Yet, in a curious inversion, it is this same sense of pride in family that Luster participates in when he drives with Benjy around the left of the Confederate monument. As he drives he sees some of his friends and to their derisive cries of "Whar you gwine, Luster? To de boneyard?" he retorts, "Aint de same boneyard y'all headed fer." Then he resolves to drive to the left of the monument: "Les show dem niggers how quality does, Benjy . . ." (Sound, 335). Benjy reacts immediately between "right" and "wrong." Evidently, on the metaphorical level, right is here the acceptance of the familiar and the conventional in order to maintain security. Wrong (that which is left wing!) is an expression of the human need for diversity and exploration of the new for its own sake, a refusal to

The Sound and the Fury

167

accept the conventional way. It is the motivating impulse, perverted in F a u l k n e r ' s males, for self-transcendence. Benjy, of course, perceives the world as a very real extension and reflection of himself, his own ego, in its limited conception of self-identity and self-preservation. His reaction is therefore immediate, instinctive, reactionary, and conservative, a desire for each t h i n g " in its ordered place." J a s o n ' s own desire for each thing in its place reflects the failure of his masculine potency to reorder circumstances according to the dictates of his will; but, ironically, the situation of Benjy and Luster itself presents the final consequences of such an a t t e m p t . It seems to m e to represent F a u l k n e r ' s final despairing, ironic, and ambivalent j u d g m e n t upon the entire idealistic and presumptuous enterprise of the striving masculine will, with the gesture now enacted by a white idiot through the agency of his proxy, a victimized and self-deluded black servant. W h a t of the blacks' relations with each other, with reference to their position as servants in the C o m p s o n household? A scene in the kitchen between Dilsey and her grandson, Luster, admirably comments on this situation. Luster is denying that he has had anything to do with the breaking of the window in J a s o n ' s r o o m : "Dese is funny Folks. Glad I aint none of em." "Aint none of who?" Dilsey said. "Lemme tell you something, nigger boy, you got jes es much Compson devilment in you es any of em. Is you right sho you never broke dat window?" "Whut I want to break hit fur?" "What you do any of you devilment fur?" Dilsey said. [Then their attention is diverted to Benjy as he sits in the kitchen.] "Watch him now, so he cant burn his hand again twell I git de table set."

(Sound, 292) This d e m o n s t r a t e s the distorted relations the blacks must suffer in the effort to function under such u n n a t u r a l circumstances. D o they imagine that each will deceive the other because deception is so necessary in their dealings with the whites? Further, in regard to

168

The Sound and the Fury

this exchange between Dilsey and Luster, Cleanth Brooks thinks that it indicates that "Faulkner does not make the mistake of accounting for Dilsey's virtues through some mystique of race in which good primitive black folk stand over against corrupt wicked white folk. Dilsey herself has no such notions." When Luster says that these are funny folks and he's glad he isn't one of them, Dilsey tells him he is and has as much devilment in him as any of the Compsons. Therefore, Brooks thinks, "she believes in something like original sin: men are not 'naturally' good but require discipline and g r a c e . ' " In disagreement with Brooks, I have already given my views about Faulkner's very real mystique of race, though I do not argue for the simplistic equation of primitive, moral blacks over against wicked, overcivilized whites, even if, as I think, some elements of this are very much a part of Faulkner's thought. I do think that Brooks' assessment of Dilsey's belief in original sin is correct and that all men must strive to improve themselves. Luster very definitely exhibits a capacity for "devilment" which Dilsey constantly condemns, but I think it is also the case that Dilsey is here referring to Luster's capacity for devilment not primarily to prove that all men are equally sinful, but expressly to prove that Luster is a true Compson and partakes of their quality, precisely because of the capacity he shares with them for devilment. Her identification with the spirit of what the Compsons are honorably supposed to stand for is her way of expressing her own pride and self-esteem. I would like to consider the situation where the family stands outside Quentin's door as Jason gropes for the keys to gain entry. "Give me the key, you old fool," Jason cries to his mother. She begins to wail, imploring Dilsey, "You know I never let anyone take my keys. . . ." She tries to take the keys and he flings her away. She is further concerned that this disreputable action is occurring on a Sunday and that Jason isn't acting like a Christian. Here Mrs. Compson's astonishing shallowness and obtuseness,

The Sound and the Fury

169

abetted by the absurdity of her utterly conventionalized sentiments, raise in the reader's mind the possibility, not fully grasped before, that Faulkner might actually have intended her to be mentally deranged. And her concern with the keys is a perfect metaphor for her condition. She is completely and utterly inviolable; she cannot be opened. No key can unlock her frozen insensitivity and selfabsorption. As the action is carried forward, Dilsey tries to reassure both Mrs. Compson and Quentin: "'Now, now,' Dilsey said. 'What kin happen? I right here. I aint gwine let him hurt her. Quentin,' she said, raising her voice, 'Dont you be skeered, honey, I'se right here'" (Sound, 297-98). Dilsey is proud, realizing that she's the only one in the house capable of humanitarian solicitude and strength. She knows that they have to rely upon her whether they like it or not, even if they are not aware of their need for her. She is aware of it. But her strength is still negative, not actively recognized. And, of course, she is deluded about its efficacy, the same way the rest of the Compsons are deluded about themselves. Furthermore, interestingly enough, one sees that Dilsey does have that busybody quality of which Jason accuses her, of a too great familiarity for a servant. Under such circumstances, how could it be otherwise? But it also results from the fact that Dilsey doesn't really consider herself a servant. Nor is her closeness due wholly to loyalty. It's due, rather, to the mistaken idea that she is an actual member of the family, like a bothersome aunt who, by means of her intimate association with the family over the years, has earned the right to direct and interfere in its doings. In this capacity, she reminds one exactly of a Miss Jenny, as she appears in Sartoris and elsewhere. Dilsey propounds no ethical system concerning human behavior. She merely acts in a humane way to all the people with whom she has contact. If there is any informing ethical framework governing her behavior at all, it is the Southern black's version of Christianity with its emphasis on suffering, endurance, the wages of sin, and the

170

The Sound and the Fury

promised afterlife. But her personal belief in such a system is of no doctrinal interest to Faulkner, who is more concerned with depicting the communion and brotherhood of black worship, and the living substance of their faith, which he does in the Eastern sermon. But throughout the novel Faulkner shows Dilsey's disciplined highmindedness in her commitment to certain principles of behavior. Faulkner even exploits this characteristic of Dilsey's to vent his outrage against the cynical breed of upstarts, the Snopeses and their kind, who appear to be taking over and corrupting the South. When Frony complains that people are talking about her bringing Benjy to church, Dilsey replies: " A n d I knows whut kind of folks," Dilsey said. "Trash white folks. Dat's w h o it is. Thinks he aint good enough fer white church, but nigger church aint g o o d enough fer him." " D e y talks, jes de s a m e , " Frony said. " D e n you send um to m e , " Dilsey said. "Tell um de good Lawd dont keer whether he smart er not. Dont nobody but white trash keer dat."

(,Sound, 306) As Dilsey and her party approach the church passing through the section where the blacks live, it is interesting to note that Faulkner's characteristic attitude of fascination and disgust, and a general perceptual scheme which evokes the negative, which accompanies any description of the ambience of black life, come to the fore: "What growth there was consisted of rank weeds and the trees were mulberries and locusts and sycamores—trees that partook also of the foul desiccation which surrounded the houses; trees whose very burgeoning seemed to be the sad and stubborn remnant of September, as if even spring had passed them by, leaving them to feed upon the rich and unmistakable smell of negroes in which they grew" (Sound, 306-7). Possibly this particular focusing upon trees results from an inversion of the life-enhancing significance trees have had throughout the novel, especially as they are associated in Benjy's mind with Caddy, and also, as they have al-

The Sound and the Fury

171

ways been associated in Faulkner's work with the freshness and purity of young women. But now, in keeping with the negative perspective of the present agenda, Faulkner deploys more of the above kinds of descriptions. The black children "looked at Ben with the covertness of nocturnal animals," a dominant image in Faulkner's descriptive iconography for both black children and adults. In the church, "Ben sat, tranquil and empty. Beside him Luster looked like a fice dog, brightly watchful." The visiting minister "was undersized, in a shabby alpaca coat. He had a wizened black face like a small, aged monkey." His appearance is a disappointment, but Dilsey says, "I've knowed de Lawd to use Criser tools dan dat." The irony of his apparent insignificance as bearer of truth parallels the irony of Dilsey's position in the Compson household as bearer of truth, and contrasts in general with Faulkner's romantic debunking of the heroic stance. But, here, these are the folks whom circumstances force to make a virtue of humility. They have no alternative, and this situation evokes again the polarities of choice in Faulkner's world. Thus the minister is only a spokesman for what is greater than he, the wisdom, endurance, and inexorable power of Time. Indeed, the voice that speaks through him feeds upon him, "succubus like." Significantly, he sounds at first like a white man, then imperceptibly begins to regress to black dialect. The white sounding quality is evidently emblematic of that which is rationalistic and egoistic—one might almost say, artificial, insofar as it is representative of the strivings of the will to force ideational constructs upon life. Those to whom the minister speaks have yielded up all the psychic apparatus of individual identity and opened themselves up to the greater cosmic identity, reaching back to the darkest beginnings, when the human mind contemplated its strengths and vulnerabilities before the mystery of the universe. It is appropriate, therefore, that his single white auditor, representative of the rationalistic opposition to such a procedure, should be

172

The Sound and the Fury

without ratiocinative powers altogether. The minister achieves the regression through the special use he makes of the prescriptive dogmas of Christianity. With magical incantatory words, he achieves a collective catharsis. What he says is nonsense, in terms of doctrinal content; efficacy is achieved by the manner in which the communal experience is conducted. It promotes a collective expiation, unburdening, solidarity, and consciousness-raising. Yet the ideational content that underlies the communal experience projects the need for order in the universe and a justification of life's travails: the wages of sin is damnation; evil will be punished; the suffering and pure of heart will be rewarded; justice exists, in the person of God; the identification with the suffering Jesus, who had the power to end his frustrations and smite his enemies but wouldn't use it, who allowed himself to be abused and mocked. It is the age-old wish-fulfillment of the black experience in America. Afterwards, Dilsey and her party walk along with Dilsey letting the tears fall down without trying to remove them—proudly. Frony rebukes her. But Dilsey is bearing witness to the fallen Compsons: ' " I ' v e seed the first en de last,' Dilsey said. 'Never you mind m e . ' " She lets the tears fall down as they traverse the black section, but as soon as they approach the white section, Dilsey stops to dry her eyes. What Faulkner has done here is very interesting and indicates, as I have tried to show, the use to which he puts blacks. Somehow, Dilsey's own suffering is inextricably bound up with the Compsons'. One might even say that it is her suffering as a black person which gives her the capacity to bear witness to the Compson dilemma, which far transcends her own puny concerns, and that it is also the superiority of her person, as sufferer, which makes her equal to the giving of expression to these higher woes. The moment of human communion, as conjured up in the Easter sermon, is over, and they make their way back into the destructive white ambience. Benjy beings to wail again. The reader sees the physical reality of the Compson house, for the first time, in its

The Sound and the Fury

173

decay and decrepitude. The blacks, Dilsey, do not bring with them a chastened recognition of the sorrows of their own mortality as blacks. Dilsey's only concern is how her recognition of the fact of suffering is most urgently expressed in the travail of the Compsons, which even takes on a kind of stamp of final authenticity through the testimonial offered it as a result of the superiority of her position as suffering black. But the black position is not felt in and for itself; it becomes manifest only in its connection to the white Compsons: '"Never you mind,' Dilsey said. 'I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin.'" Frony neither sympathizes with nor seems to understand Dilsey's behavior. With regard to the others, "Ben shambled along beside Dilsey, watching Luster who anticked along ahead, the umbrella in his hand and his new straw hat slanted viciously in the sunlight, like a big foolish dog watching a small clever one." The rest of the family, therefore, cannot appreciate Dilsey's experience, because not one of them is a "Compson" in the way that Dilsey is. Thus, the experience of their suffering, as blacks, cannot be as dignified as Dilsey's. From this point of view, therefore, Faulkner cannot imagine their suffering, simply from the fact of their station in life as black people, to be as significant or as moving. (Of course, neither is the story Faulkner is telling primarily about the blacks.) Dilsey's identification with the Compsons, and the dignity this confers upon her, ennobles her in Faulkner's eyes and provides the occasion for the release and expression of her inner substance. One can see how the Eastern service, though here uniquely an expression of the black experience, has universal significance in its presentation of the necessity and constancy of man's stance as a religious or spiritual being, however broadly interpreted. The service envelops the story of the Compsons and lends it an eternal perspective. Dilsey bears witness not only to their sorrows but also, by extension, to those of all mankind, just as do all the other Compsons, in the urgency of their experience. Dilsey symbolically takes upon

174

The Sound and the Fury

herself, as moral and humanitarian conscience in the story, the burden of the sorrows that have been, and must inevitably be, suffered. Or, rather, she is the agent through whose awareness suffering and evil and injustice, as irresoluble human problems, are recognized and acknowledged. Here she is a harbinger of the role more explicitly and complexly elaborated in Joe Christmas. She accepts the pain of life; and her image, in doing so, projects the necessity of being able to do so if life is to continue. But her acceptance of these things depends upon the ultimate justification accorded them by means of her religious beliefs, and she sees such a vindication as a possibility available only to those "whut got de blood en de ricklickshun of de L a m b . " This is the way that life can have meaning and its travails can be eventually justified. Such a possibility does not avail for the others in the book, who would look upon Dilsey's beliefs as an ignorant delusion, and whose final reliance upon their despairing human powers renders life ultimately empty and meaningless. I do not believe that Faulkner believes in the efficacy of Dilsey's views any more than his white characters do. Yet, like his characters, he seems to deeply yearn for the peace and spiritual solvency that Dilsey's views imply. He believes in the power of the will, a power which both ennobles and curses man. As an expression of the collective human will, it partakes of an "indomitable spirit" which will and must survive. M a n ' s survival is his ultimate meaning. In this regard, Cleanth Brooks says that Faulkner's title for this novel, quoting the lines from Macbeth, is apt: " T h e story has to do with the discovery that life has no meaning." 8 Following this up, Dilsey's example, forceful as it is, is essentially ineffectual, and has no final meaning either, except as she represents, out of the chaos of human experience, the continuing capacity for survival. This is man's tribute to himself, and his "meaning." For Faulkner to say of the blacks "They endured" is to give them, as he does in his descriptions of the lives of the other

The Sound and the Fury

175

characters in the novel, a life beyond the bounds of their imaginative creation. He thus invites a consideration of the validity of their portrayal as actual as well as imagined people. Man must prevail, says Faulkner. In discussing this novel at the University of Virginia, Faulkner agreed that none of the Compsons, with particular reference to Quentin in this instance, were capable of providing an example of the human strength Faulkner projects as so essential: Quentin's mother wasn't much good and he had an idiot brother, and yet in that whole family there was Dilsey that held the whole thing together and would continue to hold the whole thing together for no reward, that the will of man to prevail will even take the nether channel of the black man, black race, before it will relinquish, succumb, be defeated. 9

It will even take the nether channel of the black race, he says, with such unconscionable conviction. But what he really means, what the conceptual scheme of his work really indicates, is that the will to prevail will especially take the nether channel of the black race before it will be defeated. It will do so precisely because the black race, as depicted by Faulkner, does not so much apply the will in a self-conscious effort to secure survival as it relinquishes the will to the greater animating power of the life-force, however blind, however blundering, in its always inexorable, and ultimately triumphant, ascendency. But the callousness of the quoted statement undercuts the integrity of the very sentiments he is paying homage to, as well as the human embodiment, Dilsey, seen by Faulkner as the agent of their fulfillment. The critic Sally Page thinks that "Faulkner effectively conveyed his sense of the astonishing irony and mystery of human life when he chose an old Negro servant to embody his new vision of the ideal woman." 10 In terms of Faulkner's thematic rationale, one can see how this must certainly have been the case. But, unfortunately, I think that it is not so much the irony and mystery of life that is being expressed here as it is the insolence of racism in its purveying of invidious distinctions. The potentialities and possi-

176

The Sound and the Fury

bilities of life are not in themselves ironic but only givens, and there is no less reason to find in Dilsey the embodiment of what is good in humanity than in her white counterpart. N a t u r e does not discriminate among humans with regard to value and worth, only humans do; it is the human capacity, insidious, hurtful, to establish such distinctions which, in the first place, originates such conceptions of value.

IV Absalom,

Absalom!

In this most complex and historical of his novels, Faulkner presents in microcosm an image of the full range of the forces which created, sustained, and ultimately undermined the life of Antebellum society. The ambiguity and ambivalence of his narrative approach perhaps reflect the anguish of the Southern sensibility in confronting the tragic aspects of its history and the difficulty of morally assessing it. In Thomas Sutpen's ruthless striving for power and dominance, one sees both the individual expression of the will to power as well as a mythic manifestation of the will to power. Sutpen's efforts are presented in superhuman and mythic proportions, are "demonized" by Miss Rosa, and are compared, through Biblical references, to the ultimate example of God himself: "Then in the long unamaze Quentin seemed to watch them overrun suddenly the hundred square miles of tranquil and astonished earth and drag house and formal gardens violently out of the soundless Nothing and clap them down like cards upon a table beneath the up-palm immoble and pontific, creating the Sutpen's Hundred, the Be Sutpen's Hundred like the oldentime Be Light."1 Sutpen could be viewed as an instance of the presumptuous overreacher, as he might appear in any time and place, as well as a representative figure of the Southern experience at a time when a premium was placed upon the energy and determination necessary to wrest a plantation from the wilderness without too many scruples about how it was accomplished. Inextricable from Sutpen's ruthlessness are all the other evils which augmented and accompanied his efforts and eventually destroyed him: slavery and the

178

Absalom,

Absalom!

creation of caste systems based on race and social class; the tragic eventuality of miscegenation and the repudiation of one's own flesh and blood; the legacy of guilt and wrongdoing at the foundation of a social system which poisons the quality of life and compromises the possibility of moral responsibility. The central image of the novel is the killing of one half-brother by another at their father's gate—one white, the other black; one acknowledged and accepted as legitimate heir, the other unacknowledged and rejected as illegitimate. In terms of Sutpen's courage and determination, with which Faulkner sympathizes, it appears that Faulkner intends for Sutpen to possess such virtues in common with the genteel plantation aristocrats. However, as for Sutpen's moral failings and reprehensible conduct, Faulkner appears to wish to make a distinction between Sutpen and the traditional aristocrats, who are sometimes presented as capable of moral responsibility and conscience in their dealings not only with each other but with the blacks and poor whites as well. A lot of this may be essentially romantic indulgence. In the novel it is true that General Compson, as a typical example of genteel aristocracy, is a representative of a sane and responsible perception of reality in contrast to Sutpen's distortions of perspective, and he deals with Sutpen honorably, with charity and forbearance. General Compson is also a representative of the established values of a living tradition and the decorum of a way of life alien to Sutpen, but Sutpen is convinced this way of life can be appropriated and mastered, by an act of will, without undergoing the subtleties of that process of exposure and inculcation which would make him a true heir to the tradition. General Compson therefore views him as a little "underbred," and always there surrounds his person, as self-made aristocrat, the suggestion of an alien and spurious quality. Speaking of the decline of the aristocratic families, Cleanth Brooks says that General Compson "has failed through a kind of

Absalom,

Absalom!

179

overrefinement. He has lost his grip on himself; he has ceased finally to believe in the values of the inherited tradition. He is a fatalist and something of an easy cynic. His vices are diametrically opposed to those of Thomas Sutpen, and so are his virtues." 2 This seems to me to be true of the descendants of the Compsons, Sartorises, and McCaslins as well. They live in the shadow of a looming forebear whose deeds are taken as prototypes of behavior of which they, in the present, are no longer capable. Yet it always seems to be the case that the forebear, in his own time and place, engaged in a ruthless or, at least, a singlemindedly determined pursuit of his objectives that had much in common with Sutpen's. General Compson is somewhat of an exception here, and I think it is for the reason that he has not been portrayed, in his time and place, in the same manner as have Sartoris and McCaslin. Masculine potency and strength of will always seem to carry in Faulkner the potential for a violent, defiant, destructive, insensitive investment of the male ego in the projection of its will to power upon the world. McCaslin, the aristocrat who formulates his own values in contempt of what others think, mates incestuously with his own slave daughter, for he really does not believe in the good intentions or moral protestations of himself or anyone else. Colonel Sartoris, in a self-conscious flourish of gentlemanly decorum, shoots the abolitionists as a matter of squaring his conscience with the dictates of his heritage. After a career of shooting men with his derringer, he announces, as Irving Howe so felicitously puts it, a "moritorium on killing." The compassion, kindness, and responsible self-awareness that Faulkner seems to posit as among the necessary virtues of civilized life are frequently presented as being in opposition to the masculine principle, though such virtues are essential to man's salvation. Men must learn to modulate and curb their wills to power and bring their strivings more in line with priorities of sane and reasonable living. The ability to do this is by no means an exclusive privilege of the traditional aristocrats, nor is

180

Absalom,

Absalom!

the antithesis of this mode of being an exclusive attribute of the rapacious and amoral Snopeses. Melvin Backman, in his essay "Sutpen and the South: A Study of Absalom, Absalom!" has decisively proved this fact, separating the fact and the legend from Southern history, as Faulkner has drawn it, and showing how "Sutpen's life and career mirror the history and heritage of the South, moral as well as social and political." 3 Drawing upon historians such as Tocqueville, W. J. Cash, C. Van Woodward, and a host of other critics, Backman demonstrates the inadequacy of the Sartoris-Snopes antithesis, showing that the Antebellum South did not consist only of planter aristocracy and poor white and that the majority of its people were always the small farmers; that the decline of the South cannot be attributed to the Snopeses and their kind as a tribe of Southern Yankees, as scapegoats, since such a view falsely assumes the existence of an aristocratic South based on a benevolent system of slavery and characterized by humanistic values; that it is more accurate to assign the major responsibility of the South to its rulers, rulers such as Sutpen. 4 Backman quotes Cash's analysis of the making of the great or deep South: 1810 c a m e and went, the battle of N e w Orleans was fought and won, and it was actually 1820 before the plantation was fully on the march, striding over the hills of Carolina to Mississippi—1820 before the tide of immigration was in full sweep about the base of the Appalachians. From 1820 to 1860 is but forty years—a little more than the span of a single generation. The whole period from the invention of the cotton gin to the outbreak of the Civil War is less than seventy years—the lifetime of a single man. Yet it was wholly within the longer of these periods, and mainly within the shorter, that the development and growth of the great South took place. 5

What this means is that the aristocrats of the deep South were in actuality the backwoodsmen grown prosperous through the acquiring of land and slaves, who took as their models the established gentry of the Carolina, Tidewater, and Natchez plantations, who

A bsalom,

A bsalom!

181

brought with them the strength and ruthlessness of self-made men. The establshed gentry provided these men with a manner of living which projected their highest and ideal expectations of success and accomplishment, which were within the power of the more aggressive and ambitious among their number to fulfill, by acquiring the requisite material attributes. And it was the catastrophic effects of the Civil War, plunging the homeland into an agony of defeat and shame, which produced, as a defensive reaction, the romantic myth of the Old South; it was a myth which posited, by means of the self-vindicating psychology of the defeated, the conception of the superiority of the Old Order, with its civilized grace, gentlemanly decorum, and humanitarian solicitude, in opposition to the materialism and lack of refinement of outsiders, as especially exemplified in the Yankees and those under their influence. 6 Backman comments upon the implications of Faulkner's restructuring of such historical data: Nevertheless, Faulkner has made a distinction between Sartoris and Sutpen. They are different, not in the sense that Sartoris was an established Yoknapatawpha planter when Sutpen arrived at Jefferson in 1833—Sartoris did not arrive until a few years after Sutpen [see Requiem for a Nun (New York: Random House, 1951), p. 44]—but in the sense that Sartoris' origin was 'aristocratic' whereas Sutpen's was plebeian. Colonel Sartoris, as we see him in Sartoris and later in The Unvanquished, is a much more traditionally romantic figure than Sutpen. Sartoris, it is generally acknowledged, has been modelled in part on the character and life of the author's great-grandfather, Colonel William C. Falkner. Yet Falkner's origin more closely approximates that of Sutpen than of Sartoris: Sartoris came to Mississippi 'with slaves and gear and money' [Requiem for a Nun, p. 44] from a Carolina plantation, but Falkner came out of Tennessee as a poor boy. The inference is plain: Sartoris represents in part a projection of the legend, but Sutpen represents the reality. 7

The affront Sutpen receives in his adolescence, at the hands of the planter, is as much a blow to his own self-esteem as it is to that of his victimized kind, of whom Sutpen sees himself, in the moment

182

A bsalom, A bsalom!

of insult, as a representative. He is the recipient of their collective sense of outrage and hurt, which it becomes his mission in life to redress. Quentin Compson narrates what General Compson is said to have been told by Sutpen about the situation: All of a sudden he discovered, not what he wanted to do but what he just had to do, had to do it whether he wanted to or not, because if he did not do it he knew that he could never live with himself for the rest of his life, never live with what all the men and w o m e n that had died to m a k e him had left inside of him for him to pass on, with all the dead ones waiting and watching to see if he was going to do it right, fix things right so that he would be able to look in the face not only the old dead ones but all the living ones that would c o m e after him when he would be one of the dead.

(.Absalom, 220) It is the individual and collective narcissistic blow to self-esteem that is the motivating force of Sutpen's energies and the injury for which he seeks recompense. This is therefore the basis of Wash Jones's identification with Sutpen, who experiences in Sutpen's looming figure a vicarious vindication of his own victimization. But Sutpen betrays the trust, is coopted by the establishment into which he seeks entry and is corrupted by power and also, not the least, by the massive defensiveness of his egoistic self-investment. He treats Wash with the same contempt with which he had once been treated, and it is only fitting that the ultimate revenge should come from the despairing disillusionment of one of Sutpen's own kind. Sutpen discovered his innocence when he experienced the distinctions men made according to notions of human worth, in which some individuals took themselves to be better than others and did not attribute their advantage to the fortunate dispensations of chance or fate. The supreme example of this, according to the social priorities of Western societies, is the sense of superiority conferred upon the possessor of a white skin over against that of a black, since the white beneficiary has had no say in his coming into being and has not been personally required to earn his right to his

Absalom, Absalom!

183

sense of being among the elect. Sutpen learns the differences that society sanctions as existing not only between white and black, but between white and white—the psychology of the justification of the distinctions between the haves and the have-nots, in which the fortuitous possession of a privileged status is taken as the basis for making fundamental discriminations with regard to inherent human worth. For Sutpen, confronting such an attitude in his time and place, seeing himself consigned to the ranks of the inferior because of his lack of the social, psychological, and material attributes of the elect, it had never once "occurred to him that any man should take any such blind accident as that as authority or warrant to look down at others, any others" (Absalom, 222). During his life in the mountain homeland, he had of course been exposed to the competitive rituals in which one man proved his superiority, through accomplishment and skill, over another. Here, in the backwoods region, the emphasis was upon physical strength and endurance. The victor did not think of himself as a better man in terms of innate human worth but as a better man in terms of his accomplishment. It seems to me that this is what Faulkner means. Furthermore, the emphasis among the populace in these West Virginia mountains was not upon ownership and material aggrandizement, as was the case in the Tidewater region. The mountain people lived in a kind of communal, edenic stasis, free from the competitive stresses of the work ethic and the developmental matrix of conflict and ego assertion that underlie the urge toward the creation of complex social structures. The contrast between the two modes of existence seems symbolic, as if Sutpen's prior condition of innocence held in abeyance the divisive and destructive potential of the human inheritance which is now necessarily expressed in his confrontation with the realities of civilized life. Such potential is expressed so nakedly in him precisely because, paradoxically, he has not had sufficient exposure to the conventionalized restraints society imposes upon itself for its own protection.

184

A bsalom, A bsalom!

The turning away of Sutpen from the plantation owner's door, by the black slave, is a complex rendering of the tangled relations of the rich white, the poor white, and the blacks, since it is with the black, proxy to a white master, that Sutpen has dealings; and it is the expression on the black slave's face which reveals to Sutpen how the white landowner views him: As cattle, creatures heavy and without grace, brutely evacuated into a world without hope or purpose for them, who would in turn spawn with brutish and vicious prolixity . . . a race whose future would be a succession of cut-down and patched and made-over garments bought on exorbitant credit because they were white people, from stores where niggers were given the garments free, with sole heritage that expression on a balloon face bursting with laughter which had looked out at some unremembered and nameless progenitor who had knocked at a door when he was a little boy and had been told by a nigger to go around to the back.

(Absalom, 235) The blacks are intimately allied with the poor white's degradation, and are somehow inextricably connected with an assessment of its cause; and to eradicate it, the black laughing balloon face must be squashed. It is this face, in the ancestral memory, which is here rendered as the most potent signature of the poor white's station in life. This passage also indicates, as I have said earlier, how Sutpen is the beneficiary of a collective sense of wrong and injury, which becomes his mission to redress. The laughter of the blacks indicates here, as is usually the case in Faulkner, their identification with their masters, from whom they derive their own sense of value and worth. Denied access to an expression of integrity of being as autonomous black people, they make themselves over in the image of the authoritative whites around them, whose sentiments they adopt and express and by whose authority they are empowered to act, assuming that some of the quality of their masters rubs off on them. The derisive contempt that is a component of the black laughter must be examined further. Faulkner speaks of how during the war,

A bsalom, A bsalom!

185

for example, Sutpen's blacks would taunt Wash Jones: "They would ask him why he wasn't at the war and he would say, 'Git outen my road, niggers!' and then it would be the outright laughing, asking one another (except it was not one another but him): 'who him, calling us niggers?' and he would rush at them with a stick and them avoiding him just enough, not mad at all, just laughing" (Absalom, 281). The hostility between the blacks and poor whites can easily be understood. While one is a slave and the other a free man, the condition of life and treatment of the free poor white cannot differ much more from that of the slave, the "nigger," against whom the poor white is nevertheless compelled to assert the last and putative vestige of his sense of superiority—his white skin. This, of course, the blacks treat with derision, as a delusory and amusing contradiction, because, under these circumstances, it is not the color of skin that counts but one's "quality." Here the blacks are both correct and incorrect, themselves subject to a delusion, and it is certainly thinking of this kind which contributes to their desperate belief that some of the quality of their white superiors can be displaced upon themselves, to that degree altering the status of their blackness, or even eradicating it. Yet, in this matter of laughing, the blacks know that they can only go so far. They carry with them the collective memory of whippings and death suffered at the hands of the whites. As slaves they were at least valued property, in some measure protected. As free men, after the debacle of the war and Reconstruction, they were totally the hunted victims, the scapegoats. They taunt Jones but do not get " m a d " at him. They must conceal their emotions, and in Faulkner they are usually drawn as doing so because they are incapable of treating their feelings and experiences with the integrity which confers significance upon them. This is, therefore, why they are shown laughing so often. When they do have this sense of integrity, the etiology of it is manifestly shown to derive, in almost every case, from association with whites. In other, more complex instances of the laughter, one is more aware of the despair

186

A bsalom, A bsalom!

and internalized conflict which pervades the situation. Compare the laughter of Joe Christmas, or of Bon's son accompanied by the "apelike" black woman, as they taunt and beat white and black antagonists and are beaten themselves. These are situations in which self-hatred and hatred of life have become merged, the contradiction between social self and private identity is insoluble, and the phobias and obsessions of society, as they function within the psyche, have poisoned all prospects of sane human relations. The despairing laughter is directed at the self, at society, and at life, as if all are the dupes of a malignant fate. So when Sutpen tries to deliver his father's message to the plantation owner, he is turned away and is told to go around to the back. He discovers that there are no dealings, as a human equal, he can have with the owner that would be of any meaning or consequence to the owner, since his thoughts with regard to the owner would be considered meaningless. He is in shock and great moral anguish. For Sutpen, this particular manifestation of inhumanity becomes the prototype of the very idea of its enactment and the manner in which it henceforth, for him, assumes its most potent and insidious expression. Power, authority, ownership therefore mean that the privilege is ineluctably bestowed upon one to treat others with contempt. The course of Sutpen's development bears out this proposition. At first he says to himself with regard to the way he was treated by the landowner: "So to combat them you have got to have what they have that made them do what the man did. You got to have land and niggers and a fine house to combat them with" (Absalom, 238). But in the end he didn't combat them, he simply imitated them; he abandoned the egalitarian ethos of his frontier childhood. His innocence had consisted of his being unaware, not only of the landowner's capacity to treat him with contempt, but even of the possibilities of such an attitude. Knowledge, however, consisted not in condemning such an attitude as wrong, and fighting it with the

A bsalom, A bsalom!

187

same power and authority and land, but in wishing to adopt the same attitude of mind. The critic John T. Irwin agrees with this assessment, suggesting that Sutpen does not object to the injustice of the system; he objects to the luck that made him poor when he should have been powerful, to prove that he is as good a man as any within the system.8 He will get his revenge by becoming richer and more powerful than the planter. He will no longer take affronts but will give them—rejecting his wife and son, for instance. As Irwin suggests, "Sutpen seeks revenge on the artificial standards that make one man inferior to another, not by trying to do away with those standards, but rather by founding a dynasty, by establishing that same artificial standard of superiority for his family and bequeathing it to his son." 9 It is interesting to note that Sutpen's confrontation with the reality of injustice, which results, so to speak, in his loss of innocence and his assuming the burden of the pain of living, is consistent with the crisis or disturbance of adolescence which afflicts many of Faulkner's male protagonists. Whether it be a sexual awakening and recognition of the differences between the sexes, accompanied by feelings of disgust or loathing and/or the complicity of one's own guilty heterosexual, homosexual, or incestuous desires; or whether it be a confrontation with the legacy of guilt and wrongdoing within the matrix of the ongoing conflict of race relations or the miscegenation and love-hate relations in one's own family, the adolescent disturbance is a constant theme in Faulkner. In Sutpen's case, the initiation into the reality of life is almost synonymous with a simultaneous recognition of its inherent evil nature, and the progression of his career relentlessly bears witness to the consistency with which he kept faith with his original discovery. In pursuit of his revenge and the carrying out of his objectives, Sutpen believes in and makes use of a radical application of the will to power. Faulkner indicates, as Quentin reveals what Sutpen had said to General Compson, that Sutpen's problem was "innocence."

188

A bsalom, A bsalom!

Sutpen believed that all that was necessary was courage and shrewdness and the one he knew he had and the other he believed he could learn if it were to be taught" (Absalom, 244). He then discovers that what he meant by shrewdness was unscrupulousness, if he were to ensure the successful execution of his purposes. As I have tried to show, such an attitude would not have been unique to Sutpen and would have characterized the psychology of many of the other heroes and founders of Yoknapatawpha county. What is unique about Sutpen is his naked method of execution of such an attitude and his urgency in the service of a grand design, in which he is shown forcing himself upon an already established society which places the quality of his actions in bold relief against it. Sutpen's espousal of the rational ego's will to power represents a kind of transvaluation of values, a radical reapplication of received values regarding the decorum of moral behavior, in relation to the advantage achieved in the service of self-interest. This is, again, another—and one of the most potent—examples of the narcissistic state of mind that so often appears in Faulkner's characters. In carrying out such an approach to life, however, Sutpen encounters two interrelated obstacles, one external, the other internal, that lie at the source of the error of his thinking and make a mockery of his presumption. He discovers that the claims of custom and tradition cannot be ignored, nor seized upon and adopted as abstractions. They exist in a matrix of intangible influences which exist to give continuity and meaning to man's life in history, and they exist to protect man against himself, against his own destructive irrational and unacceptable impulses—such as, to take one example, the desire for incest. Sutpen's other obstacle presents itself in his inability to see that the purely rational and objective approach to life is impossible and is a delusion. Man's rational facility is subject to infiltration and subversion by the irrational. Appropriate examples of the latter can be found, for instance, in the Compson brothers Quentin and

Absalom,

Absalom!

189

Jason, in the elaborate defense mechanisms they have established against their repressed unconscious impulses and conflicts, and the necessary rationalizations that must be offered for their destructive behavior. The irrational, of course, stems from the unconscious, source of the potential for conflict in man's nature, but also the driving force of his emotive capacity. To deny or repress this dimension is also to repress or distort feelings. And there is a conspicuous absence of feelings of any kind in Sutpen. This is another aspect of the tragedy of his life, since the reader knows him, from his early beginnings, to have been a person of humanitarian solicitude and of deep emotional capacity and sensitivity. In his passion for achievement, he has altogether forfeited the potential for development of this side of his character. His real innocence is his unawareness of—which means resistance to—the tragic capacity of the mind for inner division. The collapse of Sutpen's design seems to him inexplicable. Because the carrying forth of the design had been a function of the rational ego, conceived of, if properly used, as a precise and infallible instrument, he is therefore involved in a matter of logistics in which the emotive dimension has no part and for which, therefore, he can experience no sense of personal responsibility with regard to a conception of wrongdoing. Therefore, Sutpen considers his problem with General Compson accordingly: "You see, I had a design in mind. Whether it was a good or bad design is beside the point; the question is, Where did I make the mistake in it, what did I do or misdo in it, whom or what injure by it to the extent which this would indicate. I had a design. To accomplish it I should require money, a house, a plantation, slaves, a family—incidentally of course, a wife. I set out to acquire these, asking no favor of any man."

(Absalom, 263) His is the independent assertion of will which assigns priorities and acts with full confidence of success upon them; and his mentioning

190

Absalom,

Absalom!

of one of his most important requirements, a wife, almost as an afterthought, as an insignificant feature, is revealing. For in the male-female dichotomy in Faulkner, woman, like the blacks, is a passive victim who has no control over her destiny, and opposes to man's rational conception of himself the claims of the dark, irrational, and unconscious mind. The spurned woman and her representative, the spurned black son, as both are symbolic representatives of the spurned data of the unconscious, return to undermine Sutpen's plans and to get their revenge. In relation to this matter, one must consider the general portrayal of individuality in Faulkner. As it is applied to Faulkner's men, there is a kind of defiance and defensiveness, as if the self were constantly under threat, as if the right to be were always in question. A massive self-investment also often accompanies it too, a pride in the refusal to need the help of others or even to need others at all. A very interesting exchange occurred concerning this issue, I think, in the Faulkner seminars at the University of Virginia: QUESTION. Mr. Faulkner, you have said that you regarded respectability as one of the prime enemies of individualism. D o you regard love as an enemy of individualism? ANSWER. N o no. What's love got to do with r e s p e c t a b i l i t y ? . . . . Respectability is an artificial standard which c o m e s from up here. That is, respectability is not your concept or my concept. It's what we think is Jones's concept of respectability. QUESTION. I don't mean to defend respectability in love or not. What I mean to do is—Quiet, please!—what I mean to ask is this. Isn't there a basic dichotomy between the kind of individualism which you are praising and the attitude of love? ANSWER. If you will substitute decency for respectability I would agree with you. I don't quite follow you between respectability and love, decency and love. That's an interesting point. H a s anybody else got a thought on that? 10

A bsalom, A bsalom!

191

The hiatus that follows this exchange does not let us know if any further discussion followed. What Faulkner seems to be saying, I believe—aside from the matter of the question of individuality vs. respectability, which is clear—is that it is true that the individualistic concern with the s e l f s own interests might infringe upon the interests of another person or might cause one not to act in a "decent" or respectful manner toward another person. But Faulkner suggests, and it seems rightfully so, that the assertion of individuality is not in conflict, necessarily, with one's ability to love. But it seems to me that what the questioner was getting at is that sense of individuality in Faulkner's characters which seems to preclude their need for others and which presents itself also in such a manner as to suggest that love is irrelevant. Rather, we see them in acts of self-love, asserting their individuality and satisfying their needs. There does appear to me to be a characterizing or habitual feature in Faulkner's treatment of this matter: individuality or the integrity or autonomy of the self vs. humanitarian solicitude, concern for the rights of others, and the "attitude of love." Somewhere involved here, too, is a distinction between self-assertion and aggression, two related but different things. Aggression seems to involve the perception of a threat against which a prior defense must be erected or preemptive defensive action taken in advance, while assertion might ideally be no more than the expression of the self in a conflict-free atmosphere of mutual acceptance and respect. Though Faulkner's presentation of individuality in its will to power is often contemptuous of conventional conceptions of "respectability" and even those of "decency" and mortality as well, those who espouse it nevertheless have their own notions of honorable and ethical behavior. I believe that Sutpen has a notion of the honor of achievement which allows him to be proud of what he's down and which specifies that he acquit himself honorably in his

192

A bsalom, A bsalom !

dealings with those whom he would consider his equals and by whom he would desire to be respected just so far as he would feel compelled to respect them. It would not matter to him what he did to Wash Jones, an inferior, nor what Wash thought of him, nor if he obtained his house furnishings—as the town thinks—by thievery from other thieves on a steamboat, the best man the winner. But he would not like General Compson, for instance, to think him a dishonorable man in his dealings with Compson or his kind, I believe, nor—taking a different instance—would his pride allow him to disparage his wife, an innocent victim, upon whom he did not look as an inferior but as an inexpedient misfortune. Such prideful concern about whether the self has acquitted itself honorably, in situations in which the self recognizes its own concept of honor as applicable, is what General Compson referred to as Sutpen's "morality" (Absalom, 272). With regard to his wife, a central fact—her admixture of black blood—had been withheld from him. The occurrence is almost a metaphor for the resistance of society to alien intrusion, since such an important factor could never have presented itself in a similar way to a traditional aristocrat. And in dismissing her, Sutpen provides for her by relinquishing any claim to her property, committing, in doing so, what to him is an act of justice. In Haiti the injustice that he saw each day with his eyes, as overseer, he did not consciously acknowledge, because of his "innocence." He knew only that he must do what he must do in order to get what he wanted. It is therefore also his innocence which, during the uprising, allows him to simply lay down his weapon and go out to confront the natives directly. It is suggested that it is the very outrageousness of the gesture which startles and routs the natives: To find flesh to stand more than flesh should be asked to stand; maybe at last they themselves turning in horror and fleeing from the white arms and legs shaped like theirs and from which blood could be made to spurt and flow as it could from theirs and containing an indomitable spirit which

Absalom, Absalom!

193

should have come from the same primary fire which theirs came from but which could not have, could not possibly have.

(Absalom, 254) The passage suggests that it is not the white man's prior awareness of his indomitable spirit which gives him the confidence to act, but that the fact of his act indicates his possession of such a spirit, which is here perceived by the natives, in its imperviousness to assault, as manifestly different from theirs and the obvious indicator of their inferiority. Such a passage, it seems to me, also indicates the general conception of the differences between the races in Faulkner, and it further frees Faulkner from the responsibility of writing convincing narrative detail (either the natives are shooting real bullets or they are not). Romantic indulgence of this kind is expressed, in another instance, during the escape of the architect, who, by applying his suspenders, employing principles of "architecture" and "physics," managed to calculate "stress and distance and trajectory and had crossed a gap in the next nearest tree that a flying squirrel could not have crossed" (Absalom, 234). The significance of the role the architect plays in Sutpen's design seems to be more complex than the meaning which can be assigned to it at first glance. His fate proves that Sutpen would as readily enslave and abuse him, a white man, as he would a black, and he sets the dogs upon him when he tries to escape. Though he is forced to remain with Sutpen, he also does so in some measure out of choice, as fascinated, perhaps, as is Sutpen to see the majesty of his own design—the artistic complement to Sutpen's—take shape. The artist knows something about the permanence of the will for selftranscendence that is expressed in the urge toward the creation of human artifacts of whatever kind, but he also knows something of the transience and impermanence of man's creations and their inevitable alteration in time. I believe that this idea is symbolically revealed in the architect's behavior, as if he knows something that

194

Absalom,

Absalom!

Sutpen must only later find out. But the inevitable futility of human effort must not at the same time cancel out man's will. When the architect is captured he is defiant: "just a will to endure and a foreknowing of defeat but not beat yet by a damn sight." He takes the proffered drink after making an impressive gesture that gathers up "all misfortune and defeat that the human race ever suffered into a little pinch in his fingers like dust" and dismisses it, flinging it "backward over his h e a d " {Absalom, 257-58). I find it interesting that his escape into the swamps bears a remarkable similarity to Molly Beauchamp's later flight into the swamps, in Go Down, Moses, to escape the moral corruption emanating from her husband Lucas' preoccupation with his search for buried gold. The motivation of the architect's behavior does not, as is the case with Molly, seem to involve moral objection to what Sutpen is doing, though it does seem to involve a knowledge of man's unavoidable complicity in the means of his own undoing. H u m a n assertion, or the defining of individuality, always seems to carry with it a kind of challenge to fate, a moving beyond the role which is prescribed, in order to establish for the self a new advantage, but also making the self vulnerable and being willing to pay the price. Curiously enough, this idea seems to be revealed in the altered relations between the architect and Sutpen's slaves that has been precipitated by his escape: Grandfather [General C o m p s o n , as the narrative is related by Quentin to Shreve] said how maybe the niggers believed that by fleeing the architect had voluntarily surrendered his status as interdict meat, had voluntarily offered the gambit by fleeing, which the niggers had accepted by chasing him and now by catching him, and that now they would be allowed to cook and eat him, both victors and vanquished accepting this in the same spirit of sport and sportsmanship and no rancor or hard feelings on either side.

(Absalom, 256) Here, again, the phrasing of this passage is in many ways identical to that describing the altered relations between Joe Christmas and

A bsalom, A bsalom!

195

Percy Grimm when Christmas makes his sudden break for freedom and Grimm pursues, catches, and castrates him. The break has provided Grimm not only with the warrant to pursue and recapture him but to enact the released sadism and the vindictive violence of his heritage which demand that he punish and murder him. I would like to examine the statements Sutpen addresses to Milly and her child, which bring about his final downfall. He says to the black midwife: "Well? Damn your black hide: horse or mare?" and that she told him and that he stood there for a minute and he didn't move at all, with the riding whip against his leg . . . and she said she saw his eyes and then his teeth inside his beard and that she would have run then only she c o u l d n ' t . . . and then he looked at the girl on the pallet again and said, "Well, Milly, too bad you're not a mare too. Then I could give you a decent stall in the stable . . ." and turned and went out.

(Absalom, 286) The very brutality of his address carries with it the signature of a kind of clever but stereotyped viciousness, as if Sutpen thinks that this is the appropriate manner of contemptuous treatment that the aristocrat reserves for his inferiors. There is something abstract and inauthentic in his referring to Milly and her child in this way, as if he were so far removed from a personal involvement in the matter as to be a god contemplating the progression of an insect. He seems to wish to exempt himself from personal feelings. But the issue is of the greatest personal import to him. It is also probably the case that his contempt for the child—"horse or mare"—reflects now his own self-contempt at having to resort to such means to obtain an heir. But since, in the pursuit of his scheme he must renounce all personal feelings in relations to others as superfluous, the more power a situation had to elicit feelings, the greater must be his denial of this possibility—which is here defended against by the contemptuous brutality of his treatment of Milly and his own daughter. The psychological mechanics of this repudiation are

196

A bsalom, A bsalom!

similar to those which govern the behavior of so many of Faulkner's other assertive male protagonists. Carothers McCaslin, for instance, had "contempt for all his get." Their attitude appears to reflect a fear of and intolerance for any situation that has an emotional value such that feelings of pity or love or guilt or shame are elicited as a natural consequence. Such feelings seem to them a threat to the purity of their obsession with masculine dominance and control. Such feelings, as I have said elsewhere, as they open up for the protagonist the possibilities of intimacy with another person that makes the self vulnerable, always carry with them the threat of a loss of autonomy. I believe that varying manifestations of the same psychological mechanism that underlies Sutpen's treatment of Wash and Milly are also at work in his treatment of his first wife and as well in his attitude toward Bon, especially with regard to his hesitancy in acting after Bon appears. Sutpen repudiates—which means he denies all basis of human identification with—his first wife, his son Charles, and Wash and Milly. He does so because, in order to carry out his dynastic plans and maintain the image of himself consistent with such an enterprise, he must squash all sympathic identification with them as victims with a righteous grievance, lest he be reminded himself of his own former helplessness and victimization. To be so reminded would present the threat of his own psychological impotence, the very thing it has been his desire to eliminate and overcompensate for through obtaining the perquisites of power, status, and dominance. But I do not think that he denies Bon or Wash on principle, on the basis of his own personal belief in their inferiority—though he must always induce himself to act as if this were the case—but rather only on the basis of considerations of utility in carrying out his intentions and the necessary maintenance of an appropriate self-image. When Bon appears, Sutpen has what appears to be a puzzling paralysis of will. But if it is true that Bon represents to Sutpen an

A bsalom, A bsalom !

197

image of his own value-free striving, the will liberated from conventional and traditional notions of morality and decorum, then Sutpen recognizes that Bon has the right to appropriate for himself, if he can, what Sutpen has appropriated. Sutpen recognizes, that is, Bon's existential right to marry Judith if he wishes, and even if he is black, since incest and miscegenation are meaningless concepts in themselves. They have validity only according to the social priorities established by men and the value ascribed to them. Though Sutpen and Bon are representatives of a common principle, Sutpen must nevertheless reserve for himself the right to protect his interests according to his priorities, against any threat posed to them by Bon. I do not believe that Sutpen thinks that what Bon is doing is wrong, in and of itself, as Henry believes, but only that it is antithetic to what Sutpen wishes to do. Therefore, there can be no retribution because there can be no wrongdoing, only errors in a mode of approach calculated to achieve an advantage. But since Sutpen has adopted the prevailing racial view, his thinking must be governed by the demands of tradition if he wishes to function within that tradition; he must reject the black son and deny him manhood and kinship, even if he is his own flesh and blood. His plans cannot be carried forth by such a son. He must do to his son, and to Wash Jones, what was done to himself. To do so is persuasive evidence of his own membership in the dominant group which exercises power, and such membership removes him from any taint associated with the victimized ones among whom he once belonged. He must, that is, continue to deny each new manifestation of his own fears and memories of inward victimization and impotence. Sutpen's fear of each new symbolic manifestation represents his own hated secret image of himself which has been denied, but which cannot be annihilated, and persists in its attempt to surface. The more this is the case, then, the greater and more intense the necessity for violent suppression of the symbolic and literal reminders of, as it were, the essential and true self.

198

A bsalom, A bsalom!

Following the course of my argument, with its use of psychoanalytic formulations, I would like to summarize some of the points I have been making regarding Sutpen's conditions as a reflection of what I take to be his state of mind. It could be said that Sutpen's behavior is consistent, in many respect, with the patterns of behavior displayed by one who has sustained a narcissistic blow to self-esteem, in which—taking one of the most destructive examples—personal integrity is not recognized, autonomy not granted, and humiliation is the attitude directed toward and taken into the self. It is a situation in which the powerful and dominant (who represent the embodiment of ideal expectation), treat one with a contempt that is at the same time reinfored by the circumstances of one's downtrodden condition (one's helplessness). For the self this precipitates, loosely stated, the conviction of one's own personal unworthiness, with deep and fearful rage and anger that cannot be expressed at the authoritative figure, the source of frustration. It precipitates also a massive desire for recompense, for compensation for the injury to the sense of self. The sense of unworthiness and victimization, as Sutpen reveals, is the very signature of one's debilitated condition, just as privilege and authority are the signature of the elect and favored. Naturally, in response to such an injury, the defiant and bitter affirmation of self-worth desperately affirms itself in the face of whatever demeaning judgments from outside. This seems to me to characterize the psychology of Sutpen in some important respects, and other of Faulkner's defiant heroes as well, who seem to be engaged in an attempt to gain revenge upon fate itself for some affront to their ideal conceptions of themselves, for some denial of their right to exercise the full range of their assertive possibilities. They do not appear to love the world or the life in it, so much as they love the image of themselves engaged in a heroic pursuit against the resistances presented to their egoistic demands. They fight against such resistances with a prior sense of inner possibilities compromised. As I have tried to show, Sutpen's

A bsalom, A bsalom!

199

ruthlessness and lovelessness are not unique to him among Faulkner's protagonists. For these protagonists it is the self which is the sole love object—a narcissistic condition. From a psychoanalytic point of view, such a condition is characteristically revealed in individuals who display an attempt on the part of the self to defend its integrity as a result of humiliation or rejection suffered at the hands of a primal love object, usually the mother or the main caretaker. The pain of rejection is thus defended against, and the unconscious adoption of the loveless mode of human relations, which characterized the self's treatment, is now seen as the normal mode of conducting human relations for the self. Any suggestion of intimacy, therefore, or of the vulnerability of genuinely reciprocal relations, signals the rewakening of the repressed feelings of the original humiliation. Thus affection, kindness, gentleness, love can only threaten the self by reminding it of its original feelings of not being loved, which, to the self, really means its unworthiness of being loved. This condition, in whatever displaced or symbolic or literal application it assumes in his characters, Faulkner himself seems to regard with a fascinated love-hate. The male characters assert themselves in their ruthlessness, displaying their contempt for our usual notions of humane dealings, but also display courage, pride, heroism, resourcefulness, and determination; and when the inevitable consequences of their human failings catch up with them, they fall in the fullness of their deeds upon their heads. And while Faulkner condemns unequivocally their wrongdoings and failings, his admiration for their prowess is inextricable from an awareness of the human failings which made them what they are. Sutpen does not achieve self-recognition and therefore tragic stature. The reason for this, I believe, is that his narcissism, his inability to admit the possibility of a flaw in his character, is radically different, for example, from that pride of the tragic heroes in classical literature. Though Sutpen is a romantic, not a classical

200

A bsalom, A bsalom !

hero, I make this comparison in order to shed particular light upon the psychological dimension of the arguments I have been pursuing and upon the meaning it has in our understanding of literature. Such pride, as for instance in Oedipus, is not a defensive psychic construct that protects against an inward, secret, guilty feeling of unworthiness. Oedipus' admission of error does not constitute a threat to or dissolution of the integrity of personhood, as would be the case with Sutpen, whose self-esteem must depend upon the reinforcement and propping up received from outward and external trappings. It seems to me that the classical tragic hero views his quality as reflected in his possession of external trappings and recognition, but his quality does not depend upon such things. For Oedipus, the admission of error reflects the capacity of the intact ego to affirm its integrity by acknowledging its own self-culpability, self-delusion, and complicity in the means of his own undoing; he recognizes the mind's own capacity for division and contradiction, and reveals his psychic wholeness and harmony through the personal responsibility assumed, at whatever cost, for the recognition and, so to speak, casting out of the erroneous and offending elements. This is the real glory of man, the expression of his indomitable spirit, that willingness to confront any manner of adverse circumstances, the worst that fate can bring, and to plumb his own psychic depths, no matter what manner of horror lurks there. According to this psychological explanation of Sutpen's character, however, he is incapable of such self-scrutiny and responsibility. But whether a hero is classical, romantic, or mythic, it is only from such self-scrutiny and responsibility that tragic stature can come—and also, possibly, the sympathetic identification on the part of the reader to the character as human sufferer, in appropriate recognition of the significance of his plight. The ironies and contradictions of Charles Bon's character are appropriate complements to the story of Sutpen. Sutpen's and Bon's

A bsalom, A bsalom!

201

actions and beliefs suggest a rationale that places behavior beyond ideas of good and evil and rests it, in Sutpen's case, upon the pursuit of self-interest, and in Bon's upon a philosophical relativism in regard to all judgments of value. This involves the awareness that such judgments are formed in response to man's need to give an agreed-upon order, meaning, and significance to life, according to criteria which, though revered, are essentially arbitrary. Bon had, Mr. Compson thinks, "a certain reserved and inflexible pessimism stripped long generations ago of all the rubbish and claptrap of people (yes, Sutpen and Henry and the Coldfields too) who have not quite yet emerged from barbarism . . ." (Absalom, 94). Bon, like his father, appeared out of nowhere without a background: "For background the shadowy figure of a legal guardian rather than parents" and "full-sprung from no childhood, born of no woman, and impervious to time and, vanished, leaving no bones nor dust anywhere" (Absalom, 74). There is an abstract and timeless quality about both Bon and Sutpen. Sutpen is defined by his rationalism, his energy and determination, his conscious awareness of a purpose which stifles all possibility of inner dissent or conflict or the intervening influence of the irrational. He does not oppose social organization or disapprove of its values. He resents only the position to which he has been assigned in it and is determined to reverse this situation by appropriating for himself the perquisites of power and authority that are the privilege of the favored and the elect. He is the heroic individualist, fortified by an awareness of the sufficiency of his resources, mounting an attack upon conventional society. He does so not, as the reformer, to destory or repudiate in the interests of promoting a greater social good, but as the rebel intent upon satisfying a private grudge. Bon, in contrast, is passive and fatalistic, cynically aware of the presumption with which men profess responsibility for their actions and the self-interest with which they pursue their causes and defend their ideals. Ostensibly

202

A bsalom, A bsalom !

one of the most privileged and envied scions of the old South, he views with indifference, skepticism, and scorn the value system he represents. He functions within the conventions of the social order, but he does not believe in them. He seems to think that there is nothing worth believing in except what is convenient. Sutpen, though full of the rigidities of a Puritan heritage, believes in a world of possibilities. Bon, the lapsed Roman Catholic, relaxed hedonist, contemplates the world with interest and detachment. Such contemplation does not provide motivation for his own striving; it rather serves only to refine and cultivate his sensibility and his perception of ways of the world and the behavior of people. Not only must he have a liaison with his octoroon mistress, but he must also marry her, as if it made no difference. Both Sutpen and Bon fail in their stance as outsiders. Bon remains "that mental and spiritual orphan whose fate it apparently was to exist in some limbo" (Absalom, 124). As Melvin Backman says, "for all his sophistication, Bon remained only the orphan (he never really had a mother since, warped by paranoiac hatred of Sutpen, she had lost the power of love) who never found the father he sought: that was his fate. So it was that he lived as if something had gone out of him, as if he did not really want to live." 11 The description of Bon's son, classic in its depiction of the predicament of the mulatto, could equally well apply to Bon. The son has had no childhood, but in a way different from what Miss Rosa means by not having had a childhood: "but as if he had not been human born but instead created without agency of man or agony of woman and orphaned by no human being" (Absalom, 196). He is claimed by no human being and exists in no nexus of family, tradition, or heritage. He therefore has no identity and is accordingly, in a sense, outside of history. The description of Bon's mother can also apply to all of those, Sutpen included, who, in Faulkner's world, stand as aliens and outsiders in relation to society and tradition. This can especially apply to the condition of the blacks, who in relation to

A bsalom, A bsalom!

203

the whites are revealed as lacking the group identity and past accomplishment that promote pride, self-worth, and autonomy. She would not grow from one metaphorphosis—dissolution or adultery—to the next carrying along with her all the old accumulated rubbishyears which we call memory, the recognizable / , but changing from phase to phase as the butterfly changes once the cocoon is cleared, carrying nothing of what was into what is, leaving nothing of what is behind but eliding complete and intact and unresisting into the next avatar as the overblown rose or magnolia elides from one rich June to the next leaving no bones, no substance, no dust or whatever dead pristine soulless rich surrender anywhere between sun and earth.

(Absalom, 196) Such people have no history and therefore no identity, and we already know the great significance the ancestral past has for Faulkner's characters and the necessity they find imposed upon them of maintaining its continuity into the present. Theirs is a literal persistence of memory. The statement about Bon's mother, as narrated by Mr. Compson, with its emphasis upon degenerate, promiscuous behavior, contradicts assertions Bon had earlier made to Henry concerning the faithfulness and chastity of the mistress. Yet, on another level, in which love and hate share the same quality and intensity of involvement, Bon's mother has remained faithful to Sutpen to such an extent that there has been no room in her thoughts for any other individual, not even her son, except as he plays a part in the service of her obsession. It is an obsession equal in intensity to Sutpen's and generated out of reaction to an affront of the same kind as Sutpen's. There is likewise, it seems to me, something exaggerated and spurious about the descriptions of Bon's own sophistication, so exotic and degenerate, his "sybaritic satiety," the absolute ascendency he has over those who come into his presence and the awe with which they view him. Consider how he is said to contemplate the distress with which Henry and Sutpen view his "almost marriage" and child, as he "courts" Judith. To Bon their concern is

204

Absalom,

Absalom!

"unnecessary" and a "fetish-ridden moral blundering which did not deserve to be called thinking." Compared to him they are "troglodytes," and he contemplated them with the "detached attentiveness of a scientist watching the muscles in an anesthetized frog" (Absalom, 93). There is an exaggerated, frenzied, and overblown quality to these descriptions that gives them the character of psychic projections. It is as if Bon's characterization is a function of the displaced thinking of others upon him, as they express the intense unconscious ambivalence toward what he stands for. This reflects, of course, Faulkner's narrative approach in this novel, in which the essential story of Sutpen and Bon is a "re-creation" in the minds of others. In the act of "re-creation" they endow the characters with a significance and motivation that reflect as much their own thinking as objective fact. It is not my intention to focus here specifically upon narrative technique. I wish rather to suggest how that technique, in its reconstruction of the imagined detals of the story, is psychologically revealing of and consistent with the mythic designation of the polarities between the two races and the concept of psychological doubling, as it has been defined throughout this work. Bon is the "nigger" and the gentleman, the irrational and the rational, the representative of all that is feared within the self, the capacity for evil doings and the compromising of good intentions, as well as the generosity of spirit and the ability for right conduct and humane behavior. This is the eternal human conflict, the inward split, and I believe that Bon personifies it, appropriately enough, combining both blackness and whiteness in his being. It is a conflict, of course, that Faulkner himself is giving expression to by means of his characters. This accounts, I think, for the alien and abstract quality of Bon's character, the restless attempt to objectify him, to grasp his significance, to even pay obeisance to him as if to something both feared and respected which must be mollified. I think Bon taps the unconscious feelings of guilt in those who have denied their own dark inner impulses.

A bsalom, A bsalom!

205

Also, he is the metaphor of the racial guilt of the South in bringing beings like him into creation in the first place. Bon is the analogical means through which it is demonstrated that no man's blood is pure, or pure enough, as it were, to free him from the unacceptable, or destructive, or contaminating impulses of the unconscious. This is demonstrated in no uncertain terms with regard to the question of incest. We are told often enough that it was Henry who seduced Judith. Bon, "the living man, was usurped." Bon and Judith were hardly together once during the "courtship" or "engagement." Bon, on the contrary, was like an "indolent esoteric hothouse bloom" (Absalom, 97). He and Henry are together constantly. We are even directly told that as a man Bon did not exist at all, was a "phantom," something which had been "created and engendered whole" by others, "some effluvium of Sutpenblood and Character" {Absalom, 104). We know that the novel itself is based upon imaginative reconstruction, in which the characters recreate or give flesh to the historical figures, using as guides their own impulses of reason and heart, their own experience as human beings, to ascertain the motivations of the historical characters with whom they share a common humanity. This may be accurate as far as it goes, but the mind is deceptive, especially in dealing with its own conflicts. The idea of what it means for Bon to be black, for example, is no more than a reflection of what others, whites, think of him and the motivations for his actions. Therefore, the idea of what it means to be black is a construct, not an inherently identifying attribute determining his behavior. It is an idea imaginatively imposed upon him by whites, the requirements of which he, as a "black," must fulfill. Such a conceptualization, put forth with the best of intentions, still seems here to reflect the racial biases and prejudices of those who themselves determine for Bon the nature of his own motivations. The whole book turns upon the fact and nature of his approach to Judith. But he did not put himself in proximity to her so much as it was inevitable that such a person as himself must find himself so

206

A bsalom, A bsalom!

juxtaposed, in order to facilitate the unfolding of a collective psychodrama. It is a psychodrama in which the guilt and unconscious conflicts involved in incest, miscegenation, the fearful denial of the instinctual life, and the extreme and defensive necessity of the assertion and vindication of the self, are worked out. Just as Bon is finally a white man's "nigger," so he is finally a white man's creation. As Quentin narrates to Shreve, "nobody ever did know if Bon ever knew Sutpen was his father or not, whether he was trying to revenge his mother or not at first and only later fell in love, only later succumbed to the current or retribution and fatality which Miss Rosa and Sutpen had started and had doomed all his blood to, black and white both" (Absalom, 269). Indeed, it is not possible to ascertain with certainty whether Bon knew himself to be black. Yet we certainly accept his knowledge of this fact; the final interpretation of which, as rendered by Shreve, fulfills the degrading and victimized status of the blacks, with Bon's condemnatory view of himself: " / was no good; do not grieve for me" (Absalom, 358-59). Still it is all conjecture. It is similar to the dilemma Faulkner creates by not specifying whether Joe Christmas is in actuality black, yet allowing him to behave as if he were. Faulkner imposes upon him behavior patterns and a self-image consistent with viewing himself as black, and therefore tainted, with all the attending ambivalence and conflict. Joe is therefore "black" because he takes himself to be, whether he is biologically so or not. And the conflict he experiences, the self-condemnation and tortured attempts to achieve identity, though in some way legitimately related to the problems such a person might actually be imagined to confront in reality, are equally much a reflection of the fear and revulsion, the phobic reaction, conscious and/or unconscious, that such a condition engenders in the author as he contemplates it and projects his own ambivalence upon it. The consequence is that Faulkner cannot help revealing his inevitable sympathy for it, as an

A bsalom, A bsalom!

207

instance of human suffering, yet his final and inevitable condemnation of it, as a contaminating fact of life. I take both Bon and Christmas to be examples of such treatment by Faulkner, sensitively and sympathetically handled, yet finally and agonizingly rendered as the feared and corrupting agents in life—and the symbolic manifestations of one's own impurity—from whom identification must be withdrawn and upon whom punishment must be brought to bear. The incest-miscegenation relationship provides a perspective from which the ideas considered above can be viewed and brought into focus. Faulkner speaks rather explicitly about the Henry-BonJudith sexual constellation. Here is Mr. Compson's version of it: Henry was the provincial. . . given to instinctive and violent action rather than to thinking who may have been conscious that his fierce provincial's pride in his sister's virginity was a false quantity which must incorporate in itself an inability to endure in order to be precious, to exist, and so must depend upon its loss, absence, to have existed at all. In fact, perhaps this is the pure and perfect incest: the brother realizing that the sister's virginity must be destroyed 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; by whom he would be despoiled, choose for despoiler, if he could become, metamorphose into the sister, the mistress, the bride. Perhaps that is what went on, not in Henry's mind but in his soul. Because he never thought. H e felt, and acted immediately. H e knew loyalty and acted it, he knew pride and jealousy; he loved grieved and killed, still grieving and . . . still loving Bon, the m a n to whom he gave four years . . . in which to renounce and dissolve the other marriage, knowing that the four years of hoping and waiting would be in vain.

(Absalom, 96-97) What Faulkner surely intends to imply by the word "soul" is that this is what went on in Henry's unconscious. By identifying with the lover, the brother takes the sister's virginity. But by identifying with the sister, the brother feels it is himself who is despoiled. In the guise of the woman, he embraces the man and thus expresses the

208

A bsalom, A bsalom!

forbidden homoerotic wish of which identification with the woman in the manner presented could be taken as the first clue. Further, the brother imaginatively chooses the lover who is to despoil the sister, in whose place he puts himself. The fact that it is described as the "pure and perfect" incest does not make it innocent. It really would be incest since Bon-Henry would be marrying his actual sister; the identification with the lover is in fact with the actual brother, and a more imaginatively apt, yet complex, working out of incestuous, homoerotic, miscegenetic fears and desires could hardly be found. One sees also, at the basis of this situation, a kind of narcissistic autoeroticism, and it speaks to the issue of the seeming inability of so many of Faulkner's characters to either give or receive love in a normal way. They are impervious to each other, to use a favorite Faulknerian adjective, except as their interaction with each other serves as the occasion for the expression of the distorted impulses of the inner life; emotionally, they seem hermetically sealed, "embattled," locked within the intensely private sphere of their egoistic self-investment. And it is possible to consider a certain kind of relationship between homosexuality and narcissism. The narcissist projects aspects of himself upon others and loves (or hates) those things in them, though the homosexual aspect may not be, strictly speaking, erotic. 12 Also—and I find this intriguing—one may go further and consider the possibilities of the sister as a substitute for the mother, with love of the sister therefore expressing the forbidden Oedipal wish. Faulkner has expressed in no uncertain terms the importance of the mother, which has been a recurring concern in his work, and his most powerful presentation of this importance, as it appears in The Sound and the Fury, is reflected in the absence of the mother, and the devastating consequences suffered by the offspring of a mother incapable of, or even antipathetic to, the fulfilling of her function.

A bsalom, A bsalom!

209

Likewise, a great many of Faulkner's male characters go through their formative years in male-dominated households without the maternal ministration they need. And when present, it is offered by a substitute, a female relative, a black matriarch, or a sister. Quentin Compson's sister Caddy, like Henry's sister Judith, is the more psychologically mature sibling and the natural leader of her brother, who seems passive and feminized in her presence. The two sisters are strong-willed, sensible, self-sacrificing, and committed to duty and conscience in their dealings with others, exemplifying the attributes of Faulkner's mother-figures, and they also exist in households in which the true mothers seem incompetent. In each case close, incestuous relations are established between brother and sister, and the brothers regard the sisters with a jealous possessiveness. Though Henry is said to read Bon's love letters to Judith without jealousy, he nevertheless regards her with incestuous interest, so it can be reasonably assumed that his attitude of disinterest is a defense against his real feelings. Indeed, he reads them as if he himself were the lover perusing his own protestations, "with that complete abnegant transference, metamorphosis into the body which was to become his sister's lover" (Absalom, 105). It is another instance of the autoerotic self-regard within the narcissistic/incestuous complex. Furthermore, with regard to the Oedipal theme, Henry's repudiation (he "abjures his father and renounces his birthright") of his father occurs precisely at the time of Bon's appearance, which suggests an expression of his own desire for the sister. And if she is also a substitute for the mother, she reactivates the unconscious Oedipal hostility toward the father over possession of the mother. It is Bon with whom Henry rides off, Bon, the figure who presents the vicarious and symbolic possibilities of incestuous possession of both sister and mother. I do not wish to crudely apply these psychoanalytic formulations in any hard and fast, dogmatic, or

210

A bsalom, A bsalom!

conclusive way. I adduce them as suggestions to enrich our understanding of Faulkner's complex art in a way that is consistent with and worthy of the depth of his psychological explorations in the creation of character. Henry resists Bon's legitimizing of his union with the octoroon mistress, and Bon replies that it is not the official and conventional sanctioning which matters but the integrity of the union as it exists between the two individuals. This breaks down the usual moralistic assessment of sexual experience according to high and low and good and bad. N o restraint is placed on Henry's own guilty sexual desires, nor is Henry forced, momentarily, to condemn them. This is so because, according to the interpretation that Henry might further and unconsciously be tempted to place upon Bon's ideas, there might not have to be such a great difference between his love for his sister and for an ordinary woman, if the two of them felt the union was acceptable. Henry no longer has an objective standard by which behavior must be regulated, specifying the good and the bad. This, I think, is a powerful unconscious element in the source of Bon's appeal to Henry. Bon might be taken as a symbolic representative of the value-free data of the unconscious mind, offering a kind of freedom from conventional and provincial constraints and, in Henry's case, from the guilty conscience of his awareness of his sexual desire for his sister. He could also gain a sense of freedom from all the repressive, rigid, and life-denying codes of his Puritan heritage, the distinctions between the high and the low, the good and the bad, that are maintained in support of its world view. This might be what Henry is really referring to when he insists on believing in Bon, "But I still believe, I will believe." He would like to think that Bon is innocent of what he has been accused of, just as, unconsciously, he would like to think of himself as innocent. But in the end he cannot accept such a schema. He would like to believe that the possibilities symbolically incarnate in Bon are real, and that

A bsalom, A bsalom!

211

they have in fact become actualized in Bon's person. Bon is and does for Henry, so to speak, what Henry cannot or dare not be or do for himself. But what Bon is and does is still sinful to Henry, and as guilt intensifies, so does self-condemnation and the sense of impurity, and the corresponding necessity of purgation; thus he truly "Kills what he loves," annihilating what to him is an offending but essential part of himself as well as the flesh and blood manifestation of it in his double, his alterego, the "nigger" brother. This helps explain Mr. Compson's perplexity about the contradictions of Henry's actions with regard to Bon, which to Mr. Compson were "just incredible. It just does not explain" itself rationally or sensibly: Henry, "who must champion the marriage to the extent of repudiating the father and blood and home to become a follower and dependent of the rejected suitor for four years before killing him apparently for the very identical reason which four years ago he quitted home to champion" (Absalom, 100). Henry reverts to the claims of his background and kills Bon, and affirms again the efficacy of the morality of his heritage. That is to say, he proscribes his own desires for Judith, condemning them as unacceptable, by killing Bon, the representative of them in whom he has achieved a vicarious acting out and satisfaction of his own desires. That is why he wants Bon to renounce the prior marriage. It confers validity upon what to him is spurious, and it divests Judith of her sanctity by causing her to be compared in stature to a mulatto, making her a "junior member in a harem." If Bon can legitimize his liaison with the mulatto, then Henry likewise can "legitimize" his incestuous desires, simply by daring to think that what he wants to do is all right by virtue of the force of his conviction. It is an immensely appealing and immensely frightening and repugnant dilemma for Henry, and he eventually proves incapable of bearing it. He rejects Bon's arguments, succumbing to the forces that repress his own desires, reestablishing again the sanctity of his sister, protecting her from his own desires, their repugnant quality,

212

A bsalom, A bsalom!

which are symbolically represented in the "nigger" with designs upon the white woman. He therefore kills the "nigger," the real external "nigger" and the symbolic "nigger" within himself. It is a powerful delineation of the relationship between miscegenation and incest. One could trace the development of the situation in this manner: the objection to Bon at first appears to be that he's already married (the lover of the sister is already compromised: Bon belongs to a mulatto wife and mother; Henry is the son of a guilty heritage which has produced both himself and Bon and has corrupted the bloodline to such an extent that it might be conceived, irrationally, that the only lovers worthy of the daughters are the sons themselves, who share the identical blood). The next objection to Bon seems to be that not only is he married but that he's married to a black, proof at once of the possibilities of the corruption of the bloodline Henry fears. But Henry's identification with Bon, at this point, is with a white man, but a white man who nevertheless loves a "nigger." And because Bon is not ashamed, as a white man, to be in union with the mulatto, his attitude represents both the strength of Henry's incestuous feelings and the repugnance felt toward them, since Bon's unacceptable love of the "nigger" is equated with Henry's unacceptable love of his sister. The eroticism and absence of conventional moralistic sentiments and restrictions, which characterize Bon's references to the life lived by his mistress, reflect Henry's sense of the sinful abandon and conscience-free pleasures suggested by incest. Incest here stands for the most extreme release imaginable that might be consciously or unconsciously sought in defiance of the restrictive pressures of a Puritan heritage. But it is an idea that, however desperately entertained, is not to be acted upon, and the manifestation of its horror is revealed in the revelation of Bon as "the nigger that's going to sleep with your sister," the white boy who unwittingly has as brother a "nigger" he loves, and a white sister who does not know that she is ready to

A bsalom, A bsalom!

213

entertain as lover and to marry a "nigger" who is at the same time her brother. Such a brother-lover-"nigger" can only raise before her unwitting eyes the spectre of her own menfolks' depravity, their tortured and tenuous hold upon self-esteem, and it is with such people, she must realize, that she daily cohabits. She is the white woman who has been spiritually elevated above the animalized black woman. The black woman, in being used and abused by the white man in satisfaction of his own bestiality, has produced the very threat to the white woman that he had sought to prevent by his use of the black. And doubtless, the white man's own desire for the white woman, as represented in the "nigger," represents as well an act of aggression against her. The white man is angry about his self-created burden of having always to protect her, the aggression against her taking the form of a final and ultimate possession of her which would m a k e her exclusively his own and at last safe from any threat. This very idea is expressed by Quentin Compson with reference to Caddy, when he imagines that by committing incest with her, the two of them would be damned to a hell in which he would be able to have her to himself throughout eternity. The problems of Quentin's own relationship to his sister account, of course, for one major element in his fascination with the Bon-Henry-Judith relationship. Bon's part in this d r a m a assumes its most compelling aspect in the mere fact of his presence, which serves as a psychic activator of the constellation of unconscious ideas which resonate around him. Bon cannot act, is passive, indolent, fatalistic, and as such, according to the scale of values prevailing here, is a representiative of the feminine, the unconscious, which compromises the masculine will (he is his mother's son, not his father's). There constantly surrounds him the aura of mystery, of motivations and impulses imperfectly grasped, guessed at, a little sinister, but sensed to be animated by forces of implacable inevitability. He exists in an atmosphere of the erotic, the sensual, in which the physical senses,

214

A bsalom, A bsalom !

the pleasures of the body hold sway and achieve undreamed of satisfactions. He has a knowledge of the depths of human wishes and desires that is taken to go beyond reason or logic. Yet his being has no locus, is not anchored in any continuity, in a tradition or line of familial descent that nurtures a sense of belonging and identity. He is, indeed, a phantom. He exists beyond good and evil. He is a representative of the psychic life of others, as it is projected upon his own shoulders, as victim and scapegoat, cause and effect, of the tortuous consequences of a corrupt way of life, the guilty conscience of a region. He is at once the sophisticated gentleman, heir to and representative of the best that the mythic South has produced, and at the same time the "nigger," a halfbreed, homeless, despised, perpetually in search of roots and orgins that must be perpetually denied him. The very contradictions of his conception betray the unconscious conflicts out of which his being emerges. Bon himself sires and abandons a similiarly cursed son, bequeathing to him the heritage of his own unresolved dilemma. Unacknowledged son of Sutpen, Bon is at the same time, through the special and stigmatizing means of his coming into being, the anonymous son of all those who, like Sutpen, have contributed their share toward the creation of a collectively anonymous human assemblage. This assemblage now threatens, in ways increasingly more intricate and subtle, the desired purity of legitimate issue. As Bon says, " / seem to have been born into this world with so few fathers that I have too many brothers to outrage and shame while alive and hence too many descendents to bequeath my little portion oj hurt and harm dead" (Absalom, 308). This describes one side of the matter, of which the complement can be seen in this description of Bon, "who had had so many fathers as to have neither love nor pride to receive or inflict, neither honor nor shame to share or bequeath; to whom one place was the same as another, like a cat" {Absalom, 315).

A bsalom, A bsalom!

215

As his mother's son, Bon is the agent of the forces of the nether world. With regard to Sutpen, Bon brings to bear the vindictive and triumphant return of the repressed—the feelings Sutpen repudiated, the responsibility he denied, the guilty recognition of the vulnerability he shares with all other humans as a victim of forces beyond his understanding or control. Bon's mother—akin to Bon's mistress in terms of Faulkner's description of the latter as "the eternal female, the eternal who-suffers" (Absalom, 114)—returns to join back to the man that part of himself he would escape through his rationalizations, his self-delusion. Bon's own masculine will has been completely usurped by the power of the irrational as it is personified in his mother. Hers is pure feeling, pure hatred, as it can only be expressed by the elemental female: " / am looking upon my mother naked" he says (p. 306). The force of the elemental nature, summoned (by Sutpen's treatment of the mother) by means of the most vicious assault upon and contemptuous dismal of the civilizing restraints that hold it in check, cannot, as a consequence, be mediated or restrained and goes beyond good and evil, taking on that form of atavistic centrality that Faulkner's men so often find in women. We are reminded of it in Mr. Compson's description of Miss Rosa, another victim consumed by hatred, in the act of stealing cloth from her father: "that amoral boldness, that affinity for brigandage in women" (p. 78). When Bon is finally thought to assert himself in his own behalf, it is in response to one of the most basic and elemental needs, that of love, acceptance, and belonging. He wishes confirmation of his sense of selfhood, manhood, his right to exist, such as we expect freely to be bestowed on him by those responsible for his coming into being in the first place. So in the end, Quentin and Shreve imagine the exchange between Henry and Colonel Sutpen. Sutpen tells Henry that Charles' mother was "part negro." Before this revelation, it is thought, Henry was going to let Bon marry Judith, and let all of them be damned. This means that the unconscious imperative, as manifested in the Bon-Henry double figure, would be allowed a defiant

216

A bsalom, A bsalom!

acting out, which for Henry would still be on the level of fantasy wish-fulfillment; it is only through the intervention of reality, with the introduction of the fact that Bon is "part negro" and is also Henry's actual brother, that the identification with the lover is revealed in all its horror. It is revealed as an identification with the brother, the image of one's self and a bearer of one's own desires, the repugnance of which is now manifestly revealed in the perception that the bearer of such desires, actual and symbolic, is a "nigger." Shattered, now returned from their father's tent, Henry presents himself to Bon: —So it's the miscegenation, not the incest, which you cant bear. Henry doesn't answer. —And he sent me no word? He did not ask you to send me to him? No word to me, no world at all? That was all he had to do, now, today; four years ago or at anytime during the four years. That was all. He would not have needed to ask it, require it, of me. I would have offered it. I would have said, I will never see her again before he could have asked it of me. He did not have to do this, Henry. He didn't need to tell you I am a nigger to stop me. He could have stopped me without that, Henry. —No! Henry cries. —No! No! I will—Til— (Absalom, 356)

Doubtless what Henry was about to say was, "I'll kill you!" in immediate reaction to the horror of the revelation of Bon's identity, as well as the anguish and guilt involved in his sense of complicity in the actions of his friend. The consequence of the incestuous desires and their meaning, and the unthinkable threat they pose, are now objectified. Henry accordingly asks Bon to think of Judith, not of Henry. Bon replies, " / have. For four years. Of you and her. Now I am thinking of myself (Absalom, 357). Thus it appears that Bon the man never had personal intentions toward Judith, and approached her only out of the need, intensifying as the situation progressed, to gain recognition from his father. The irony here is that Henry, torn apart by the anguish of his conflict between loyalty to Bon and loyalty to the sanctity of his family

A bsalom,

A bsalom!

217

and claims of his heritage, nevertheless grants to Bon the love and acceptance Sutpen withholds. He cannot use the pistol Bon offers him: Henry looks at the pistol; now he is not only panting, he is trembling; when he speaks now his voice is not even the exhalation, it is the suffused and suffocating inbreath itself: — You are my brother. —No rm not. Tm the nigger that's going to sleep with your sister. Unless you stop me, Henry.

(Absalom, 357-58)

It is not true, as Shreve and Quentin think at one point, that "Bon didn't care; that since both of the two people who could have given him a father had declined to do it, nothing mattered to him now, revenge or love or all, since he knew now that revenge could not compensate him nor love assuage" (Absalom, 343). Bon knows that what he is going to do is wrong, is repugnant, is offensive to civilized sensibilities, but he knows that Sutpen's actions were an instance of the same, and I think he believes, consciously or not, that it is only by an act of equal monstrousness that he can pay Sutpen back in kind. I think the fact that such a monstrous act is necessary reflects the depth of Bon's hunger for a sense of selfhood, manhood, which must be authenticated and acknowledged in order for Bon to think of himself as existing at all. Carrying out this act against Judith proclaims to Sutpen that Bon exists, and presents the proof, however awful, of his existence, which Sutpen must acknowledge and against which further repudiation is meaningless. But it is still a despairing act and one Bon wishes were not to be, which is why he leaves it up to Henry to stop him. I think Bon ironically relfects upon the deprecated status to which he has been assigned when he says, "I'm the nigger that's going to sleep with your sister"; and though it is an expression of selfcondemnation, I do not believe he accepts it as a true judgment of himself. Rather, it seems he is using it to ridicule the absurdity and

218

A bsalom,

A

bsalom!

falsehood of the conventionalized notion of the designs of blacks upon white women, and even to taunt Henry into a recollection of the common humanity they share, or, further, to cause Henry to muse upon the fact that, far from being the despised "nigger," Bon is and remains that person whom Henry slavishly imitated as a model. But, when he substitutes the pictures of the octoroon mistress and child for Judith's, Bon is revealed as fulfilling the requirement of "niggerness," mainly by Shreve: "And you old man wouldn't know about that too: why the black son of a bitch should have taken her picture out and put the octoroon's picture in, so he invented a reason for it. But I know. And you know too. Dont you? Dont you, huh?" He glared at Quentin, leaning forward over the table now. . . . "Dont you know? It was because he said to himself, 'If Henry dont mean what he said, it will be all right; I can take it out and destroy it. But if he does mean what he said, it will be the only way I will have to say to her, I was no good; do not grieve for me.' Aint that right? Aint it? By God, aint it?" 'Yes,' Quentin said.

CAbsalom, 358-59) Shreve is understandably excited, since they have reached the end of a long, puzzling sequence of events and have begun to see its pattern and to unravel its mystery. But the tone also becomes personal, slightly defensive, almost triumphantly punitive and vindictive, as if there were a compulsion to reveal Bon in a necessary and belittling light. The integrity of the pain and anguish Bon has experienced is hereby undermined, vitiated. Shreve's view of Bon is one in which Bon acquiesces to the judgment of his unworthiness as a human being, the source of which judgment here is inextricable from the perception of him as a "nigger." He is revealed as forfeiting his claim upon the righteous indignation and justifiable anger he had toward Sutpen and all those who had helped create his unfortunate life. Most importantly, in the Faulknerian scale of values, he forfeits that purity of intention, that respect for and sense of the significance of his own actions and feelings, that seem to ennoble a

A bsalom, A bsalom!

219

Faulknerian character, even though such qualities may arise from a mistake in judgment and may lead to the injury of others. Yet his case is presented as one easy enough to dismiss. Shreve, the outsider, liberated from prejudices of race, class, and region, nevertheless passes his almost contemptuous judgment upon Bon with glee, categorizing him as a "black son of a bitch," as the presumptuous "nigger" aspiring to the white mistress's bed. If Bon did intend the switching of the pictures as an act of retaliation, it would be, as critics have pointed out, a woefully inept act, since Judith does not know of his black blood and has been wholly honorable in her intentions toward him.13 And Bon already knows what harm he will inflict upon Henry by causing him to kill him. I believe that the switching of the pictures is simply a metaphorical complement to his fulfilling of the mythic requirements of "niggerness," where the broken body of the victim is revealed in all the helplessness of its condition—"diffident, secret, inarticulate, and sad," as Quentin Compson described it elsewhere—with, close to its breast, the images of those like himself among whom he belongs.

V Go Down, Moses

Against the background of the McCaslin family, in Go Down, Moses, Faulkner presents explicit treatment of some of the principal themes which have been central to his work, among them man's appropriation and violation of the land in his attempts at possession and self-aggrandizement, and his violation of the human rights of others. In a disciplined and principled fashion Faulkner now pursues the enactment and consequences of man's misdeeds, as they are revealed in the McCaslin family. Faulkner sympathizes with inevitable human weaknesses, yet condemns their existence, recognizing the evil and destructive effects of their influence upon life. Faulkner now allows for the possibility of the rejection of injustice, the resistance to its further enactment, and an attempt to personally assume, as demonstrated by Ike McCaslin, the burden of misdeeds and to atone for them. Thus Ike must come to grips with the claims of his racial and social inheritance. He cannot reject his heritage, but he must now look upon it with the eye of an uncompromising and morally informed critic. He undergoes the spiritual anguish and outrage of a betrayed son who must find an honorable way, at whatever sacrifice to himself, to live with this heritage. If he cannot change it at least he can change himself, and to that extent, perhaps, he can change it through his example. It is the wrong and the shame that define the collective experience of his heritage, as well as the personal history of his family. He confronts the record of such history in the family ledgers, which reveal "not only the general and condoned injustice

222

Go Down, Moses

and its slow amortization but the specific tragedy which had not been condoned and could never be amortized." 1 They reveal the horror of slavery and its consequences, the begetting by white masters of interracial issue from their black slaves, the producing of the cursed and feared mixed-blood individual who must be rejected, the brutalizing of natural feelings, and as a result, the corrupting of the possibilities of normal human relations, with kinsman rejected by kinsman. Ike sees the story of his grandfather Carothers McCaslin, who has a child, Thomasina, by a slave named Eunice, and later, in 1835, has a child by Thomasina. Carothers instructs that a 1,000-dollar legacy be paid to the incestuously begotten son, Tomey's Turl, on his twenty-first birthday, which is not claimed by him but is claimed by his descendant Lucas. But Ike sees two generations later that the legacy is an act of contempt, a repudiation, cheaper than Carothers having to say "my son" to a "nigger." This enactment of repudiation, the continuous and insidious manifestation of the evil of slavery and racism, the rejection of those who have been loved or with whom one has existed in a relationship of love, is a recurring theme in the novel. Carothers Edmonds repudiates Lucas' son Henry with whom he had grown up as a brother; Roth Edmonds cannot acknowledge Molly Beauchamp, Lucas' wife, as the woman who reared him at her own breast and served alone as the mother who met his needs throughout his upbringing; Roth Edmonds, having come close to marrying the fair-skinned mulatto who had his child, finally rejects her in an act he himself recognizes as contemptible and for which he condemns himself in anger and shame. The drama of repudiation is especially compelling in the relations between Lucas and Zack Edmonds. Zack, who carries his white man's privilege too far by acknowledging the blood he shares with Lucas and acts upon the obligations such kinship imposes upon him as he sees fit, taunts Lucas with the statement: "Or maybe you aint even a woman-made

Go Down, Moses

223

McCaslin but just a nigger that's got out of hand?" ("Fire," 55). Here is one of the preeminent examples in Faulkner, reminiscent of the conflict between Charles Bon and Henry Sutpen, of the rejection of the brother, the kinsman. The situation between Zack and Lucas (as Robert Penn Warren remarks, "the duel across the bed—the bed, mind you—is a mythic struggle of antipathy and identity of blood") is a symbolic representation of the crime that is the final crime against both nature and the human community. 2 Along with the anguish and torment of conflict, whether a function of conflicting social, racial, or mythic imperatives, there is now the introduction of a new element into the white consciousness with regard to the black. There is a recognition on the part of the white person of wrongdoing and a feeling of guilt and shame at the realization of his betrayal of himself as an honorable human being and kinsman. Zack Edmonds, in taunting Lucas, for example, realizes that he "was wrong" and that he has "gone too far" in his attempt to maintain the insufferable barrier of race and caste. There is, similarly, a change in Faulkner's depiction of the blacks. They may still be the obverse reflection of the whites they live among, but they are at least recognized as entities who cannot be easily known, whose reality must be grasped with effort, and who may conceivably have some hard-earned and honorable conception of themselves that may belie the mockery, contempt, and amusement of paternalistic whites. They are now seen as human beings, though still tentatively grasped and still anchored within the limitations of the culture of their time. But there is a recognition of their pain and anguish as victims, and of the hardships and debilitating effects of racism they have endured. In them is the spirit mollified and chastened yet "indomitable." Sam Fathers and Lucas Beauchamp are Faulkner's special examples of this. Another, a mere anecdote or sketch, appears in "The Bear" in the black cook Ash's resentment at never having been allowed the hunter's prerogative of appearing among the men on the hunt, and his jealousy and

224

Go Down, Moses

disbelief, though petulantly rendered, at Ike's having killed a deer as a young boy. When the men agree that Ash must at least once be granted the privilege to hunt, it is arranged that he should accompany Ike. But Ash, of course, does not know how to deport himself, how to carry a gun, prepare it and ready himself for the kill, and when the opportunity does present itself, he bungles it hopelessly. Faulkner has recognized what might surely have been authentic feelings in a person such as Ash, but he has nevertheless allowed Ash to appear as presumptuous, not so much in wishing to hunt without knowing how, but in putting himself in the place of the white men as hunters. H e is revealed as having the same desire for masculine competence, as it is measured by being a successful hunter, but the accomplishment must forever elude him, lacking as he does the skill, discipline, and experience that are prerogatives from which people such as himself must be excluded. Perhaps this is why he is not thought capable of acquiring such skill. Ike, realizing his inexperience and patiently tolerating it, does not minister to Ash with the concern which he himself had received as a novice. Nor does Ash, in spite of his many years of experience and association with hunters, seem to have acquired even a rudimentary understanding of what might be expected of him. The whole episode is treated as a joke, the outcome of which was anticipated in advance—Ash's shameful return to his condition of emasculation as cook. Faulkner has here introduced a major aspect of the reality concealed behind the blinders of racism, in his depiction of Ash's burning desire to validate himself as a man; yet Faulkner has been unable to carry through on this perception according to his own intention of presenting it in an honorable manner. But it is nevertheless a glimpse of the reality behind the mask, some attempt to grasp what the black may be for himself, in spite of, or in some cases because of, the demeaning social designation and role by which he is defined and into which he is forced. Faulkner explicitly specifies, on one occasion, the shift Lucas

Go Down, Moses

225

Beauchamp makes from personal reality to social role: "apparently without effort nor even design Lucas became not Negro but nigger, not secret so much as impenetrable, not servile and not effacing, but enveloping himself in an aura of timeless and stupid passivity almost like a smell" ("Fire," 59-60). Lucas assumes a pose in order to achieve an advantage for himself, willingly defining himself in terms of a stereotyped designation that is familiar and recognizable to the whites, in order to deceive them. But the deception can only be successful if the whites take him in fact to be what he appears to be, without the slightest suspicion on their part of duplicity on his. Yet, it is precisely duplicity of this kind which is the rule rather than the exception in relations between blacks and whites. One therefore assumes that the whites knew that the blacks were only role playing, but nevertheless expected them to play such a role. The blacks, on the other hand, must have recognized that their success and survival depended on presenting themselves in a fashion other than what they knew themselves to be. But, in doing this, they doubtless must have found that much of what they pretended to be—because of the necessity of its continuing enactment—had become incorporated as features of character difficult to separate from what was authentic. Therefore, the whites would always perceive them in terms of the mask, regardless of the extent to which they diverged from it. And, of course, as I have suggested, the mask is the only thing the whites would accept. Faulkner demonstrates something of this in "Pantaloon in Black," with Rider's grief over his dead wife. No matter how Rider's grief was expressed, it could not be viewed as motivated by the same kind and quality of sentiment as that of the whites. The fact that Rider's intense and superior endowment as a black man determines the manner of expression of his grief is simply viewed as a corrupt function of his blackness and not as a unique and compelling expression of his endowment as a human being. Another contrast between individual reality and social designation is

226

Go Down, Moses

revealed in Faulkner's dignified, if somewhat rhapsodic, rendering of the slave Eunice's suicide, in juxtaposition with the gruesome and contemptible entry in the ledgers: "Who in hell ever heard of a niger drownding his self' ("Bear," 267). Faulkner's program of reinterpretation of the position of the blacks in the story "Was" assumes an interesting form in the relations between Tomey's Turl and Uncle Buck and Uncle Buddy. Faulkner says that "Tomey's Turl had been running off from Uncle Buck for so long that he had even got used to running away like a white man would do it" ("Was," 9). His intelligence and shrewdness are recognized, even though they are viewed as the attributes of a white person that have come into the possession of a black. It is, of course, the special circumstances of his enslavement by Uncle Buck which allow Tomey's Turl to gain the experience of running away in the first place, and which account for the manner in which he runs away. Since Buck and Buddy are "abolitionists" after their own fashion, and have worked out an agreement between themselves and their slaves which recognizes the human needs of the latter and grants of them certain limited freedoms within the institution of slavery, slavery itself is presented as being experienced by Tomey's Turl as more a benign inconvenience than a brutalizing and dehumanizing condition of life. He runs away not to seek freedom, in fear of life and limb, but rather to participate in a ritual, to seek female company on the neighboring Beauchamp plantation, his destination known by all in advance. He succeeds in his efforts, eluding Buck in his chase upon the horse Black John, and ends up causing Buck to be "enslaved" by his marriage to Miss Sophonsiba. Tomey suggests to the young Cass Edmonds the means by which he is able to work his plans: "I gonter tell you something to remember: anytime you wants to git something done, from hoeing out a crop to getting married, just get the womenfolks to working at it. Then all you needs to do is set down and wait" ("Was," 13).

Go Down, Moses

227

He of course has no control over the circumstances which cause Buck to become married to Sophonsiba. Yet his statement is the metaphorical equivalent of woman's resourcefulness in Faulkner. Thus it is, so to speak, through subterfuge and cunning that the blacks and women, twin victims in Faulkner, get their way, since they lack the necessary means to enforce their will. The twin status of the women and the blacks is underscored by the manner in which the fate of Tomey and Miss Sophonsiba is determined by the outcome of a card game. Viewed another way, one sees that the very circumstances which led to the birth of Ike McCaslin involved a basic contempt for human integrity as revealed through the corrupt or, at least, insensitive enactment of masculine prerogatives. It is Sam Fathers who initiates Ike into responsible manhood, resulting in his recognition and moral assessment of the injustice of his heritage and his attempt to atone for it. It is fitting that Ike should learn how to be a man before being able to act responsibly as one, and he undergoes his initiation, under the tutelage of Sam Fathers, into the rites of manhood, literally and symbolically rendered as man's entrance into the woods. He enters the woods, the primal unknown and source of his being, as alien and intruder, as hunter pursuing the hunted, as one who destroys. But his alienation from and fear of the woods is a consequence of the extent to which the civilizing sources of his human nature have divested him of his sense of kinship and harmony with the woods and the life in it with which he shares a common origin. Inevitable human imperatives pit him in opposition to the woods; but this very fact binds him to the woods by providing him with the ground upon which he tests himself and realizes his potential, and unites him with all the living creatures he encounters there in a realization of and respect for the integrity of all life. The hunter therefore achieves virtue by recognizing the obligations incumbent upon him, in the taking of life, to love the creature he slays as a tribute to the sacred thing that is animate in both, and to do so in humility and pride, since his

228

Go Down, Moses

power over life and death has been granted as an accident of his human nature. Sam is "the old man of seventy who had been a negro for two generations now but whose face and bearing were still those of the Chickasaw chief who had been his father" ("Old People," 164-65). He is at once lowly black and exalted noble figure out of olden times. Faulkner says that a "dullness of the hair and fingernails" was the only visible trace of Sam's black parentage; but there was also something else about the eyes, in their expression: "not the mark of servitude but of bondage; the knowledge that for a while that part of his blood had been the blood of slaves. 'Like an old Lion or bear in a cage,' McCaslin said." When Ike cries that they should therefore free him, should "Let him go," he is told that the "cage" is not his enslavement to the McCaslins: "He was a wild man. When he was born, all his blood on both sides, except the little white part, knew things that had been tamed out of our blood so long ago that we have not only forgotten them, we have to live together in herds to protect ourselves from our own sources." ("Old People," 167). The awareness of that part of his blood which has been enslaved is here revealed through a recollection of a distant time, not vouchsafed to the blacks as such, when Sam or his people were free and autonomous men, and not free merely in the sense of being free from the coercion of other men. They were free in some primal sense, from social and civilizing restraints as well, a freedom threatening in its possibilities, against which the white men must protect themselves. As I have shown in other contexts, it is this fear of the primal and unconscious inheritance in the white man, distorted in its repression and brutalized in expression when it does achieve release, which is projected upon the blacks and ambivalently viewed and condemned as exclusive features of their endowment. Here it achieves a salutary, relatively benign and inoffensive application in Sam's closeness to the sources of his being in na-

Go Down, Moses

229

ture. Here it appears as an authentic and even ennobling attribute. Yet the expression about S a m ' s eyes, insofar as it is the indication of the indignity of enslavement, must equally well be assumed as an inheritance of the blacks; but the dynamics of Faulkner's portrayal of S a m ' s predicament do not allow him to see the blacks in a similar way. It seems to me interesting to note that Faulkner introduces the dullness of the hair and fingernails as indicators of S a m ' s black parentage, then offers, as an extension, the expression in the eyes as a signature of bondage. The first is a supposed physical condition, the second a psychological reaction, something induced and conditioned—not a universal, as the condition of the hair and nails is presented as being. One is supposed to be innate, the other acquired, yet they seem to be equated as common indexes ol the condition they are said to represent. It is the physical inheritance of blackness which has preempted or compromised the authority of Sam's Chickasaw blood and undermined his dignity. Sam found out he "had been betrayed," not by his father for the actual act of selling him and his mother into slavery, "because the damage was already done before then and it was the warrior's and c h i e f s blood in him and [his father] both that was betrayed through the black blood which his mother gave h i m " ("Old People," 168). The possession of the black blood carries with it a cursed and defiling stigma. Divested of dignity itself, it imposes no obligations upon others to treat it with such, so that Sam's father cannot be thought of by Sam as having betrayed him by selling him. Indeed, to maintan the dignity of the Chickasaw blood line, S a m ' s father's act can from this vantage point be seen as an appropriate, necessary, and honorable one. As is always the case in Faulkner, the possession of different bloodlines is presented in terms of a necessary inward conflict that is not only psychological but apparently even mechanistic in its dualism. It sometimes appears that it is the blood itself which prompts certain kinds of behavioral traits and attitudes. Faulkner

230

Go Down, Moses

says that Sam wasn't betrayed by having been sold into slavery but by the possession of the blood of slaves. But merely possessing the blood of slaves does not make one a slave. It is, of course, rather the historical context in which the differing racial groups found themselves that determined how each would be treated by the other, granting to each as a result a particular psychological inheritance. Sam naturally identifies with his Chickasaw heritage, however compromised it has become in the present, as the source of his strength and past glory; but it might also have been possible for him to view the "blood" a man possesses as an irrelevant and artificial concept as opposed to the inner quality and dignity a man achieves and bestows upon himself through his confrontation with the exigencies of life. He would become, as Faulkner describes it, "self-progenitive," the way in which Faulkner desires to present Lucas Beauchamp in his final resolution of the dilemma with which Sam is confronted. Sam nevertheless enjoys a putative freedom. No one tells him what to do, and he does not labor in the fields, as the blacks do, but performs white man's work, when he works at all. He dresses like and associates with blacks, but is accorded a special deference and respect by them. And the way Sam is accorded dominance over the part-Indian Boon Hoggenbeck, taken in every other way as a white man, has an expanded parallel in Lucas' dominance over the McCaslin whites within his purview. Ike's association with Sam reveals to him the reality of the attempt to affirm dignity and self-respect in the oppressed which he is later able to apply to the blacks en masse. There is for Sam no demeaning social role into which he could be forced by a white, and therefore no reason for him to defend himself against feelings of resentment and injured selfesteem in his dealings with whites, as would be the case with the blacks themselves. Nevertheless Ike sees the "black," as incarnate in Sam, involved in honorable and mutually respectful relations with whites. Sam will teach him that integrity ought to exist not

Go Down, Moses

231

only between men but also between man and all other living things, and between man and his natural habitat. He learns this lesson in the woods, "older and bigger than any recorded document," and no man "could own a piece of it." The woods were the seat of the Omniscient. [The wilderness] seemed to lean inward above them, above himself and Sam and Walter and Boon in their separate lurking-places, tremendous, attentive, impartial and omniscient, the buck moving in it somewhere, not running yet since he had not been pursued, not frightened yet and never fearsome but just alert also as they were alert, perhaps already circling back, perhaps quite near, perhaps conscious also of the eye of the ancient immortal Umpire. ("Old People," 181)

When Ike kills his first deer, he and Sam are irrevocably bound in a sacrament. Sam consecrates him through the marking of his face with the still warm and smoking blood of the slain animal. Years later, in "Delta Autumn," Ike in his old age articulates to himself the idea he had been unable to phrase as a boy of twelve: " / slew you; my bearing must not shame your quitting life. My conduct forever onward must become your death . . ." ("Delta Autumn," 351). Faulkner's men here propound a code of honor and morality which they impose upon themselves in the assessment of their worthiness. This is the measure of integrity, the opposite of which is shame, the betrayal of the ideal of worthy conduct. Integrity is difficult to achieve but always within the grasp of possibility. "The Bear" carries Faulkner's portrait of Sam to its inevitable conclusion with his death, concomitant with the death of Old Ben, both of whom represent the spirit and majesty of the wilderness. The wilderness represents the primal legacy of the past in its power and awesomeness, against which man contends, but which he must also learn to accept and respect as he must the primal inner terrors of his own nature. Symbolically, Old Ben is the primal terror itself, while Sam serves as mediator between the force of its reality and

232

Go Down,

Moses

the quasicivilized resistances presented to it by man. Thus they conduct a "yearly pageant-rite of the old bear's furious immortality" ("Bear," 194). Through the exercise of their masculine prerogatives, they fulfill as well the claims of their human inheritance. This is why the conversation, in and of the woods, was a matter of consequence, described by Faulkner as "the best of all talking": It was of the men, not white nor black nor red but men, hunters, with the will and hardihood to endure and the humility and skill to survive, and the dogs and the bear and deer juxtaposed and reliefed against it, ordered and compelled by and within the wilderness in ancient and unremitting contest according to the ancient and immitigable rules which voided all regrets and brooked no quarter;—the best game of all, the best of all breathing and forever the best of all listening, the voices quiet and weighty and deliberate for retrospection and recollection and exactitude a m o n g concrete trophies. . . . There was always a bottle present, so that it would seem to [Ike] that those fine fierce instants of heart and brain and courage and wiliness and speed were concentrated and distilled into that brown liquor which not women, not boys and children, but only hunters drank, drinking not of the blood they spilled but some condensation of the wild immortal spirit, drinking it moderately, humbly even, not with the pagan's base and baseless hope of acquiring thereby the virtues of cunning and strength and speed but in salute to them. ( " B e a r , " 191-92)

A word about the hunting tradition itself, as rendered by Faulkner, might be in order here. It seems to me that in this work the hunting tradition is a kind of metaphor—as well as literal enactment—of the male's unique plight in the world with regard to his masculine function. Through the initiation rite, he achieves manhood and a recognition of his function in the capacity of one who violates—as an expression of either biological or circumstantial mandates. The rite dramatizes the inevitability of his function as aggressor and violater, as one who asserts himself against what is, in order to achieve identity and meaning; but it is conducted under the auspices of a quasireligious ceremony that in-

Go Down, Moses

233

vests the fact of his function with a recognition of moral obligation. The male, in the exercise of his masculine function, must at the same time recognize his obligations to abide by those cherished ideals that prevent him from forfeiting his human nature. He achieves respect for human life and the integrity of all living things. Thus, his deepest impulses for evil are mediated through the articulation of an ethical code of behavior. This code stresses, on the one hand, his uniqueness and glory as masculine striver, and, on the other, the rigorous and splendid capacity of the human mind and heart for moral conscientiousness. In the woods man is alone against the great overarching swell of nature. In the woods he recognizes both his bond with nature and his uniqueness as a human being, especially with reference to the implications of his masculinity. This, it would seem, is the necessity for the exclusion of woman from this domain. Here, in the woods, occurs not only a realization and crediting of the masculine function, but also an exalting and vindication of it, through a recognition of the Faulknerian virtues of pity and courage, love and pride. The female function, as revealed by Faulkner, requires no such vindication. The masculine function is not, however, redeemed any more than man's plight can be redeemed through the application of his own efforts. Man always has the choice to exercise good over evil, which posits the efficacy of his own capacities as a morally responsible agent to perform deeds which reflect the nobility of the human endowment and the ability human beings have to come to grips with contradictory impulses. Man is capable of love as his natural birthright, and indeed, sometimes he is able to give expression to it. The choice Ike makes, in divesting himself of the trappings of civilization and confronting Old Ben on an equal footing, seems to me analogous to the choice he makes in his willingness to confront and recognize the evil deeds of his heritage and the injustice it perpetuates. The choice he makes not as a punitive and self-righteous moralist, but as one who recognizes the full complexity of human

234

Go Down, Moses

complicity and compromise in the commission of wrongdoing. He must divest himself of that fidelity to kin and kind which restrains and moderates. He must divest himself of that natural reluctance to view the degeneracy and brutality of the heart in all its naked aspect. He must do this in order to see reality and come to terms with it, and to interpose by his example an image of how men might more honorably live in relation to it and perhaps alter it. Irving Howe says that to kill the great bear Ben is to violate a mute bond with the natural world, and the fraternity the men have felt in the hunting camp could exist only in terms of an equable relation to the natural world. Yet this is an inevitable violation, a fated part of their life, and this is why it is given to Isaac McCaslin—Isaac, the son blessed by the father—to lead in the destruction of the totem. He, alone, will keep true the memory of the totem and the tribe, not so much the rites themselves or the men who performed them but the meaning of the rites and the value of the men. 3

I agree with this view, and I would like to elaborate upon it with reference to the position Sam occupies as a black person. Sam is a living embodiment of the ancestral memory of the freedom of spirit and the community of men in honorable and equable relationship among themselves and with nature. He is an embodiment in whom, though such ideals have been violated and corrupted, the memory remains, the knowledge of the truth of such ideals remains. Because Faulkner does not depict such experience as being vouchsafed to the blacks as such, Sam shares with them, in an ameliorated form, the condition of servitude and/or bondage. But it is necessary for this condition to have been visited upon him so that he is able to hold the ideals in trust, to become the living embodiment of that violation of human and natural equity that is inevitable in life, since the appropriating of land from the Indians by the white men, and the enslaving of the blacks, are seen as one sin and violation. Yet Sam's position is one elevated above that of the blacks in a manner sufficient for him to be able to impart his wisdom to Ike, to a white

Go Down, Moses

235

man, and be heard, in contrast, for example, to the inability of a Dilsey to effect any change upon the whites within her purview. After the end of the hunt and its sequence of events, Ike is presented some five years later in his discussion with his cousin McCaslin Edmonds, as he considers the decision he has already made to give up his inheritance. It is a searching examination of the history of the South—and specifically as this is revealed in his family—and of its unique destiny in relation to the rest of the country and in relation to the issue of race relations. It is a philosophical attempt to assess the meaning of man's actions, fallible and imperfect, within the context of the working out of a divine plan. The anguish of their discussion causes Ike to cry out, in the end, that the land is cursed for both races, that the whites have forfeited their chance and all that remains for them is to endure until the curse has been lifted, at which time the blacks will have their chance. Later Ike muses upon man's capacity in general for freedom, describing those upon whom freedom and equality had been dumped overnight and without warning or preparation or any training in how to employ it or even just endure it and who misused it not as children would nor yet because they had been so long in bondage and then so suddenly freed, but misused it as human beings always misuse freedom, so that he thought Apparently there is a wisdom beyond even that learned through suffering necessary for a man to distinguish between liberty and license. ("Bear," 289)

This may be true, but it does not seem to really be the issue in question with regard to the slaves themselves. They were ignorant and unaccustomed to self-governance, as Ike himself points out to McCaslin, and even if they weren't, the atmosphere of unrelenting hostility in which they lived would still have effectively constrained their efforts in the exercise of their freedom. There is always somehow the expectation that, granted freedom, the blacks would either not know what to do with it—which, as conceivably would be

236

Go Down, Moses

the case with any other ignorant and oppressed group, ought to constitute no judgment against them—or else would use it better than their oppressors. The latter might easily be the case ("They are better than we are," says Ike), were they granted the same opportunities as their white peers, and the freedom from the hostility and interference of their former masters. Yet the blacks are still viewed as virtuous in a way the whites are not. This is revealed in the discussion between McCaslin and Ike when they debate the merits and defects of the blacks as an entire race. McCaslin speaks of their supposed faults and limitations, while Ike counters with their supposed virtues, their "pity and tolerance and forbearance and fidelity and love of children," a love, he continues, "whether of their own or not or black or not. And more: what they got not only from white people but not even despite white people because they had it already from the old free fathers a longer time free than us because we have never been free" ("Bear," 295). In terms of the way the blacks are depicted in Faulkner, what the above quote essentially means is that, in contrast to the whites, they are free of the corrupting and destructive effects of that aggressive assertion of the self against others and against nature in the attempt to achieve an advantage to the self, at whatever cost of injury to whatever stands in its way. That is, they are free of the fear of inner conflict and the compromising quality of the irrationl and unconscious psychic inheritance, and therefore are able to accept the bestial in man without fear and the loving capacity with gratitude, allowing the natural emotive capacity to be expressed with equanimity without distortion. Therefore, they are capable of accepting themselves as they are, of living in relation to themselves and to all other living things with integrity and respect. This is the legacy of the "old free fathers," the expression of which we have never before seen recognized by Faulkner and presented as the source of any virtue in the blacks, which is now taken as the thing lacking in the

Go Down, Moses

237

whites that prevents them from having ever "been free." Faulkner has come a long way with the introduction of such ideas, and though they constitute a fancifully absurd and contradictory, if not insulting, tribute, we believe Ike—and Faulkner also—to be sincere in their expression. Certainly this is the freedom that Ike saw ideally embodied in Sam Fathers, the adoption of which, as Ike says and apparently believes, has likewise set him free. It is also with the discussion of Ike and Sam in this novel that Faulkner for the first time, so far as I have been able to ascertain, begins to dignify the black race through the adoption, although still selective, of the capitalized designation of the proper noun, Negro, which he had always rendered before, and on occasion will continue to do so, in the lower case. The upper case appears consistently in Intruder in the Dust six years later, which may be the result of personal decision as well as editorial suasion. This whole matter seems to me not insignificant. Faulkner has always used the capitalized designation to achieve a particular emphasis or conceptual effect, such as his descriptions of lynch mobs seeking not a negro but a Negro. The application assumes a more idiosyncractically perverse character when he refers, for example, to a black serving maid, capable in her function, and unqestioning of her demeaning status, not as a negro or even "nigger," but a Negro, Negress, or even " N e g r o w o m a n . " Again, in moments of solemnity or dignity, in which blacks participate not as members of their race but as participants among others in the human community, the capitalized designation may appear, as it does in descriptions of the black participants in the communal ritual that is enacted at Samuel Worsham Beauchamp's funeral. The same applies to moments of crisis, or, to take another example, when the black person himself would seem to force himself upon the whites in such a way—if, indeed, such is possible in Faulkner's world—as to insist on being accorded the appropriate dignity. The one striking instance of this is the black man (and his depiction verges closely upon caricature) who presents

238

Go Down,

Moses

himself to McCaslin Edmonds to announce his intentions of marrying Fonsiba. He is capitalized with a vengeance. Faulkner does not capitalize the words Negroes or Negro, in the edition I have, in reference to Sam Fathers in " T h e Old People," yet, surprisingly, the capitalized designation makes its appearance in "The Bear," in reference to Sam, and even in descriptions that are almost identical in phraseology. It is as if in the very act of carrying forward Sam's story, Faulkner's réévaluation and appreciation increased proportionately, until it reached the point that necessitated the linguistic equivalent. In "Delta Autumn," Ike is now Uncle Ike, as old in his time as was Sam Fathers in his, years ago, when he accompanied Sam, his spiritual leader and mentor, and an assemblage of other men, into the woods. The same situation now ironically applies to the assemblage over which Ike presides as spiritual leader; the honor and dignity of the pursuit have been undermined, and the pilgrimage has been divested of its sacrosanct quality. This has been brought about by the necessary inclusion of the implements of civilization and modernism and their accompanying mentality, and by the contentiousness of the men, in conflict with themselves and with each other. Ike, the idealist, continues to bear witness to the wisdom acquired from Sam Fathers; but his example, as he is soon to learn, has not been sufficient to halt the course of evil in his family; his example in some ways may even have abetted it. Another McCaslin has (incestuously?) had a son with a black kinswoman whom he now rejects, an act for which he seeks reparation by attempting to pay money. The dishonor of the assault upon the doe, a vulnerable and defenseless creature, is made clear symbolically and literally in the equation between "doe," in its human form, Roth has been stalking and has betrayed, and the announcement about the literal doe he has killed at the end of the story. Thus the impiety of the crime

Go Down, Moses

239

against nature and the propensity for human injustice become inextricably linked. The jeering that the men subject Roth to is interesting. It acknowledges the unmanliness of his conduct toward the defenseless female and condemns him for it, while the woman's color seems at once cause both of his loss of honor as a white man, by associating with a black woman, and of the implication that he is doubly less of a man because of his weakness of character and inability to defiantly carry through with his intention of violating racial decorum. At the beginning, the direct references to the act of love, the details of Roth's physical involvement with the woman, are completely lost upon Uncle Ike, for whom the woods have served as his "mistress and wife." Legate speaks of Roth: "If it was just a buck he was coming all this distance for, now. But he's got a doe in there. Of course an old man like Uncle Ike cant be interested in no doe, not one that walks on two legs—when she's standing up, that is. pretty light-colored, too. The one he was after them nights last fall when he said he was coon-hunting, Uncle Ike. The one I figured maybe he was still running when he was gone all that month last January. But of course a old man like Uncle Ike aint got no interest in nothing like that." ("Delta Autumn," 337)

It is the involvement in the compromises and heartaches of life, and not merely in its gross and sexual aspect, from which Legate implies that Ike is exempted, and not merely because of his advanced age. It is a supreme irony, since Ike's act of renunciation grew precisely out of an awareness of such involvement. He had attempted to ease the pain of such involvement, at least in regard to some of its more blatant aspects over which man had control. But Roth seems to argue in favor of the determining contingencies of life, over which no man has control. What must be done and what will be done can only be seen in retrospect, after what has happened has happened. Ike says that "there are good men everywhere, at all times. Most men are. Some are just unlucky, because most men are a little bet-

240

Go Down, Moses

ter than their circumstances give them a chance to be. And I've known some that even the circumstances couldn't stop" ("Delta Autumn," 345). This naturally hits home to Roth, who replies: "So you've lived almost eighty years. And that's what you finally learned about the other animals you lived among. I suppose the question to ask you is, where have you been all the time you were dead?" Roth must desperately believe that it is only conventional pressure and the force of the law which make men do right. But what Roth is actually saying is that he wishes that it were absolutely the case that man be ruled by custom and authority, so that Roth himself can cite such custom and authority as the compelling reasons for his mistreatment of the girl, since he doesn't have the courage to be, as Ike says, better than his circumstances allow him to be. When the woman enters Ike's tent, she is said to bring some "intangible" signature of her black identity, "an effluvium which he knew he would recognize in a m o m e n t . . ." because her introduction had been in strict accord with the conventions of racial decorum as carried out by the black aide. Ike looks upon "the face indistinct and as yet only young and with dark eyes, queerly colorless . . ." ("Delta Autumn," 357). We must take this as the psychological elaboration of the actual distinctions in physiognomy which might be perceived, however elusive and indistinct, which to the white mind carry a negative value enforced by the ancient fear of race mixing and the loss of the characterizing identity of the white self. That it is a psychological perception is further indicated by the contradictions of a later view of her by Ike: "The dark wide bottomless eyes in the face's dead and toneless pallor which to the old man looked anything but dead, but young and incredibly and even ineradicably alive . . ." ("Delta Autumn," 360-61). The close approximation to, yet difference from, the white appearance is a source of fear and disturbance which negatively characterizes the woman's actual appearance and imposes a perceptual value upon it which obscures and traduces her actual fea-

Go Down, Moses

241

tures, so that she appears to have a "toneless pallor" and seems " d e a d " while at the same time she appears "incredibly and even ineradicably alive." But after he realizes that she is black, the psychological perception takes over entirely, and what beauty and distinctiveness she had, in and for itself, is completely eradicated by its judgment according to a white standard. It is not a standard of health or beauty necessarily, but only one of approximation to the conventionalized notion of what is taken to be recognizably and ineluctably white. He now looks at her and sees: " t h e pale lips, the skin pallid and dead-looking yet not ill, the dark and tragic and foreknowing eyes" ("Delta A u t u m n , " 361). The woman knows Roth well enough and says that he didn't have to promise marriage: " I knew what I was doing. I knew that to begin with, long before honor I imagine he called it told him the time had come to tell me in so many words what his code I suppose he would call it forbid him forever to d o " ("Delta A u t u m n , " 358). When Ike therefore asks her what she has come for, since she has refused the money, she is in the grip of a complex emotion far more difficult to articulate. It involves her acceptance of herself and her actions, and the recognition of the intangible loyalties of kinship which must be respected and to which she bears witness. There is also the recognition of her strength and her belief in the necessity of responsible conduct, with which she wishes to confront those who have failed in such a recognition. She does this not only because it is the right thing to do, but also because of the inexorable bond of her love and kinship, which compels her concern for those who have come to have a meaning in her life. Thus she speaks about the McCaslin family, black and white, and implicates Ike in Roth's inability to realize his possibilities: " I would have made a man of him. He's not a man yet. You spoiled him. You, and Uncle Lucas and Aunt Molly. But mostly you" ("Delta A u t u m n , " 360). It is appropriate that her accusation of his irresponsibility, the contribution he has made toward the creation of Roth's character and the ineffectuality of his attempt to help the blacks, should oc-

242

Go Down, Moses

cur simultaneously with his recognition of her as a black. The complexity of the issue of the Southern inheritance, and of black-white relations, is revealed in all the depth and magnitude of its persistent and ineradicably destructive influence. I think it is now, because Ike truly realizes this that, "in a voice of amazement, pity, and outrage" with regard to the continuing impossibility of her as a black woman marrying the white Roth, he cries out "You're a nigger!" Because he still feels what he feels within himself—the strength of the phobic reaction—how much stronger must such feelings be in those who, unlike himself, make no effort to accommodate the blacks and treat them with dignity and respect, those who in fact actively resist and condemn such attitudes toward the blacks and the attempt to treat them with any human equity? Thus he thinks in despair that only in a thousand years can true equality become a reality. The truths of the heart in the anguish of suffering may even be denied to him, to Ike himself, and righteousness may only be a self-delusion. He had bought his way out of responsibility in the same way that Roth is now attempting to do; and he is being used by Roth, as the guilt of one descends upon and reflects the guilt of another, to serve his purpose. He has had his awful revelation, which is one driven home when the woman accosts him with a reminder of the power and necessity of love in human relations. That she loves Roth we have no doubt. What we feel compelled to ask is why she should love him, even as we know, as she has just pointed out, that no one can fathom the power and the secret workings and ways of the heart. Nevertheless, I take her protestations of love, as a black, for a white who dishonorably uses and abuses her and cannot bring himself to allow himself to respect her, as simply one more, though immeasurably more complex, instance of the white need for black forgiveness. It is the metaphorical equivalent of wish fulfillment that no matter what the injury done to the black, it becomes finally canceled and finally meaningless by the reassuring and undaunted capacity of the blacks for love, quite in the man-

Go Down, Moses

243

ner of Ike's earlier statements in "The Bear" of the ability of the blacks to love all things—children in this instance—whether their own or not, whether black or not. It may be that Sam Fathers' blessing of the white son Isaac, accepting him into the mythic brotherhood of the people of color, absolving him of white guilt so that he has the authority to go among his white brethren correcting their faults, discharging the mandate received from the oppressed victims of color—it may be that this too is a metaphorical enactment of the same belief in and expectation of the inevitability of black forgiveness. Nevertheless, Ike, courageous and admirable individual that he is, acknowledges the bond of kinship with the woman and accepts the son, the heir, recognizing the necessity of physical contact, of flesh upon flesh, movingly rendered by Faulkner, as he reaches to place his "gnarled, bloodless, bonelight bonedry old man's fingers" upon the "smooth young flesh where the strong old blood ran after its long lost journey back to home" ("Delta Autumn," 362). He gives to the woman, as the child's inheritance, the one thing he has to give that signifies the truth of his life as he has tried to live it—the hunting horn, symbol of brotherhood and spiritual solvency. She accepts it; and perhaps it is the thing, the gesture, that she had come to receive from him in the first place, not really in expectation or hope of its occurrence, but simply in the recognition of the possibilities of the goodness that Ike had said exist in "men everywhere, at all times." Her physical presence allows her to fufill her moral obligations to herself. In doing so, she provides the occasion for Ike to fulfill his own. The unusual mixture of realistic with superhuman and supernatural elements in "Pantaloon in Black" constitutes a special and unique presentation of themes and concerns which are nevertheless central to Faulkner's work. On the realistic side, verisimilitude is established with respect to the way details of character and

244

Go Down, Moses

social setting conform in a recognizable way to Faulkner's usual depiction of the blacks, their mode of living, and the nature of the relations that obtain between them and the whites. A connection is also made with the story of the McCaslins, which is situated within a social and historical milieu. The Edmonds plantation and its environs constitute the seat of the action, and reference is made to Lucas and Molly Beauchamp, who also reside within the area. This reference is not merely in the service of atmospheric coloring, since the thing referred to—the fire on the hearth set by Lucas as a symbolic act of consecration of the marital union—serves as the inspiration of Rider's own act and is a reflection of his feelings with regard to his marriage to Mannie. It is an instance of the love and respect and the shared confrontation with life's problems on the part of the marital partners. Though such a confrontation is rendered by means of the contingencies of black life, it nevertheless expresses the attitude toward marriage that Faulkner considers to be ideal, usually unattainable, usually undermined by actions beyond man's control, as is the case here, or violated by man's egocentricity and the force of his perversions. That Rider is a special and unusual black man is clear, and the manner in which his distinctiveness is expressed reveals the mythic conception of the black as well as a realistic assessment of what such a person, in his time and place, might be like. The emphasis is upon his brute strength, raised to the superhuman, his primitivism, the elemental force and instinctual sources of his nature, and his nonratiocinative self-sufficiency. This is consistent with Faulkner's usual depiction of the blacks. What is different, I think, and makes Rider's masculine function comparable to that of the whites, is his sense of pride, defiance, and vanity, his awareness of his superior prowess over black and white men alike. He feels the necessity, before Mannie's death, to prove himself, his superiority, in conventional exploits; after her death, he wishes to prove himself in a challenge against fate itself. In this respect he seems to share, with

Go Down, Moses

245

especially some of the white aristocrats, that dissatisfaction with the circumstances in which man finds himself, the willingness, bred of

an

illusory

sense

of

omnipotence

and

invulnerability,

to

challenge such circumstances and to enforce an order of his own. He expresses the desire to achieve a kind of self-transcendence by carrying forth such intentions. The requisite means that enable Rider to function in such a way, his brute strength and elemental force, are attributes of blackness; but the strength of will, the human pride, the defiance, are no different from the feelings and resources which animate the white protagonists. I think it is the elemental will to assertiveness, the instinctual drives toward self-definition, which are the sources of this behavior in both black and white, with the difference that such forces can be more nakedly revealed in the black Rider than in a white protagonist. Rider is shown to be directly in communion with nature. Y e t it is his human nature, his self-conscious awareness and need to provide explanations for untoward circumstances, which make him unable to exist in accord with natural processes and accept the forces of the universe which affect the course of human destiny. On the contrary, Rider demands that fate offer a justification for its treatment of him that he can accept. Since, of course, no justification can be forthcoming—he rejects the humility and the solace of the Christian acceptance of God's will—he is condemned to defiantly assert his ineffectual strength against the operation of forces greater

than himself.

He does so in a

self-destructive

challenge that can only reveal the puniness of man's role in the universe and offer no solution to his problem. Revealed also are the limitations of morality, about which, in the end, he can't stop thinking. His conception of justice is based upon the limited perspective of the supremacy of man's powers, as conceived in his ability to execute his will. When Rider tests his strength against fate, it is with the idea that if he can be defeated, then he might be satisfied, and justice, so to

246

Go Down,

Moses

speak, would be in the world; the weak cannot prevent things from happening to them, while the strong deserve to triumph. The drinking of the alcohol, the handling of the heavy log, and the final entrance into the crap game constitute, as Leonard A. Blanchard has pointed out in a perceptive essay which takes a position toward this story similar to my own, his "challenging of the same fate which struck down Mannie to take his life also." 4 He must restlessly seek ways to assuage his grief and justify the affront to his pride and what is now his sense of the uselessness of his splendid human qualities. When he began to work again on his job, and subsequently took up the heavy log, Faulkner says that "then he could stop needing to invent to himself reasons for his breathing, until after a while he began to believe he had forgot about breathing since now he could not hear himself above the steady thunder of the rolling logs . . ." ( " P a n t a l o o n , " 145). Blanchard makes a summarizing statement of Rider's predicament to which I subscribe and which I believe can be related to the way I have tried to describe Rider's similarity to other Faulknerian protagonists: It has not been generally recognized that by creating in Rider a symbolic representation of the primitive man of brute strength and pure feeling who, in utter disregard of the supernatural, would assume full responsibility for and control over his destiny, Faulkner illustrates that the pride and the self-reliance which do not consider and respect those forces beyond the powers of man to comprehend or order are inevitably doomed. 6

We have seen the many ways in which Faulkner has demonstrated that the attempt of man to assume full responsibility for and control over his destiny is doomed. It invests m a n with an illusory sense of his self-importance and omnipotence which leads to acts destructive to himself and to others. It alienates him from his sense of a rightful place within nature's scheme and the natural chain of life, which he ceases to treat with respect. It makes him suppress the force of the irrational within himself, in his misguided

Go Down, Moses

247

and impossible attempt to carry forth his intentions in an exclusively rational way. It seems to me not accidental that Rider describes this condition, as he mulls over his own predicament, as being "snakebit and bound to die" ("Pantaloon," 152). Rider means that he is already poisoned—"pizen cant hawm me"—and is ready to take on any dare, since he can't be harmed any further. This is an interesting conception. It seems that he has had to compromise, in view of the limitations of mortality, and the ineffable powers of the universe greater than himself, which he must accept. But his refusal to accept his human limitations, and his vulnerability to the forces of nature, which determine human destiny, condemn him to an endless and increasingly self-defeating and destructive series of repetitious and defiant acts of daring, in an attempt to challenge the irrevocable. His attitude is the same as that of Faulkner's defiant and despairing aristocratic protagonists—I am thinking here particularly of the Sartoris brothers John and Bayard—in their attempt to prove the triumphant ascendency of their heroic prowess. They have as their mandate the challenge of emulating and transcending a prototypal model of heroic behavior already set by distant forebears who, by virtue of their position as original instigators of the heroic pattern, are to just that extent purer embodiments of man's elemental nature. Such an idea is revealed in the defiant masculine striving for self-assertion, for defining the self in the way it chooses, for so powerfully projecting upon the world the force of the self that it is freed from the bonds of mortality. The difference between Rider and these protagonists is that Rider is a direct embodiment of the elemental force itself. This view of him is facilitated by the realistic depiction of Rider's physical attributes, the emphasis upon the strong primitive and instinctive force of his nature, and the unavoidable because mythic and unconscious (or even conscious) recognition that such things

248

Go Down, Moses

are most appropriately represented in a black. The situation seems to me a kind of metaphorical statement of man's destiny, from which point of view Rider, like the aristocratic protagonists, is a personification of Fallen Man, snake-bitten, deprived of Eden and invested now with the tragic attributes of his human nature. His endowment as the fallen human causes him to be the inheritor of splendid powers which in his pride allow him to imagine himself a potent rival of fate; yet the bitter reminder of his mortality is constant, death is inevitable, and, because its occurrence is a matter over which he has no control, it is seemingly capricious. Such capriciousness can also appear to be the character of life, against which the defiant heroes strive to enforce their own justice and their own law. The struggle of these protagonists in Faulkner, as we know, is doomed, in the same way and for similar reasons as is Rider's. Rider is like them in the endless necessity of the challenge, and he is like the original forebear in the primal and authoritative manner of his assertion. The original forebears—John Sartoris, Carothers McCaslin, for instance—are often referred to by Faulkner as the "progenitorless" ones, metaphorically responsible for their own creating of themselves, creators of their own patterns and of the course of life they pursued. In a similar though not necessarily equivalent way, Rider too is "progenitorless," having no parents he can remember and being raised by his aunt, referred to as "Spoot" (p. 151); but it is the identity he has achieved himself, in making his way through the world as an adult, that cause him to be dubbed Rider. Thus too he creates himself, and in an act which irrevocably sets him apart from the family with whom he grew up. Their love for him remains constant, but he can no longer judge himself by their standards. He says to his aunt's husband, a frail old man, "you cant keep up" (p. 148) when he comes to offer solace and convey the aunt's request that he come see her. The aunt's husband is significantly diminished

Go Down, Moses

249

in comparison to the aunt, just as all the other black men are significantly diminished in comparison to Rider. When he does come to see his aunt, she makes him admit, through the respect he has for the force of her person, that the alcohol hasn't done him any good. But she can get no further concession from him, either through the power of her concern for him, or through the appeal of sentiment based on the bond that existed between them of old, which she attempts to evoke by referring to his childhood name. It is the same kind of situation that exists between the young aristocratic protagonists, in their predicaments, and the women in their lives, often aunts, who try to help them. And I think Rider's rejection of his aunt's Christian solution to his problems in some significant way reflects Faulkner's attitude. Such a solution involves the humility that is necessary for a sane perspective on life, but it also projects a contemptible acquiescence which undermines man's necessary sense of his strength, self-sufficiency, and power of endurance. This represents a persistent polarity in Faulkner's work. It is accurate to say that Rider has not one but two visions of Mannie, each attendant upon the process of a radical change in his life. The first occurs when "he saw Mannie, whom he had known all his life, for the first time and said to himself: 'Ah'm thu wid all d a t ' " ("Pantaloon," 138), referring to the unrestrained, undisciplined, and undomesticated character of his past life. The second vision occurs when he sees her spirit, which serves as the occasion of his full realization of his irrevocable separation from her. It reveals the weight of his grief at such cruelty and injustice, which he refuses to accept, and his desire to pit himself against fate in a demand for justification. His first vision of Mannie in the flesh is a most remarkable rendering of the masculine capacity in Faulkner for the idealization of woman, this time given a realistic and responsible application. Man desires to join with woman as the creative source of his salvation and potential immortality; and woman, in her capacity as

250

Go Down, Moses

domesticator and nurturer of life, reclaims man from his irresponsible pursuits and provides an appropriate place, within the confines of the family, to realize his potential. This precisely describes the relations between Rider and Mannie, the true sanctity of the marital union, as it seems to me has hardly ever before been presented by Faulkner so openly and movingly and without distorting negativism. And, because of our preoccupation with other aspects of the story, the direct contrast Faulkner makes, between Rider and his wife and the sheriff and his, could easily become obscured. Mannie and her loving attendance upon her household, the way she cares for Rider's needs and the way he cares for hers, and the way she is fulfilled, are contrasted with the sheriffs "choleric" (p. 154) wife, who speaks harshly to and bullies her husband, and declares that "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" ("Pantaloon," 159), and criticizes him for his failure to do his job, seeing him as lazy and irresponsible. When Rider sees his wife's spirit, the reader is given to understand that it is a real physical emanation, not a delusion, not only because of the care taken to evoke the fact of her actual presence, but also because of the dog's reaction to her as a physical reality. One feels that it is because of Rider's communion with the primitive and mythic forces of nature that the spirit can in fact make an appearance. And he is not afraid of her: "He didn't breathe nor speak until he knew his voice would be all right, his face fixed too not to alarm her" ("Pantaloon," 140). This seems to me one of the finest and most remarkable moments of the rendering of character in Faulkner's work, this love of a strong man for a woman, and it is also one of the most moving and remarkable instances in Faulkner of mature love—or, rather, not the presentation of mature love but the presentation of the possibility, the promise of it, since it is not in fact fulfilled. As the spirit begins to fade, he says to it, "'Wait'

Go Down, Moses

251

. . . talking as sweet as he had ever heard his voice speak to a woman: 'Den lemme go wid you, honey'" ("Pantaloon," 140-41). But she is fading, and he feels between them the gulf separating the flesh and the spirit, "the insuperable barrier of that very strength which could handle alone a log which would have taken any two other men. . . ." It is also interesting to note here that Cleanth Brooks suggests that Rider's vision of his dead wife compares thematically with Ike McCaslin's vision, in "The Old People," of the "immortal quarry." 8 This seems eminently right to me, and may also serve as a minor reinforcement for the position I have taken that Rider represents some of Faulkner's main concerns. Often in Faulkner, as he approaches a sympathetic understanding of the blacks, there is a proportionate intensification of what I can only best describe as the effects—blatant, subtle, obscured, contradictory—of his inherited phobic reaction, a reaction that distorts or undermines, even when the intentions are honorable. One might think, even though one recognizes the deliberate exercise in irony, that the overall portrait of Rider nevertheless conforms to such a procedure—that the humanity of the blacks can only be revealed through the imposition of some fundamental limitation, or through the perception of them as the alien and unassimilable Other. One can easily see the irony of Rider's possession of his unique qualities. They are here focused upon a fiction—the wife he had is finally only an illusion of a wife. The ideal union with her, measured against the judgment of reality, is meaningless, reality here being what the whites think about his character and his relations with his wife. One could suggest that Rider's situation is a special instance of that masculine idealization of woman which substitutes an image, here literally realized, for the love object. It is the perfect rendering of the idea, suggested by the recurring impediments to its enactment in Faulkner, that love is pain and anguish, not capable of consummation on this earth. Again, considering the peculiarities of Faulkner's view of the blacks, one can consider the

252

Go Down, Moses

idea that the heightened effect of his use of the supernatural is greatly facilitated by the myth and stereotype of black receptivity to the spirit world. So the very depth and intensity of Rider's feelings, as they are so paradoxically and ironically expressed, misrepresent his true attitude. The more his sensitive nature is tormented by his loss, the more he appears only a crude, unfeeling brute. He is, among his own people, as totally alone as he is among the whites. This sense of being alone, at least, unites him, as a black, with the white heroes he resembles, in their defenselessness and perplexity. He shares with them a recognition of the intractability of life, a thing not subject to the human will. The heroic opposition to this intractability and the failure to effect change—a characteristically white concern—is the thing now which makes Rider a typical Faulknerian protagonist. As I have already indicated in my discussions of this novel, Go Down, Moses is a culmination of the themes fundamental to Faulkner's work, which he gives explicit treatment within the confines of the McCaslin family. Carothers McCaslin's descendants, black and white, live under the constant shadow of his mythic apotheosis. To do so is a difficult task, and men like Ike McCaslin and Roth Edmonds do not emerge victorious. Within the confines of the story, however, Lucas Beauchamp—grandson of Carothers by a slave woman—does. Through his point of view Faulkner presents the decay of the tradition, which is brought into strong relief through the force of Lucas' personality acting against it. His is the consciousness through which the present is to be assessed and viewed; he is the bearer of the McCaslin heritage. Lucas, in contrast to Isaac, is vigorous, tougher, more rigorously self-regarding, like Carothers himself. Lucas shares attributes with Carothers that are the basis, not merely of their psychological identification, but of their shared exemplification of the masculine self-

Go Down,

Moses

253

assertive principle. Lucas is like Carothers because he imitates him; yet, at the same time, he imitates him—or he acts like him—because he possesses the same inner substance that was expressed in Carothers. This inner quality, so expressed, takes on its appearance in the hard and uncompromising masculine will to power and dominance. Faulkner reveals it as a raceless and timeless concept, mythic in its power of evocation of the masculine function and its possibilities. The irony here is that this enactment of masculine selfassertiveness, normally taken as an exclusive attribute of the whites, is now most potently expressed in a black. In conjunction with this, it is interesting to consider the particular way in which Lucas becomes a " M c C a s l i n . " Since Carothers, Lucas' grandfather, was also his great-grandfather, having sired Lucas from the slave girl who was also his daughter, Lucas is therefore an inheritor, as it were, of a double dose of the McCaslin substance, and each time from the original source. But Lucas' possession of the assertive masculine possibilities also implies that Lucas' actions be delimited or qualified in some way by the constraining effects of his heritage as a black. Lucas has an opposing moral sense and acceptance of the limitations of life which finally prevent him from causing harm to others or from destroying himself, in contrast to the white protagonists. And, in any case, all of Lucas' actions are executed within the confines of the McCaslin family heritage into which he is received with ambivalent tolerance and an understanding not found in the society at large. Roth Edmonds looks at Lucas, at the face which was not at all a replica even in caricature of his grandfather McCaslin's but which had heired and now reproduced with absolute and shocking fidelity the old ancestor's entire generation and thought—the face which . . . was a composite of a whole generation of fierce and undefeated young Confederate soldiers, embalmed and slightly mummified—and he thought with amazement and something very like horror: He's more like old Carothers than all the rest of us put together, including old Carothers. He is both heir and prototype simultaneously of all the geography and cli-

254

Go Down,

Moses

mate and biology which sired old Carothers and alt the rest of us and our kind, myriad, countless, faceless, even nameless now except himself who fathered himself, intact and complete, contemptuous, as old Carothers must have been, of all blood black white yellow or red, including his own. ("Fire," 118)

The action of " T h e Fire and the H e a r t h " opens with Lucas' involvement in the running of an illicit distillery, the deceit and evasion he must engage in as a result with Edmonds, and the comic complications of his dealings with George Wilkins, a shiftless and incompetent black who is also involved in the operation of a distillery and who also has the presumption to court Lucas' daughter. Lucas is contemptuous of George, and Faulkner's presentation is such that the psychological distance between Lucas and George is as great as that imagined between George and a white man. At the outset these machinations concerning the operation of a distillery could be thought of as typical "nigger" behavior. This, combined with Lucas' subsequent mania to find hidden gold that drives his aging wife to seek a divorce, has a surface stereotyped verisimilitude. But Lucas is not a social being; he is one oi the original McCaslin-made individualists. H e is to have vices and weaknesses, but he will always assume responsibility for his actions. Faulkner therefore wishes to show that the things Lucas does wrong, the excesses he indulges in, are not peculiar to blacks and an indication that blacks are different from white people in this respect. Faulkner wishes to show Lucas as an individual in the sense that he is not a "nigger." Faulkner catalogues event after event, showing Lucas always in a stance of self-affirmation. As Lucas approaches Edmonds' house, he compares the changed conditions under which his landlord lives with the way things were in the past, and he thinks of events in the past that reflect the history of the region, the traditions and the actions which have created him and the people around him. Faulkner makes use of flashbacks and stream-of-consciousness monologues. Recessed into the texture

Go Down, Moses

255

of the story, as it reflects the necessary workings of Faulkner's narrative technique, this merging of past and present is simply another application of Faulkner's concept of time as one simultaneous temporal sequence. Lucas sees the mark of modern technology upon Edmonds' life and sees this as a weakening of will, disparagingly comparing Roth to the vital and energetic forebears. Edmonds, moreover, is a McCaslin descendant through the female line and this fact has forever been the signature of his inferiority. It is certainly a testimony to Faulkner's self-evident sense of the superiority of patriarchy that Roth's father Zack, when questioned by the young Roth, accepts his putative inferiority as a matter of course, as a result of being a descendant of the female McCaslin. It is a psychological as well as a physical sex-linked inheritance that is being referred to here; it is the fact of possessing the masculine "blood" that counts. This naturally reflects Lucas' sense of what it means to be a McCaslin. For example, Lucas, in his commitment to the heroic ideal, has never understood or sympathized with Isaac's principles or his actions in repudiating his heritage. For Lucas, Isaac's giving up the land would be the equivalent of his giving up the mythic mandates of his possession of McCaslin blood. Lucas knocks on Edmonds' window pane preparing to set his scheme into operation, and when Edmonds comes out, his appearance and the charged nature of the scene remind Lucas of the time when he confronted Edmonds' father Zack 43 years ago, the night Roth was born. That night he swam the flooded river to get the doctor and returned to find the white woman dead and his own wife Molly "already established in the white man's house." It ought to be mentioned here that the aristocratic woman had such a decided proclivity for dying off early, for not enduring, that the white man had a necessarily practical need for the black women, among other needs. Their dying off must be metaphorical in some way, because no similar mention is made of the black women dying off. Their vulnerability, in fact, must surely have been greater than that

256

Go Down, Moses

of the white women, and their birth rate, certainly, was as great if not greater. Edmonds has kept Lucas' wife for six months without thinking to return her, until Lucas, realizing his outrage, goes to demand her back. Edmonds, in keeping her, was merely arrogating to himself the traditional privileges allowed him by the racial conventions. It is the exercise of this right against Lucas which incenses him, through Faulkner seems to wish to specify that, apart from being guilty of this offense, Edmonds, as a man of honor, was telling the truth when he denies having had sexual relations with Molly. This is a matter that can never be known to Lucas, though in regard to rectifying his honor, it could have made little difference if it were known. But the implication that Faulkner seems to be making is that there is a difference in the white man's mind between his using Molly as an object to serve his household needs and his holding her in concubinage. When he asks Lucas what kind of man did Lucas take him to be, Lucas' answer can only be that he takes him to be the kind of man he appears to be, one who takes black women into his house and uses them as he pleases. Lucas, looking at his wife the night she has returned, thinks in incredulous rage, " w h y she aint even knowed unto right now that I ever even suspected.'''' This seems to refer to the sexual implications of her staying with Edmonds. It is significant that Molly remains silent and even, it seems, a little resentful at Lucas' probing into her affairs, as if she remained still in a kind of secret league with Edmonds. However, the complicated nature of the confrontation with Edmonds is yet to unfold in all its ramifications. Molly has brought Edmonds' infant with her and the sight of the white infant nestling against the brown of her breast incenses Lucas. He springs toward Molly and the child she is suckling in her arms before the hearth, and she catches his wrist, restraining him: "'Whar's ourn?' he cried. 'Whar's mine?'" She points vehemently to their son sleeping peacefully on the bed, declaring that it was not Edmonds who made her

Go Down, Moses

257

bring the child. She did so of her own volition because she could not bear to leave it. Her objection is that in the broadest humane sense it would be inconceivable to leave it, irrespective of her personal feelings for it—though she does not attempt to deny her own personal affection for it. Molly behaves according to Faulkner's prescription concerning the maternal function and the loving nature of blacks. Her love for the child and defense of her actions in taking and caring for it supersede her sharing in the outrage of her husband at the insult against the integrity of their marital union. The sense of honor that inflames Lucas does not seem to apply to her, nor is the situation conceived by her as involving a consideration of her own personal integrity. When, after a series of fortuitous events, Lucas has returned safely from his second visit to Edmonds with the intent of killing him, he and Molly afterward establish a normal pattern for their daily life together—tenderly, banteringly, with an edge to their humor. Somewhat gruffly he inquires about an activity of the day: "She went on, neither answering nor looking back, impervious, tranquil, somehow serene. Nor was he any longer watching her. He breathed slow and quiet. Women, he thought. Women. I wont never know. I dont want to. I ruther never to know than to find out later I have been fooled''' ("Fire," 59). It should be pointed out here that Lucas' dilemma with regard to his wife is only one particular instance of the conflict of attitudes between men and women in Faulkner. From such a perspective we are to understand that Molly's necessary desire to minister to the needs of the child, and to do so regardless of the circumstances involved, constitutes in and of itself her recognition and acceptance of an ethic of behavior that is binding upon her in its importance before all other considerations. Such a conception ideally expresses the virtues of Faulkner's women, who stabilize civilization and are the source of its endurance. From this point of view, Molly cannot be thought to have betrayed herself with reference to the loyalty she owes to Lucas and the values he espouses. She is rendered as

258

Go Down, Moses

satisfying her allegiance to values greater than those of Lucas, and values also which emphasize the selfless and sacrificial rather than the self-serving action. One can see how Faulkner's general conception of woman's function, applied here to black women, incorporates the effects of the history of victimization of black women, projecting upon them as natural traits what may more serviceably be thought of as the consequence of their degraded exploitation. The legacy of such exploitation is obviously at work in Edmonds' handling of Molly, and so is the conception of her which allows her to view her cohabitation with him without qualm and as no violation of her marital commitment to Lucas. But woman's refusal to adopt masculine notions of honor is also something of which Faulkner's white men find occasion to accuse their women. When Edmonds does not come to get his son, which would have signaled his adherence to the code of reciprocal relations between equal human beings, Lucas proposes to go and kill him. Assuming full responsibility for his act—because he expects either to die or be lynched afterwards, since it is not his way to run away—he prepares himself. He puts into the sleeping Molly's shoes, which had belonged to the dead white woman, a kerchief knotted with coins which he had begun saving since he was ten years old. Had Edmonds come for the child Lucas would have forgiven him. It is the thing that, as he believes, old Carothers would have wanted him to do. But Edmonds had tried to demoralize him. He had tried to beat him, '"and you won't never,' says Lucas, 'not even when I am hanging dead from the limb this time tomorrow with the coal oil still burning, you wont never.'" He continues: "All you have to beat is me," Lucas tells him. "I got to beat old Carothers. Get your pistol" ("Fire," 53-54). Lucas has to "beat" Carothers by proving that the masculine imperative is no less potent in him, a black, than it was in Carothers, a white. For Lucas this means an honorable acquitting of and accounting for the self in all situations. The psychological power and physical prowess of the black man

Go Down, Moses

259

are in contrast to the quietly diminished, though dignified, appearance of the white man. When Lucas flings away his razor and demands that Edmonds get the pistol, it is then that Edmonds makes the reply that causes them to fight: "Come on then. Do you think I'm any less a McCaslin just because I was what you call woman-made to it? Or maybe you aint even a woman-made McCaslin but just a nigger that's got out of hand?" ("Fire," 55). Lucas has been attempting to act by the code and Edmonds has again tried to undermine him. It is not so much a statement of selfdefense as a denial of Lucas' right as a black man to represent the ideals he articulates, and, therefore, in this context, the statement is tantamount to a denial of his humanity: Then he cried, and not to the white man and the white man knew it; he saw the whites of the negro's eyes rush suddenly with red like the eyes of a bayed animal—a bear, a fox: "I tell you! Dont ask too much of me!" [Lucas says], I was wrong, the white man thought. I have gone too far. But it was too late. ("Fire," 55)

They fight and Lucas overpowers Edmonds, striking and flinging him away, obtaining the pistol. It misfires, however, as in the decisive moment Lucas pulls the trigger. It is here that Lucas' stream-of-consciousness shifts away from the earlier time to the present and the reader is not given the details of the resolution of the struggle. Afterwards, we find him in the fields, musing upon the unspent cartridge: Because I wouldn't have used paid. I would have waited for paid. So I reckon I aint got old Carothers, he thought. I needed

the second one, he thought. I would the rope, even the coal oil. I would Carothers' blood for nothing, after all. him and he come and spoke for me. {"Fire,"

have have Old 58)

But what really "spoke for" him was his own innate capacity for honor and integrity, as a human being, as a black person, which in this context, unfortunately, is inextricable from the McCaslin heri-

260

Go Down, Moses

tage. Faulkner can only allow for Lucas' integrity as it reflects his McCaslin heritage. Similarly, Lucas' real capacity for the demonstration of integrity is in complete contradiction to the inhumanity and moral callousness of the real Carothers as he existed in the flesh. Lucas actualizes not merely the bravery and daring, which did exist, but also the honorable possibilities of the mythic inheritance that were not in fact observed by the original progenitor; yet Lucas, in doing so, confers upon them a reality that they did not have until he brought them into being. Curiously enough, what Lucas does is similar to what Isaac does, though the particular context, and motivations for their actions, are worlds apart from each other. Yet each of them performs an act of honor and integrity which is of the tradition but has never before really been performed within it.

VI Intruder in the Dust

Intruder

in

the

Dust

continues

Faulkner's

blacks first begun in the portraits of S a m B e a u c h a m p in Go Down,

Moses.

réévaluation Fathers and

of

the

Lucas

In Faulkner's new perspective,

the despised and victimized blacks achieve a humanity shared in c o m m o n with the whites. Lucas is the very image of the precarious life that is the lot of the blacks, the hardship and indignity passively suffered. Y e t , at the same time, he is the image of their endurance and triumph over almost insurmountable odds as well as the image of their possibilities for self-respect, self-assertion, and a love o f and demand for justice and honorable conduct. T h e emphasis now, as revealed in Lucas, is upon the a u t o n o m y of the blacks and the integrity of their personhood, and upon the recognition and rejection by the blacks o f the demeaning aspects o f their status in society. In Faulkner's conception, the means through which Lucas acquires his sense of integrity and his forcefulness is his identification with his white M c C a s l i n forebears. This provides him with a legitimate source of strength and family tradition, but it denies him the possibilities of such things occurring in any w a y as a result of his black inheritance. Y e t Faulkner's general depiction of the blacks in this novel, his attempt to confer upon them a humanity shared in c o m m o n with the whites, and his depiction of the shocked attitude on the part of the whites, is laudable and is a significant departure from the caricatured and denigrated images of the blacks in his earlier w o r k . But Faulkner knows too well the real difficulties faced by the blacks in society, difficulties imposed upon them and resisted

262

Intruder in the Dust

and resented by them, but endured, at a price of great anguish and suffering. Lucas' story, as it is played off against the transition into manhood of young Charles Mallison, is yet another instance of a Faulknerian male protagonist experiencing his necessary confrontation with the realities of life and making the choice for good or evil with regard to how he will conduct himself as an adult. A s is the case with the other protagonists, there is the perilous effort of the morally informed will to act in the interests of conscience and humanity in an attempt to counteract the effects of man's capacity for evil. In the same way that S a m Fathers chooses Ike McCaslin, because of his receptivity to the things S a m has to teach him, to be the one out of whom the redemptive potential of the whites can be suitably wrought, so Lucas chooses Charles. Of central importance therefore is his awareness of the inhumanity of the tradition he inherits and is expected to uphold, as he encounters Lucas, the black man who does not conform to the codes of behavior Charles has taken for granted. He is forced to look at these codes anew. He evaluates them, finding them lacking, and rejects them; but he becomes reconciled in the end to an enlightened awareness of his responsibility to his homeland. Again, a general effort to reevaluate the lives of black people is made in the book. There is the admirable portrait of Charles' intelligent and courageous friend, Aleck Sander. Though he is seen as an exception to his race, the fact is taken as a matter of course, as with Charles. The integrity of Faulkner's attitude toward Sander is shown most conspicuously in the details of the grave-digging scene, in which we see Aleck performing in a quick, sure, and thoughtful way. One finds this an admirable tendency in the book and encounters it in unexpected places, for instance, when Charles is sitting at the breakfast table after the unearthing of the grave the previous night and he sees his mother "setting the cup of coffee down

Intruder in the Dust

263

in front of him in a way that if Paralee [their black maid] had done it she would have said that Paralee had slopped it at him." 1 Human relations begin to take precedence over social ties, just as Charles' intuitive faculties begin to take precedence over his uncle's logic. Miss Habersham, of aristocratic stock, comes to the aid of Lucas not only because she believes him innocent but also because she has an emotional tie to Lucas' wife, Molly. She must put aside her work and come to the aid of "an arrogant insufferable old nigger who got the whole county upset by trying to pretend he murdered a white man" (Intruder, 189). Her concern with Lucas is a merging of a number of factors: the effects of traditional paternalism; the intense and contradictory loyalties between blacks and whites bred of a caste system that forces the two into intimate cohabitation; and the untrammeled receptivity, as Faulkner describes it, of women to the truth, when the truth appears contradicted by circumstance. The portrayal of Lucas' character is obliquely rendered by Faulkner, to be guessed at through the pattern of Lucas' behavior. A compelling example of what I am referring to occurs when Lucas enters the store, with what is taken to be arrogant self-assurance, in order to buy a box of gingersnaps. He is immediately accosted by one of the lower-class white men, said to be slightly intoxicated: "You goddamn biggity stiffnecked stinking burrheaded Edmonds sonofabitch." Lucas replies: "I aint a Edmonds. I dont belong to these new folks. I belongs to the old lot. I'm a McCaslin." When his interlocutor counters with, "Keep on walking around here with that look on your face and what you'll be is crowbait," the situation moves toward its inevitable climax in the following manner: For another moment or at least a half one Lucas looked at the white man with a calm speculative detachment; slowly the carton in one of his hands tilted further until another gingersnap dropped into the other palm, then lifting the corner of his lip he sucked an upper tooth, quite loud in the abrupt silence but with no implication whatever of either derision or rebuttal

264

Intruder in the Dust

or even disagreement, with no implication of anything at all but almost abstractly, as a man eating gingersnaps in the middle of a hundredmile solitude would—if he did—suck a tooth, and said: "Yes, I heard that idea before, and I notices that the folks that brings it up aint even Edmondses." {Intruder, 19)

It is a complex rendering of anger and retaliatory insult that, though greatly restrained, is nevertheless greatly effective. Does the restraint reflect either Lucas' conception of his psychological advantage, or the unshakable residue, now a character trait, of black passivity, or both? Insofar as Lucas brings off the insult with such despatch, he reveals that same monstrously intact self-control which characterizes some of the most compelling of Faulkner's white characters. Such action marks a self-investment and selfpossession so complete that the character seems divorced from the sources of the emotions which at the same time so powerfully animate him. When the white man, enraged, attacks Lucas, he is restrained by the proprietor's son, who urgently admonishes Lucas to leave the store. "But still Lucas didn't move, quite calm, not even scornful, not even contemptuous, not even very alert [emphasis added], the gaudy carton still poised in his left hand and the small cake in the right, just watching while the proprietor's son and his companion held the foaming and cursing white man" (Intruder, 20). Finally Lucas leaves, unconcerned, still chewing. Lucas is certainly selfconsciously provocative, yet he doesn't act aggressively, although he must surely be aware that what he does do is as dangerous as if he'd struck his accoster in the face. What, we wonder, would he have done had his attacker not been restrained? Does he disdain even to fight his low-born accoster, a creature of no moment, whose resentful and almost despairing outburst indicates just how much space Lucas' arrogant posture of self-sufficiency takes up in the white man's imaginative life and just how diminished a person the

Intruder in the Dust

265

man imagines himself in comparison to Lucas, so that Lucas can contemptuously dismiss him with such ease? He cannot assault Lucas' dignity the way Zack Edmonds, his equal, could, provoking Lucas to the point that he must seek direct physical satisfaction. In the instance with Zack, Lucas is ready to die to preserve his honor. In the confrontation in the store, there is the possibility that Lucas may forfeit his life; yet his apparent assessment of the threat posed to him is as of a trivial, inconsequential, event. His psychological distance from his accoster is so great that it seems a physical distance as well—indeed, as the text indicates, almost as if he were alone in a hundredmile solitude. He is alone in his mind in the face of imminent danger, with a self-delusory sense of invulnerability that we have seen before in Faulkner's characters. It is akin to a kind of madness. Here, fortunately, it is a serviceable and successful characteristic. Lucas is often seen half in the world and half out of it, the black's traditional position in any case, and here it is even more exacerbated by Lucas' halfbreed condition. He is alone and is proud of it because there is no place for him in either world, and so he exists within himself. Unlike Joe Christmas and all his spiritual heirs, Lucas is presented by Faulkner, I think, as having come to grips with the mixed-blood conflict. Nevertheless, one must think that one of the reasons why Lucas seems so granite-surfaced, unknown, unknowable, "intractable" and, from this perspective, even personality-less, could be the amount of energy expended containing his anger, maintaining his defense against appearing a "nigger." One could think that this kind of defense makes him appear unnatural in the eyes of the whites, just as adopting the behavior of a "nigger" would make him appear unnatural in his own. Both are modes of behavior which are artificially assumed, which distort the natural expression of the personality and which, in each case, cause the self to be seen as an object. "The Fire and the Hearth" is concerned with the revelation of

266

Intruder in the Dust

the character of Lucas within the immediate context of the McCaslin family and within the larger social and philosophical framework that governs the condition of life. Intruder in the Dust, however, offers a more oblique portrait of Lucas as a moral agent bringing into focus the pattern of rural conventions of the society at large. The prospect of a lynching, of avenging a white man thought to have been murdered by a black, guarantees an emotional reaction spanning the whole of the social strata that must penetrate deeply into both the black and white psyches. Charles is the sixteen-year-old boy who accepts Lucas' command to unearth the evidence that proves Lucas innocent and prevents the lynching. It is the suitable climax to a sequence of events that had begun when, as a boy of twelve, he had fallen into the creek, had confronted Lucas, and had begun the tortuous reexamination of traditional attitudes toward racial relations. He sees the imposing figure of a black man who cannot conceive of being contradicted by a white boy any more than could his own grandfather. He is led to the black man's house, different in character and surrounding from that of the whites, as he expected, appropriately confirming his opinion of the blacks' essential difference from the whites. He thinks it is appropriate for him to refuse to be led by Lucas and to go instead to Edmonds' house; but he knows he will not, rationalizing his inability until he finds himself stripped of his sodden clothing and securely enfolded in a quilt, "enclosed completely now in that unmistakable odor of Negroes" (Intruder, 11). At the very outset, it should be pointed out that Charles doesn't uphold the white authoritative position, since he falls into the creek inexcusably—behavior, it is said, that might be expected of a girl but not of him. He had in any case walked the rail without falling off many times before and for longer distances. Thus he is made vulnerable, indicating in the presence of the blacks an equal susceptibility to the human limitations by which the blacks are thought to be exclusively afflicted. Here there is no possibility of white projec-

Intruder in the Dust

267

tion upon the blacks of the feared and unacceptable sense of personal inadequacy, since it must now be confronted and accepted as an inescapable feature of the collective human endowment. The viewing of the blacks as the feared and contaminating agents in life, the embodiment of limitation, has little to do with the reality of the blacks as they are and everything to do with a defensive need on the part of the whites. Soon Charles confronts directly the feared projection itself, as it is both literally and symbolically manifested in the "odor" of the blacks; he finds that it is not necessarily something in the blacks themselves, an indelible signature of their being, so much as it is a creation of circumstance. "He had smelled it forever, he would smell it always; it was part of his heritage as a Southerner; he didn't even have to dismiss it, he just no longer smelled it at all as the pipe smoker long since never did s m e l l . . . the cold pipereek . . . of his . . . clothing" (Intruder, 12). So, aside from whether the odor were present or not, he would always smell it whenever he encountered blacks just as he would always expect all people named Mallison to be Methodists. I think this clearly explains why there are so many references to this phenomenon of odor in Faulkner as an exclusive, peculiar, stigmatizing property of the blacks and not of any others—poor whites, for example—in whom dire poverty and poor hygiene might conceivably offer equally legitimate basis for its presence. For the insubstantial, yet acutely distinctive properties of an odor—that which is perceived by the sense of smell—parallel the intense, yet unconscious and elusive character of the mental processes which make use of projection, among other psychic mechanisms, in the self s attempt to be liberated from its fears. This, it seems to me, is the real reason why Faulkner has Stevens insist that the only way the racial problem can be solved is for the South to do it itself. The South's granting the blacks their freedom can only constitute the whites' own liberation from the fears within themselves which

268 dictated,

Intruder in

the

in the first

Dust place,

their

mistreatment

o f the

blacks.

F r e e d o m for the b l a c k s constitutes the whites' o w n healthy a c c e p t a n c e o f themselves. B y penetrating to the heart o f b l a c k n e s s , C h a r l e s c o n f r o n t s the secret inner terror within h i m s e l f — t h e possibilities of negativity, limitation, and d e f i l e m e n t — f o r which b l a c k n e s s is a m e t a p h o r , and subdues it, even

finding

it b o g u s , liberating in the process both

himself and the b l a c k s . H e u n d e r g o e s a kind of regression, b e c o m e s stripped o f his clothing and is rendered n a k e d , as he nestles in the o d o r o u s guilt. It is a kind o f rebirth, and it reminds o n e o f the necessity o f I k e M c C a s l i n ' s having t o divest himself o f the e q u i p a g e o f civilization in order t o enter the w o o d s and m e e t old B e n on an equal footing. S i m i l a r l y , C h a r l e s must be divested o f his preconceptions and the artificial social c o n v e n t i o n s which establish false distinctions a m o n g men. A n d the thing that causes him t o perceive the i n a d e q u a c y o f his thinking is the recognition, f o r c e d upon him by L u c a s , of the f u n d a m e n t a l h u m a n e q u a l i t y he shares with L u c a s , o c c a s i o n e d by the latter's refusal to a c c e p t p a y m e n t . H i s p a y m e n t o f L u c a s w o u l d h a v e been a c o n v e n t i o n a l act o f ben e v o l e n c e w h i c h w o u l d h a v e o b v i a t e d the possibility o f equality. If, therefore, it is possible for C h a r l e s to c o n c e i v e o f L u c a s as a h u m a n being f u n d a m e n t a l l y like himself, then it is also possible to c o n c e i v e o f the c i r c u m s t a n c e s in w h i c h L u c a s exists as not peculiar t o L u c a s but contingent features o f life which h a v e u n f o r t u n a t e l y

become

L u c a s ' lot to experience. T h i s is w h a t happens with his notion o f the f o o d the b l a c k s w e r e supposed t o eat as well as the o d o r supposed t o be a s s o c i a t e d with them: He would have gone to his grave never once pondering speculating if perhaps that smell were really not the odor of a race nor even actually of poverty but perhaps of a condition: an idea: a belief: an acceptance, a passive acceptance by them themselves of the idea that being Negroes they were not supposed to have facilities to wash properly or often or even to

Intruder in the Dust

269

wash bathe often even without the facilities to do it with; that in fact it was a little to be preferred that they did not.

(Intruder, II) This recognizes at least, at last, the effects of the legacy of victimization with which the blacks have had to contend. But there is still the negative implication that by being blacks they are nevertheless responsible for a situation they cannot prevent, and that their inability to deal with the situation—their passive acceptance of what it means here to be black—is still in some way peculiar to them; otherwise it would be recognized at once that this acceptance of the impossibility of adequate cleanliness—if indeed such is the case—would apply no less to the blacks than to anyone else in a similar predicament. One does not imagine, that is to say, that old man Gowrie and his kind, for example, would smell any different from the way the blacks are supposed to smell. After having eaten the dinner that obviously had been intended for Lucas, Charles has been listening to Molly speak of her acquaintance with members of his family, and he extends the coins as token payment for services rendered. As Charles stands with the coins in his hands, all present are bound together in this most oppressive of intimacies, the enactment once again of the ritual of betrayal. As a white person Charles had acted according to decorum, yet in doing so he had violated an even more binding code. That day he had gone hunting not as a guest of the Edmonds' plantation but of old Carothers McCaslin, and Lucas had appreciated this and had acted accordingly, whereas he had not. So Lucas had, in a sense, "beaten" him. But his basic misunderstanding had been more fundamental. He had used social and cultural manifestations (the food, the smells, etc.) as criteria for appraisal of human nature. His distinctions are based upon superficialities. Yet these are the things he still accepts as fundamental; he feels, as he realizes the rest of the town feels, the necessity of making Lucas act like a "nig-

270

Intruder in the Dust

ger." Such action on Lucas' part would preclude the possibility of reciprocal relations. The town would accept him as they think he intends to be accepted if he would only admit he's a "nigger" first (Intruder, 18). Charles does not see how such a proposition is inherently contradictory. Charles has experienced an exquisite rebuke in the form of the irretrievability of his act and its consequence. The act, once committed, the violation of fraternity, the denial of brotherhood, is forever. But it must be noted that the references to the deed, occurring over and over again in Faulkner in all their anguish, seem to indicate that it is the commission of the act itself which is forever beyond recall, but not that the attitudes responsible for it are unalterable. For it is now, at last, that the offender is offered a second chance, a way to m a k e up for his transgression. With regard to this matter, however, I would like to pursue a line of thought consistent with the position I have taken all along in this essay. Charles' awareness of his wrongdoing does not depend upon his sense of the violation of the abstract principle of the common human respect owed Lucas. It depends, rather, upon the conventional concept of the violation of hospitality and the insult rendered to Lucas, and therefore to the spirit of the McCaslin heritage, which Lucas represents. Respect is not rendered to Lucas himself, so much as it is rendered to the McCaslin heritage, the only means through which Lucas can become worthy of respect. Perhaps this is the necessary form of social interaction through which the abstract principle can be applied to Lucas, much in the same way that it is said, later on, that the principle thou shall not kill is meaningless until it is first accepted in fact that Gowrie shall not kill his brother. This only means, so to speak, that Lucas proved to be more of a gentleman than Charles, since Charles was unable to recognize his obligations as a gentleman when they were most urgent and was derelict in his duty when he failed to recognize one of

Intruder in the Dust

271

his own kind when he saw him. Lucas therefore beats him at his own game, and lives their own traditionas better than does Charles. Nevertheless, one can still say that for Charles to appreciate his wrongdoing does not require his transgression to be defined as injury done only to the McCaslin heritage but requires nothing more than a respectful acceptance of the mutuality of human relations, of equals hosting equals. Lucas does not see the insult received as a lack of respect for his person, but rather as an affront to his identity as a McCaslin and a representative of the name and what he takes this to mean. In this capacity he assumes human dignity. But it must be said that even knowing that the whites would not recognize his dignity and human worth as a black person, without reference to the McCaslins, does not mean that he is bereft of an awareness of it. They might spurn and abuse him as a black man, but this cannot prevent him from knowing just the same that he is a black man worthy of respect. And, of course, it is this idea that Charles doesn't appreciate, since his understanding of Lucas' standing up for his dignity devolves upon his McCaslin heritage, not upon his fundamental integrity as a human being. Apparently, Faulkner too cannot appreciate such a stance in a black man either, unless it has been fortified through the agency of white mediation. Yet, Lucas' belief in himself and the attitudes so engendered prevent him, in the eyes of the whites, from being a "nigger." He escapes this fate through the adopting of white behavioral traits—taken as the sole means through which integrity can be rendered and interpreted—and, more obliquely, through the inherited psychological condition that is his heritage as a result of his white blood and/or association with the McCaslins. He therefore cannot "help" being the way he is, and cognizance of this fact on the part of the whites alters their perception of him and induces their tolerance as well as their hostility and fear.

272

Intruder in the Dust

Nevertheless, Faulkner goes far in his attempt to honorably render the reality of black life. His treatment of Aleck Sander, as I have said, is commendable. There is still about him that characteristic Faulknerian aura of the mysterious otherness of black folk; but the use Faulkner puts it to, I think, is not condescending. Yet it seems to me that there is always in Faulkner a fundamental sense of the otherness of blacks: and from the social and psychological points of view, blacks are, perhaps, other to Faulkner—as they may be said to be to most white people. The beginning of the story evokes this attitude. As the hunting trip for Charles is being prepared, Faulkner exacts a bit of ribald humor from the appearance of the hunting dog, which was a "nigger" hunting dog: a true rabbit dog with some hound in him, perhaps a great deal of hound, who was supposed to have a rapport with rabbits the way whites thought blacks had a rapport with mules (Intruder, 5). Aleck, consistent with the mood of this conceptual scheme, has the ability to throw his tap stick at rabbits with an accuracy almost as great as Charles' ability to shoot a gun at them. This is the mysterious power of the blacks, the thing that enables Aleck, when they are out at the graveyard digging, to be so helpful: he hears the mule coming down the hill two minutes before Charles and Miss Habersham hear and see it; he seems to have the ability to see in the dark and always to know instinctively what to do in a situation. Yet, for all Aleck's good qualities, they are still exotic, strange, and extrarational. The more impressive these qualities are, the more curiously he differs from white people—although Faulkner wishes to make it clear that he is brave, intelligent, and quickwitted in the conventional sense. The thing that made Aleck know that Highboy smelled quicksand, and allowed him to hear the mule coming down the road, is the same thing that makes him go get a board to make the digging go faster. Yet the first two, according to our conventional designations, we must call extrarational abilities, while the

Intruder in the Dust

27Ì

second is immanently rational. The person on the mule, as they discover later, was the actual murderer, Crawford Gowrie, heavy with the body of his brother Vinson after he had replaced it in the grave with Montgomery's body, the third party in their scheme. Aleck has prevented them from being openly discovered. Already Aleck can tell by looking at the grave that it has been recently disturbed. These things are educational to Charles. Earlier he has had to reprimand himself for doubting that Aleck would have had the "foresight to drive Miss Habersham's truck off the road into the underbrush for concealment." Seeing the truck hidden away, he "knew of course Aleck Sander had done that and it was not Aleck Sander he had ever doubted but himself for even for one second doubting Aleck Sander . . . " (Intruder, 95). This self-accusatory doubting of the self, precisely as Faulkner describes it, is the perfect example of the mechanism of projection, of casting out of the self the feared deficiencies and viewing them as features of the alien other. Afterwards, when the trip is over, the sheriff fixes his eyes upon Aleck; "'You,' he said, 'You're the one. You went out there in the dark and helped dig up a dead man. Not only that, a dead white man that the rest of the white folks claimed another nigger had murdered. Why? Was it because Miss Habersham made you?'" And Aleck answeres: '"Never nobody made me . . . I didn't even know I was going. I had already done told Chick I didn't aim to. Only when we got to the truck everybody seemed to just take it for granted I wasn't going to do nothing else but go and before I knowed it I wasn't'" (Intruder, 113). One takes this to be an accurate rendering of the syntax and nuance of speech of a person such as Aleck. The linguistic distortion, with its preponderance of negatives cancelling each other out, must reflect the psychological resistance, hesitation, and conflict such a person as Aleck might experience. By extension, it could be taken as an excellent metaphorical application of the conflict experienced by the blacks

274

Intruder in the Dust

themselves, as they attempt to perform the honorable, self-respecting action that in every way their life circumstances forbade, so that they realized that they had done what they dared not do only after the action had in fact been performed. The strength of the resistance, and the way in which it is overcome, as indicated in Aleck's case, reflects what must be Faulkner's own perception of the very real difficulties faced by the blacks in the awareness and execution of their intentions. An incidental comment on Faulkner's use of dialect is in order here. Aleck's shrewdness and quickness of mind are apparent, just as, to take a difficult example, they are in the case of Lucas' daughter Nat in "The Fire and the Hearth." Faulkner's skillful use of the nuances of dialect is obviously intended to indicate these things. Comparing Nat's speech with that of, say, George Wilkins, one can see that the latter's deviation from standard usage is more marked than Nat's, Nat's is more pronounced than Lucas', and Lucas' is more pronounced than, say, Edmonds'—though the matter is problematical. Edmonds is obviously more literate or learned than Lucas—he presumably has a better grasp of the proprieties of standard usage—but he is just as obviously not more intelligent or more capable of self-expression than is Lucas. In fact most of the time he appears as Lucas' inferior in this regard. Faulkner mainly seems to use dialect and degree of deviation from standard English as indicators of social standing and position in the community and the amount of formal education acquired—and not as reflectors of native intelligence as such. All of the dialects indicate an expressive quality about the people, and are tied to Faulkner's conceptions of their personal psychology. The diversity with which he employs such usages is interesting. One notes the spirited, almost frenetic quality of Nat's speech, as against the humorous, plodding quality of George's. He always seems on the verge of satirizing himself, and one feels certain that Faulkner creates this effect deliberately. The rules which govern the behavior of Aleck, Charles, and Miss Habersham are circumstantial and open-ended; they are also based

Intruder in the Dust

275

upon friendship, loyalty, and the integrity of the individual person. Out of a regard for Lucas' wife Molly, who had been her childhood friend, Miss Habersham must help Lucas. This sort of natural human communion, the decorum of natural human relations, is contrasted with the artificial rules that so rigidly govern social behavior at large. Charles listens as his uncle speaks of Mr. Lilley, a merchant in the black community, and how Lilley's sense of decorum affects his relations with the blacks. Mr. Lilley will help them and be patient with them and even look away when he knows that they, in retaliation at his hypocracy, are stealing from him: All he requires is that they act like niggers. Which is exactly what Lucas is doing: blew his top and murdered a white man—which Mr. Lilley is probably convinced all Negroes want to do—and now the white people will take him out and bum him, all regular and in order and themselves acting exactly as he is convinced Lucas would wish them to act: like whites folks; both of them observing implictly the rules: nigger acting like a nigger and the white folks acting like white folks and no real hard feelings on either side (since Mr. Lilley is not a Gowrie) once the fury is over; in fact Mr. Lilley would probably be one of the first to contribute cash money toward Lucas' funeral and the support of his widow and children if he had them. Which proves again how no man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.

{Intruder, 48-49) It might be interesting to investigate what, in the context above, being a "nigger" means. By causing Mr. Lilley to appear in a disparaging light, Faulkner ingeniously allows to be discredited Mr. Lilley's view that blacks might desire to murder whites. But surely, granted the revulsion one must feel before the prospect of anyone wishing to murder anyone else, it is still nevertheless the truth of the matter that the blacks have felt that the whites have certainly given them cause to wish to murder them. I think Mr. Lilley knows precisely the truth of this matter, that if he were in the place of the blacks and had to contend with the abusive and contemptuous treatment of racists such as himself, or, on the other hand, the Gowries and their kind, he would certainly wish to kill them.

276

Intruder in the Dust

Being a " n i g g e r , " on the one hand, m e a n s that one acts violently without regard for custom, convention, or the m e a n s of self-preservation. One violently reacts to one's debasement, as a " n i g g e r " would, without j u d g m e n t or circumspection. O n e seeks vengeance, so that the inevitable result, white retaliation, must follow, which one must accept like a " n i g g e r , " passively. The " b a d nigger" is in the end divested of his threat. O n the other hand, being a " n i g g e r " also m e a n s that one must always stifle one's anger and hurt, that one must never acknowledge one's debasement and abuse, that these things must be accepted passively. O n e does not even know that one is angry and must certainly never voice such anger to a white person. On the basis of these two conceptions, the black is at once a potentially dangerous, violent, viciously repressed renegade, while at the s a m e time he is an innocent and harmless adjunct to white life, a presence to be pitied and cared for. The black is d a m n e d if he submits to the concept of " n i g g e r " and d a m n e d also if he repudiates it and acts manfully. And the burden of ths dilemma is always m a d e to appear as if it is solely his, as if he created it and is solely responsible for it. As they ride in the s h e r i f f s party back to the site of the grave, Charles and his uncle engage in an analysis of the Southern tradition. His uncle speaks of the variety of people inhabiting the Southland—of the Gowries and I n g r a m s at h o m e upon the unprofitable backhills and the Bookwrights and A r m s t e a d s settled down in the valleys along the rivers, on the rich land that afforded them an honest and profitable living (Intruder, 148-49). Stevens speaks of the black in the collective, termed " S a m b o , " who can live in either region. H e says that they elect to live in both because they can stand either, because they can stand anything. Stevens says that " n o t all white people can endure slavery and apparently no m a n can stand freedom . . . " (Intruder, 149). But this, unfortunately, implies that while only some white people can endure slavery, all

Intruder in the Dust

277

blacks can, which is just silly and ignorant, as is much of what Stevens says. It would be like saying—to put the matter into an accessible perspective—that while not all the white citizens in a town could stand the deprivation, demoralization, and abusive treatment experienced at the hands, for example, of a victorious and brutal occupying army during a war, all the black citizens could do so. Stevens says that it is because of the actual fear and distrust in which personal liberty is held that men evolve ways of absolving themselves of the responsibility of the exercise of personal liberty, although he thinks among racial groups the Anglo-Saxons are the most enlightened and aware of the burden of being responsible for one's fellow man. He says, however, that the people named " S a m b o " have survived physical slavery and may even endure or avoid the psychological slavery of acquiescing to the burden of personal liberty that threatens the white man. I do not wish here to address the issues Stevens raises or questions pertaining to black-white relations in regard to the destiny of the South and the rest of the nation. Whether the South should resist outside interference and free the blacks is by now a moot question. But the manner in which this proposal is made is very definitely not. I am referring to the recalcitrance, the arrogance unwittingly and often consciously assumed in the face of debilitating human limitations, that Faulkner knows well and has catalogued so often in his characters. I think that a carryover of this attitude, to take a particular example, is found in Stevens' insistence on using the term " S a m b o " to refer to the blacks. Cleanth Brooks says that Stevens is not using " S a m b o " disparagingly, but rather to "indicate that his praise of the Negro is said in perfect awareness of all the usual disparagements of him, past and present," though Brooks admits that the term is certainly in "bad taste." 2 One hopes that Brooks's attitude is the right one to be taken toward the situation. But I think it is nevertheless the case that Stevens' use of the term is another expression of the "defiance" of

278

Intruder in the Dust

the Southern position, as if Stevens here, as a Southerner, knowing the wrongs done the blacks and willing to redress them, almost feels that he has earned the right to use the term. His is a position self-consciously arrogant, willing to grant the black his human rights and allow him respect in the human community, while, in the same breath, continuing the spirit of the insults heaped upon him and belittling and contradicting the very idea of brotherhood and that respectful imaginative solicitation that allows one to put oneself in one's brother's place. It is this spirit of insult that is being expressed, nevertheless, in "perfect awareness of all the usual disparagements of [the blacks] past and present." This, it seems to me, is precisely a case where tone expresses meaning, is meaning. It indicates, again, the absence of integrity, of responsibility, in the awareness of wrongdoing. A final statement indicating the pervasiveness of this attitude might be made with regard to the townspeople's reaction to the identity of the real murderer. This reveals the operation of those unconscious psychic processes of which I have been speaking in this book, which allow the whites to displace upon the blacks their own guilt, guilt they cannot accept for themselves. With regard to their mistaken notion that Lucas is a murderer, it seems to me that the deeper issue of the townspeople's sense of shame is not so much that they are wrong as the way in which they are wrong and the manner in which they are brought to realize this. The heinousness of the perspective lynching of Lucas is thrown into violent relief by the horror of fratricide. The town still has no greater sense of respect for Lucas' life, but it does have a greater sense of shame at the spectable of the taking of a life, because of the manner in which it was taken. Crawford Gowrie has dehumanized them and contradicted their sense of moral superiority as white men. He has made "niggers" of them by his singular disrespect for life, and for this he can never be forgiven. But "what [the townspeople] really did was worse: they deprived [Crawford] to the full extent of their

Intruder in the Dust

279

capacity of his citizenship in m a n " (Intruder, 202). In this context, does this not also mean that they deprived him of membership in the community of white men? He is no longer a man but a brute, as it were, like the "niggers"; and, by implication, because he is white, he had tried to drag them down to his level, making of them "niggers" like himself. For this, indeed, he must be punished to the fullest extent of their capacity.

Epilogue

I think it would be generally agreed that Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha saga is as much an imaginative creation as it is an authentic recreation of the North Mississippi locale that serves as its model. But Faulkner is no mere regionalist. His depiction of his Southland, haunting and timeless in its power of evocation, is a great mythic image of a society engaged in the agony of its own self-contemplation. The questions asked are always those which matter the most: in what does integrity consist, and how is it to be cherished and maintained, in view of our ongoing capacity for self-deception and betrayal of our ideals? The Southland, with its special and distinctive historical conflicts, provided Faulkner with the immediate backdrop for an urgent and searching examination of such questions. The novelist's conventional powers of observation and concern with human issues are obviously in evidence in Faulkner, but what seems to be most extraordinary is his intuitive grasp of and concern with psychological conflict, especially as this is revealed in extreme, unusual, disturbed, and regressive states of mind. The mind divided against itself in all its anguish is Faulkner's great and recurring theme. This doubtless resulted from his courage in facing his own conflicts as well as those of his compatriots, so grievously afflicted by pride, self-hatred, and irrational fears. The truth of Faulkner's exploration of these matters is a measure of his uncompromising integrity, and this more than anything, I think, will remain the most telling index in the assessment of his work.

282

Epilogue

Faulkner has shown us how, in the grip of our darkest impulses, we unwittingly wreak such destruction upon ourselves and others, in the service of beliefs mistakenly thought to be honorable and in our own self-interest. This is especially the case when such beliefs are sanctioned by convention and custom or are enforced by the distorting dynamics of unconscious wishes and fears. Pride, egotism, vanity, contempt constantly threaten and undermine our vision of decency and rectitude; yet they are inescapable features of our human inheritance, just as are the virtues—love

and

compassion

and

humane

Faulknerian

dealings

with

our

f e l l o w s — d i f f i c u l t to observe, but never impossible to realize. T o realize them daily constitutes our c h a l l e n g e — t o be capable of that imaginative solicitude that allows us to put ourselves in our fellows' places, without fear or alarm or some distorting negativism. In race relations, I think, Faulkner knew this to be the only acceptable recourse open to us. I do not think that he himself, in his w o r k , had b e c o m e sufficiently liberated to fulfill such a prescription, but he recognized the necessity of moving in that direction and of being satisfied with nothing less, and this is the final measure of his integrity.

Notes

Introduction 1. Frederick J. Hoffman, "An Introduction," in William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism, ed. Frederick J. Hoffman and Olga W. Vickery (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1960), p. 32. 2. Charles H. Nilon, Faulkner and the Negro (University of Colorado Studies: Series in Language and Literature, no. 8; Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1962), p. 1. I am indebted to this work, the only fulllength study I know of published on this subject at the time of this writing. My intent, however, different from that of Nilon's, has been to view Faulkner more critically from the perspective of the emerging black consciousness, and also to view his work, in part, from the perspective of a psychoanalytic assessment of the meaning of recurring stereotypic conceptualizations, mythic patterns, and social and cultural assumptions which are reflected in relations between the black and white races in our society. 3. William Faulkner, "The Bear," Go Down, Moses (New York: The Modern Library, 1955), p. 257. All subsequently quotations from Go Down, Moses are taken from this edition and will be noted in the text. 4. Allen Tate, "Introduction" to William Faulkner, Sanctuary (New York: New American Library, 1968), p. xi. 5. Robert Penn Warren, "Faulkner: The South, the Negro, and Time," in Faulkner, ed. R. P. Warren (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), p. 256. 6. Robert Cantwell, "The Faulkners: Recollections of a Gifted Family," in William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism, ed. Frederick J. Hoffman and Olga W. Vickery (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1960), p. 55. 7. Warren, "Faulkner: The South, the Negro, and Time," p. 256. 8. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying (New York: Modern Library reprint, 1946), p. 191. All subsequent quotations from Sound are taken from this edition and will be noted in the text.

284

Notes

9. William Faulkner, Sartoris (New York: New American Library reprint, 1964), p. 228. All subsequent quotations from Sartoris are taken from this edition and will be noted in the text. 10. See Addison Gayle, Jr., "Cultural Hegemony: The Southern White Writer and American Letters," in Amistad I, eds. John A. Williams and Charles F. Harris (New York: Random House, 1971). p. 6. 11. Gayle, p. 8. 12. Ibid., pp. 8-9. 13. Ibid., pp. 9-10. 14. Ibid., pp. 15-16. 15. Irving Howe, William Faulkner, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1952), p. 120. 16. Hoffman, "An Introduction," Three Decades, p. 47. 17. Cleanth Brooks, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 36. 18. Lawrence Thompson, "Mirror Analogues in The Sound and The Fury, in William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism, ed. Frederick J. Hoffman and Olga W. Vickory, p. 112. 19. Brooks, p. 37. 20. Ibid. 21. Go Down, Moses, p. 349. 22. Hoffman, "An Introduction," p. 32. 23. Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner, eds. Faulkner in the University (New York: Vintage Books reprint, 1965), p. 5. 24. Faulkner in the University, p. 133. 25. Ibid., p. 271. 26. Brooks, pp. 42-43. 27. Irving Howe, William Faulkner, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 119. 28. Faulkner in the University, p. 211. 29. Howe, 3rd ed., p. 123. 30. Leslie A. Fiedler, An End to Innocence (New York: Stein and Day, 1972), p. 144. 31. Ibid., p. 147. 32. Ibid., p. 151. 33. Faulkner in the University, p. 46. 34. Ibid., p. 211. 35. Warren, "Faulkner: The South, the Negro and Time," p. 261. 36. Faulkner in the University, p. 211.

Notes

285

37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., p. 269. 39. William Faulkner, Soldier's Pay (New York: Liveright, 1926), p. 111. All subsequent references are to this edition and will be noted in the text. 40. Nilon, p. 12. 41. Faulkner in the University, p. 210. 42. William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Modern Library reprint, 1964), pp. 139-40. All subsequent quotations from this novel are taken from this edition and will be noted in the text. 43. Howe, 3rd, ed., pp. 128-29. 44. Warren, "Faulkner: The South, the Negro and Time," p. 263. 45. Robert Penn Warren, "Introduction: Faulkner: Past and Future," in Faulkner, ed. R. P. Warren (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), p. 3. 46. Warren Beck, "William Faulkner's Style," in Faulkner, ed. R. P. Warren (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1966), pp. 62-63. 47. James B. Meriwether and Michael Millgate, eds. Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, 1926-1962 (New York: Random House, 1968), p. 255. 48. Warren, "Faulkner: Past and Future," p. 4. 49. Gunter Blocker, "William Faulkner," in Faulkner, ed. R. P. Warren (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1966), p. 122. This article has been condensed from "William Faulkner," from Die Neuen Wirklichkeiten by Gunter Blocker, trans. Jacqueline Merriam (Berlin: Argon Verlag, 1958), pp. 112-23. 50. William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (New York; Modern Library, 1948), p. 26. 51. Jean-Paul Sartre, "Time in Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury," in Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism, ed. Hoffman and Vickery, pp. 227-32. Sartre's essay reprinted from Situations /, "Le Bruit et la Fureur" (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), pp. 70-81. 52. William Faulkner, Light in August (New York: Modern Library reprint, 1959), p. 5. All subsequent quotations from Light are taken from this edition and will be noted in the text. 53. Particular emphasis is given this point in Jean-Paul Sartre, "Time im Faulkner," p. 228. 54. Jean Pouillon, "Time and Destiny in Faulkner," in Faulkner, ed. R. P. Warren (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1966), p. 80. From "Temps et

286

Notes

Destinee chez Faulkner," in Temps et Roman by Jean Pouillon, trans. Jacqueline Merriam (Paris: Gallimard, 1946), pp. 238-60. 55. Ibid., p. 81. 56. Ibid., p. 83. 57. Ibid., p. 85. 58. R. G. Collins, "Light in August: Faulkner's Stained Glass Triptych," in Mosaic, 7, no. 1 (Winnipeg, Canada: The University of Manitoba Press, 1973), p. 119. 59. John T. Irwin, Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), p. 6. 60. Ibid., pp. 8-9. 61. Ibid., p. 25. 62. Ibid., pp. 32-33. 63. Ibid., p. 33. 64. Ibid., p. 58. 65. William Faulkner, "The Stockholm Address," reprinted in William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism, ed. Frederick Hoffman and Olga Vickery, p. 348. 66. Irwin, p. 159. 67. Faulkner in the University, p. 79. 68. Alfred Kazin, "The Stillness of Light in August," in Faulkner, ed. R. P. Warren (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1966), p. 157. 69. Collins, p. 106. Chapter I. Light in August 1. Faulkner in the University, p. 72. 2. John L. Longley, Jr., "Joe Christmas: The Hero in the Modern World," in Faulkner, ed. Robert Penn Warren (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1966), p. 166. 3. Sally R. Page, Faulkner's Women: Characterization and Meaning (Deland, Florida: Everett/Edwards, 1972), p. 148. 4. William Faulkner, Light in August (New York: Modern Library reprint, 1959), p. 110. All subsequent quotations from Light are from this edition and will be noted in the text. 5. Collins, p. 116. 6. Ibid. 7. Faulkner in the University, p. 112.

Notes

287

8. Collins, p. 126. 9. I mean here a black, unlike Joe Christmas, who is obviously so in color. 10. See Collins, p. 121. 11. John Longley, p. 173. 12. Fiedler, p. 146. 13. Ibid., p. 151. 14. John Longley, p. 170. 15. Collins, p. 148. Chapter II. The

Uvanquished

1. Cantwell, p. 57. 2. Howe, p. 148. 3. Faulkner in the University, p. 254. 4. William Faulkner, The Unvanquished (New York: Vintage Books reprint, 1965), p. 11. All subsequent quotations from Unvanquished are taken from this edition and will be noted in the text. 5. Cantwell, pp. 55-56. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., pp. 63-66. 8. Ibid., p. 66. 9. Ibid., p. 61. 10. Ibid., pp. 61-62. 11. William Faulkner, Sartoris (New York: New American Library reprint, 1964), p. 47. 12. William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (New York: Modern Library, 1948), p. 19. 13. Brooks, p. 256. 14. See Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). Chapter III. The Sound and the Fury 1. William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying (New York: Modern Library reprint, 1946), p. 82. All subsequent quotations from Sound are taken from this edition and will be noted in the text. 2. Page, pp. 57-58. 3. Ibid., pp. 57-60.

288

Notes

4. Howe, p. 123. 5. Brooks, p. 386. 6. Robert Vale, "Oxford, Miss., Which Faulkner Transcended, Is As He Left," The New York Times, 14 January 1973, section 10, p. 11. 7. Brooks, p. 343. 8. Ibid., p. 347. 9. Faulkner in the University, p. 5. 10. Page, p. 39.

Chapter IV. Absalom,

Absalom!

1. William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Modern Library reprint, 1964), pp. 8-9. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition and will be noted in the text. 2. Brooks, p. 307. 3. Melvin Backman, "Sutpen and the South: A Study of Absalom, Absalom!" PMLA, 80, no. 5 (December 1965), pp. 596-604. 4. Backman, p. 597. 5. W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (Garden City: Doubleday, 1954), p. 24. 6. See Backman, p. 598. 7. Ibid., pp. 598-99. 8. See Irwin, p. 98. 9. Ibid., p. 104. 10. Faulkner in the University, pp. 35-36. 11. Backman, p. 602. 12. I wish to thank the psychoanalyst Leila Lerner, in New York City, for pointing out this possibility, as it may apply within the context of the issues considered here. 13. See Brooks, p. 443.

Chapter V. Go Down, Moses 1. William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses (New York: Modern Library reprint, 1955), p. 266. All subsequent quotations are from this edition and will be noted in the text. Individual stories of the novel will be abbreviated in the following manner: "Fire" for "The Fire and the Hearth"; "Pantaloon" for "Pantaloon in Black"; "Old People" for "The Old People"; "Bear" for "The Bear."

Notes

289

2. Warren, 262. 3. Howe, 94. 4. Leonard A. Blanchard, "The Failure of the Natural Man: Faulkner's 'Pantaloon in Black,'" in Notes on Mississippi Writers, 8, no. 1 (Spring 1975), 28-32. 5. Ibid., p. 28. 6. Brooks, p. 35. Chapter

VI. Intruder

in the Dust

1. William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (New York: Modern Library reprint, 1955), p. 127. All subsequent quotations are taken from this edition and will be noted in the text. 2. Brooks, 420-21.

Selected

Bibliography

Backman, Melvin, Faulkner: The Major Years: A Critical Study. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1966. "Sutpen and the South: A Study of Absalom, Absalom!" PMLA, 80, no. 5 (December 1965), pp. 596-604. Beck, Warren, "William Faulkner's Style." Faulkner, ed. Robert Penn Warren. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1966. Blanchard, Leonard A. "The Failure of the Natural Man: Faulkner's 'Plantaloon in Black.'" Notes on Mississippi Writers, 8, no. 1 (Spring 1975), pp. 28-32. Blöcker, Günter. "William Faulkner." Faulkner, ed. R. P. Warren. Condensed from Günter Blöcker, "William Faulkner," Die Neuen Wirklichkeiten, trans. Jacqueline Merriam. Berlin: Argon Verlag, 1958. Blotner, Joseph L. Faulkner: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1974. Brooks, Cleanth. William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963. Cantwell, Robert. "The Faulkners: Recollections of a Gifted Family." William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism, ed. Frederick Hoffman and Olga Vickery. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1960. Cash, W. J. The Mind of the South. Garden City: Doubleday, 1954. Collins, R. G. "Light in August: Faulkner's Stained Glass Triptych." Mosaic, 7, no. 1. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1973. Des Pres, Terrence. The Survivor. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! New York: Modern Library reprint, 1964. Go Down, Moses. New York: Modern Library reprint, 1955. Intruder in the Dust. New York: Modern Library, 1948. Light in August. New York: Modern Library reprint, 1959. Sartoris. New York: Modern Library reprint, 1964. Solider's Pay. New York: Liveright, 1926.

292

Selected

Bibliography

The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. New York: Modern Library reprint, 1946. "The Stockholm Address." William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism, ed. Hoffman and Vickery, pp. 347-48. The Unvanquished. New York: Vintage Books reprint, 1965. Fiedler, Leslie. An End to Innocence. New York: Stein and Day, 1972. Gayle, Addison, Jr. "Cultural Hegemony: The Southern White Writer and American Letters." Amistad /, ed. John A. Williams and Charles F. Harris. New York: Random House, 1971. Guerard, Albert J. The Triumph of the Novel: Dickens, Dostoevsky, Faulkner. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. Gwynn, Frederick L, and Blotner, Joseph L., eds. Faulkner in the University. New York: Vintage Books reprint, 1965. Hoffman, Frederick J. "An Introduction." William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism, ed. Hoffman and Vickery, pp. 1-50. William Faulkner. New York: Twayne, 1961. Howe, Irving. William Faulkner. 2nd ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1952. William Faulkner. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975. Irwin, John T. Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975. Jellifee, Robert A., ed. Faulkner at Nagano. Tokyo: Kenkyusha Press, 1956. Kazin, Alfred. "The Stillness of Light in August." Faulkner, ed. R. P. Warren, pp. 147-62. Kovel, Joel. White Racism: A Psychohistory. New York: Vintage Books, 1971. Korenman, Joan S. "Faulkner's Grecian Urn." Southern Library Journal, 7, no. 1, pp. 3-23. Longley, John L., Jr. "Joe Christmas: The Hero in the Modern World." Faulkner, ed. R. P. Warren, pp. 147-62. The Tragic Mask: A Study of Faulkner's Heroes. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963. Meriwether, James B., and Millgate, Michael, eds. Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, 1926-1962. New York: Random House, 1968. Millgate, Michael. The Achievement of William Faulkner. New York: Vintage Books reprint, 1971. Nilon, Charles H. Faulkner and the Negro. University of Colorado

Selected Bibliography

293

Studies: Series in Language and Literature, no. 8. Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1962. O'Connor, William Van. William Faulkner. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1959. Page, Sally R. Faulkner's Women: Characterization and Meaning. Deland, Florida: Everett/Edwards, 1972. Peavy, Charles D. Go Slow Now: Faulkner and the Race Question. Eugene: University of Oregon Press, 1971. Pouillon, Jean. "Time and Destiny in Faulkner." Faulkner, ed. R. P. Warren, pp. 79-86. From "Temp et Destinee chez Faulkner," Temps et Roman, trans. Jacquelin Merriam. Paris: Gallimard, 1946. Sartre, Jean-Paul. "Time in Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury." Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism, eds. Hoffman and Vickery, pp. 225-31. Reprinted from "Le Bruit et la Fureur," Situations I. Paris: Gallimard, 1947. Swiggart, Peter. The Art of Faulkner's Novels. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1962. Tate, Allen, "Introduction" to William Faulkner, Sanctuary. New York: New American Library, 1968. Thompson, Lawrence. "Mirror Analogues in The Sound and the Fury." William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism, eds. Hoffman and Vickery, pp. 211-24. William Faulkner. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1963. Utley, Francis Lee, et al. Bear, Man, and God: Eight Approaches to William Faulkner's "The Bear." 2nd ed. New York: Random House, 1971. Vale, Robert, "Oxford, Miss., Which Faulkner Transcended, Is As He Left." The New York Times, 14 January 1973, Section 10, p. 11. Vickery, Olga W. The Novels of William Faulkner, rev. ed. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964. Volpe, Edmund L. A Reader's Guide to William Faulkner. New York: The Noonday Press, 1964. Waggoner, Hyatt Howe. William Faulkner: From Jefferson to the World. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1959. Warren, Robert Penn. "Faulkner: The South, the Negro, and Time." Faulkner, ed. R. P. Warren, pp. 251-71. "Introduction: Faulkner Past and Future." Faulkner, ed. R. P. Warren, pp. 1-22. Watson, James Gray. " ' T h e Germ of My Apocrypha': Sartoris and the Search for Form." Mosaic, 1, no. 1, pp. 15-34.

Index

Absalom, Absalom/, 34-35, 177-219; romantic indulgence in, 193 Allen, Bobbie, 82 Ames, Dalton, 6, 143 Anglo-Saxons, 277 Archetypes, 48, 97, 103^1, 146 Aristocracy: families failing in responsibility, 2; characteristics of, 178-79; white aristocratic heroes compared to Rider in "Pantaloon," 247-48; as progenitorless, 248 Backman, Melvin, 180-181 Barr, Caroline: "Aunt Callie," 119; basis of creation of Dilsey and model for black mammy, 164-65 "Bear, The," 28-29, 32-33 Beauchamp, Lucas, 252-79; compared with Ringo, 131; compared with Carothers McCaslin, 252-58; compared with Isaac McCaslin, 260; relationship with Charles Mallison compared to that of Sam Fathers with Ike McCaslin, 262; character obliquely rendered, 262-65; as successfully resolving mixed-blood conflict, 265; dignity conferred as result of McCaslin heritage, 270-71 Beauchamp, Molly, 165, 194, 222, 256-58, 263 Beauchamp, Miss Sophonsiba, 226-27 Beck, Warren, 36-37 Ben, Old, 231-33 Blacks: exemplars of humility and

suffering, 9; as primitives, 15; viewed under mythic designation, 18-20, 154-61, 235-37, 268-69; mystique of, 19-20, 123, 160, 168, 244-45, 272-73; demonstrating efficacy of Christianity, 20-21; question of literal or symbolic depiction, 22-24; negatively conceived as cursed or defiling agents, 30, 53; embodiments of white sexual fantasies, 55; black woman as degraded sexual object, 81-82; as sacrificial victims, 104-5; accepting servitude in The Unvanquished, 120-21; as obverse reflections of whites, 155; Faulkner's distortions of, 159-60; as biographical basis for image of black mammy, 164-65; distorted relations among themselves as result of racism, 167-68; laughter of, 185-86; mythic status compared to that of white woman, 227; psychological effects of racism, 264-65 Blanchard, Leonard A., 246 Blocker, Giinter, 41-42 Bon, Charles, 200-19; compared with Sutpen, 200-2; as psychic projection of whites, 203-6 Brooks, Cleanth, 120-21; on Faulkner's primitivism, 14-16; on endurance and resignation in blacks, 162-63; denial of Faulkner's mystique of blacks, 168; on Stevens' use of term Sambo, 277 Burden, Calvin, 85-86

296

Index

Burden Joanna, 61-62, 84-95; as a southern woman in disguise, 85-86; characterization undermining legitimacy of interest in blacks, 90-91; relationship with Joe symbolic of white fears, 92 Calhoun, John C., 10-12 Cantwell, Robert, 111-12 Caspey, 120 Chain of being, 12 Christianity, 16-18, 97-98, 245, 249; restraining effects of its idealism, 9; blacks demonstrating efficacy of, 20-21; Calvinism or Puritanism, mind-body antithesis, 18, 80, 136-37, 160, 202, 210; Joe Christmas and Christ parallels, 97-98; southern black's version of, 169-70, 174; Easter sermon in The Sound and the Fury, 171-73 Christmas, Joe, 42; determining effect of past upon, 43-46; warring blackwhite mentality expressing doubling, 50; racial conflict internalized, 62-67; as existential hero, 65-66; as stereotypic conception, 67, 74; as expressing schizophrenic delusions, 67; in relation to dietitian, 69-72; fear of womanshenegro, 81-82; sacrificial acceptance and betrayal of black identity, 95-100, 104-5; Christ parallels, 97-98; compared to Dilsey, 173-74; compared to Lucas Beauchamp, 265 Civil War, 1, 4-5, 36, 61, 148 Coldfield, Rosa, 35, 38 Collins, R. G „ 53-54, 78, 85-86, 104 Compson, Benjamin ("Benjy"), 137-39; as embodiment of past, 44; as embodiment of tragic suffering, 140; Caddy as mother figure, 146-47 Compson, Candace ("Caddy"), 143-44; compared to Mrs. Compson and

Dilsey, 135-36; as mother figure, 146-47 Compson, Caroline Bascomb, 135-36, 168-69; antithesis of mother figure, 144, 168-69 Compson, General Jason L., II, 7; compared to Thomas Sutpen, 178-79 Compson, Jason, III: compared to Mrs. Compson, 141-42; influence upon son Quentin, 142 Compson, Jason, IV, 151-53 Compson, Quentin (brother of Candace): speaking like a "colored man," 4; identification with past, 7; fight with Gerald Bland as expression of mythic narrative technique, 43; suicide with reference to narrative technique, 47; doubling between the races, 50-51; as brother avenger, 136-37; despairing need of mother, 144; blacks as obverse reflections of whites, 154-61 Compson, Quentin (daughter of Candace), 152-53, 160

"Deacon," in The Sound and the Fury, 156-57 "Delta Autumn," 27, 238-43 Destiny, irresistible sense of in characters, 41 Dialect, uses of, 273-74 Dietitian: in relations with Joe Christmas in Light in August, 69-73; as symbolic parent of Joe, 73 Dilsey, 15, 30-31, 161-76; capable of deeds of idealism, 14; compared to Caddy, 136, 139; not appreciated for her services, 140 Doubling, 150; in relations between black and white characters and related to narcissism, 48-60, 153-56; as explanation of antagonism between black and white races, 49-50; between

Index Henry Sutpen and Charles Bon, 207-9 Drake, Temple, 86 "Dry September," 92 Du Pre, Virginia Sartoris, "Aunt Jenny," 169 Easter sermon, in The Sound and the Fury, 171-73 Edmonds, Carothers McCaslin: in discussion with Ike McCaslin about blacks, 235-36 Edmonds, Carothers ("Roth"), 21, 222, 238-42 Edmonds, Zachary, 222-23, 255-59, 265 Elnora (wife of Caspey), 119-20 Enuice (black slave in "The Bear"), 226 Fathers, Sam, 227-34; compared to Lucas Beauchamp, 230 Faulkner, William: theory of evil regarding black-white relations and masculine assertion, 1-3, 112, 135, 231-35; communal values and modern commercial technology, 3; Col. William C. Falkner as prototypal figure, 5, 111-12; moral responsibility in characters, 7-10; attitudes toward blacks symbolized by three characters, 13 (see also Dilsey, Joe Christmas, Lucas Beauchamp); characterizing features in work relating to blacks, 13-36; privitive societal life, 14; views toward women, 15, 57-58; tragic view of life and in reference to Christianity, 16-18; "verities of the heart," 17; the hunt as a symbol, 18; symbolism of Keats's Urn figure, 18-19; realist in depiction of race relations, 22-24; on wrongs done blacks, 26; whites' inability to know blacks, 29-30; assumptions about black endurance, 31-32,

297

174-76; on racial differences, 34; characters personally revealing of author, 36; narrative technique as expression of mythic, 36-46; concept of time, 37-38; narcissistic component in imagination, 49; psychological implications of Nobel Prize speech, 52; on his conception of Joe Christmas, 63; blacks in The Vnvanquished accepting selflimitation, 121; idiosyncratic perversity of distorted views of blacks, 159-60, 237; mammy Caroline Barr as biographical basis for creation of Dilsey, 164-65; individuality vs. attitude of love, 190-91; change in attitudes toward blacks, 223, 237-38, 261-63; limitations of views of blacks, 271; concerns and strengths as novelist, 281-82

Female principle, see Woman Fiedler, Leslie, 24-25, 103 "Fire and the Hearth, The," 145-46, 252-60 Fletcher, John Gould, 10 Fonsiba, 32 Forebears, legendary: effect of emulation of, 6 Fraternity, violation of, see Race Relations Freud, Sigmund, 47 Frony, 172-73 Gayle, Addison, Jr., 10-12 Go Down, Moses 221-60 Gowries, the: "Nub," 269, 275; Crawford, 278 Grimm, Percy, 36, 42; as white chauvinist and agent of his heritage, 88; murdering Joe Christmas, 101-2 Habersham, Miss Eunice, 263, 274-75 Ham (biblical): related to mythic

298

Index

Ham (cont.) conception of blacks, 58-60, 64 Harvard, 143, 156 Hawks, Drusilla, 117-18 Head, Herbert, 143 Het, "Old," 20 Heterosexual relations: retreat from in Faulkner's men, 24-25; difficulty in achieving, 55-56 Hightower, Gail, the elder, 161 Hightower, Rev. Gail, 6, 36 Hines, Eupheus, "Doc," 18, 61-62; malevolent effect upon Joe Christmas, 70-75; symbol of wasted resources and energies of the South, 72; symbolic parent of Joe Christmas, 73; see also Dietitian Hogganbeck, Boon, 15, 230 Homoeroticism, 24, 83, 89; related to narcissism, 208 Honor, code of, 4, 6, 258-60; necessity of identification with past, 108; defense of, 126; Ringo and Bayard Sartoris compared, 131-32; related to Quentin Compson, 137 Howe, Irving, 234; on Faulkner's attitudes toward blacks, 13, 21, 24, 35-36; Dilsey not an embodiment of Christian resignation and endurance, 162 Hunting tradition, 232-35 Idealism, 141-43, 249-50; related to yearning for mother figure, 146-47; deflated, 161, 166-67 Incest: related to striving for ideality, 147; related to miscegenation, 48, 207-9,211-12 Indians, American, 2, 234; Chickasaw, compared to blacks, 228-30 Individuality vs. "attitude of love," 190-91 Integrity: Faulkner's vision of, 281-82

Intruder in the Dust, 26, 123, 261-79 Irony: mythic irony of failed expectations, 151-52, 161 Irwin, John T„ 47-52, 187 Jews, 23, 151 Jones, Wash, 182, 185 Jung, Carl Gustav, 146 Kazin, Alfred, 53, 63 Keats, John, 18-19, 42; urn figure related to striving for ideality, 147 Legate, Will, 239 Light in August, 36, 61-105; Max and Mame representing anti-society, 6; narrative technique as expression of mythic, 42-43; dietitian experiencing sex as degrading, 56 Lilley, Mr., 275 Longley, John, Jr., 65-66, 97, 104 Loosh, 115-16; expression of desire to be free, 117-18 Louvinia, 115-16 Love: individuality vs. "attitude of," 190-91; mature vision of, 249-50 Luster, 160, 166-67, 171 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 174 Mackenzie, Shreve, 206, 218-19 Mallison, Charles, Jr., 262-63, 266-75 Mammy, the black, 31 Man: retreat from and difficulty in achieving heterosexual relations, 24-25, 55-56; homoeroticism, 24, 83, 89; male-female dichotomy, 190; hunting tradition, 232-35; see also Masculine Principle Masculine Principle, 179, 227-28, 232-35, 253-55, 265; adolescent disturbance in Faulkner's men, 187; psychology of, 195-96; as revealed in

Index Rider, 244-46; aristocratic heroes as progenitorless, 248 Masks: reality behind, 224-26, 265 McCaslin, Isaac, 1-2, 25-30, 221-22, 227, 238-43; negativity of repudiation of patrimony, 9; debate with McCaslin Edmonds about blacks, 28-29; instructed by Sam Fathers in the woods, 231-35; see also McCaslin Edmonds McCaslin, Lucius Quintus Carothers ("Old Carothers"), 179, 252-53 McCaslin, Theophilus ("Uncle Buck"), 226 McEachern, Mrs., 76-77, 80-81 McEachern, Simon, 18; compared to aristocratic heroes, 77-78; as villain, 78-79 Millard, Rosa ("Granny"), 117, 132 Miscegenation, 14, 34-36, 97; fear of, 26-27; related to incest, 48, 207-9, 211-12; as duality of conflicting bloodlines, 229-30; psychological and mythic perception of, 240-41 Mississippi, 281 Mothering Figure, see Woman Mulatto: ambivalence in description of, 206-7 Mystique of race: blacks, 160, 168, 272-73 Mythic Consciousness, 36-46, 231-35; as revealed in Grimm's murdering of Joe Christmas, 101-2 Narcissism: in characters, 48-49, 147; narcissistic identification defined, 148-50; related to doubling, 153-56; in Thomas Sutpen, 188, 198-99 Narcissus, 50 Nazi death camps, 121 Ned, "Uncle," 112 "Nigger": as a social concept, 254, 265; definition of, 278-79

299

Nilon, Charles, 1, 33-34 Noah (biblical): related to mythic conception of blacks, 58-60, 64 Odor: as mythic and psychological concept, 266-69; see also Smell Oedipus (Sophocles), 41, 200 Oedipus Complex, 48, 208-9 Original Sin, 16, 168 Page, Sally, 69, 119, 175; on Jungian idea of longing for ideality as expression of yearning for mother, 146 "Pantaloon in Black," 225, 243-52 Paralee, 263 Past, the: effects upon present, 7-8; necessity of identification with as matter of honor, 108; persistence of, 141 Popeye, 5-6, 86 Pouillon, Jean, 38; Faulkner distinguishing between knowledge and consciousness, 44-45 Projection: in black-white relations, 266-67, 278-79 Psychoanalysis: related to mythic consciousness and narrative technique, 46-60 Puritan Heritage, see Christianity Race Relations: fraternal ties violated—fraternity "finer" than equality, 21, 23-25, 222-23, 263, 269-70; breaking down of artificial barriers, 35; black men and white women, 53-54, 71, 92, 256-57; white guilt, 54-55; incest related to miscegenation, 56-57; identity by race and as a mythic concept, 61, 64-65, 114, 204; Joanna Burden's vision of blacks as cursed, 86-87; mythic consciousness in Joe Christmas'

300

Index

Race Relations (cont.) acceptance of a black identity, 103-5; black-white differences in endowment, 100-1, 124; white rejection of black mammy, 145-46; doubling and blackwhite relations, 153-56; distortions of blacks in The Sound and the Fury, 163-64, 171; blacks and poor whites compared, 185; blacks and whites compared in "The Bear," 235-37; white need for black forgiveness, 242-43; metaphorical application of white women dying young, 2S5; projection in whites' attitudes toward blacks, 266-67; freedom for blacks liberating to whites, 267-68; blacks achieving dignity only through white mediation, 270-71 Racism, 164, 222-25 Rank, Otto, 47; on doubling and narcissism, 49 Reconstruction Period, 185 Reivers, The, 119 Requiem for a Nun, 181 Rider, 243-52; compared to white aristocratic heroes, 247 Ringo, 113-14; as a reactionary, 119-20; identification with whites and southern heritage, 114-15, 122, 126-31; contrasted in intelligence with Bayard Sartoris, 124; intelligence as basis of identification with whites, 127; compared to Lucas Beauchamp, 131; compared to Bayard Sartoris as representative of code of honor, 131 Roskus, 140, 157 Sadism: in Faulkner's characters, 78 Sander, Alex, 262-63, 272-73; compared to Ringo, 123 Sartoris, Bayard ("Old Bayard"), 6, 19, 108, 113-14

Sartoris, Col. John, 109-10, 179 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 38, 42 Sexual relations: as degrading, 56; white male's negative view of female, 72; resistance to sexual differentiation, 83; see also Man Slavery, 185, 226, 276-77; justification of, 10-12; in The Unvanquished, 113; effects of, 118-19, 228-30; yearning for freedom distorted, 124-25 Smell, sense of: references to, 39; "smell" of blacks, 139; odor as a mythic and psychological concept, 266-69 Snopeses, the, 3, 5, 6, 170, 180 Soldier's Pay: negative attitudes toward blacks, 33, 119 Sound and the Fury, The, 135-176; as psychologically revealing of South and Faulkner, 147-48; distortions of blacks, 163-64; negative ambience of description of blacks, 170-71 South, Old, 148, 177-80; myth of, 3, 5, 10-12, 180-81; romanticizing of 39-40; romanticizing of white woman, 56; possible decline as result of disruption of family, 145; Jason Compson's section an allegroy of, 151; historical development, 180-81; Sartoris and Sutpen compared, 181 Southern heritage, 267; analysis of in Intruder in the Dust, 276-78 Stereotypes, 22-23, 32-33, 89-91, 224-25, 251-52 Stevens, Gavin, 20, 32, 64, 100-1; use of term Sambo in reference to blacks, 276-78 Stowe, Harriet B., 11 Sutpen, Clytemnestra ("Clytie"), 35 Sutpen, Henry, 210-11 Sutpen, Thomas, 177-200; compared to Col. Sartoris, 11; demonstrating

Index narcissistic overcompensation, 196-99; compared to classical tragic hero, 199-200 Synesthesia, 138-39 Tate, Allen, 3 Thomasina, 222 Time, concept of: effect of past on present, 37-38, 140, 141 Tomey's Turl, 222, 226-27 Tragic Hero, 199-200 Uncle Tom (Harriet Stowe), 11 Unvanquished, The, 107-133; romanticizing of old South, 107-9; as comic melodrama, 115; Loosh, Joby, Philadelphy, Louvinia in relation to idea of freedom, 115-18; Faulkner's

301

ambivalence, 116; comparison of black female servants, 119-20; younger blacks not disloyal, 119-20 Vale, Robert, 164-65 Versh, 160 Warren, Robert Penn, 4-5, 6, 29, 36, 223 Wilkins, George, 254 Woman: female principle, 73-74, 152-53,249-50, 257-58, 263; mothering figure, 137, 144, 146-47 Woodward, C. Van, 180 Wylie, Ash (black cook), 223-24 Yoknapatawpha, 281