[to be published in Faulkner in Context, ed. John Matthews, Cambridge University Press, c. 2014]<\/p>\n
Reading Faulkner in historical context must include consideration of antebellum and early New South plantation fiction. Before the Civil War, representations of pastoral economies and harmony among the races played a key role in the southern counter-attack against Harriet Beecher Stowe\u2019s Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin (1852), the most influential fictional indictment of slavery as a threat to the economic and moral fabric of the United States. After the War, during the era of Jim Crow at home and U.S. colonialism abroad, influential new narratives set on plantations by southern writers appeared to great acclaim in national magazines like Scribner\u2019s and Harper\u2019s. The Civil Rights era in the mid-twentieth century eventually transformed our understanding of both Faulkner and plantation fiction\u2014most notably via new interpretive strategies inspired by black studies, feminist criticism, postcolonial theory, and the \u201cglobal South\u201d turn in U.S. studies. Broadly speaking, postwar plantation fiction\u2019s appeal was once primarily understood as an expression of nostalgia for a pre-modern, rural, and regional past in both economic and social relations, a southern variant of dialect stories and regional realism that became known in the nineteenth century as \u201clocal color.\u201d Since the 1980s, though, plantation fiction and local color writing has been interpreted as helping to create modernity (MacKethan, Wells). Plantation fiction helped readers manage tragedy and loss associated with the Civil War via narratives of reconciliation between northern and southern characters, and it offered a reassuring model of postslavery race and class relations. <\/p>\n
Most recently, the transnational turn in U.S. Studies has given us new hypotheses about how a seemingly backward- and inward-looking form shaped a future-oriented, global vision. Plantation fiction during the early imperial era (the 1890s and after) modeled how to shoulder the \u201cwhite man\u2019s burden\u201d at home and abroad. Like the South, new U.S. colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific existed in a liminal zone as a dangerous yet alluring pre-modern region within the U.S.\u2019s expanded national boundaries (Kaplan, Smith and Cohn, Schmidt, Greeson, Ring, Wells). The South as a longstanding \u201cexception\u201d seemed to threaten the core values of American exceptionalism\u2014that view that the United States collectively had a special, God-given destiny to redeem the sins of human history. Yet by the late nineteenth century those advocating for global power argued that, with its original sin of slavery expunged, the United States was now ready to uplift both the old South and its new colonies. In short, cultural historians now trace the \u201cglobal scope of the local\u201d in New South literature, as Jennifer Rae Greeson has termed it. Although many postwar plantation writers forced an aesthetic of consensus on their stories, however, we increasingly recognize that New South fiction before Faulkner was quite heterogeneous, working with a wide range of narrative modes expressing ambiguity, dissent, doubt, rage, repression, fear, and mourning sometimes encoded within the very tales that seemed most consensus-obsessed.<\/p>\n
Two elements were particularly important to the reconstruction of the South as it occurred in post-Civil War fiction: its use of the romance genre and its popularization of the character of the black Mammy. Southern fiction\u2019s sentimental romance plots stressed not just courtship and marriage between northern and southern characters; these tales also often tied the success of whites\u2019s new identities to the approving nod of black servants who had once been slaves. Romantic reconciliations promoted by postwar fiction thus narrated proper forms of \u201cfree\u201d black dependency as well as North\/South reunification. The romances of this era also featured the \u201cnatural\u201d subordination of women to men, including the necessity to protect white women\u2019s purity from racial threats. Such romance plots proved adaptable to new colonial as well as southern settings. Thomas Dixon\u2019s The Leopard\u2019s Spots: A Romance of the White Man\u2019s Burden (1902) and The Clansman (1905) are notorious (and conflicted) in this regard, but a fascinating example that should be better known is Margaret Mitchell\u2019s Lost Laysen, a short romance set in the South Pacific written in 1915 when she was a teenager. Laysen is obsessed with the eros of miscegenation in ways that foreshadow both Faulkner\u2019s work and certain elements in Gone With the Wind (Williamson; Schmidt, \u201cOn Eros\u201d; see also Porter on Faulkner and Mitchell).<\/p>\n
The free black Mammy character central to much plantation fiction gave readers one way to mediate the obvious contradictions in the sentimental romances just described. Full of initiative and invective, the Mammy nevertheless embodied undying loyalty to her white masters. For white readers she demonstrated not just how postwar racial relations ought to work, but also what free black labor should look like (Hale; Wallace-Sanders). In Joel Chandler Harris\u2019 \u201cAunt Fountain\u2019s Prisoner\u201d (1887), for example, \u201cAunt\u201d Fountain donates her profits from selling ginger-cakes to her former owners in order to keep their plantation from being sold to pay their postwar debts; she also is instrumental in arranging the marriage between the owners\u2019 eligible daughter and an industrious northerner who becomes the plantation\u2019s manager and then its master. Other Harris Mammy tales are more complex, such as \u201cThe Case of Mary Ellen\u201d (1899), in which \u201cAunt\u201d Minervy Ann inspires whites secretly to violate the color line. <\/p>\n
Paul Laurence Dunbar\u2019s portraits of black men and women, particularly in The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories (1900) and In Old Plantation Days (1903), are similarly multivalent, offering ironic commentary on contemporary race relations even if they sometimes have antebellum settings. Dunbar\u2019s \u201cThe Ingrate\u201d may be read as an ironic evisceration of white paternalism, while \u201cThe Case of Ca\u2019line,\u201d \u201cAunt Tempe\u2019s Triumph,\u201d and \u201cAunt Tempe\u2019s Revenge\u201d all feature strong black women who get their way. \u201c\u2019Are you the man who owns this plantation?\u2019\u201d a neighbor asks in bewilderment in \u201cAunt Tempe\u2019s Triumph,\u201d to which the plantation master, whose name is Mordaunt, mordantly replies, \u201c\u2019I used to think so\u2019\u201d (Complete Stories 204). Harris is most well known for creating Uncle Remus, a character who appeared (to many white contemporaries at least) to render African-American tricksters safe for plantation fiction sentimentalism. But Harris and Dunbar arguably played just as important a role in U.S. cultural history by reworking the meaning of the Mammy as she became a major figure in U.S. popular culture. While sometimes conforming to the ideal of the loyal servant, Harris\u2019 and Dunbar\u2019s black elders display considerable subversive energy. These authors\u2019 best stories engage with no little ironic force Jim Crow platitudes, prescribed gender roles, and colonial-era pieties about the \u201cwhite man\u2019s burden.\u201d<\/p>\n
William Faulkner\u2019s Mammy figures, such as Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury (1929), fit within plantation fiction\u2019s consensus tradition. True, Dilsey has unusual humor, dignity, and tragic stoicism in dealing with the ways of white folks. But Dilsey\u2019s portrait is not out of line with those of earlier fictional Mammies, nor is Margaret Mitchell\u2019s Mammy in Gone With the Wind (1936). Indeed, in both Faulkner and Mitchell the Mammy figure as rebel and reconciler in the service of white self-regard achieves something like an apotheosis. <\/p>\n
Faulkner\u2019s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and Go Down, Moses (1942) revise plantation fiction more radically. Faulkner\u2019s dangerous move was to read popular plots as defense mechanisms. In the process, Faulkner transformed narratives of reconciliation into tales warped by the forces of repression and resistance. Faulkner features self-divided characters attempting to impose a singular vision onto the labyrinth of history\u2014the race purity and aristocratic standing signified by Sutpen\u2019s 100 acres in Absalom, for example, or Ike McCaslin\u2019s attempt to repudiate the past in \u201cThe Bear.\u201d In each of these cases, though, the protagonist becomes embroiled in counter-narratives that cannot be controlled. Absalom undoes repression with eros, an erotic attraction to what is denied or abused, whereas Go Down, Moses\u2019 Ike\u2014the least driven by eros of all of Faulkner\u2019s major characters\u2014tries to track and expunge the lies of history as if he were stalking a bear in the woods. If Sutpen\u2019s goal is to rewrite his own past, Ike\u2019s goal is even more ambitious: to free himself from what James Joyce\u2019s Stephen Dedalus called \u201cthe nightmare of history.\u201d <\/p>\n
Thomas Sutpen\u2019s epic scheme to join the white planter class in Mississippi collapses when his \u201cblack\u201d Haitian-born son Charles Bon shows up demanding recognition from the father and the right to marry Judith Sutpen, his unacknowledged half-sister, and then is murdered by his half-brother Henry acting in the name of the father. Early in the novel, when Judith and Henry are young children, their father stages a wrestling match in the plantation stables to demonstrate to his son his physical as well as mental racial superiority as a patriarch. Sutpen is victorious, yet his intended initiation of Henry into whiteness\u2014what Rosa Coldfield, this section\u2019s narrator, somewhat archly calls a \u201cspectacle \u2026 toward the retention of supremacy, domination\u201d (29)\u2014goes drastically wrong in ways that foreshadow the doom of Sutpen\u2019s entire project. Henry gets physically sick from the scene\u2019s violence, while his sister Judith\u2014who wasn\u2019t supposed to be present\u2014not only witnesses the fight but is erotically stimulated by both her father\u2019s and his slave\u2019s sweat- and blood-slick bodies in the firelight. The final image of the chapter stresses not just Judith\u2019s attraction to the \u201ccaged snake\u201d (30) of her father\u2019s manhood, but also the ambiguity of Sutpen racial identity (at least as it is imagined by Rosa): \u201cI was not there to see the two Sutpen faces this time\u2014once on Judith and once on the negro girl beside her\u2014looking down\u201d (30). When Judith later becomes sexually attracted to Charles Bon, it is caused not just by rebellion against her father or Charles\u2019 handsome air of worldly sophistication, but also because of the erotic charge instilled in Judith by this primal scene at the climax of Absalom\u2019s first chapter. Absalom thus replaces the gendered white-supremacist romance of plantation fiction with a narrative driven by the eros of racial mixture. But not just that: Rosa\u2019s erotic interest in the story she tells is feverishly denied even as it is being narrated. Rosa sees with Judith\u2019s eyes, but in her retelling of the primal scene she tries mightily to identify with Sutpen\u2019s wife Ellen\u2019s outrage, not Judith\u2019s gaze. The psychological complexities here contain Absalom in microcosm, rewriting heroic plantation plots meant to reaffirm \u201cproper\u201d race, class, and gender boundaries as repressed erotic transgression, transference, and introjection.<\/p>\n
The novella \u201cThe Bear\u201d in Go Down, Moses, written in the same decade as Absalom but published in final form in 1942, challenges plantation fiction differently, through it too features a patriarch\u2019s erotic attraction both to blackness and to violent domination. Originally conceived as an epic story of a bear hunt in which its boy hero, Ike McCaslin, under the tutelage of Sam Fathers learns how Nature may redeem fallen human history, \u201cThe Bear\u201d in its expanded form contains Part 4, a different kind of quest. Ike investigates the ledgers chronicling his own family\u2019s plantation history, reading between the lines to discover silenced stories about the McCaslins and their slaves. But if Nature and Sam Fathers inspire Ike to see if time\u2019s losses and the sins of history may be \u201crepudiated denied and free\u201d (281), those dusty ledgers turn out to be a formidable antagonist. Ike originally thinks that he can redeem fallen history\u2014his grandfather Carothers McCaslin\u2019s rape of slaves, including his own daughter, and his father\u2019s and uncle\u2019s compounded complicity in other injustices\u2014but Faulkner\u2019s narrative shows Ike to be tragically deluded.<\/p>\n
The keyword in \u201cThe Bear\u201d signifying time\u2019s tragic form is \u201cmazed\u201d: Faulkner\u2019s novella, like Absalom, \u201cmazes\u201d any straightforward truth or linear heroic narrative. \u201c[T]he whole plantation in its mazed and intricate entirety,\u201d the narrator calls it after Ike asserts his inheritance is so cursed that he must renounce it (298). History itself is so tangled and misunderstood that Ike\u2019s cousin McCaslin invents a special verb to describe the mess: \u201cBuck and Buddy to fumble-heed that truth so mazed for them\u201d (282). Ike hopes he can buy forgiveness for his grandfather\u2019s sins the way one pays down debts, \u201camortizing\u201d them with cash to Carothers\u2019 remaining black kin as Ike executes the old man\u2019s will. But even as Ike carries out his plan he realizes its futility. The money won\u2019t teach its recipients to use well their freedom; indeed it commodifies human relations just as slavery did. As Ike imagines it, Carothers\u2019 will was \u201cflinging almost contemptuously, as he might a cast-off hat or pair of shoes, the thousand dollars\u2026. So I reckon that was cheaper than saying My son to a nigger\u201d (269). Like Sutpen, Carothers refuses to acknowledge his sons.<\/p>\n
The plantation ledgers from both slavery time and afterwards in \u201cThe Bear\u201d emphasize white power in an unusual way: instead of the \u201ctedious recording filling this page of wages day by day and food and clothing charged against [McCaslin blacks]\u201d (269), they selectively record births and deaths and other life events, as if these too were property transactions. Faulkner juxtaposes the neat linearity of the ledger entries with a spot on the flooring next to the desk in the plantation office: \u201cthe scuffed patch on the floor where two decades of heavy shoes had stood while the white man at the desk added and multiplied and subtracted\u201d (292). For Ike, these anonymous inscriptions rubbed into the wood mark the unredeemable, silent, and continuous expression of black suffering. (For more on throwaway bodies and the unnamed abject in southern fiction, see Yaeger.) Such marks and the lives they imperfectly represent can never be fully amortized; they are history\u2019s tragic maze in physical form, forever canceling Ike\u2019s attempts to be a Christ-like figure. This \u201cscuffed patch\u201d also excoriates plantation fiction lies about slavery and postslavery planter regimes treating blacks as \u201cone of the family\u201d and their \u201cwhite man\u2019s burden.\u201d <\/p>\n
Like Absalom, \u201cThe Bear\u201d embodies mazed truth in both the micro and macro levels of its storytelling, from the gnarled syntax of its sentences to its overall structure. Ike\u2019s wilderness training from Sam Fathers convinces him that time is redeemable if the right ritual can be found. Death may even be undone and time reversed, as in this magnificent excerpt from Ike\u2019s meditation at Sam\u2019s and Lion\u2019s grave in \u201cThe Bear,\u201d Part 5: <\/p>\n
quitting the knoll which was no abode of the dead because there was no death, not Lion and not Sam: not held fast in earth but free in earth and not in earth but of earth, myriad yet undiffused of every myriad part \u2026 dark and dawn and dark and dawn again in their immutable progression and, being myriad, one (328-29)<\/p>\n
In Ike\u2019s invocation here, identities are not separate but part of an eternal cycle, and the hunt that killed Old Ben the bear replays itself eternally, reversing time\u2019s losses, including the bear\u2019s dismemberment and Lion\u2019s disemboweling, while the heroic ritual of the chase continues on in its own \u201cimmutable progression,\u201d forever a part of Nature\u2019s rhythms of rebirth. Even a twist of tobacco, a new bandanna handkerchief, and peppermint candy\u2014Ike\u2019s graveside offerings honoring Sam\u2014are \u201ctranslated\u201d (328) from store-bought commodities into a sacred gift economy where there is no death, only transformation. <\/p>\n
Fallen human history proves more recalcitrant. \u201cThe Bear\u201d doesn\u2019t end with Ike safely transported into sacred time. After Ike\u2019s encounter with a snake, an avatar of Sam Fathers\u2019 spirit, his equilibrium is invaded by the sound of Boon hammering on a broken gun so he can slaughter squirrels trapped in a gum tree. Boon\u2019s hoarse screams are ironically juxtaposed with the stealthy silence of legal contracts bequeathing to lumber corporations the right to divide and log the wilderness Ike so reveres. \u201cDont touch a one of them! They\u2019re mine!\u201d (331) could be the logging company\u2019s credo, not just Boon\u2019s. Sam\u2019s tracking and hunting skills passed down to Ike may have proven invaluable in the forest and in Ike\u2019s quest to decode the hidden meanings buried in his family\u2019s ledgers. Yet in those plantation records Ike encounters a form of time that can neither be amortized\u2014safely paid down and made past\u2014nor cleansed through sacred ritual. Instead, Ike encounters time fallen and mazed, stubbornly entangling all involved. As Faulkner wrote in Requiem for a Nun (1950), \u201cThe past is never dead. It\u2019s not even past.\u201d<\/p>\n
Faulkner\u2019s prose not only often muddles past, present and future; it also frequently represents an action through a kind of demonic gerund verb\u2014always continuing and compounding itself, with no easily identifiable points where an event can be said to have begun, much less concluded. (Look at how the movement of Ike \u201cquitting\u201d the grave knoll is represented in the previous indented quotation, for instance.) Such constructions destabilize the nouns that would be subjects in a sentence, just as the forces of history influence human identities in unknowable ways and render them unstable, divided, opaque. Even a purported \u201cmaster\u201d can be displaced as his sentence\u2019s sovereign subject by his slaves. Such a grammatical slave rebellion indeed occurs in what is perhaps the most Faulknerian sentence in \u201cThe Bear,\u201d which runs in Part 4 from pages 263 to many pages thereafter (it depends how you count). The sentence begins trying to chronicle the actions of Ike\u2019s father and uncle, Buck and Buddy McCaslin, as recreated in Ike\u2019s imagination based on his scrutiny of the ledger data. Soon there is trouble: the sentence\u2019s subject nouns, Buck and Buddy, are dislodged in the syntax by their \u201cproperty,\u201d a long list of McCaslin slaves, \u201cRoscius and Phoebe and Thucydides and Eunice,\u201d down to \u201cthe anomaly calling itself Percival Brownlee\u201d (263). This list of myriad subject nouns is then itself pushed aside for a three-page-long parenthesis chronicling the \u201csingle page\u201d (263) of the plantation ledger that is one source, along with family stories, for the information we are reading. This parenthesis samples ledger entries by Buck and Buddy written in the same italics used for Ike\u2019s inner thoughts. It does not conclude until the bottom of page 265, after which we finally get the sentence\u2019s primary verb and then another long clause modifying both that verb and the sentence\u2019s subject nouns: \u201c\u2026 took substance and even a sort of shadowy life with their passions and complexities too as page followed page and year year; all there, \u2026 tragedy which \u2026 could never be amortized\u201d (265-66). The subjects who take on substance and life here in Ike\u2019s imagination are the McCaslin slaves and their free descendants, wresting agency away from their masters and, we might even say, breaking the bounds of the parenthesis in which they were enclosed. Yet even as this lengthy sentence displaces white male power, it surely also simultaneously entangles whites and blacks in eternal struggle. <\/p>\n
As Ike reads between the lines of the ledger entries, he finds not emerging free agency for slaves and ex-slaves but a repressed history of rape and suicide and incest\u2014leading him to the conclusion that his family and the South itself is cursed and that all he can do is to try to renounce this inheritance. Ike\u2019s impossible hope to extricate himself from white guilt is partly inspired by Sam Fathers\u2019 vision of redeeming Nature. But Ike is motivated by another, surprising source\u2014one of the heirs of Carothers\u2019 guilt money, Lucas Beauchamp. Lucas stages his own version of a lexical slave rebellion, literally appropriating a white master\u2019s power to rewrite his own history. He was originally named Lucius but altered its spelling while proudly keeping all of the other family names: his full name is Lucas Quintus Carothers McCaslin Beauchamp. On page 281 Ike imagines Lucas in 1874, after Buck and Buddy have both died, inserting his new name into the McCaslin ledgers and even (ironically?) using Buck and Buddy\u2019s writerly voice. This event is the opposite of the silent patch of scuffed flooring: Lucas here signifies that he is the sole living direct male heir of the old patriarchs. In Ike\u2019s words, \u201csimply taking the name and changing, altering it, making it no longer the white man\u2019s but his own, by himself composed, himself selfprogenitive and nominate, by himself ancestored, as, for all the old ledgers recorded to the contrary, old Carothers himself was\u201d (281). Lucas gives Ike the powerful hope that he too can repudiate sin-filled McCaslin history. Yet Lucas in life hardly provides a model of responsible freedom, and the project of self-generation that Ike imagines for Lucas repeats rather than negates the failings of Lucas\u2019 father. Ike\u2019s attempts to leap free from reenacting family trauma also fail. The tragedy of \u201cThe Bear\u201d is that financial transactions cannot free Ike from guilt-debt, nor can he or Lucas uncoil themselves from Carothers\u2019 legacy simply by claiming authorship of their own lives. <\/p>\n
The ironies or contradictions attending Ike\u2019s and Lucas\u2019 actions bedevil Faulkner\u2019s authorial project as well. The genius of \u201cThe Bear\u201d exists in highlighting such a paradox, not repressing it. Far from being selfprogenitive, the narrative voice of Faulkner\u2019s novella finds itself recycling old assumptions and plotlines\u2014not just those of Faulkner\u2019s white plantation fiction predecessors, but also those of historians like William Archibald Dunning, who, in the 1890s and after as Jim Crow segregation was being instituted throughout the South, wrote accounts of the War and Reconstruction to justify new forms of white rule as a model for the nation and its new imperial colonies. Faulkner\u2019s distinctive fictional \u201cvoice\u201d is profoundly intertextual, not autonomous or singular. <\/p>\n
The narrator of \u201cThe Bear,\u201d particularly in Part 4, for instance, doesn\u2019t just shift between McCaslin\u2019s and Ike\u2019s words as they debate how to understand history. At particularly tension-filled moments it also subtly morphs into an unpredictable and ideologically loaded third-person voice. Mixed with Ike\u2019s (and Faulkner\u2019s) progressive views of the South\u2019s sins and need for atonement lurk many narrative memes recycled from earlier writings by whites reinterpreting the War and Reconstruction to demonstrate the tough benevolence of white rule. Ike paints a picture of heroic plantation mistresses that could have been lifted directly out of antebellum defenses of slavery as more humane than northern wage-based capitalism: \u201cwives and daughters at least made soups and jellies for [slaves] when they were sick and carried the trays through the mud and the winter too into the stinking cabins and sat in the stinking cabins and kept fires going until crises came and passed\u201d (285). A few pages later, Faulkner bestows third-person narrative authority onto familiar representations of Reconstruction as that \u201cdark corrupt and bloody time.\u201d Newly freed blacks are \u201cthose 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 \u2026 but misused it as human beings always misuse freedom\u201d (289). Black illiteracy making Reconstruction government a farce\u2014a claim common to anti-Reconstruction articles, cartoons, and fiction, as Eric Foner has shown\u2014is validated as truth via this same narrative voice, particularly in the portrait of an ex-slave not so subtly named Sickymo who became a United States marshal in Jefferson and \u201csigned his official papers with a crude cross\u201d (291). Faulkner\u2019s narrator even suggests that Ku Klux Klan lynching parties were primarily composed of descendants of Union Army quartermasters and contractors who stayed after the War but soon were \u201cengaged in a fierce economic competition of small sloven farms with the black men they were supposed to have freed\u201d (290). True, there are some details in this Faulknerian panorama that would be at home in pro-Reconstruction literature, such as the novels of Albion Tourg\u00e9e depicting terrorist acts against postwar reforms: \u201cmen shot dead in polling booths with the still wet pen in one hand and the unblotted ballot in the other\u201d (291). But immediately after this particular detail in \u201cThe Bear\u201d we get the clich\u00e9d portrait of Sickymo as an emblem of Reconstruction\u2019s folly. (Compare the negative representations of Reconstruction in Faulkner\u2019s The Unvanquished, 1938.) Faulkner\u2019s various narrators in \u201cThe Bear\u201d are thus full of ideological and rhetorical detritus from the U.S. past even while they borrow Biblical rhetoric to give voice to Ike McCaslin\u2019s yearning to escape it all.<\/p>\n
Sentimental plantation fiction about the South became popular because it gave a powerful new spin to American exceptionalism, that discourse whereby trials and suffering were converted into tests to be passed in order to reaffirm God\u2019s favor and America\u2019s special role in redeeming world history. Many of Faulkner\u2019s characters are deeply invested in exceptionalist rhetoric too, as when Ike in \u201cThe Bear\u201d invokes \u201cthat whole hopeful continent dedicated as a refuge and sanctuary of liberty and freedom from what you [McCaslin] called the old world\u2019s worthless evening\u201d (283). Even while calling the South cursed, Ike assumes that repudiation and atonement will somehow return fallen American history to sacred time, just as he believes the truly American self claims the right to rewrite history and become \u201cselfprogenitive,\u201d \u201cby himself composed.\u201d Yet the very texture of Faulkner\u2019s sentences and the structure of his fictions obviate such dreams. Ike\u2019s and McCaslin\u2019s language\u2014and Faulkner\u2019s as well\u2014remains weighed down by the ledgers and discourses of a past that is not past, haunted by the unspeakable black suffering it yearns to render as either payable debt or something redeemable by a single heroic white man\u2019s gesture.<\/p>\n
The somber point here is not just that Faulkner\u2019s narrative lends its authority to familiar anti-Reconstruction clich\u00e9s, but that Faulkner\u2019s (and Ike\u2019s) fondness for the discourses marketed by American exceptionalism and plantation fiction are mazed. Instead of simply being reaffirmed, the \u201cfacts\u201d and narrative frames that pass for such history are placed in a vertiginous space on Faulkner\u2019s pages where they are subjected to questioning, interpolation, revision. The true \u201ccontext\u201d of Faulkner\u2019s plantation fiction legacy is thus neither outside of Faulkner\u2019s texts, safely part of his and our literary past, nor definitively atoned for within his texts\u2019 present action. Context and history in Faulkner function like his gerund verbs: they are ongoing traumas occurring on continuously contested terrain.<\/p>\n
In mazing the past while repeating it with a difference, Faulkner opened the boundaries of the U.S. South and its history to redefinition and transformation\u2014a shift that proved far more subversive than any claim to \u201credeem\u201d it. We can thus, as we do today, engage in readings placing Faulkner in conversation with all those who trace the shadows plantation slavery\u2019s hemispheric history casts onto our present. Gabriel Garc\u00eda-M\u00e1rquez and \u00c9douard Glissant, for instance, but see also the other essays in this volume and, for a few examples of many cogent assessments of an \u201cinvented South\u201d in U.S. memory, Lott, Kreyling, Hale, McPherson, Duck, Greeson, Romine, Ring, and Porter.<\/p>\n
Bibliography<\/p>\n
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[to be published in Faulkner in Context, ed. John Matthews, Cambridge University Press, c. 2014] Reading Faulkner in historical context must include consideration of antebellum and early New South plantation fiction. Before the Civil War, representations of pastoral economies and … Continue reading