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[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] Fury (1929) and Light in August (1932) powerfully and much more criti- cally explore the psychological effects of racism among white and possibly mixed-race Southerners, as Joe Christmas s racial background remains forever indeterminate; in that process, Faulkner reveals race to be a so- cial construction. But he does not devote extended attention to the eco- nomic and political effects of that construction the ways in which, for example, it constrains or enables choices, and marginalizes or legitimizes viewpoints until Go Down, Moses (1942) and later novels. Absalom, Absalom!, situated between these two phases, is strangely muted on these questions: their import repeatedly rises to the surface of the narrative, and at these moments, meaning seems almost deliberately to be silenced or occluded, a pattern many critics attribute to the emer- gence of overwhelming historical knowledge.36 Without denying these 32 lei gh anne duck arguments, I want to argue that Absalom, Absalom!, rooted in a short story profoundly relevant to Depression-era debates about Southern labor, also contains that is, includes and constricts important and perhaps desta- bilizing observations about race in Faulkner s contemporary social struc- ture. In this novel, Faulkner implicitly moves from seeing race as a so- cial and subjective division deeply rooted in local cultures to seeing it, in addition, as a political and economic division that organizes and sustains capital and oppressive labor relations across national contexts. He makes this move by sending his poor white protagonist to Haiti. As Richard Godden notes, one kernel of Absalom, Absalom! lies in the short story Wash, published in 1934; here, a stereotypical white trash man without property or work, and nothing to sustain him but his racial identification with a wealthy white man who allows him to live in a decayed shack on his plantation finally realizes that the plantation owner is nei- ther heroic nor his ally.37 Having lost much of his family and land during the Civil War, the once wealthy Thomas Sutpen impregnates Wash Jones s granddaughter, Milly, and then refuses to marry her once she delivers a girl; having hoped for a boy who might replace his lost heir, he dismisses Milly with the comment, Too bad you re not a mare. Then I could give you a decent stall in the stable (535). Though deeply troubled that Ne- groes, whom the Bible told him had been created and cursed by God to be brute and vassal to all men of white skin, were better found and housed and even clothed than he and is, and sensing always about him mocking echoes of black laughter, Jones has in the past consoled himself by visual- izing Sutpen as his own lonely apotheosis (538). When Sutpen abruptly denies the possibility of a transclass white racial alliance by viewing Milly as less worthy of housing than his livestock, Jones kills Sutpen and, later, Milly; he then burns his shack and great-grandaughter, rushing out to challenge with Sutpen s scythe the sheriff, the police, and their guns. As Caroline Miles has argued, the class resentment enacted here sug- gests a radical commentary; in its exploration of race and psychology, this story also asks vital questions about Southern labor relations in the 1920s and 30s.38 During this period, conservative and liberal analysts agreed that the rigid triangulation of race and class was crucial to the white suprema- cist status quo in the South: they differed only as to whether poor whites were congenitally convinced or manipulatively persuaded to forego the sorts of economic and political rebellion that would acknowledge their shared class interests with poor African Americans.39 Though hardly new to this period, questions about how and why racial identification might pre- empt class identification emerged with new urgency amid economic de- From Colony to Empire: Postmodern Faulkner 33 pression and increasing national anxiety over Southern social structures. Accordingly, for example, both Wash, published in 1934, and C. Vann Woodward s Tom Watson, Agrarian Rebel, published in 1938, consider a troubling contemporary dynamic by tracing or imagining its manifesta- tions in the past. Absalom, Absalom! deepens this implicit critique by pro- viding Thomas Sutpen a past in which he exploits both slaves and Milly Jones in the pursuit of class revenge as Faulkner later argued, for all the redneck people. 40 Rather than rebelling against an oppressive system, however, Sutpen seeks wealth that would rival the holdings of the most es- tablished Southern aristocrat. For where Wash Jones only occasionally suspects that his status might be lower than that of slaves and, later, free African Americans, young Thomas Sutpen briefly loses all his illusions about social status. Growing up in a remarkably undifferentiated hill society, he subscribes, effectively, to the frontier myth that often underwrites celebratory accounts of capi- talism and opportunity in the U.S.41 Faulkner complicates this myth by noting that the relative homogeneity of Sutpen s Appalachia is achieved through the systematic murder of Indians, but that does not lessen its psy- chological impact on young Thomas, who didn t even know there was a country all divided and fixed and neat with a people living on it all di- vided and fixed and neat because of what color their skins happened to be and what they happened to own (179). As his family moves into a plan- tation region, however, he very quickly determines that race can be ex- pressed as species difference, and refers to African Americans as bull[s] and monkey[s] (182, 186 90). Separating slaves from the racial classifica- tion shared by himself and the wealthy initially helps to defer his awareness of class difference among whites the idea that any man should take any such blind accident as birth into a propertied family as authority or war- rant to look down at others (180). But this strategy collapses when, seek- ing to relay a message to his father s boss, Sutpen is told by the slave/butler who answers the door that he must go to the back presumably the door slaves would use, and certainly the door African Americans were required to use at white homes during Faulkner s lifetime. As Hortense Spillers argues, this event utterly disrupts Sutpen s under- standing of both self and society: as it happens he seem[s] to kind of dis- solve, and he concludes that he and his family also, from the plantation [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |