B006JHRY9S EBOK (26 page)

Despite his occasional avuncular claim that he understood blacks (as in the notorious Howe interview), his more abiding position was skeptical. In
the same speech in which he urged the Negro “to cease forever more thinking like a Negro and acting like a Negro,” he also showed that he understood the concept of “Negro” itself to have no reliable meaning. Rather than the sign of a reality, it was a mask, a shield. “It is possible that the white race and the Negro race can never really like and trust each other,” he wrote; “this for the reason that the white man can never really know the Negro, because the white man has forced the Negro to be always a Negro rather than another human being in their dealings, and therefore the Negro cannot afford, does not dare, to be open with the white man” (ESPL 157). Could a political program have based itself on this insight? It is doubtful, yet this insight went to the heart of his Southern experience, and it would recur powerfully in his finest novels. Whites did not know who blacks were, not because blacks were unknowable but because whites had for the longest time been fouling their own nest. They had abused blacks, broken faith with them, made them adopt the protective masks and strategies required to survive the whites.

Why did he so exercise himself in a cause he must have eventually recognized as unwinnable on his terms? Perhaps his most revealing answer came in a long and musing essay he wrote in 1954, “Mississippi.” There, in barely concealed autobiographical terms (but using his fictional characters’ names rather than those of his own family), he revisited his lifelong experience of “his native land: he was born of it and his bones will sleep in it; loving it even while hating some of it” (ESPL 36). Man in the middle: you love what you hate. You love it despite what you hate about it. What you hate is too deeply rooted to disappear simply because you wish it would. What you hate was not far to find: “But most of all he hated the intolerance and injustice: the lynching of Negroes not for the crimes they committed but because their skins were black” (37).

The middle is precisely where no effective racial politics could be constructed in the mid-1950s. But it was where, stumbling and contradicting himself, seeing too many competing realities to get them into a single vision, Faulkner found himself. He didn’t want to be there, but he felt he had no choice in the matter. The crisis was urgent; he had to engage it. Yet he knew, in his novelistic bones, that race trouble in America—however urgent—wasn’t going away soon, no matter what the politics for addressing it. His much maligned phrase, “go slow now,” meant all the reactionary or blindsided things it has been glossed to mean, but it also meant something more. The national malady of violent racism permitted of no specific remedy to cure it once and for all. No governmental antibiotics existed for ills
in the body politic—ills so long established as to seem virtually constituent of American reality. Regions, let alone countries, do not remake themselves in a year or even a decade. Politicians often refuse to think in such long-range terms, for reasons both good and bad. But novelists do. “The human heart in conflict with itself,” as he put it in his 1950 Nobel Prize speech, operates outside the instrumental terms of problem and resolution. Dramas of the heart are rarely about winners and losers. As Faulkner put away his speeches and his public letters in the later 1950s, entering his last five years of life (though he couldn’t have known this), he might have felt an immense sense of frustration and fatigue. There was so much work on race still to be done, but he lacked the heart and energy to pursue it further. And he knew no one was looking to him for it. Could he have realized that his supreme contribution to the understanding of racial turmoil in his native land had already been done? It lay behind him, in his finest novels.

No reader of the early fiction would have guessed it though. His first writings were virtually free of black portraits or themes.
Soldiers’ Pay
and
Mosquitoes
attended to white characters with white dilemmas. Some of the
New Orleans Sketches
did show signs of his power to enter racial territory—black vernacular rhythms caught and articulated, even the specific timbre of black distress. Blacks began to show up in number, and to open up to narrative development, though limited, only with
Flags in the Dust
. But they could not escape
Flag’s
plantation frame, its “whites only” emphases. Though skillfully drawn, the retinue of servants attending the Sartoris family—Simon and Leonora, Caspey and Isom—did not escape the repertory of stereotypes traditionally used to represent the black domestic. The rebelliousness of the returning Caspey might well have offered Faulkner a chance to explore the trouble-making restlessness of blacks coming home after the Great War. But Caspey’s menace, given nowhere to go in
Flags
, loses its edge and portent, reducing to the familiar uppityness of a misbehaving servant. The book remained focused on its intricately suffering white protagonists.

Perhaps the most memorable black character Faulkner was ever to create appeared in his next novel,
The Sound and the Fury
. But he did not allow the Compsons’ black maid, Dilsey Gibson, despite her resourcefulness, to break through the novel’s undeviating focus on white postbellum dysfunction. Often reductively misread, Dilsey radiates dignity and a clear-eyed capacity to parse Compson misdoings well beyond the ken of any stereotypical mammy. The
strongest character in the novel, she is nevertheless far from its most mesmerizing. It is as though her achievement of mental health itself kept her from Faulkner’s more penetrating scrutiny. Bounded by the demands of a failing white household, she was kept on the near side of emotional and mental free fall. Unpreparedness and vulnerability in the present moment—the signs of Faulkner’s deeper investment in a character—are denied her.

Minor black characters in this novel share a good measure of Dilsey’s composure. Versh, T.P., Frony, and Luster—three generations of Compson servants—caretake this unsavable family as efficiently as is humanly possible. With wry humor and unillusioned endurance, they deflect—or absorb—the racial slights coming their way. Deep down, they remain imperturbable, which is precisely the mark of their secondariness in this book: no onslaught of sound and fury
could
reach them. The most suggestive instance of such imperturbability is an unnamed black man sitting atop a mule. On a train heading home for Christmas vacation during his freshman year at Harvard, Quentin encounters him:

I didn’t know that I really had missed Roskus and Dilsey and them until that morning in Virginia. The train was stopped when I waked and I raised the shade and looked out. The car was blocking a road crossing … and there was a nigger on a mule in the middle of the stiff ruts, waiting for the train to move. How long he had been there I didn’t know, but he sat straddle of the mule, his head wrapped in a piece of blanket, 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 put there saying You are home again…. I raised the window.

“Hey, Uncle,” I said. “Is this the way?”

“Suh?” He looked at me, then he loosened the blanket and lifted it away from his ear.

“Christmas gift!” I said.

“Sho comin, boss. You done caught me, aint you?”

“I’ll let you off this time.” I dragged my pants out of the little hammock and got a quarter out. “But look out next time. I’ll be coming back through here two days after New Year, and look out then.” I threw the quarter out the window. “Buy yourself some Santy Claus.”

“Yes, suh,” he said. He got down and picked up the quarter and rubbed it on his leg. “Thanky, young marster. Thanky.” Then the train began to move. I leaned out the window, into the cold air, looking back. He stood there beside the gaunt rabbit of a mule, the two of them shabby and motionless and unimpatient. (SF 943)

“Coming back”: the entire passage is suffused in the nostalgia of a return to the past. This black man—he has neither history nor name—radiates a bond with nature itself. Like the fence, the road, and the hill, it is as though he has been there forever. He seems planted like a signpost to reassure Quentin that whatever the Yankee surprises of his first semester at Harvard, “You are home again.” The train moves with the technological velocity of a changing world, but not this black man, nor his motionless mule. The social ritual accompanying their encounter is likewise saturated in practices dating from antebellum times. “Christmas gift” was a game whites would play with friends and servants (or, further back, with slaves) during the last week in December. Whenever two people would cross paths, the first to say these words would be entitled to a small gift from the other. If the ritual involved a slave, the time-honored tradition insisted that the slave always said it first. Quentin gets to the ritual phrase sooner than the black man on the mule, but he does not fail to pass a quarter to him. They encounter each other as young marster and submissive darky. Fixed against the horizon by the train’s hurtling motion away, the black man appears to Quentin as all but biologically bonded with his mule, “the two of them shabby and motionless and unimpatient.” Faulkner seems to have invented the word “unimpatient” to convey the hard-won resilience of blacks in
The Sound and the Fury
. Eluding the onslaught of modernity (which is dispossessing and disorienting the white Compsons), this black man endures the indignities that come his way without succumbing to impatience. As though gifted with an instinctual component lacking in whites, he finds his way past the myriad reasons for frustration and recovers a contemporary “unimpatience” that replaces the traditional “patience” no longer available.

Faulkner accesses otherwise the damaged white Compson brothers—Benjy, Quentin, and Jason. He uses present-tense, first-person interior monologue to narrate their encounters. Their experience bursts upon them as assault, overwhelming their defenses. Remembering an earlier moment of distress when he had broken his leg and was trying to prepare himself for the ensuing pain, Quentin thinks:
“Wait I’ll get used to it in a minute wait just a minute I’ll get”
(SF 72, emphasis in the original). Go slow now, wait, stop: such language reappears in Faulkner’s frantic later attempts to forestall a coming racial juggernaut (the violent move, in the 1950s, to integrate his beloved South). But Quentin—no more than Faulkner—cannot get ready in advance. His plea that the pain slow down is itself violently interrupted—
“wait just a minute I’ll get”
—his distress overriding his linguistic effort to bind it. No
hindsight or foresight possible: he is being crushed
now
. Caught in present-tense dilemmas, Faulkner’s white protagonists lack “unimpatience.”

In his early novels, Southern distress remained racially innocent. This fiction either ignored blacks or seemed to access them as inhabitants of another planet. More precisely, inhabitants of another time (antebellum-derived), embodiments of an earlier culture. More precisely yet, he imagined them as carriers of a separate blood. Even if they carried an admixture of white blood (like Elnora), Faulkner was not interested in probing the trouble that mixture might imply. But from
Light in August
(1932) through
Go Down, Moses
(1942), he would imagine blacks otherwise. And it was by seeing them as potentially scandalous carriers of white blood that he came upon a supreme insight. He grasped that racial turmoil in the South—at once yoking and dissevering white and black lives for over two centuries—centered on miscegenation. From 1932 forward, Southern trouble would no longer strike him as racially innocent. Innocence itself had lost its charm; Southern whites who basked in it had no title to it.
Light in August
would inaugurate Faulkner’s attempt to probe the nightmare hiding in that simple phrase “dark twins.”

I have already noted the unfamiliar sequencing of materials in this novel—the ways in which none of the opening chapters seems to prepare its reader for the one that comes next. Preparing one for what comes next is of course the role of tradition itself, and the very unfolding of
Light in August
sets off an alarm: tradition is useless here, you will not be ready for what is coming. Nor will you know whom to follow when it arrives. Seemingly minor, this deviation from standard novelistic practice is major. From Clarissa Harlowe through Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, and Jake Barnes, the great novels of Western fiction tell us early on who matters more and who less—where to train our eye. They economize our passage through the
time
of reading, reassuring us that—though we still need to remain alert—we’re on the right path. Faulkner takes five chapters and introduces a trio of possible protagonists—Lena, Byron, Hightower—before he settles in on Joe Christmas. He also insinuates, with increasing discomfort for his reader, that though we come to know Christmas intimately, we do not know a cardinal fact of his existence: his racial identity. Joe does not know this either. In any of Faulkner’s previous novels, such not-knowing would be of no
moment, since none of them engages racial identity as a question. This one does—its 375 pages do little else—and the consequences are astonishing.

How can racial identity be a serious question in a novel that has virtually no black characters? (A few young blacks wander the Jefferson streets late one night, a pair of older blacks figure in Hightower’s memories of his nineteenth-century childhood. None of them has much bearing on the book’s events.) Yet racial hysteria—like a bomb threat—can flare up, uncontrollably, with neither blacks nor bombs anywhere to be found. In an essay entitled “Stranger in the Village,” James Baldwin explains the logic of this hysteria: “At the root of the American Negro problem,” he writes, “is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to live with himself … ‘the Negro-in-America is a form of insanity which overtakes white men.’”
⁸
Dark twins: it is as though the American white man has been surreptitiously infected with Negro-ness. The insanity such infection foments is white alone. My figure of speech invokes the blood, which is
Light in August’s
obsessive concern. Joe Christmas is incapable of finding a way of living with the Negro in order to live with himself, and this is because he senses his dark twin living inejectably, blood-coiled, beneath his skin. How does Christmas come to believe this? How does Faulkner let us find it out?