Miscegenation and Progression: The First Americans of Jean Toomer and William Faulkner

This chapter analyzes aspects of miscegenation in William Faulkner’s work relative to several African American antecedents, contends that Jean Toomer’s work contributed to Faulkner’s treatment of the subject, and argues for a partial realignment of the traditional critical paradigm in Faulkner studies that approaches miscegenation through the segregation-era lens of threatened “whiteness.” Relying on an intertextual reading of Go Down, Moses with Toomer’s Cane and “Blue Meridian,” the chapter contends that we can discern Toomer’s influence on Faulkner’s portrayal of miscegenation. Most significantly, Toomer’s vision of progressive racial evolution culminating in a multi-racial, original American helps us frame Sam Fathers as Faulkner’s first American. As such, Fathers represents not only the end of both the Native American presence and the wilderness era in America, but he also serves as an originary model for an evolving mixed-race nation.

Natasha Trethewey’s Joe Christmas and the Reconstruction of Mississippi Nativity

This essay references the poet Natasha Trethewey’s publicly expressed appreciation of William Faulkner’s Light in August and identification with the novel’s protagonist, Joe Christmas, to establish a point of contact between two authors with lives and literary pursuits indelibly marked by native ties to Mississippi. A focus on Trethewey’s poem “Miscegenation” opens up an examination of themes and tropes that make for a complex and dynamic intertextual exchange between her acclaimed 2006 collection, Native Guard, and Light in August. Natasha Trethewey’s Joe Christmas is a variation on the original, as she enlists one of Faulkner’s signature characters in a personal project of reclamation that draws on literature, history, and memory. Trethewey signifies Faulkner as part of an overarching effort in Native Guard to give voice to the contradictory feelings and experiences of racial trauma and survival, of recollected exclusion, and negotiated belonging that underwrite her claim to “Mississippi nativity.”

Morrison’s Return to Faulkner: A Mercy and Absalom, Absalom!

This chapter examines an intertextual relationship between Toni Morrison's novel, A Mercy (2008) and Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936). A Mercy returns to racial motifs in Faulkner's work and shifts the focus from the dominant culture to the marginalized and explores racial meanings that have eluded readers for whom black and white are discrete, dichotomous categories. Whereas the narrators of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! are the white upper class that Morrison calls “the dominant cultural body,” Morrison's novel incorporates narrators include all perspectives--white, black, Native American, free, and slave--and Morrison's culturally marginalized narrators foreground meanings that are implicit, but often withheld, disguised, or denied by Faulkner's narrators.

From Yoknapatawpha County to St. Raphael Parish: Faulknerian Influence on the Works of Ernest J. Gaines

This essay examines affinities between Faulkner and one of the South’s most important contemporary authors, Ernest J. Gaines. It begins by noting the powerful geographical and intertextual imagination at work in the two writers: each created a bounded fictional domain that served as the principal setting for numerous works (Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County and Gaines’s Louisiana parish of St. Raphael), each used recurring characters across multiple fictions and each writer’s assembled books speak in a kind of dialogue with each other that integrates and amplifies the impact of the overall body of work. By his own admission, Gaines learned much from Faulkner, but just as important are the things to avoid that he found in Faulkner. Where Faulkner too often portrays African Americans in narrow terms of victimization or sheer endurance, Gaines went beyond those limitations to present black figures who achieve a full human standing acknowledged by the larger community.

Dangerous Quests: Transgressive Sexualities in William Faulkner’s “The Wild Palms” and James Baldwin’s Another Country

William Faulkner’s novels explore forms of social change and development from which the same author publically advocated retreating. James Baldwin praised Faulkner as one of a handful of writers who had begun to engage with race in American literature in a progressive fashion. However, in his essay “Faulkner and Desegregation,” Baldwin challenges Faulkner’s statement that the process of racial integration in the South should “go slow.” In a common focus on social progress, Faulkner’s “The Wild Palms” and Baldwin’s Another Country explore sex and sexuality’s potential as a tool to create a new social order. In these texts, transgressive sexual and artistic practices are used to question social boundaries and limiting binaries of gender and race. These acts of transgression serve to critique the way power polices boundaries of social division, although Faulkner’s text does not share the gesture toward transcendence at the end of Baldwin’s novel.

Reconstructions: Faulkner and Du Bois on the Civil War

The Unvanquished was Faulkner’s most sustained fictional account of the Civil War, as well as an occasion for him to model various methods of studying the conflict. The novel approaches the war from several historiographically distinct viewpoints, sometimes presenting it as a demonstration of abstract, universal principles, and other times as a fight over slavery. In making the former case, The Unvanquished resembles some of the most cutting-edge, “revisionist” Civil War histories of the 1920s and 30s. But in making the latter it echoes W.E.B. Du Bois’ then-unfashionable, now-accepted insistence that the war was fundamentally concerned with black subjugation and liberation.

Narrative Leaps to Universal Appeal in McKay’s Banjo and Faulkner’s AFable

This chapter explores connections between Claude McKay and William Faulkner by considering the way each writer negotiates aesthetics and politics in his fiction. Focusing on fictional texts set in France, it engages with critical conversations about the extent to which travel, negotiation of identity and the idea of “home,” may have impacted each writer’s work. The textual and aesthetic interaction between the particular and the universal in each writer’s work informs, in intersecting ways, their approaches to race, gender, class and nationalism and this chapter explores this vast range of intersections by focusing on the mapping of race and home that operate within the texts.

Lingering in the Black: Faulkner’s Illegible Modernist Sound Melding

Faulkner clearly paid attention to the trends and directions of modernist writing in the early 1920s, but what is less obvious is how the work of African Americans contributed to his “making it new,” as Pound suggested for creating a modern poetics. This essay explores the soundings from Black cultural and literary production that Faulkner drew upon and melded into his writerly voice and modernist aesthetic. From the blues and jazz music of Black musicians, such as W. C. Handy, through the fictive realms of modernist writers (e.g., Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, Roark Bradford) whose artistry drew on Black voices, to the aesthetic work of modern Black writers (in particular, James Weldon Johnson’s sermons in verse), Faulkner found models for rendering the sounds of Black life in his literary art. These Black soundings remain audible though not transparent in Faulkner’s fiction and practice through the 1920s and beyond.

Contemporary Black Writing and Southern Social Belonging: Beyond the Faulknerian Shadow of Loss

This chapter examines how Randall Kenan responds to both the force and inadequacy of Faulkner’s gothic representations of white southern loss which have arguably functioned to export—and perhaps exploit—a sense of the South as a “wound culture.” The chapter argues that in confronting how representations of white loss might have been used to legitimize or excuse pervasive forms of exclusion, racism, and homogeneity, contemporary black writers such as Kenan address the function of the gothic, as a genre of loss, in fostering a culture held in the grip of slavery. Specifically, Kenan’s queer appropriation of the gothic in A Visitation of Spirits signifies on the regulatory implications of the genre, calling into question the orthodoxies of white Renascence fiction.

Tracking Faulkner in the Paths of Black Modernism

This essay tracks the relationship between Faulkner’s career and the development of modern African American literature. It shows how the development of black modernism created a new environment for his work, for his work’s reception, and ultimately for his literary imagination—as well as how black writers responded to his work. Faulkner’s approach to fiction developed out of many of the same intellectual cross-currents that gave rise to interest in African American writing, and the shift in his use of black characters in the 1940s registers his awareness of black-authored fiction and his anger over American racism in the midst of World War II. Finally, the essay addresses his problematic response to the Civil Rights movement in relationship to critiques of white southerners’ “tragic misconceptions of time” by Martin Luther King, Jr. and Toni Morrison.