Slavery, Modernity, and the Turn towards Death in the Black Atlantic World of Yoknapatawpha County

As Faulkner wrote his way into the crisis of Mississippi race relations across the 1930s and 1940s, he turned with increasing frequency to the subject of slavery and the figures of black slaves. In these figures he progressively recognized what Paul Gilroy identifies as a counter-Hegelian modernity that rewrites Hegel’s master–slave dialectic along new lines. Where for Hegel the struggle for recognition between lord and bondsman was predicated on the latter’s inevitable submission to the former, Faulkner’s fictions of slavery come more nearly to evoke a black intellectual legacy in which the dialectic pivots not on the slave’s fear of death but on what Gilroy calls the turn towards death. Here death functions not as an index of despair, surrender, or flight, but as a powerful ontological resource, a revolutionary negation of Atlantic slavery whose eschatological implications point to the possibility of a freer and more just world elsewhere.

William Faulkner and the Faces of Modernity

William Faulkner has enjoyed a secure reputation as American modernism’s foremost fiction writer, and as a landmark figure in international literary modernism, for well over half a century. Less secure, however, has been any scholarly consensus about what those modernist credentials actually entail. Over recent decades, there have been lively debates in modernist studies over the who, what, where, when, and how of the surprisingly elusive phenomena of modernism and modernity. It is the aim of this book to broaden and deepen an understanding of Faulkner’s oeuvre by following some of the guiding questions and insights of new modernism studies scholarship into understudied aspects of Faulkner’s literary modernism and his cultural modernity. William Faulkner and the Faces of Modernity explores Faulkner’s rural Mississippians as modernizing subjects in their own right rather than mere objects of modernization; traces the new speed gradients, media formations, and intensifications of sensory and affective experience that the twentieth century brought to the cities and countryside of the US South; maps the fault lines in whiteness as a racial modernity under construction and contestation during the Jim Crow period; resituates Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County within the transnational countermodernities of the black Atlantic; and follows the author’s imaginative engagement with modern biopolitics through his late work A Fable, a novel Faulkner hoped to make his “magnum o.” By returning to the utterly uncontroversial fact of Faulkner’s modernism with a critical sensibility sharpened by new modernism studies, William Faulkner and the Faces of Modernity aims to spark further reappraisal of a distinguished and quite dazzling body of fiction. Perhaps even make it new.

Genealogies of White Deviance

Chapter 5 examines Faulkner’s engagement with eugenics discourse as that Progressive-era reform movement began making inroads into the South in the twenties and thirties. Eugenics was riddled with contradictions: in addressing itself to the purification of modern whiteness, it ironically divided whiteness against itself, positing deviant, degenerate forms that supposedly sapped the vitality of the nation’s economy and racial stock—a problem with distressing implications for the strict biracial order of Jim Crow. In his first five Yoknapatawpha County novels along with the early Snopes narrative “Father Abraham,” Faulkner appropriates many of the signature features of eugenics discourse—its fondness for elaborate genealogies, its use of the family-study genre, its rhetorical framing of heredity as problem or doom, its concept of “feeblemindedness” and emphasis on the compulsory segregation and sterilization of the unfit—in ways that by turns collude in and powerfully critique the guiding assumptions of the movement.

Yoknapatawpha County

A fictional county created by American author William Faulkner, Yoknapatawpha County serves as the setting of many of Faulkner’s works. Based on Lafayette County in Mississippi, Yoknapatawpha is located in north-western Mississippi. In Faulknerian lore, this area was dominated before the Civil War by the Sartoris, Compson, and Sutpen plantations and by slave labour. Many of Faulkner’s novels—including Sanctuary, Absalom, Absalom!, and The Sound and the Fury — as well as some of his short stories take place here. Because of this common setting, characters, plots, and locations transcend traditional boundaries, building a web of textual interconnectivity. The name ‘Yoknapatawpha’ derives from two words of the local Native American Chickasaw language (meaning ‘split land’). The name could reference either the physical nature of the land, divided as it is by the Tallahatchie River into plantation and pine-topped hill lands, or the division of Black and White created by the slave system. The map of this fictitious county, included in Absalom, Absalom!, allows readers a point of entry for the interconnected and vibrant setting that characterizes Faulkner’s modernist aesthetic.

Southern Gothic Literature

Southern Gothic is a mode or genre prevalent in literature from the early 19th century to this day. Characteristics of Southern Gothic include the presence of irrational, horrific, and transgressive thoughts, desires, and impulses; grotesque characters; dark humor, and an overall angst-ridden sense of alienation. While related to both the English and American Gothic tradition, Southern Gothic is uniquely rooted in the South’s tensions and aberrations. During the 20th century, Charles Crow has noted, the South became “the principal region of American Gothic” in literature. The Southern Gothic brings to light the extent to which the idyllic vision of the pastoral, agrarian South rests on massive repressions of the region’s historical realities: slavery, racism, and patriarchy. Southern Gothic texts also mark a Freudian return of the repressed: the region’s historical realities take concrete forms in the shape of ghosts that highlight all that has been unsaid in the official version of southern history. Because of its dark and controversial subject matter, literary scholars and critics initially sought to discredit the gothic on a national level. Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) became the first Southern Gothic writer to fully explore the genre’s potential. Many of his best-known poems and short stories, while not placed in a recognizable southern setting, display all the elements that would come to characterize Southern Gothic. While Poe is a foundational figure in Southern Gothic, William Faulkner (1897–1962) arguably looms the largest. His fictional Yoknapatawpha County was home to the bitter Civil War defeat and the following social, racial, and economic ruptures in the lives of its people. These transformations, and the resulting anxieties felt by Chickasaw Indians, poor whites and blacks, and aristocratic families alike, mark Faulkner’s work as deeply Gothic. On top of this, Faulkner’s complex, modernist, labyrinthine language creates in readers a similarly Gothic sense of uncertainty and alienation. The generation of southern writers after Faulkner continued the exploration of the clashes between Old and New South. Writers like Tennessee Williams (1911–1983), Carson McCullers (1917–1967), and Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) drew on Gothic elements. O’Connor’s work is particularly steeped in the grotesque, a subgenre of the Gothic. African American writers like Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) and Richard Wright have had their own unique perspective on the Southern Gothic and the repressed racial tensions at the heart of the genre. Southern Gothic also frames the bleak and jarringly violent stories by contemporary so-called Rough South writers, such as Cormac McCarthy, Barry Hannah, Dorothy Allison, William Gay, and Ron Rash. A sense of evil lurks in their stories and novels, sometimes taking on the shape of ghosts or living dead, ghouls who haunt the New Casino South and serve as symbolic reminders of the many unresolved issues still burdening the South to this day.

Interrogation, Torture, and Confession in William Faulkner’s Light in August

This chapter explores the issue of police brutality Faulkner's seventh novel, Light in August. The novel locates the violent questioning of an African American detainee by the Yoknapatawpha County sheriff and his deputies within a national debate over custodial interrogation tactics that arose in the years after World War I, which became “a staple in American popular culture” as Faulkner was reaching maturity as a novelist. It shows that “the third degree,” as it came to be called, could be found not only in the legal and penal spaces of the Jim Crow South but also in the nation's metropolitan police departments. Faulkner demonstrates how “the difficulty of knowing, the indeterminacy of truth, and the ambiguity of identity” work to elicit and to compound the racialized violence of Light in August.

Case Study #1: A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner

In “A Rose for Emily,” Faulkner discusses the relationship of the individual and thecommunity. So assume, for the time being, that you live in a modest town, possibly in Yoknapatawpha County somewhere in rural America. Not only are you a long-time member of the community, but you are also one of the several people who keep the town government operating smoothly. You might be the town’s clerk, its manager, or its mayor. Those townspeople are your friends and your neighbors as well as the public that you serve. The era might be the early 1900s, as it is here in “A Rose for Emily;” in certain respects, however, it could almost be today.Now with that frame of reference in mind, read William Faulkner’s short story.