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Call Me Nigger!: Race and Speech in Faulkner's Light in August

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Richard Godden
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Extract

Much has been written about community in Yoknapatawpha; a great deal of it reads like an apology for Arcadia. Cleanth Brooks is a persistent offender:

The little town is old-fashioned and backward looking. It is suspicious of any outsiders who would disturb its life, and when it cannot expel the alien, it tries to wall him off in a kind of cultural cyst as bees enclose with waxen walls a beetle or wasp that has got inside the hive.

The activities of Jefferson, Miss., in Light in August strike me as being less benevolent than the activities of bees. However, my point is more general: even in “old fashioned” communities people do not “Know who they are and where they belong” (xviii) as of a timeless right. They know because they engage in social exchanges which substantiate or qualify their belonging.

Recently Myra Jehlen has undertaken a class-based analysis of such exchanges. In Class and Character in Faulkner's South she discovers “the living pulse” of Yoknapatawpha in its “tangled social context.” As a result, she pleads with some justification for a shift of interest towards class in Faulkner scholarship:

William Faulkner was obsessed by history … [and] he drew characters whose inner lives are essentially linings for selves tailored to unalterable social patterns.… His people's tragedy is that their interior world has been co-opted by an external world they never made and apparently no one can ever unmake, (p. 1)

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , August 1980 , pp. 235 - 248
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

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References

Richard Godden lectures in the Department of American Studies at the University of Keele, Keele, Staffs., ST5 5BG.

1 Brooks, Cleanth, “Introduction to Light in August” (New York: Random House, 1968), pp. xvii–xviiiGoogle Scholar. Subsequent reference to Brooks' essay is to this edition.

2 Jehlen, Myra, Class and Character in Faulkner's South (New York: Columbia U.P., 1976), p. 11Google Scholar. Subsequent pagination refers to this edition.

3 Faulkner, William, Light in August (New York: Random House, 1972), p. 419Google Scholar. Subsequent pagination refers to this edition.

4 Douglas, Mary, “The Couvade and Menstruation,” collected in Implicit Meanings (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 59–60Google Scholar.

5 Jameson, Frederick, “Metacommentary,” PMLA, 80 (1971), 13Google Scholar.

6 Cowley, Malcolm, The Faulkner-Cowley File (New York: Viking Press, 1966), p. 14Google Scholar.

7 The linguist Vološinov offers a useful gloss on the implications that I am attempting to draw from the passage: “Between the psyche and ideology there exists … a continuous dialectical interplay: the psyche effaces itself, or is obliterated, in the process of becoming ideology, the ideology effaces itself in the process of becoming the psyche. The inner sign must free itself from absorption in the psychic content (the biological-biographic context), must cease being a subjective experience, in order to become an ideological sign. The ideological sign must immerse itself in the element of inner subjective signs; it must ring with subjective tones in order to remain a living sign and not be relegated to the honorary status of incomprehensible museum piece.” Vološinov, V. N., Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Matejka, L. and Titunik, I. R. (New York: Seminar Press, 1973), p. 39Google Scholar.

8 The phrase “mapping fantasy,” is taken from Jameson's definition of the relationship between the individual subject and ideology: “The ideological representation must … be seen as that indispensible mapping fantasy or narrative by which the individual subject invents a ‘lived’ relationship with collective systems which otherwise by definition exclude him insofar as he or she is born into a pre-existent social form and its pre-existent language.” (“Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism and the Problem of the Subject,” Yale French Studies, No. 55/56 (1977), p. 394Google Scholar.) “Mapping fantasy” links cartography and reverie, aptly expressing the very point of exchange (ideology with psyche) approached by Vološinov (note 7).

9 Repetition of the term “nigger” commits the reader to some form of the question, “how does actual existence determine the sign (and how) does the sign reflect and refract existence in its process of generation?” Vološinov, p. 19.

10 More to the point, it is difficult to measure. Even in a stable grouping, where three generations might conceivably co-exist, blood percentages would be a matter of guesswork and rumour.

11 Kazin, Alfred, “The Stillness of Light in August,” in Light in August and the Critical Spectrum, ed. Vickery, O. W. (Belmont: Wadsworth Pub. Inc., 1971), pp. 263 and 265Google Scholar.

12 Olga Vickery, “The Shadow and the Mirror,” Vickery ed., p. 69.

13 As a boy Joe learns about sex from other boys. One particularly “graphic” description of menstrual “filth” causes an extreme, though calculated, reaction: “On the Saturday following … he shot a sheep… Then he knelt, his hands in the yet warm blood of the dying beast, trembling, drymouthed, back-glaring” (p. 174). Presumably, he has cut out its womb in order to test the dirty talk.

14 Frazer, J. G., The Golden Bough (New York: Macmillan, 1944), pp. 207–16Google Scholar. Frazer's account of menstruation among Zulu girls is typical of the effect that “dirty” blood can have on order: “the girl is viewed as charged with a powerful force which … may prove destructive … to all with whom she comes in contact” (p. 607).

15 Joe's ruination of Mrs. McEachern's and Joanna's cooking has less to do with a Freudian subplot than with the delight Joe takes in spoilure, i.e. making dirt in bedrooms and kitchens.

16 Douglas, Mary, Purity and Danger (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 48Google Scholar.

17 Himes, Chester, If He Hollers Let Him go [1945] (Aylesbury: Sphere Books, 1976), p. 173Google Scholar.

18 Mallarmé, Stephane, Mallarmé, trans. Hartley, Anthony (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 159Google Scholar. Subsequent pagination refers to this edition.

19 Faulkner discovers “perhaps” in Joe's consciousness, and with it means to dramatize some of the social implications of the linguistic theory that “sign-cognition is cognition of the absent.” Price, H. H., Thinking and Experience (London: Hutchinson's University Library, 1953), p. 95Google Scholar.