Tag Archives: Racism

New Orleans, the Confederacy, and Hating It

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I didn’t make nearly enough of the stirring story of toppling monuments to the Confederacy in New Orleans this month. After reading GDM and AA in particular, we should have a keen sense of the depth of historical resonance as Mayor Landrieu has overseen the removal of monuments to Confederate leaders such as Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. The removals have been accompanied by protests and counter-protests, often with valences of fascism (e.g., burning torches and heavy arms) as well as more reasoned reactions by writers from right to left meditating on what it means to remember and/or memorialize the past.

For us, we should think of certain aspects of Faulkner’s legacy. For example, we might remember how large the War looms in the imagination of Quentin Compson, so much so that he feels emptied out in the present, “his very body an … empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names.” We might also reflect on two contrary vectors in Faulkner’s work that are highly relevant. On the one hand, we have Faulkner’s strenuous effort, amid the resurgence of nativism and white supremacy, to reveal the absurdity of racial ideologies (especially in LIA and AA via Christmas and Bon), and to attempt, however awkwardly at times, to inhabit black subjectivities and imagine black desires (especially via Lucas and Molly in GDM).

In similar fashion, Landrieu and other white elites, who very much still dominate the city and state governments and control a vast share of capital and influence, nonetheless have made a courageous effort to chip away at the toxic legacy of white supremacy with this act. On the other hand, we should remember that Faulkner shares with his liberal Southern counterparts an antipathy to some aspect of antiracist progressivism of his era and a strong preference for the kind of “going slow” on racial issues that King later mocked as meaning “never.” The very existence of these monuments in 2017 speaks to the equivalence of “later” and “never” in many minds up to this point, and the push to remove them now represents, one hopes, a growing will on the part of a substantial majority of the nation to reckon with this painful past. We need to replace what Landrieu calls “a fictional, sanitized Confederacy” in our official modes of memory with a more complex narrative in which white supremacy and the violent subjugation of indigenous peoples and members of minority groups is central to the formation and maintenance of “The South.” Here’s Landrieu’s speech, which is well worth a read: .

Racism and Southern Perspective

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The differences in the racist perspectives of narrators in The Sound and The Fury generate a dialogue on race that points towards a pessimistic position on progress. Specifically in the juxtaposition of Quentin and Jason, the two new potential heads of the family, Faulkner uses racism and the close relationship between race and the South to show two modes of male impotency.

Quentin has an obsessive nostalgic appreciation of the black man. He imbues the black man with the timelessness and nobility of the south, but also the south’s stasis and immobility. In his memory of the black man and mule parked on the train tracks he recollects his “quality… of shabby and timeless patience, of static serenity” derived from the “childlike incompetence and paradoxical reliability that… robs then steadily and evades responsibility and obligations” (87) This sort of racial archetype stands in for a post-slavery south that has no method of progress. Quentin’s racism points to a south in a slow decay of poetic timelessness.

Jason’s more antagonistic racism corresponds to the separatist vein of southern decay. His anti-semitic theories about northern Jews and his slave master persona in the town depict a southern maleness that is in opposition to the advancement of genial liberal ideas, and reinforce the fissure between the south and the rest of the US. Jason’s bitterness is quite different from Quentin’s dreamy nostalgic sense of laziness… just as Jason drives himself further and further into embarrassment, his racism illustrates the embarrassing realities of a racist south. His complaints often point to the expansive collective of black workers, and the white perception of the laziness and ineffectiveness of this working class. On 186 he complains that he “feeds a whole damn kitchen full of niggers to follow him around, but if I want an automobile tire changed, I have to do it myself.” This quote highlights the sense of reliance of white landowners, and the antagonistic relationship of racism and codependency.

Faulkner offers counter-perspectives to the white male despondency in the final section of the novel during the church scene, illuminating the spiritual community of the working class with a social unity that is missing from the incestual individualism of the white landowners. Jason and Quentin, however, show how race, class, progress and space, are intertwined in a portrait of decline.