Faulkner and Racism
The single most indelible fact about William Faulkner's work is his persistent concentration on observing and recording the culture and country in which he was born; what is most striking now, as we look back on his legacy from our own, is the enormous courage and cost of that task. Faulkner's Lafayette County, in northeastern Mississippi, not far from the battle sites of Brice's Cross Roads, Corinth, and Shiloh, is still marked in its town squares with statues of soldiers of the Confederate Army of the United States, in full battle dress and, more often than not, facing South towards the homeland they mean to protect with their lives. But what for Faulkner is most haunting is not the communal psychology of war so much as the agonizing recognition of the exacting expenses of racism, for him the most difficult and most grievous awareness of all. Racism spreads contagiously through his works, unavoidably. Its force is often debilitating, and its consequences often beyond reckoni!ng openly. The plain recognition of racism is hardest to bear and yet most necessary to confront. There is a much keener racial awareness at work ten years later, however, in Faulkner's novel of the war of Northern a
As a man moving into the modern world, he will not have an easy life, but he will not be recklessly or nonsensically "heroic" in defending the Sartoris position. Kinney's "Faulkner and Racism"PHILIP COHENReference: Arthur F. "Dont you know he's leading you into misery and starvation?"Philadelphy began to cry. ""Dont you go, Philadelphy," Granny said. He was still battling when he died, living, quite consciously, what [page 278] he had finally come to terms with in an essay for Holiday magazine in 1954: "Loving all of it even while he had to hate some of it because he knows now that you don't love because: you love despite; not for the virtues, but despite the faults. Faulkner's writing not only reproduces the social and political institutions based on racism in the South, it frequently undercuts that racism, demonstrating its cor!rosive impact on both races. This novel at times works more indirectly, though, as if Faulkner was himself still shy at showing racist thought, racist tension, and racist tragedy. While biographers and critics have continued to produce more and more complex figurations of the man and the writer, Kinney's account as a whole reclaims Faulkner as a controlling consciousness, placing a coherent (through troubled) self at the center of the inquiry. It is regarded and judged skeptically; and the book, which has at times risked the most superficial of romantic meanings, closes on a note of somber meditation about the motives men have for killing each other. At the same time, he wrote in Ebony magazine of all places, the leading black national magazine published in the North. Faulkner's blacks even live in a proxy relationship to some of his white characters, Faulkner expresses his attraction to cultural primitivism this way: "I think that man progresses mechanically and technically much faster than he does spiritually, that there may be something he could substitute for the ruined wilderness, but he hasn't found that. The episode is a powerful one, easily as strong as the meeting of Granny with Loosh and Philadelphy; and the signs of a system under pressure are as insistent as in the later novel. ) When we turn back to Faulkner's texts themselves, the questions persist. His article is a clearly stated reminder that the texts were rooted in time and place; and it successfully brings attention back to author and region in an era of postmodern dissolutions of these anchors.
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