“A Strange Nigger”: Faulkner and the Minstrel Performance of Whiteness

Abstract

Faulkner Journal John N. Duvall “A Strange Nigger”: Faulkner and the Minstrel Performance of Whiteness D espite the assertions of many racist characters in Yoknapatawpha County, William Faulkner’s fiction repeatedly illustrates that race is not a simple matter of essence or biology but is always mediated by performance. Faulkner particularly makes visible an opening between racial and cultural identity through certain reflections on the construct “nigger.” During his year at Harvard, Quentin Compson comes to realize that “a nigger is not a person so much as a form of behavior” (SF 86). In Go Down, Moses, we see a trickster Lucas Beauchamp who, when the need arises, can manipulate threats from the white world by becoming “not Negro but nigger, not secret so much as impenetrable,” who masks his intelligence “in [an] aura of timeless and stupid impassivity almost like a smell” (58). But if Faulkner opens a space between black performance and racial essence through the depiction of certain African American characters, he is equally aware that not all Caucasians are fully white in a South that wishes to absolutize all racial difference. What I wish to emphasize is the performativity of whiteness in Faulkner, deriving from his figurative use of two distinct but not unrelated theater traditions: not simply American blackface minstrelsy but an older European whiteface minstrelsy as well. The result is a fictional world in which one sees, by turns, a dizzying variety of masking: whites in blackface, blacks in blackface, whites in whiteface, and blacks in whiteface. Clearly, such multiple performative possibilities serve to unhinge the Southern binary that would oppose whiteness to “the Negro.” My thinking in this essay is indebted to Toni Morrison’s work on the Af­ ricanist presence (as well as the use of figurative blackness) in texts by canonical white American novelists and to Susan Gubar’s work on “racechange,” forms of racial metamorphosis in art, which she sees emerging in the twentieth century as a “crucial trope of high and low, elite and popular culture, one that allowed artists from widely divergent ideological backgrounds to meditate on racial privilege and privation as well as on the disequilibrium of race” (5). Despite drawing on Morrison and Gubar, I do see limitations to their projects inas­ much as they always identify white writers’ engagements with blackness as a problem or a failure. Morrison typically identifies a failure in aesthetic de­ sign, while Gubar sees the failure more in ethical terms. For Gubar, in the last instance, every white appropriation of blackness can only be a net loss in the 106 The Faulkner Journal Fall 2006/Spring 2007 107 search for a more ethical understanding of race.1 And of course Morrison and Gubar are correct: there are aesthetic and ethical shortcomings to be identified in a white writer’s appropriation of blackness. But they may be only half right, because there is also something potentially productive in such appropriations. In Faulkner’s case, there are in-between characters—Caucasians who instantiate blackness in ways that complicate the Southern racial binarism. These pre­ sumptively white characters come to embody black culture, where “black” is not exactly race any longer, but (because it is the South) it is not exactly not race either. I make this last assertion following E. Patrick Johnson’s interrogation of what is at stake in, to invoke his book’s title, “appropriating blackness.” Black­ ness, as Johnson casts it, is not a racial essence but always involves performance. The questions he asks are germane to this essay: What happens when “blackness” is embodied? What are the cultural, social, and po­ litical consequences ofthat embodiment in a racist society? What is at stake when race or blackness is theorized discursively, and the material reality of the “black” subject is occluded? Indeed, what happens in those moments when blackness takes on corpo­ reality? Or, alternatively, how are the stakes changed when a “white” body performs blackness? (2) For Johnson, “‘blackness’ does not belong to any one individual or group. Rather, individuals or groups appropriate this complex and nuanced racial sig­ nifier in order to circumscribe its boundaries or to exclude other individuals or groups” (2-3). Johnson is fully...