“Being Uncle Remus”: The Folk Uncanny and the Remus/Rabbit Archetype in Faulkner’s “Was” and The Reivers

Abstract

“Being Uncle Remus”:The Folk Uncanny and the Remus/Rabbit Archetype in Faulkner’s “Was” and The Reivers Chad Jewett (bio) Beginning with Go Down, Moses (1942) and ending with his final novel, The Reivers (1962), William Faulkner’s final two decades of writing consistently focused on questions of black humanity and racial discord in his Yoknapatawpha County. While the literal voicing of narrative is left in the hands of white characters like Cass Edmonds in “Was” and Lucius Priest in The Reivers, the role of expressing the New South’s racial turbulence is left to black characters like Tomey’s Turl and Ned McCaslin. Like Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit in Joel Chandler Harris’s plantation stories, to which both Turl and Ned share a similarity, both of significance and depiction, these characters offer counter-narratives of disruption and expressions of black striving and resistance. As this article will show, Faulkner’s ironic use of the Uncle Remus/Brer Rabbit archetype serves as the forum for these physical “narrations,” which come in the form of a disturbing uncanny within the folk-nostalgia milieu of Cass and Lucius’s reminiscences. Both tales are narrated by a version of the white youth that makes up Remus’s audience, only to reveal the reality of the African American presence as the driver of these narratives, just as Remus’s narration of the self-asserting Brer Rabbit becomes a sleight-of-hand reflection of Remus’s own precarious freedom. [End Page 370] Like the young audience of Uncle Remus, these oblivious, white storytellers miss the assertion of autonomy coded into the Brer Rabbit-like actions of the black men they narrate, only sensing the dissonance between their attempts at golden memory and the interruptions of racial discord signified by the black characters in their stories. Like Brer Rabbit in the Remus tales, smuggling questions of black self-expression into minstrel folk stories, Faulkner plants interrogations of white ignorance and black travail in his own versions of “folk uncanny.” I use the phrase “folk uncanny” to define the moments in which expression of black struggle and strife arise in the otherwise nostalgic and (allegedly) humorous narrative of the folk tale or legend that is The Reivers and “Was.” Freud defines the “uncanny” as “something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed,” a submerged memory or idea that nevertheless resurfaces (148).1 Thus in the context of Faulkner’s nostalgic narrators, the “un-canny” becomes the moments in which a sort of “unpleasant aftertaste” surrounds attempted white revisions of black action, from drama to comedy. The uncanny is the uncomfortable repression and familiarity that we see in Cass’s and Lucius’s attempts at folk memory, which are attempts at removing racial pain from a sepia-toned, remembered South, but that nonetheless show moments of surprising struggle on the part of their black characters. While the Southern folk tale, of which the Remus stories are prime examples, establishes expectations for surprise and defiance of expectation and its own set of uncanny moments (talking animals, violent ends followed by later resurrections), Faulkner uses these generic conventions to surprise the reader with differently “uncanny” moments of racial strife. As Remus’ Brer Rabbit finds his way into conflicts that allow him to make a case for his own autonomy (and for Remus to make a case for black autonomy), so too do the actions of Ned and Turl, which are narrated as moments of laughter and surprise by the willfully nostalgic Lucius and Cass, allow for expressions of black independence and effort. Ned’s and Turl’s actions become narrations that replace the actual narration of Remus.2 David W. Robinson and Caren J. Town interrogate similar questions of expression and signifying blackness in their article “‘Who Dealt These Cards’: The Excluded Narrators of Go Down, Moses.” They frame the significance of the African American characters of the novel as a kind of [End Page 371] “narration,” in which “narration is understood here to denote not just verbal articulation, but also nonverbal, nonmimetic shaping of the text … Faulkner’s excluded narrators may not always come to voice, but they...