Black Culture in William Faulkner's “That Evening Sun”

Abstract

When a white writer portrays a black character, racial stereotypes and literary patterns almost always reveal their power. The portraits of blacks take forms that are by now archetypal: the mammy, Stepin Fetchit, the buck, the unspoiled primitive, the member of the oppressed black proletariat…. Such forms come all too easily to white writers; but “modern realism,” as Erich Auerbach called it, comes hard. Thus, white writers can seldom present a “tragically conceived life” of a black character and set that life solidly in a black culture. In portraying blacks, white writers tend toward the sentimental, the satiric, and the didactic rather than “objective seriousness, which seeks to penetrate to the depths of the passions and entanglements of a human life, but without itself becoming moved, or at least without betraying that it is moved” (Auerbach, 457 and 490). Although William Faulkner often tumbles – and sometimes leaps – into those pitfalls, occasionally he avoids them altogether. When he does so, however, readers find his work particularly hard to understand. His story “That Evening Sun” is a case in point.