Fatherless Children and Post-Patrilineal Futures in William Faulkner’s Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses

Abstract

Mary Paniccia Carden Fatherless Children and Post-Patrilineal Futures in William Faulkner’s Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses W hitney Houston’s 1985 hit “Greatest Love of All” proclaims “the children are our future” and exhorts listeners to “teach them well and let them lead the way.” These familiar sentiments, Lee Edelman has argued, express a pervasive cultural “logic of rep­ etition that fixes identity through identification with the future of the soc order,” a metaphorical transformation that both promises and demands the perpetuation of cultural norms (25).1 In much of William Faulkners fiction, child-characters fulfill just such a purpose; their often bleak and essentially predetermined lives tend to forecast futures of continuity and sameness.2 Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses, however, offer notable exceptions in child-characters who perform precisely the opposite function. These three novels have in common their fraught examinations of patrilineage as the primary factor determining Southern identities and organizing relationships among Southern subjects. Each novel is deeply and urgently con­ cerned with mixed-race identity and nonpatrilineal forms of filiation. A less obvious point of commonality involves the texts’ tendencies to posit, but sub­ sequently retreat from, alternative family configurations. In LA, AA, and GDM, these concerns manifest themselves in child-characters who serve as augurs of discontinuous and dissimilar Southern futures. I will suggest that in these nov­ els imagined children and children not fully articulated as characters—childfigures to whom the reader lacks direct access, who do not speak for themselves, who accumulate layers of speculative and symbolic projection—represent am­ bivalent and sometimes contradictory incarnations of cultural difference. As overdetermined figures offantasy, they encode social and textual anxiety about the direction ofthe postbellum South. 'Edelmans No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive focuses on “the queer” as a figure ofresistance to reproductive futurism based in the heterosexual couple. He argues that queerness “figures, outside and beyond its political symptoms, the place ofthe social order’s death drive” (3). 2In The Sound and the Fury, for example, Faulkner announces the futures of the next generation of Compsons early in the novel through the perspective of the “idiot” Benjy. As a seven-year-old child, Caddy is impulsive, defiant, and willful, threatening to “run away and never come back” (12). Quentin, already the quixotic defender of family honor, fusses over her lack of ladylike comportment, while Jason calculates methods of profiting from their conflict. Coming of age in a crumbling postaristocratic household and un­ able to formulate useable alternatives to their parents’ self-absorption and cynicism, the Compsons, as Andre Bleikasten observes, “[remain] true to [their] childhood[s[” (110). For more, see Bleikasten and Noel Polk. 51 52 Mary Paniccia Carden Fatherless Children and Post-Patrilineal Futures Faulkner originally titled both LA and AA “Dark House,” a phrase that connotatively links patrilineage (the house) to race (darkness), and evokes “deeply ingrained familial and cultural structures that contain the seeds of the novels’ major crises” (Polk 25). Given these associations, it seems strange that Faulkner did not use “Dark House” as a working title for GDM, as well.* 1 * 3 In all three novels, mixed-race sons dispute and disrupt white patrilineal author­ ity, troubling the seemingly absolute divisions upon which Southern histories, identities, and social structures rest. LA, AA, and GDM project unanswerable questions about the outcomes of unsettled familial and racial identifications onto fatherless children who threaten to “lead the way” to impossible, virtually unimaginable Southern futures. The Future of Integration in Light in August Perhaps no character embodies childhood predestination more fully than Joe Christmas in Light in August (1932); having been persuaded as a child of his unacceptable difference, the adult Joe can find no comfortable places and form no sustaining relationships.4 Opening his depiction of Joes childhood with the observation “[mjemory believes before knowing remembers,” Faulkner ex­ plores the social regulations that warp Joe’s self-concept and doom him to a solitary and estranged life (111). The novel places responsibility for Joe’s condi­ tion squarely with his grandfather, the unhinged Eupheus “Doc” Hines, who, believing Joe’s father to be part black, abandons the infant in...