Narrative Miscegenation: Absalom, Absalom ! as Naturalist Novel, Auto/Biography, and African-American Oral Story

Abstract

Charles Darwin's evolutionary ideas, especially as disseminated by Herbert Spencer, profoundly affected literary criticism at end of nineteenth century, with treated like biological species to degree that at least one critic wrote about struggle for existence among (Pizer 82). A century later, in Law of Genre, Jacques Derrida repeatedly expresses this law-that genres are not to be mixed (51)-in naturalist terms. He remarks that have been treated in a system akin to race, familial membership, [and] classificatory genealogy whereby to mix is, by convention, to risk impurity, anomaly, or monstrosity (57, 53). It is to commit a kind of miscegenation. Yet his essay finally finds such intermixing inevitable, an inevitability he calls the law of law of genre (55). William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! also employs naturalistic language in its various accountings of rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen. While story turns on historical Southern taboo of racial intermixing, Faulkner artfully incorporates generic miscegenation into novel's structure. The narrative structure of Absalom, Absalom! can be viewed as a cross-breed of several literary forms, including (among others) naturalist novel, biography, autobiography, and oral tale largely associ-