"(Obvious now)": Forgetting How Race Works in Requiem for a Nun

Abstract

"(Obvious now)":Forgetting How Race Works in Requiem for a Nun Garrett Bridger Gilmore (bio) Two recent volumes of Faulkner scholarship, Michael Gorra's monograph The Saddest Words and the edited collection Faulkner and Slavery, have relatively little to say about Requiem for a Nun. To those familiar with Faulkner studies this is likely not a surprising state of affairs, as Requiem is typically regarded as a curious dud of an attempt at narrative experimentation. Many of the extended critical accounts of the relationship between slavery, race, and Faulkner's fiction that I find most fruitful, Thadious Davis's Faulkner's Negro, Richard Godden's Fictions of Labor and An Economy of Complex Words, Edouard Glissant's Faulkner, Mississippi, and the smattering of references to Faulkner contained across Hortense Spillers's writing as collected in Black, White and In Color, likewise have little or nothing to say about Requiem for a Nun. Further complicating matters, most extended discussions of Requiem for a Nun have little to say about slavery. Noel Polk, for example, calls slavery's presence in Jefferson "ominous" without much elaboration (44). These silences strike me as odd given the fact that Requiem contains perhaps the single most comprehensive account of the political and economic history of Yoknapatawpha County and one of Faulkner's most straightforward attempts to do legibly racially liberal work by confronting and undermining, "demystifying" in Deborah Barker's account, the racist cultural trope of the Mammy in his depiction of Nancy Mannigoe (71). One might conclude from the preponderance of critical attention that Requiem is not particularly suited for thinking slavery, and therefore not fit for a certain contemporary iteration of "the work of anti-racism." In this essay I read Requiem as an anxious and regressive rewriting of the historical contradictions contained under what Hortense Spillers calls "the sign of race" previously worked through in Faulkner's earlier and more critically prominent novels (348). "'Race' alone bears no inherent meaning," Spillers writes, "even though it reifies in personality, but gains its [End Page 231] power from what it signifies by point, in what it allows to come to meaning" (380). Race points to different structures of power in Requiem for a Nun than it does in Faulkner's earlier work; what emerges, I will argue, represents an uncritical retreat into racial ideology Faulkner had previously exposed as contradictory and is therefore less analytically powerful than what had come before. I read Requiem's attempts to provide a concise history of Jefferson not as a sign of continuity with his earlier works' presentation of the meaning of slavery and race in the minds and lives of the planter class and its descendants,1 but rather as the production of new historical memory and racial self-fashioning whose pathologies are metacritically revealed in works such as Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury but whose symptoms merely appear in the first order in Requiem. If Steven Weisenburger is right that in Requiem we see Faulkner "literally in the process of retrenching, making a last stand on a radically conservative idea of individual sovereignty," this retrenchment takes form in part through a revision of the centrality of slavery to white Southern society (750). I argue that continuity across the novel's dramatic and narrative sections is forged to substantiate the Jacksonian "principle that honor must be defended whether it was or not since, defended, it was, whether or not" (Requiem 545).2 Though trafficking in Jacksonian frontier mythology in its historical construction of white Southern experience and identity, Requiem also borrows from emergent discourses of racial liberalism in its depictions of interracial cooperation and emphasis on the moral importance of individual attitudes in explaining and resolving racial conflict. The interlocking valorization of frontier sociality, of white characters' ability to accurately observe and explain racial difference, and of Nancy's apparent agency, grounds a redefinition of the South as a multiracial space of flawed individuals worthy of protection from external threats. That is, interference from national political forces. In what follows I hope to clarify several aspects of the relationship between Faulkner and "the work of anti-racism" by reading Requiem through analytical lenses for theorizing...