Racial Mixture, Racial Passing, and White Subjectivity in Absalom, Absalom!

Abstract

Masami Sugimori Racial Mixture, Racial Passing, and White Subjectivity in Absalom, Absalom! I n his 1987 study of the critical reception of Absalom, Absalom! Bernd En­ gler points out that “since the mid-Seventies the only interpretations to gain favour have been those which, at least partly, regard Absalom, Ab­ salom! as the conscious realization of an open work of art” (246). Some­ what testifying to how the text’s indeterminacy specifically concerns the inter­ connection of race and narrative, Engler’s survey also shows that noteworthy monographs from the decade include those concerning “Faulkner’s attitude towards racial questions” (252) as well as “the novel as a study in narratology and/or epistemology” (256). Indeed, even as Quentin and Shreve finalize their reconstruction of the endlessly uncertain past by reading Charles Bon’s white­ looking body as “passing white,” Faulkner does not supply any evidence for Bon’s racial mixture outside the white character-narrators’ invention. Engler is quick to note, however, that most race-related scholarship does not fully attend to the novel’s open-endedness, as exemplified by four studies from 1983: “Walter Taylor, Eric J. Sundquist, Thadious M. Davis, and Erskine Peters begin, as do most others, with the dubious assumption that Bon’s iden­ tity as Sutpen’s part-negro son has been clearly established in the text” (253). And it seems that this problem is still compromising the Absalom, Absalom! scholarship.1 For example, while critiquing the discursive domination of “‘le­ gitimate’ white caretakers of history,” Maritza Stanchich bases her postcolonial reading upon the same white “legitimacy” and uncritically follows Quentin and ‘One of a few exceptions to such a tendency, Barbara Ladd’s study delves into the subjectivity that interracializes Bon and elucidates why, “[although both [Quentin and his father] imagine Bon as a creole possessed of the expected creole decadence and capable of corrupting the innocence of Sutpens, it is only in Quentin’s narrative that Bon is constructed as black” (540). Ladd asserts that both Mr. Compson and Quentin, as historically conditioned subjects, invest in their narrative reconstruction their own anxiety over America’s constantly embattled providential design. Thus, Ladd argues, their fashioning of Bon varies due to the different historical forces that frustrated the American mission—i.e., Old World colonialism for Mr. Compson as the first postbellum generation, and racial “amalgamation” for his son. And, alienated from the lost cause, the narrators find their own identities in the respective Bons they construct: “it is really not very far, in terms of metaphorical development, from Jason’s creation of Bon (and by extension of himself) as cynical or fatalistic European charged with the seduction ofthe South through the unveiling of the white ne­ gro—the beautiful octoroon woman or ‘apotheosis of chattelry’ (AA 89)—to Quentin’s creation of Bon (and by extension himself) as the white negro, a man who has inherited both the violence and the illegitimacy, and whose blood demands vengeance. Both Jason’s and Quentin’s accounts are dramatizations of the white southerner’s sense of his own construction by postbellum history” (Ladd 542). 3 4 Masami Sugimori Racial Mixture, Racial Passing, and White Subjectivity Shreve’s re-creation of Bon as “a free mulatto who can ‘pass’ as white”: “When the narrators of different generations are faced with Bon, a free mulatto who can ‘pass’ as white and threatens to upset the South’s rigid race caste, their preCivil War and post-Civil War fears overlap and intermingle.... The strategy of the narrative seeks to uphold white domination by representing all characters of color through Rosa, Quentin, General Compson and Shreve, the ‘legitimate’ white caretakers of history” (608). Margo Crawford’s 2004 psychoanalytical study of racial mixture in Absa­ lom, Absalom! shows the same problem. For, while revealing how the novel’s white subjects cannot represent “interracialness” as a coherent Other but only as “abstract contradictions,” and thus exposing their own “meconnaissance, the recognition that is misrecognition, the‘me’ that is‘not me’” (76), Crawford fails to apply her critical paradigm to the white subjectivity that has made Bon—her most discussed example—“interracial” in the first place. Given that the narra­ tors do not...