“Room to breathe”: Narrative Anacrhony and Suffocation in William Faulkner’s “Pantaloon in Black”

Abstract

“Room to breathe”: Narrative Anacrhony and Suffocation in William Faulkner’s “Pantaloon in Black” antaloon in Black,” the third chapter of William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses (1942), is separated into two sections—first, a section focal­ ized through a black laborer named Rider, and second, one focalized through the white deputy who was “officially in charge ofthe business” (GDM 116) ofclearing away Riders body after the unrepresented lynching that divides his section from the first. Although Faulkner presents the central scene of violence as itself “unnarratable” (Prince 2), an as yet unstudied narrative phenomenon depicts Riders physical experience as anticipating his unseen murder: before actually being lynched, Rider repeatedly experiences suffoca­ tion. Following from the death of his young wife Mannie and his resulting loss of autonomy, Riders attacks function as a link between his eventual death by hanging and his disenfranchisement as a black man—unable to protect, or to afford to care for, his loved one. While an integral element of the story arc of “Pantaloon in Black,” Riders suffocation also functions structurally. Because it anticipates the central act of unrepresented violence, Rider’s experience can be conceived of in terms of Genette’s “prolepsis” (67) as ordering the chapter towards the hanging, suggesting that Riders life and death contain the same potential choked out by post-Emancipation white supremacy. “Pantaloon in Black” is not Faulkner’s first fictional attempt to grapple with the legacy of American lynching. Prior to the publication of Go Down, Moses, three texts had already struggled with the question of how to represent racist mob violence, and whom to hold accountable for its proliferation. The short story “Dry September” (1931) and the novels Sanctuary (1931) and Light in August (1932) introduced lynching as a repeated motifin Faulkner’s oeuvre be­ fore the publication of Go Down, Moses. However, it is in “Pantaloon in Black” that Faulkner makes his most overt criticism of lynching practices. The shift represented by the third chapter ofthe novel not only concerns a lynching that does not result from accusations of sexual violence—the usual representation of lynching in his previous work and elsewhere—but it also importantly wid­ ens the field ofreflection on racist violence that the earlier three texts explored. While an obvious critique of the Southern ideologies that justify vigilante vio­ lence is still present in the novel, Go Down, Moses attempts more than many of Faulkner’s earlier works to capture both black subjectivity and the ways racism 49 50 Sarah E. Stunden “Room to breathe” in “Pantaloon in Black! makes access to that subjectivity impossible, inconceivable, or merely inconve­ nient for members ofwhite society. Contrasting Riders murder with Faulkners three earlier representations of lynching, Edward Clough argues that in “Dry September,” Sanctuary, and Light in August, Faulkner “typically read lynching as a white phenomenon. . . . Yet when [he] returned to the theme a decade later in Go Down, Moses, he... instead presented lynching as fundamentallya traumatic black experience, a threat to do­ mesticity and individual subjecthood” (394). As Clough notes, it is important for this reason that the reader of“Pantaloon” actually witnesses the crime for which Rider is murdered (as distinct from the earlier texts), as well as the traumatic frame of mind that results in his resistance to an abusive system of wage labor. Together, the erroneous assumptions of guilt that result in Will Mayes’s (“Dry September”) and Lee Goodwins (Sanctuary) deaths, or the misunderstanding surrounding Joe Christmas’s murder (but not rape) of Joanna Bundren (Light in August), demonstrate an unbridled white supremacist thirst for blood that is driven more by the need to kill than by any desire to restore justice. In contrast, although “Pantaloon” also centers upon the erasure of Rider’s legitimate criti­ cism ofsystematic labor oppression, it does so only after giving the reader access to what had previously been an unrepresentable black consciousness. While the original three lynching narratives veer away from the internal experiences ofthe black characters who will suffer most violently from Jim Crow racism, the focalization of “Pantaloon in Black” through Rider illustrates his emotional and physical reality prior to his death. Offsetting the intentional ab­ sence ofthe lynching from the narrative...