Terrorizing Whiteness in Yoknapatawpha County

Abstract

Sharon Desmond Paradiso Terrorizing Whiteness in Yoknapatawpha County I n Absalom, Absalom! Quentin Compson’s epiphany that Clytie “owns the terror” (295) is a white conceptualization: to white (and terrified) Quen­ tin, Clytie embodies the fears of race-mixture that characterize any white supremacist society, certainly the pre-Civil Rights-era South. Quentin, though one ofthe most confused and tortured individuals in Yoknapatawpha, is, up until this point, at least sure of one thing: he is sure of his race. He knows he is white, and he knows—or thinks he knows—how to negotiate the racial codes of his culture, even if he is less sure about the gender codes, the sexuality codes, the honor codes, and all the rest. But confronted with the fact of Clyde’s mixed racial heritage, Quentin’s last bulwark against the complete fragmentation of his identity comes under ideological siege: if Clytie can ex­ ist as half-black, half-white, what meaning can there be in Quentin’s white­ ness? If “nature” itself can allow such an ideologically “wrong” admixture to be, to exist, to live, to breathe, and to function, then the entire ideology becomes suspect, giving rise to “terror” in those who espouse and benefit from the ideology. And further, if this embodiment lends power (it is something Clytie “owns”; it is, somehow, property, and property, in a capitalist society, is power), then the fear becomes very deep indeed—nothing less than the entire world, specifically, in this case, Quentin’s world, is at stake. As Rosa Coldfield puts it, one might as well “watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too” (112). Though Rosa seems to scoff at the notion that such an event would ever be possible, Quentin begins to understand that because of Clytie and others like her, perhaps that fall is at hand—and what is more, per­ haps it should be. And if it were to happen, what would Quentin be left with? Without caste, there could be no whiteness, and without whiteness, Quen­ tin, and others like him, would have no self. Clytie’s existence thus terrorizes Quentin’s whiteness; the “terror” that Clytie “owns” is a white terror, a white’s terror, of becoming not white. But if Clytie were to speak about terrorizing whiteness (which, of course she does not—cannot), she would likely hold a different view. For Clytie, as for most if not all of Yoknapatawpha’s Negroes, terrorizing whiteness is not something to do-, it is something one experiences. It is a noun, not a verb. Acts and ideas of terror pervade the history of white domination of non­ whites in the South; indeed, slavery itself is a terrorist institution. Terror is, in many ways, the mechanism by which whiteness both asserts and enforces its power. 23 24 Sharon Desmond Paradiso Terrorizing Whiteness By terror here, I am referring not only to those groups and individuals who practiced (and in some instances still practice) acts of violence and in­ timidation against persons of color: the Ku Klux Kian, the Night Riders, the various lynch mobs, Governor George Wallace, etc. Rather, in this context, ter­ ror encompasses the entire legal and social structure that creates, enables, and perpetuates a system of white supremacy, even beyond the Jim Crow era; it is a system of repression that at once defines a code of behavior for the Other and denies the experience of the Other under that code. As bell hooks notes, To name that whiteness in the black imagination is often a representation of terror: one must face a palimpsest of written histories that erase and deny, that reinvent the past to make the present vision of racial harmony and pluralism more plausible. (172) Terrorizing whiteness, then, becomes not only the active process of terrifying violence, but as well the passive process ofterrifying erasure, in which the black experience is whitened into universality, i.e., whiteness. It is interesting, then, to look at Faulkner’s black characters from the per­ spective ofthis terror—not simply to determine how they do or do not respond to it (though that is certainly worthwhile), but more to understand the ways...