The Haitian Revolution in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes

Abstract

Faulkner Journal Adam Long The Haitian Revolution in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom; and George Washington Cable’s The Grandissimes I n his 2014 study The Haitian Revolution in the Literary Imagination: Radi­ cal Horizons, Conservative Constraints, Philip Kaisary argues that since the 1930s black writers in both the United States and the Caribbean have found that “the recuperation and representation ofthe events of 1791 -1804 offered the opportunity to articulate a narrative ofemancipation in which black agency and universal intent were central” (1-2). For these writers, “one of the major attractions of recuperating the narrative of the Haitian Revolution . . . is that radical reconfigurations of the Haitian Revolution directly undermines the hegemony of the still massively influential cultural and historical body of works where the values ofthe slave society have been romantically condoned or sanitized” (12). On the other hand, for white writers, who remain largely com­ mitted to this hegemony, the Haitian Revolution has remained a silent influ­ ence. Because of this, it sometimes appears in surprising ways. George Wash­ ington Cable sets his novel The Grandissimes in the period ofthe revolution and makes a fugitive slave (an embodiment of the fear that the Revolution created in slave owners in the United States) central to the novel’s plot. Similarly, the narrators ofWilliam Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! create a Creole past, tied to the Haitian Revolution, for the character Charles Bon. Though both Cable and Faulkner include Haiti in important ways, they do so for different purposes. While Cable is able to use the Haitian Revolution to re-imagine the Creole and make assimilation possible, Faulkner’s narrators, particularly Quentin Comp­ son, remain incapable of accepting such assimilation. Though both Faulkner and Cable use Haiti as a narrative trope, like other Southern writers, they erase large elements of the actual history, turning Haiti into a literary landscape on which they can write their own narratives of as­ similation. As Edward E. Baptist notes, “Haiti’s relationship to US History re­ mains . . . invisible in American discussions of the Carribean nation’s” history (16). The actual history ofthe Haitian Revolution, when not erased, is strongly tied to the history of the United States. Not only did the Revolution happen geographically near the American South, there was also tremendous cultural exchange between displaced Haitians and Southerners. Nathalie Dessens cites the large change in the population of New Orleans as an example: “There is 79 80 Adam Long The Haitian Revolution in Faulkner and Cable no doubt that these ten thousand new arrivals [Haitian refugees] had an enor­ mous influence on a city whose population in 1805 was only eight thousand” (29). This “enabled it to resist much longer the Americanization that followed the Louisiana Purchase” (35). Thus, New Orleans became connected with the Haitian Revolution in the Southern mind, becoming a place of the Other, a place that resists assimilation. Hegemonic US identity has, in turn, attempted to erase this Otherness, to assimilate it. Michael Kreyling summarizes: “We can’t let any thing, any place be the sovereign Other, beyond the hegemonic reach of our modes of knowing, of gridding and ordering both factual and symbolic orders. We always send in the marines, or Fred and Ginger, or a com­ pany of literary and cultural critics” (120-21). In this case, Faulkner and Cable are the cultural critics. Both transform the details of the Haitian Revolution in order to turn the Haitian into a blank slate on which they can examine the dif­ fering narratives of American assimilation. Their narratives of assimilation are explored on an individual level. Nei­ ther Cable nor Faulkner portrays a migration, a mass arrival of Haitian ref­ ugees doubling the population of a US city and thus changing its character. Instead, both authors conceive of a character of mixed race possibly upsetting the hierarchy of two single families, the Grandissimes and the Sutpens. The character ofmixed blood is perceived as a threat to the assimilation ofthe fam­ ily in much the same way that the presence of Haitian refugees is perceived as a threat to the nation. Barbara Ladd argues that the character of mixed race carries “within himself or herself, the repressed history associated with...