The Slow Burn of Masculinity in Faulkner’s Hearth and Morrison’s Oven I entered this hall pleasantly haunted by those who have entered it before me. That companyoflaureates is both daunting and welcoming, for among its lists are names of persons whose work has made whole worlds available to me.... The astonishing brilliance with which they practiced their craft has challenged and nurtured my own” (Morrison, Nobel Lecture31-32). These are the openinglines of Toni Morrison’s Nobel acceptance speech in 1993. Given that Morrison studied the works ofWilliam Faulkner, the 1949 Nobel Laureate, and wrote her MA thesis at Cornell University on Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, Faulkner is obviously one of the shadows haunting her. At the 1985 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, Morrison herselfadmitted that “in 19561 spent a great deal oftime thinking about Mr. Faulkner” (“Faulkner and Women” 295-96). “[T]here was for me,” she states, “not only an academic interest in Faulkner, but in a very, very personal way... Wil liam Faulkner had an enormous effect on me, an enormous effect” (296). Despite her subsequent comments that she is “not sure that [Faulkner] had any effect on [her] work” (296), in recentyears Morrison and Faulkner critics alike have established that his work has in fact “challenged and nurtured” hers, and her work has altered and enlightened understandings ofhis.1 My entrance into this conversa tion is not to argue for an intentional intertextual relationship of “publicly verifi able fact,”which would fall into the category ofliterary criticism that Morrison calls the “‘Oh, yes, this is where he or she got it from’ school” (“The Site of Memory” 112). I do, however, want to examine an important and discernible dialogue that I see existing between Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses and Morrison’s Paradise. Specifically, by expounding on the themes of Go Down, Moses in Paradise— such as relinquishment and preservation of heritage, withdrawal and social seclu sion in response to racial trespasses, and fear of miscegenation—Morrison fills in gaps and reimagines alternative viewpoints of black masculinity. As Morrison states, “Authors arrive at text and subtext in thousands of ways, learning each time they begin anew how to recognize a valuable idea and how to render the texture that accompanies, reveals, or displays it to its best advantage” (“Site” 118-19). I ar gue that one of the ways that Morrison arrives at one of the subtexts of Paradise is by the rememorization of her interest in Faulkner. As she states, “memory weighs 'See, for example, Weinstein; Kolmerten, Ross, and Wittenberg; Duvall, The Identifying Fictions; Schreiber ; Dussere; and Bauer. Numerous articles have also approached this issue, including an entire issue of Proteus in Fall 2004. The 2010 Faulkner and Morrison conference sponsored by the Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University in Cape Girardeau was devoted to these two authors. 53 54 Jennie J. Joiner The Slow Burn ofMasculinity in Faulkner and Morrison heavily in what I write, in how I begin and in what I find to be significant. . . . These ‘memories within’ are the subsoil of my work. But memories and recollec tions won’t give me total access to the unwritten interior life ofthese people. Only the act of the imagination can help me” (111). Morrison imagines alternative scenarios for the black men of Go Down, Moses. Specifically, options are present ed to the black grandsons of white plantation owner, Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin, other than those documented in the plantation ledger by Isaac Mc Caslin: fames Thucydus Beauchamp, who “Vanished sometime on the night ofhis twenty-first birthday Dec 29 1885. Traced by Isaac McCaslin to Jackson Tenn. and there lost” and Lucas Quintus Carothers McCaslin Beauchamp, who, rather than disappearing on his twenty-first birthday, instead claims from Isaac McCaslin his financial inheritance from his white grandfather, marries, and establishes a home in the middle of the McCaslin plantation (261). Through such reimagining in Paradise, Morrison, to borrow Richard Gray’s words, engages in “a web of con versation that is simultaneously inner and outer, personal and social, and that, being open ended, is a mobile medium, subject to a continual process of growth, addition, and accretion” (5). Thus...
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Mar 1, 2011
Maria Husabø Oen 
Open Access