Lucas Beauchamp's Black Modernity:Agonistic Identities and the Ethics of Sympathy in Intruder in the Dust Bernard T. Joy (bio) Faulkner's heroes take many forms. We see an archetype of an adventurous, ruggedly individualist, though ambiguous, nineteenth-century heroism in the Sartoris family. There are also the Bundrens who, to lesser and greater degrees, struggle to maintain contact with the land and their poor white traditions when the modernity of the big town beckons, and Ike McCaslin, who rejects his corrupt patrimony. There is heroic nobility in Joe Christmas's attempts to forge a personal identity outside the racist social norms that seek to delimit and dehumanize his being, in Tomey's Turl's intransigent rebellion against plantocracy codes, and in Eunice's valiant suicide. However, Lucas Beauchamp epitomizes a particularly Faulknerian vision of heroism and nobility. Lucas provides, I argue, the closest thing to a consummation of the emancipatory labors of his Black predecessors. His success derives from the way he draws upon and activates his Black modernity, the traditions preceding him out of what Paul Gilroy has named the Black Atlantic that work to reveal the plurality of his own agonistic identity together with that of the society he inhabits. Lucas as a figure shines a light on the constructed nature of racial identity, on the irreducible pluralities that materially constitute persons and geographies. Once revealed, these perspectives entirely belie the myth of unitary essence and so, in bringing them to light, Lucas discomforts the white societies of his time. The simple evidence of his plurality unseats the racial hierarchies and the codes of white belonging upon which those societies are based and in defense of which they are willing to reinforce Black subjugation and white supremacy via ritualized acts of violence. Not despite but because of the white discomfort Lucas inspires, in those white people less invested in racial supremacy and their own whiteness he is also able to trigger an investment in an ethics of sympathy by which characters [End Page 207] like Chick Mallison seek connection outside white belonging and, in embracing the humanity of the excluded, begin to recapture contact with a common humanity they themselves have lost. Lynch Culture, White Belonging, and Chick Mallison's Sympathy As the story of a narrowly averted lynching, Intruder in the Dust takes as one of its core concerns a meditation on how group belonging, with its foundations in exclusion, engenders absurd racial codes like those of Jim Crow and the extreme racist violence used to establish and maintain such systems. It explores the process of dehumanization that Black people have endured, a process which made white-on-Black lynching possible. Intruder in the Dust is a narrative concerned primarily with white-on-Black lynching; that this practice has particular features that are not common in other forms of extrajudicial violence is central to the reading I provide here. Chick's obsessive discomfort with Lucas at the beginning of the novel is framed as an iteration of what "every white man in that whole section of the country [Jefferson, Mississippi, the South] had been thinking about him for years: We got to make him be a nigger first. He's got to admit he's a nigger. Then maybe we will accept him" (Faulkner, Intruder 18). This desire to force racialized subjects into subaltern positions within hegemonic hierarchies and thereby to bolster white supremacy as well as rigid codes of white belonging is one which the townspeople of Jefferson are willing to employ a particular brand of violence in order to realize. The novel recognizes the specific senseless brutality of white-on-Black lynchings—the use of overkill, symbolism, and theatre exhibited almost exclusively by white mobs attacking Black people. As Brent Campney describes: whites demonstrated their racially divergent attitudes through their treatment of Black versus white [lynching] victims: employing large groups of lynchers against Blacks rather than small ones; killing Blacks slowly—supplemented with torture—and usually publicly rather than quickly and often privately; desecrating Black bodies rather than respecting them; and persecuting all Blacks for the alleged transgression of one Black rather than only the transgressor himself. (109) In Intruder in the Dust...
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Feb 1, 2020
Erik T Withers 
Open Access
