The Black Cure For The White Disease

In William Faulkner’s fictional world Yoknapatawpha,the relationship between the whites and the blacks is represented as a network in which the dynamics are exchanged in a dialectical movement instead of being distributed in a hierarchical way.The revolutionary element in Faulkner’s writing of racial relation is his acute perception of the existence of the white-black relation in the South,in which “each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other.” Specifically speaking,For Faulkner,the white monomaniac intention to keep a white identity construction on the basis of their difference from the black only results in a white disease that plagues the white society,and the disease from white purist isolation can only be cured through an errantry into the black world where the formerly excluded ambivalence and complexity can serve as a remedy for the white persecutors.There is a progression in Faulkner’s understanding of the southern racial situation: roughly following a pattern of psychological — semiotic — sociological development of Faulkner’s racial perspective of modernity.The psychological consideration of the white problem lasts the entire1920 s when Faulkner went into the depth of the white psyche and found a “white neurosis” that plagues the white people because of the repression of the black unconscious in their mind,for which Faulkner prescribes a “black analysis”.The psychological reflection is followed by a semiotic consideration of the relationship between the white and the black,indicating a white hermeneutic blindness about their own history caused by a reification of the black sign in their semiotic signification of the world,here termed as a “white blindness”.For this white writing,Faulkner develops a black reading as a counter process that cures.As Faulkner’s life was constantly assailed by social and economic problems,the reflection turns more sociological.A sociological perspective reveals to Faulkner that the white people are affected by a “white isolation”caused by their alienation of their fellow black men and the only way to save them from the isolated state of living is to establish a world of black relation.In the three stages,three works of Faulkner gained prominence,respectively The Sound and the Fury(1929),Absalom,Absalom!(1936)and Go Down,Moses(1942).The body of the dissertation is divided into three chapters and each chapter is a devoted and careful reading of one of the texts so as to show Faulkner’s view of racial relationship in its totality.The first chapter reveals that in The Sound and the Fury,Faulkner made a psychological diagnosis of the southern individuals as one plagued by a white neurosis and prescribed a cure in the way of a black analysis.In order to maintain a white patriarchy,the theoretical basis for slavery,within the family,the Compson children all undergo a racial oedipalization process inwhich the white ego is established by a repression of the black unconsciousness,resulting in an image of a white father of complete authority and a black mother of total submission.However,in the twilight years of the Southern genteel tradition,the obstinate clinging to the white patriarchy only produces an abnormal existence in the Compson family: all of the Compsons suffer from an inexpressible melancholy or madness,rendering the house a hell full of “the sound and the fury”.The hope of salvation must be other-oriented,as Faulkner has to turn to the black Gibsons to give the story of madness some sense of redemption and significance.A black analysis saves the story from a mire of white pains and sufferings and elevates it into a classic work of insight and meaning.The black analysis is manifested in a psychoanalytical tracing of the white stream consciousness where both the white repressive mechanism and the suppressed black unconsciousness is released and revealed.By revealing the white violence and the black violated,Faulkner implies the way for cure – that is a lifting of the defense mechanism and a full acknowledgement of the black existence.The second chapter demonstrates that in Absalom,Absalom! Faulkner revealed a white way of writing about the southern history with an abstraction or even an omission of the black sign there and the disastrous writing can only be salvaged from total destruction by a black reading,which is a counter-process of the white writing with the result of revealing the obliterated black sign in the southern historiography.Thomas Supten,the founder and the owner of the Supten Hundred plantation is a typical white writer.By ignoring the black sign in both his conception of a design and his fiction about his design,he both plants the destructive seed for the collapse of the design and lays the reason for the incoherence of his fiction,which is characterized by fragmentariness in an anecdotal manner.Those who intend to write about Supten’s story suffer from the same problem with his,thus resulting in an aching desire to know the truth in the Sutpen tragedy.Such an ache,or a void,gives an opportunity for the emergence of black reading,in which process,the white writers find it necessary to stop their “writing” and to read and reinterpret the materials and examine the disastrous way of writing.At this critical moment,they have to find someone to work with him,thus a breaking from the white authority and totality.This reading eventually forces the writers to face what has been omitted and abstracted in their writing – that is,the black sign,which is epitomized in the black character that obsesses and haunts almost all of the white narrators in the story,Charles Bon.As Absalom,Absalom reveals,a black reading with the discovery of a black character should occupy the core and center of a truthful southern historiography.The third chapter shows that in Go Down,Moses,Faulkner exposed a white alienation of its black population,which leads to a white isolation,and the way in which the white isolation is dissolved by a black relation.The white people,by alienating the black people as a tool in themanual work on the plantation,a figure in their ledger,or simply a symbol of white repentance,caused a kind of white isolation they have not anticipated: an isolation from real work,from blood kinship,and from a true repentance.Isaac McCaslin,in spite of his insight into his forefathers’ sin against the black people and his willingness to repudiate the sinful patrimony,leads an isolated life from relation and truth as long as he regards the black people as some abstract existence,not as an existence that is as fleshed and embodied as himself.So his repudiation,which is aimed to cleanse himself of the sin,paradoxically pushes him even deeper into the sin.Isaac’s dilemma can only be overcome by a black relation.In Go Down,Moses,the black relation is first manifested in a white attempt to communicate with the blacks,that is,the twelve year-old Isaac McCaslin’s initiative step to read the family ledgers where the blacks are alienated as abstract and lifeless numbers and to envision them as flesh individuals.Second,the black relation can only be revealed from a perspective of a poring narrator,still in the person of McCalsin,who,though isolated as he is,serves to be a space of crisses and crosses where the white people and the black people find their inseverable relation with each other.Poring as narrator Isaac McCaslin as,people other than him and of the race other than his own race find the interstitial space in his memoir to reveal themselves as they are.In this way,the novel,Go Down,Moses,in the form of a collection of short stories,shows a great variety of permutations between the central consciousness Isaac McCaslin and the narrative voices(including black voices)other than Isaac McCaslin.Such a variety itself is a reflection of the miscegenated world of the South which Isaac McCalsin fears but must accept.A study of Faulkner’s development in his view of the racial relationship shows that Faulkner,though largely critical of the white southerners’ behavior in the history,is confident that the white people are making efforts to recompense the havoc they have wrought upon their black fellow men.From the impotent Compson children who needs a psychoanalyst narrator to have a black analysis of their mind,to the obsessed Quentin Compson who finds it compulsive to have a black reading of the southern history in order to approach the truth,and to Isaac McCaslin who not only chooses to give up his sinful patrimony but takes some effort to recompense the black people and establish a connection with them,the image of the white man is becoming positive in Faulkner’s oeuvre.Meager as their effort is,it indicates a hopeful future for the South.