Reimagining interracial male bonding in William Faulkner, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin

This study examines the representations of interracial male bonding in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Richard Wright's Native Son (1940), and James Baldwin's Another Country (1962), focusing on how each of these twentieth-century American writers appropriates, revises, and ultimately reconfigures its nineteenth-century paradigm. To establish some backgrounds for the examination, the introduction addresses the works of James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain, who created such archetypal male couples as Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook, Arthur Pym and Dirk Peters, Ishmael and Queequeg, and Huck and Jim. Because of their transgressive nature, these male romances have been long regarded as fictional embodiment of the American ideal of equality as well as Fiedlerian expression of the white male desire for a utopian racial harmony. But I challenge such appraisal by demonstrating that these fictional male relationships are not a bond of friendship that operates through equality and reciprocity, but a bond of difference that operates through asymmetry and hierarchy, contingent upon the arbitrary racial and gender politics of hegemonic white masculinity.;Unlike their literary forbears, who would often describe this cross-racial encounter as a mythic movement from white to black, as a journey toward transcendence, Faulkner, Wright, and Baldwin deconstruct this central myth of American culture and deploy the representations of interracial male bonding to reveal the history of white racism that belies such harmonious and equal human relationship between white men and black men. While responding to the particular cultural context in which they are written, these twentieth-century writers, on both sides of the color line, clearly show that race has not been transcended and that race is still the main issue for American writers, including themselves.;Chapter 1 discusses Faulkner's depictions of the relationship between Henry Sutpen and his mixed-race best friend and half-brother, Charles Bon, examining their ultimately failed relationship in terms of the South's fear and anxiety of black male sexuality and racial mixing as revealed by Henry's murder of Bon to prevent Bon from marrying his white sister, Judith Sutpen. Chapter 2 focuses on Bigger Thomas's relationship with Jan Erlone and Boris Max, discussing Bigger's first-name relationship with Jan in the last scene in light of Wright's vision of interracial solidarity. And Chapter 3 considers the relationship between Rufus Scott and his two white male lovers, Eric Jones and Vivaldo, in light of Baldwin's literary philosophy of love.