Transcendence versus the embodiment of racial abstraction in novels by William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and John Edgar Wideman

In order to explore the illusions of transcendence created by constructs of race, this dissertation analyzes representations of the embodiment of racial abstractions in novels by William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, and John Edgar Wideman. In Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Faulkner endows interracialness with transcendence. In The Bluest Eye (1970), Morrison unfolds the horror of lived experiences of "pure" blackness as grotesque and pure corporeality. Tar Baby (1981), Sent for You Yesterday (1983), and Paradise (1997) demonstrate that resistance to antiblack racism can lead people to endow the idea of "pure" blackness with transcendence. In Tar Baby as Morrison contemplates illusions of race and illusions of transcendence, she imagines contexts in which "pure" blackness is experienced as a beautiful visual essence and then proceeds to problematize any formulation of race and beauty that causes bodies to be experienced as abstractions. Like Tar baby, Sent for You Yesterday is a critique of racial essentialism's substitution of bodies for ideas. Wideman makes the main character, Brother, an albino, in order to imagine the source of anxiety that the lack of melanin might be for people who fetishize skin color in racial ways. In Paradise Morrison envisions a type of transcendence from race that would not be a ruse, one that would involve the de-racializing of colors in order to see them as pure abstraction and a reclamation of the body itself as "open" and "unmarked." The representations of transcendence from race in Paradise are inseparable from the representations of transcendence from gender. Although this study focuses on representations of race, gender is also a crucial point of analysis. As the relations between bodies and abstractions are explored, feminist theories of the body and psychoanalytic theories of the phallus are examined in conjunction with critical theories of race.