These two books are thrilling ventures in
reading William Faulkner and Toni Morrison intertextually. This activity
in search of new critical possibilities for gaining deeper understanding
of the works of these dramatically contrastive novelists in the light of
their differences naturally involves scholars of American literature with
different orientations: the writers of these critical essays consist of
scholars whose major achievements have been made in the field of Faulkner
studies and scholars whose primary interest lies in the works of African
American writers. Philip M. Weinstein, the author of What Else But Love?,
is a distinguished Faulkner scholar of long standing while the contributors
to Unflinching Gaze, a collection of 15 essays, make a constellation
of well-known Faulknerians (including Weinstein) and established and up-and-coming
energetic scholar of African American literature.
Considering the phenomenon wherein apparent
similarities and radical differences between the two novelists are often
pointed out and discussions on the subject have been getting more frequent
and fervent, especially after the publication of Morrison's fifth novel,
Beloved, and that of her sixth novel, Jazz, these two volumes
on the analytical attempt of intertextual reading can be called the first
harvest in book-form of this critical climate. These writings may well
serve as a timely response to the urgent need for theoretical approaches
that will elucidate how the texts of this white male writer and of this
black female writer intersect in terms of theme and form, and how examining
their differences and similarities will offer clues that will open up new
perspectives from which to read these two great novelists who have created
the vortexes that have brought about revolutionary changes in the 20th
century American novel.
Regardless of scholarly orientations, it is
apparent similarities of the two novelists that first invite critics to
try their analytical comparisons, but once an intertextual reading has
started, it is the novelists' differences that matter. Analysing those
differences and clarifying the cause and effect of them are creative efforts
to bring into relief characteristics of Faulkner's oeuvre through Morrison's
and vice versa.
It is understood that the various similarities
in the texts that catch the critical eye basically come from two characteristic
tendencies shared by Faulkner and Morrison: they never avert their eyes
from the tragedies of racialism, the most serious problem throughout the
history of America, and at the same time they have become indefatigable
experimental artists of language in their struggles to represent the traumatic
effects of racial prejudice on the inner sphere of selfhood, the injurious
blows on the identity formation of the characters they create, whose tragedies
symbolize the inveterately wounded American society. Absalom, Absalom!
and Beloved are the most remarkable proof of both writers' unaverted
gaze on the racial theme and their eloquent endorsement of the inseparability
of theme and from through the context and language of their works. Taking
these basically common attitudes into consideration, we find that such
often-cited situational resemblances between Charles Bon and Golden Gray
(Jazz), or between Clytie and Circe (Song of Solomon) or
between Ike McCaslin in a bear hunt and Milkman Dead in a bobcat hunt (Song
of Solomon), or the epochmaking modernist and postmodernist techniques
that weave the texture of Absalom, Absalom! and Light in August,
or that of Beloved and Jazz offer inviting gateways to various
intertextual readings.
But whatever each critic's analytical procedure
through these gateways may be, it eventually leads his or her attention
to how different these two writers are. For example, these critics find
how Faulkner and Morrison are opposingly different in their ways of imagining
the psychological motivations of their characters' behaviours in similar
circumstances, or how they are different in their recognition of the irrecoverability
of history, naturally the history of white (male) Americans as subjects
to Faulkner, the history of African Americans as subjects to Morrison.
Above all, the most significant difference lies in their central concerns
and emphases in dramatizing individual racial tragedies. Needless to say,
the common understanding of the writers of these critical essays is that
these differences inevitably owe to the novelists' different positionings
in terms of race, gender and cultural background.
Thus, what should be noted is that both similarities
and differences between Faulkner and Morrison keep their (American) intertextual
readers and critics under high tension. Both novelists' unflinching gaze
on the theme of race compels readers and critics themselves to reexamine
their private and social realities concerning race, gender and culture
which are the base of their positioning. In fact, as the author of What
Else But Love? and the editors of Unflinching Gaze honestly
confide to us, the painful act of self-reflection and that of confronting
the cacophonous disputes or turmoils of their racialized society which
often surface in controversial classroom discussions are unavoidable in
the process of reading and teaching the works of these two writers at the
same time, one who is a white male descendant of the southern aristocracy
and one who is a black female writer who is a descendant of the African
slaves in the South. This immediacy of the American racial situation permeates
the above two books and makes them vivid and magnetic to a nonAmerican
scholar of American literature like myself, whose knowledge of American
racial dynamics is not founded on personal experiences and therefore whose
neutral vacuum tends to make the activity of intertextual reading of these
writers a less personal and less immediate intellectual game. The humanistic
love and concerns which are the origin of the two great artists' creative
passion and which the titles of these books on them emphasize seem to be
shared by the writers of the essays. The introductions of both books make
clear that the essays are intended for more than a professional audience.
What Else But Love? explores "the drama
of identity formation" in the works of Faulkner and Morrison by means of
examining how the racial and gender norms in American society influence
individuals in their formative processes. The exploration is carried through
three aspects vital for this drama of human development, namely, "mothering,"
"fathering" and "inheriting" through which children absorb the norms and
values of the society in which they are destined to live. It is not only
the identity formation of the characters in the works of both novelists
that the author examines. Wanting to know the role race and gender as cultural
resources and as limitations in forming the positionings of the novelists
who create those characters and those of readers who read their works and
respond to their characters from their own perspectives formed by their
cultures, their own concepts of race and gender, Weinstein starts his book
with reflection on his own boyhood in the South under the loving care of
Vannie, a faithful female servant of long years, similar to Callie in the
Faulkner family. He tries to examine how his closeness to her and his love
for her made his partial understanding of this black woman possible, and
how his privileged status as a white male prevented him from knowing and
imagining Vannie as a whole person. The racial boundary did not allow him
to see Vannie in other aspects of her life than that of being a maid for
the white family and kept the chasm between his "self" and her "otherness"
uncrossable.
The examination of his personal experiences
leads Weinstein to an insightful consideration of Faulkner's representation
of Dilsey modeled on Callie. Taking as a contrastive example, the characterization
of Dilsey and Nancy on one hand and that of Pauline (The Bluest Eye)
and Ondine (Tar Baby) on the other, Weinstein argues that, unlike
Morrison whose positioning as a black woman enables her to see black women
from all aspects of their lives and enter their subjectivity, Faulkner's
relational positioning as a white male only allows him to see them partially,
mainly observing them in the role of mammy for white children or that of
servant. The role of mother to their own children in Morrison's subjectified
black women is the most important element in her representation of black
women characters. Applying the same argument to Morrison's white male characters
such as Bodwin in Beloved, Weinstein calls their nonuniversal angle of
vision "relational positioning." Weinstein's point is not to denigrate
the limitations of each writer's inevitable relational positioning but
to say that they see "truths of relational seeing," rather than the obsolete
fiction of "universal truths." It seems that he sees "the drama of self-other
dynamic" in such truths of relational seeing and does not completely deny
the possibility of the artists' imaginative power to transcend boundaries
between self and other in order to enter the subjectivity of other in spite
of and because of their relational positionings.
Weinstein's analysis of male characters in
Faulkner's and Morrison's novels in their struggles to achieve manhood
or in search of a father throws light on how their attitudes are different
toward the concepts of fathering and manhood based on the Oedipal/patriarchal
model in Western traditions. As Faulkner's white male characters are burdened
with history and fettered by conventions, unable to imagine any other way
of attaining manhood than inheriting the code and value of their society,
the dysfunction of the culture that invalidates the fathers' bequeathment
of legacies and the sons' inheritance of them is fatal. These legacies
are supposed to secure for them "the proper, propriety and property," the
conditions for manhood defined by Weinstein according to the Lockean premise
for a man with natural, inalienable liberty under the law of Nature. What
Faulkner's white male characters mostly do is to grieve about the impasse
they are driven to or about the loss of innocence and purity through the
recognition of the sins of their fathers. On the other hand, Faulkner's
mix-blooded males try to assert their manhood on the grounds of the white
male paradigm represented by their sires.
Morrison's black male characters cannot afford
the griefs Faulknerian white male characters indulge in. Deprived of those
conditions for manhood, "the proper, propriety and property" from the moment
of birth, and excluded from the dominant culture's frame work and denied
self-esteem, the constant concern of Morrison's black make characters in
this racialized society is to survive any kind of danger and traumatic
humiliation and still find a way to recover their injured manhood. Weinstein
points out that, ever since the creation of Cholly Breedlove in The
Bluest Eye, who becomes a dangerously free man as the result of his
failure in identity formation due to the devastating circumstances
often inevitable to black adolescence, the ordeals of Morrison's black
male characters have never ceased to authenticate how Western patriarchal
concepts for manhood preclude black men and disfranchise women of any colour
and thus manifest the author's refusal of those concepts.
Weinstein believes that Morrison has continued
to grope for new concepts for unpatriarchal fathering concepts for manhood
that will make possible for the vulnerable, underprivileged black males,
identity formation as whole man; and he also suggests that Morrison's quest
has led to the creation of such characters as Paul D, Stamp Paid in Beloved
and Joe Trace in Jazz whose malleable imaginations can liberate
their spiritual beings from the fetters of the values of the racialized
society and keep the inner sanctuary of the soul free from the patriarchal
law. The embracing power of understanding they have developed under the
inhuman adversity is nonjudgemental, accepting discredited elements beyond
the Oedipal law and beyond man's will. And these characteristics acquired
through their struggle for survival lead them into maturity in spite of
and because of the traumatic humiliations and deprivations Morrison's male
characters can hardly avoid.
Weinstein pursues the comparative analyses
of form in parallel with the detailed examination of content along the
theme of identity formation through pairs Faulkner's and Morrison's texts
such as Go Down, Moses and Song of Solomon, Absalom, Absalom!
and Jazz, and Light in August and Beloved. His argument
may be summarized as follows: Faulkner's full practice of modernist techniques
in his prime is most effective in representing the bankruptcy of southern
patriarchy and the unworkability of its values for successful identity
formation in white males in the first place, and consequently, black males,
and finally, women. Morrison's much later and modified practice of modernist
techniques beautifully combines with her folkloric storytelling techniques
rooted in African American oral tradition, refusing to be stranded on the
tragic impasse or to allow the obscurity of history to be reduced into
the realm of myth and legend where obscurity of history to be reduced into
the realm of myth and legend where earlier modernist form tend to lead
Faulkner. This formal innovation is all for the reclamation of the repressed
history of black people and their culture from underneath white civilization.
Instead of blindly accepting Western patriarchal concepts for manhood,
her characters must draw on the resources thus retrieved for weaving their
coherent identity.
In Weinstein's argument, both novelists' stylistic
differences are due to the different directions they take to look for solutions
for the almost four century continuation of racial tragedies. He points
out how Morrison's style turns the vocal chasm in Faulkner's style into
a vocal continuum, the chasm between poetic and private voice and the one
between vernacular and public voice. This indication is richly suggestive
when we think of the alienation of Faulkner's characters from their society
and his artistic stratagem to resist easy access by readers, while Morrison's
ideal is a "village literature" where call and response between author
and reader accomplish a work of art which is shared like in an exciting
religious a meeting accomplished between a preacher and his congregation.
It seems to me that Morrison's vocal continuum symbolizes her ideal of
relation between community and its individual members, which Faulkner's
modernism neither targeted nor accomplished.
Weinstein closes his book with the question
of value of literary works and his tentative answer to it. If there do
not exist such truths as universal truths seen from a universal point of
view and the "universal standard" which was established by the Euramerican-centered
traditions of literature for evaluating literary works is not to be trusted
any more in this age of muticulturism, and if the Kantian criterion of
formally achieved aesthetic disinterest is not applicable, what common
measure could be suggested to decide the values of literary works without
falling into the dispute of identity politics or into the isolated tenet
of New Criticism? Weinstein suggests a measure based on the idea of "the
circulation of social energy," the term used by Greenblatt in his Shakespearean
Negotiations, arguing to the effect that aesthetic value inheres
in the formal power of the text to represent its social energies in conflict,
to subjectify its social, ideological clashes and let them be acknowledged
through the subjectivity of readers. Throughout the book the author bears
his self-assigned homework in mind, that is, thinking about the role race
and gender play in the making and receiving of literature. This way of
defining literary value surely supports the meaningful role of race and
gender and the relational positioning taken by raced and gendered writers.
The fifteen essays in Unflinching Gaze
are arranged in four sections: "Intertextuality," "Pairings," "Absalom,
Absalom! and Beloved," and Coda.
In section I four critics provide comprehensive reviews of the
two novelists' careers and outstanding features in their oeuvres and demonstrate
potentials for intertextual reading. John N. Duvall, who points out a dialogical
continuation between Absalom, Absalom! and Jazz on the theme
of quest for a father, assumes a critical stand between Morrison's often-cited
and justifiable statement "I am not like Faulkner" and Gates' undeniable
assertion "all texts signify upon other texts, in motivated and unmotivated
ways." Carolyn Denard argues that mythical consciousness is a common element
shared by Faulkner and Morrison. She demonstrates how this unique consciousness
not only connects the present moments in their works with the past and
the future but also places their human comedy in the mythical perspective
of eternity. Adrea Dimino examines the influences that both writers have
exerted on American society and culture both as writers and public figures,
bringing into relief the revisions Morrison has been making on the Faulknerian
representation of race and gender questions through her own literary works
and her public speeches and lectures as educator, literary critic, and
much sought after opinion leader, a role Faulkner, who called himself a
farmer story teller, did not play until late in his career. Weinstein's
"David and Solomon: Fathering in Faulkner and Morrison" (a section from
What Else But Love?) considers the differences also discussed by
Dimino. But he is not interested in how Morrison has been playing the role
of Faulkner's revisionist: his interest lies in how cultural and historical
differences in the races of the writers have made their works what they
are. These four essays form a kind of observatory which commands a general
view of the cosmoses the two writers have created, preparing the reader
for the intertextual readings of their paired texts in the following sections.
In "Pairings," seven pairings of Faulkner's
and Morrison's novels are discussed. Those pairs are as follows: Absalom,
Absalom! and The Bluest Eye, Absalom, Absalom! and Jazz,
Beloved and As I Lay Dying, Beloved and Requiem
for a Nun, "The Bear" and Song of Solomon, and The Bluest
Eye and As I Lay Dying. In section III, all the three intertextual
readings are given to pairing Absalom, Absalom! and Beloved.
Though topics and approaches in these essays
vary, there are three common factors the writers of these essays invariably
confront in their intertextual readings: 1) The important role of African
American culture pervasive in the works of both novelists. 2) The fact
that those silent mask-like black characters kept in the background of
Faulkner's novels have been foregrounded and given subjectivity in Morrison's
novels, bringing about changes in the map racial relationships, and inviting
Faulknerians to read his works from new angles that lead them to revise
long accepted, authorized interpretations of his black characters. 3) Both
novelists’ use of modernist and postmodernist techniques as means to discover
the past from histories which have become irrecoverable and their continuous
struggle to find language capable of the task of telling their stories.
Concerning the first factor, Nancy Ellen Batty's
"Riff, Refrain: Toni Morrison's Song of Absalom" analyze how differently
religious and secular black music functions in the novelists' works. The
second factor inspires Weinstein's and Dimino's insightful considerations
of meanings and differences in both Faulkner's and Morrison's representation
of black characters. The third factor is the strong motivation for such
essays as Roberta Rubenstein "History and Story, Sign and Design: Faulknerian
and Postmodern Voices in Jazz,” Catherine Kodat, "A Postmodern Absalom,
Absalom! and a Modern Beloved: The Dialectic of Form,” and Philip
Novak "Signifying Silences: Morrison's Sounding in the Faulknerian Void."
The last two essays are interesting in that they clarify differences in
the two novelists’ attitudes toward absence, loss, desire, and, above all,
history through discussions of their different purposes and the effects
of their use of similar modernist techniques.
The book closes with Patrick O'Donnell's "Faulkner
in Light of Morrison" which examines what O'Donnell calls Morrison's influence
on Faulkner. Based on Morrison's critical theory of the role of blackness
in white imagination in her Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary
Imagination, this essay seeks to define the meaning and the function
of the naked body of Joe Christmas caught by headlights in the blackness
of night.
Except for O'Donnell and Duvall in his examination
of Morrison's apparent anxiety of Faulknerian influence, the writers of
these critical essays seem to cautiously circumvent the use of the term
"influence," standing on the tacit consent that there is no "master text"
or "universal standard" by which to evaluate those that come later and
that if the term "influence" is applicable at all, it can only grow out
of the activity of intertextual reading itself and apply mutually. Still,
Toni Morrison has professed to be an admiring reader of Faulkner while
at the same time she is a severe critic of this writer's limitations that
arise from his relational positioning as a white male raised in the South.
Whether by deliberate endeavor or not, there are many seeming rewritings
of Faulknerian plots, scenes, and characters in Morrison's novels which
the critics refer to with terms such as "reshaping," "revisioning" or "signifying."
It is a pity that I am not able to introduce
all the fifteen essays in Unflinching Gaze because of limited space.
Most are inspiring, suggesting further possibilities of intertextual studies
of these two great artists. At the same time the book is as a whole not
as intensive or fulfilling as it could be owing to the wide scope of coverage
and restricted space given to each topic. This impression is probably due
to the fact that I read these two books in the order in which I reviewed
them. What Else But Love? has the advantage of being focused on
one theme and written by one author.
I find both books very pleasurable reading
especially because they offer intertextual interpretations the great writers
I most admire. On reading these two books, I come away considering how
it might be possible to reach, through my own intertextual reading, a new
understanding of each writer from my own relational positioning as a Japanese
female scholar of American literature. This is no easy task.
Copywright (C) 1999 Yoshida Michiko
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