Haiti

I am just leaving this proposal here. If my paper seems to align with a "Haiti" heading, I will post the entire thing here as well!

In this paper, I hope to explore the centrality of Haitian revolution and struggle in Absalom, Absalom!. The section of the novel describing the uprising, restructured through the retelling of General Compson and interpreted again through Quentin’s explanation to Shreve, is essential to the plot of Sutpen’s miraculously acquired wealth, the metaphor of Southern economy as a system focused on the control of human bodies, and the thematic centrality of physical dominance and mastery as a technique for psychologically processing systemic racism. I hope to look at the scene where Ellen discovers Sutpen wrestling his slaves in conjunction with the memory of the Haitian rebellion, in order to construct a dialogue between the personal and structural importance of racial mastery through the form of struggle. Frantz Fanon, as a martiniquan theorist of black revolution, will help me to explore the nature of physical and psychological mastery at work in Absalom, Absalom! I will specifically look at his section reinterpreting the Hegelian master slave dialectic. Fanon focuses on the desire for struggle, and the important role that this struggle plays in the post-revolutionary construction of identity. He favors the American history of civil rights movements over the French. In the US, he argues, black revolutionaries managed to form an identity separate from slavery through struggle; in other systems where struggle (particularly violent struggle) was absent, the “Negro slave has been allowed to assume the attitude of a master” without any true systemic change. Fanon’s marxist and psychoanalytic argument will help me to highlight the repetition of struggle in Absalom, Absalom! as a technique which demonstrates the complexity of black revolution as a methodology of restructuring Southern racial dynamics. For Faulkner, struggle results in a sort of social miscegenation, contributing to a vision of progress characterized by inbred returns to the past.

Richard Godden’s work on Haitian revolution in Absalom, Absalom! will assist me in developing an understanding of the way Faulkner’s choices in historicizing and aestheticizing the uprising in Haiti. Godden argues that Faulkner misrepresents the history of Haiti by using it as a site of Sutpen’s accumulation of wealth in 1923-1927, when in fact the Haitian revolution took place in 1791, and had been established as a black nation in 1904. This oversight, contends Godden, is not an error, nor is it what could easily be perceived an act of literary counter-revolution. Rather, the anachronism seems to be an attempt to dramatize the complexity of black suppression, before, after, and during slavery. Godden argues that the through the reconstruction of the story through the retellings of Compson, Quentin, and Shreve, and the presence of the dominated Haitian slaves throughout the text, that Faulkner dramatizes the Southern landowners need to “construct a story that affirms a clear cut racial mastery” (687).

In addition, Sara Gerend’s article on the paternal imperialism of America’s relationship to the West Indies will help me to attach the importance of struggle to the entire thematic index of the novel. Gerend argues that the representation of Haiti in Absalom, Absalom! is indicative of America’s imperialist attitude towards the West Indies. She explains that the relationship of the American nation to the radical outskirts of the Caribbean thematizes a design of empire through the discourse of paternalism. She also focuses on the importance of the Caribbean to the entirety of the novel, and reflects on an academic history which has only recently brought attention to this critical valence.

Similarly, John Matthews attempts to both affirm the importance of the Caribbean slave experience to Absalom, Absalom!, and explore the way that the representation of Sutpen’s innocence corresponds to a cultural device that buries evidence of oppression in order to sustain mastery. Instead of deferring the knowledge by hiding it, Matthews argues, Faulkner hides the essential Caribbean history in plain sight, too obvious to be seen. Secrets buried in the past serve as a central theme of the novel, and perhaps help to govern the structure of the narrative. In contrast to the typical move of returning to the same place, namely Sutpen’s Hundred, to compound secrets and discoveries, the move outside to Haiti shows Faulkner’s awareness of a cosmopolitan complexity behind the timeless facade of Southern aristocracy. Faulkner reaches beyond Sutpen towards a history of international colonialism characterizing the “thousand secret dark years which had created the hatred and implacability” of Haiti (200).

Using a close reading of both the description of Haiti and the uprising and Sutpen’s wrestling scene, with attention to the theory of Fanon and this constellation of contemporary academic work on the novel, I hope to argue that the symbol of black struggle, first depicted in the Haitian revolution, and reiterated through the wrestling scene, reveal Faulkner’s complex analysis of race struggles in America. This analysis, like the novel, contends that history consistently reverberates in the contemporary, and that violent struggle does not necessarily initiate progress, but rather establishes a new structure of domination that may destroy oppressors in unexpected ways. As the conclusion of the novel shows, the figure of miscegenation outlasts the Sutpen estate, Rosa Coldfield, and (reading alongside The Sound and the Fury) Quentin Compson himself.

The Hegelian struggle that Faulkner invokes does not move in a progressive vertical structure, but rather through a destructive erasure of power. The black revolution does not replace white oppressors with black competitors. Instead, the white aristocracy of the south begins to be erased while the black workers become ghostly figures that haunt the sites of former power. Fanon envisions the future of the civil rights movement as a “field of battle, its four corners marked by the scores of Negroes hanged by their testicles, [where] a monument is slowly being built that promises to be majestic” (222). Absalom, Absalom! depicts this field of battle cleared, but expresses ambivalence about the type of monument that will be erected.

Bibliography Godden, Richard. “Absalom Absalom!, Haiti and Labor History: Reading Unreadable Revolutions. ELH, Vol. 61, No. 3 (Autumn, 1994): 685-720

Gerend, Sara. “My Son, My Son!”: Paternalism, Haiti, and Early Twentieth-Century American Imperialism in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!” The Southern Literary Journal, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Fall, 2009): 17-31

Matthews, John T. “Recalling the West Indies: From Yoknapatawpha to Haiti and Back” American Literary History, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Summer, 2004): 238-262

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York, NY: Grove Press, 1967.

Hegel, Georg. Phenomenology of the Spirit. Trans. A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Donaldson, Susan. “Visibility, Haitian Hauntings, and Southern Borders.” American Literature, Vol. 78, No. 4 (Dec. 2006): 715-716

This is a great start and will make a fine essay. You might look at Glissant's FAULKNER, MISSISSIPPI, which talks about Faulkner's relationship to the Caribbean at various points. And if you haven't, obviously ask Jeremy for some biblio, since he's far more expert than I in the history of Haiti and its literary representation.

ja