Shegog

The Reverend Shegog appears in the fourth section of TSAF. He is a visiting preacher from St. Louis who delivers the Easter Sunday sermon that Dilsey attends with her daughter Frony, grandson Luster, and Benjy Compson. The congregation bonds in a shared moment of community during the sermon and Dilsey experiences an epiphany and is moved to tears, proclaiming “//I’ve seed de first en de last//” (297). Despite its short length of only eight pages, (290-297) this scene has received much critical attention and debates continue about its meaning in the text with respect to identity, race, and religion. It has been “praised as a richly realistic evocation of African American preaching, notably in Shegog’s modulations through several levels of discourse, and of the black Southern church service” (//A William Faulkner Encyclopedia// 351). The sermon highlights the importance of speech/sound and the oral tradition in the mostly illiterate black South. According to David Hein, Faulkner uses the church scene and Shegog’s sermon to “interrogate modernity,” proposing an alternative narrative to “Jason’s egocentrism and Quentin’s despair” where participating in the Christian Word and identifying the suffering of individuals’ daily lives with Jesus’s brings hope and gives significance to time and human experience (Hein 577). Refuting this position, Eric J. Sundquist dismisses Shegog’s sermon, Dilsey’s experience, and the “Christological structure of the plot” as “of no real value whatsoever” but merely a “pose of cathartic naturalism” that achieves the novel’s strategy to portray a “shattering of belief and to depict the urgent failure of modern consciousness to sustain any useful moral or temporal structures” (Sundquist 13).

Racial markers in language in Shegog's sermon are widely studied by critics.The white narrator of section four describes Shegog as an “//undersized//” man with a “//wizened black face like a small aged monkey//” who sounds like a white man who then transforms as his body feeds his voice “//succubus like//” and he takes on “//the attitude of a serene, tortured crucifix//” (TSAF 293-294). Though Shegog begins his sermon in standard (white) English, he moves into “//negroid//” pronunciation and dialect: from the small “//monkey body//” preaching to “//Brethren and sisteren//” that “//I got the recollection and the blood of the Lamb//!” he moves into a disembodied voice chanting to “//Breddren en sistuhn//” that “//I got de ricklickshun en de blood of de Lamb//!” (TSAF 294-5). Olga W. Vickery calls this scene “the one meaningful ritual in the book” where the participants lose their identity and find humanity through “the knowledge that all men are equal and brothers in their suffering” (Vickery 49). Walter Benn Michaels uses Shegog’s sermon to illustrate his proposition that a subversive “nativist modernism” exists in the racializing of cultural identity that masquerades as pluralism in post-WWI American modernist fiction. Michaels identifies Faulkner’s racism as Shegog replaces the white man’s voice with “negroid” dialect. Though the congregation is made into a family during the sermon through sharing “the recollection and the blood,” the racial family (which, according to Michaels, has become the model for a national identity focused on racial difference) repudiates the “intonations of assimilation” and “the dissimilated Negro emerges” (Michaels 8-11). John T. Matthews differs from Michaels in his assessment of Faulkner’s portrayal of race. Matthews points to TSAF as the novel “most saturated with dialect,” highlighting African American speech as central to Faulkner’s “aesthetic ambition” and TSAF as the place where Faulkner finds his modernist voice and “accepts the obligation to tell about the South” (Matthews 72-73). In Shegog’s sermon Faulkner “reproduces minstrel and dialect forms partially and self-consciously because he senses the long history of cultural work they performed” while deliberately demonstrating the “burden of representational and social history in the efforts to comprehend racial difference” creating “the only authenticity possible, a kind of dialectical artifice that acknowledges the means of production in the midst of reproduction” (Matthews 78-84). Faulkner’s truth is in the tension in representing the complicated history of race in the South.

As a modernist, Faulkner was acutely aware of and struggled with the problem of using language to represent human experience and express meaning, to try to see if there was more than sound and fury. Studying Faulkner’s use of dialect, Noel Polk sees in Shegog’s sermon the “breakdown in the representation of words, and so in the capacity of words themselves to convey meaning” and finds that meaning is achieved when the congregation participates, not in words but through “ritualistic incantation” (Polk 133-134). Polk calls Shegog’s sermon a “hodgepodge of pseudo-eloquence and non-sequitur and nonsense theology” observing that he invokes the visual icon of the “wordless image” of the “silent //pietà//” (using Jesus as “a signified which cannot have a sufficient signifier”) as he moves away from standard language and the signification of words to “bypass the obfuscation of signifiers” and go to “a direct, unmediated experience of the signified” as language breaks completely down (Polk 135). Philip Dubuisson Castille cites in Shegog’s sermon evidence of Faulkner’s interest in anthropology, specifically in Frazer’s //The Golden Bough//, connecting much of the material Shegog incorporates in his sermon to pagan rituals of death and rebirth and not only to Christian but also Hebraic and Near Eastern religions as well (Castille 424-426). [Castille also makes a connection to Faulkner’s naming of his home, noting that the rowan oak is a “golden bough” (Castille 426). Faulkner bought and renamed Rowan Oak in 1930, it was “known locally as the Shegog Place, after Col. Robert B. Shegog” who had built the imposing Georgian-style house in the mid-nineteenth century (Parini 155).]

Shegog’s sermon and its influence on Dilsey may be Faulkner’s nod to contemporary discussions about race and religion. Ultimately, what does Faulkner see as the influence of the church in 1928 for African Americans? Is it all sound and fury? Barbara Dianne Savage reviews evolving arguments about the role of African American religion and religious institutions and notes the debate in the early decades of the twentieth century (documented in Carter G. Woodson’s 1921 //The History of the Negro Church,// and commented on by DuBois, Booker T. Washington and many others) highlighting the disappointing reality that the early twentieth century church was not a “powerfully engaged political actor but rather an aged, sleeping giant squandering its potential” (Savage 238). Dilsey’s epiphany triggered during Shegog’s sermon and her subsequent move out of the decaying sphere of the Compsons may represent an awaking power of rebirth, but the fact that the novel does not end on this note, but rather with the restoration of Benjy’s meaningless order, may negate the power of faith to bring meaning to the sound and fury of human life. An argument has also been made that Shegog’s sermon (and Dilsey’s epiphany) “dramatizes for the reader the kind of faith—communal, emotional, mystical—that underlies the daily, unpretentious heroism of Dilsey’s life” (//A William Faulkner Encyclopedia// 352).

= Works Cited = Castille, Philip Dubuisson. "Dilsey's Easter Conversion in Faulkner's The Sound and The Fury." //Studies in the Novel// 24 (1992): 423-433. Faulkner, William. //The Sound and The Fury//. 1929. New York: Vintage, 1990. Hamblin, Robert and Charles A. Peek, //A William Faulkner Encyclopedia//. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1999. Hein, David. "The Reverend Mr. Shegog's Easter Sermon: Preaching as Communion in Faulkner's The Sound and The Fury." //Mississippi Quarterly// Summer-Fall (2005): 559- 580. Matthews, John T. "Whose America? Faulkner, Modernism, and National Identity." //Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha: Faulkner at 100: Retrospect and Prospect//. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000. 70-92. Michaels, Walter Benn. //Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism//. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Parini, Jay. //One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner//. New York: Harper Perennial, 2004. Polk, Noel. //Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner//. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. Savage, Barbara Dianne. "The Study of African American Problems: W.E.B. Du Bois and 'The Negro Church'." //The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science// (2000): 235-249. Sundquist, Eric J. //Faulkner: The House Divided//. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. Vickery, Olga W. //The Novels of William Faulkner: A Critical Interpretation//. Revised. Vol. The Novels of William Faulkner. Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press, 1964.