Literature Review Essay 4 pages

Masami Sugimori

RACIAL MIXTURE, RACIAL PASSING, AND

W H I T E SUBJECTIVITY IN ABSALOM, ABSALOM!

I n his 1987 study of the critical reception of Absalom, Absalom! Bernd En- gler points out that "since the mid-Seventies the only interpretations to gain favour have been those which, at least partly, regard Absalom, Ab- salom! as the conscious realization of an open work of art" (246). Some-

what testifying to how the text's indeterminacy specifically concerns the inter- connection of race and narrative, Engler's survey also shows that noteworthy monographs from thexdecade include those concerning "Faulkner's attitude towards racial questions" (252) as well as "the novel as a study in narratology and/or epistemology" (256). Indeed, even as Quentin and Shreve finalize their reconstruction of the endlessly uncertain past by reading Charles Bon's white- looking body as "passing white," Faulkner does not supply any evidence for Bon's racial mixture outside the white character-narrators' invention.

Engler is quick to note, however, that most race-related scholarship does not fiilly attend to the novel's open-endedness, as exemplified by four studies from 1983: "Walter Taylor, Eric J. Sundquist, Thadious M. Davis, and Erskine Peters begin, as do most others, with the dubious assumption that Bon's iden- tity as Sutpen's part-negro son has been clearly established in the text" (253). And it seems that this problem is still compromising the Absalom, Absalom! scholarship.' For example, while critiquing the discursive domination of "'le- gitimate' white caretakers of history," Maritza Stanchich bases her postcolonial reading upon the same white "legitimacy" and uncritically follows Quentin and

'One of a few exceptions to such a tendency, Barbara Ladd's study delves into the subjectivity that interracializes Bon and elucidates why,"[a]lthough both [Quentin and his father] imagine Bon as a creóle possessed of the expected creóle decadence and capable of corrupting the innocence of Sutpens, it is only in Quentin's narrative that Bon is constructed as black" (540). Ladd asserts that both Mr. Compson and Quentin, as historically conditioned subjects, invest in their narrative reconstruction their own anxiety over America's constantly embattled providential design. Thus, Ladd argues, their fashioning of Bon varies due to the different historical forces that frustrated the American mission—i.e.. Old World colonialism for Mr. Compson as the first postbellum generation, and racial "amalgamation" for his son. And, alienated from the lost cause, the narrators find their own identities in the respective Bons they construct: "it is really not very far, in terms of metaphorical development, from Jason's creation of Bon (and by extension of himself) as cynical or fatalistic European charged with the seduction of the South through the unveiling of the white ne- gro—the beautiful octoroon woman or'apotheosis of chattelry' (AA 89)—to Quentin's creation of Bon (and by extension himself) as the white negro, a man who has inherited both the violence and the illegitimacy, and whose blood demands vengeance. Both Jason's and Quentin's accounts are dramatizations of the white southerner's sense of his own construction by postbellum history" (Ladd 542).

4 Masami Sugimori Racial Mixture, Racial Passing, and White Subjectivity

Shreve's re-creation of Bon as "a free mulatto who can 'pass' as white": "When the narrators of different generations are faced with Bon, a free mulatto who can 'pass' as white and threatens to upset the South's rigid race caste, their pre- Civil War and post-Civil War fears overlap and intermingle The strategy of the narrative seeks to uphold white domination by representing all characters of color through Rosa, Quentin, General Compson and Shreve, the 'legitimate' white caretakers of history" (608).

Margo Crawford's 2004 psychoanalytical study of racial mixture in Absa- lom, Absalom! shows the same problem. For, while revealing how the novel's white subjects cannot represent "interracialness" as a coherent Other but only as "abstract contradictions," and thus exposing their own "méconnaissance, the recognition that is misrecognition, the 'me' that is 'not me'" (76), Crawford fails to apply her critical paradigm to the white subjectivity that has made Bon—her most discussed example—"interracial" in the first place. Given that the narra- tors do not racialize Bon until Quentin and Shreve's conclusion, her discussion sounds highly questionable when she finds in Mr. Compson's "limbo halfway" metaphor for Bon's elusive existence {AA 98) a reference to his racial mixture: "He [Mr. Compson] connects 'blackness' to the body as pure corporeality and 'whiteness' to the power of the mind ('mentality'), and he imagines Bon as be- ing a mind that is limited and trapped by a body" (Crawford 81).̂

Besides the sense of closure the work appears to offer by ending with Quen- tin and Shreve's subjective account, one can rightly attribute this persisting pit- fall oí Absalom, Absalom! scholarship to the critical discourses applied by read- ers. For, attempting to examine the racial oppression, physical or discursive, dramatized in the novel, race-oriented readings have necessarily had to name

^Despite his acknowledgment that "we never learn whether in fact Bon has black blood" (117), James Snead's analysis of race and narrative in Absalom, Absalom! also fails to attend to Bon's white-looking body in its endless indeterminacy. Noting that Shreve manages to expose "figures of merging" (e.g., Bon as an interracial Sutpen) of which the preceding Southern narrators dared not conceive, Snead argues that Shreve's narrative operation still has a limitation:

Shreve finds the black in the most intimate circles of Southern and Northern white society... but his "admis- sion" seems a non sequitur. Even were the black to be restored, the "carrier" would resist total signification here, as in Light in August. To Rosa, Clytie has an "inscrutable coffee-colored face" (AA 110); Sutpen cannot "read" the truth about his first wife from her "parchment-colored" face (AA 268); the parchment is written in an ink that was black until society made black invisible. Bon, tbe most "invisible" black, becomes real only by crossing the black shadow of the fence posts. "Crossing the fence" in every sense means the death of the black. Dead, he vanishes: "I never saw him. 1 never even saw him dead" (AA 121).

The final message to be suppressed by the chain of carriers is that the tale, like the "natural formation" of color designation, contains hiatus-like joints, each of which may sooner or later develop sprains, challenging its latent inaccuracies, particularly concerning its black figures. (131-32)

Here, Snead ascribes the white narrators' failure in "total signification," exemplified by the lack of defini- tive blackness, to their willful concealment of the "sprains" symptomatizing the "latent inaccuracies" of the restored "black figures." In so doing, however, the critic predicates his discussion upon Bon's blackness as "accurate" information and accordingly upon the very white subjectivity that it has to critique. Given the significant role that racial passing plays in the novel's thematic and structural complexity, I would argue, Faulkner seems to intend the not-black-enough bodies to indicate a deeper "sprain"—namely the fact that the narrators'"restoring" move itself draws arbitrarily upon reading characters with inadequate bodily evi- dence as "interracial" or "black."

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Bon a racial Other—whether it be Stanchich's narratively colonized "character of color" or Crawford's "interracial abstraction." By turning Bon's indetermin- able white-looking body into a fixed object of racial investigation, and by doing so for their own argumentative agenda, those criticisms have echoed Quentin and Shreve's narrative invention and thus unwittingly reinforced, rather than elucidated Faulkner's deconstruction of, white subjectivity.^

That, to make a coherent narrative whole and thus fashion themselves as authoritative discursive agents, Quentin and Shreve (and commentators on the level of critical discourse) transform Bon into a "black son of a bitch" (AA 286) demonstrates Toni Morrison's theory on how white subjectivity relies upon blackness in a circular manner. Whites' identity construction, she argues, de- pends on their "projection of the not-me" onto blackness (38), i.e., making the silenced African American body signify non-whiteness and thus circularly identifying themselves as not non-white. (Hence, as Ruth Frankenberg aptly puts it, "the notion of whiteness as unmarked norm" is already "a white delu- sion" [73].) While Morrison points out that "the dramatic polarity created by skin color" (38) has made such projection possible, however, Faulkner's sub- stitution of white-looking Bon neutralizes the visual "polarity" and unsettles whites' narrative agency including that which enables them to name him a "passing mixed-race" in the first place. Thus, in Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner intensifies Morrison's model—which bases itself upon visible white/black dif- ference—with racial passing and points to a deeper circularity built in the pro- cess. Here, with no substantial reference point for difference, one names/fabri- cates an "interracial object" against which to define himself or herself as "white subject," but in its discursive arbitrariness this strategy depends already upon the very white subjectivity that it has to establish.

Indeed, as the first section of this paper will point out, Absalom, Absalom! occasionally describes characters with "passing" light skin—such as Charles Etienne and even "coffee-colored' Clytie—in ways that put the very existence of racial mixture into question. If a passing person by definition looks the same as whites, Faulkner seems to ask in those scenes, how could one tell whether s/he is really passing? While suggesting his own answer that one could not, Faulkner takes pains to portray how the language of race works to suppress the question. To sustain its system of differentiation, racial ideology capital- izes on the dichotomizing operation of language to cover up the essential lack

'We can locate the implicit working of white subjectivity also in commentators' New Critical impulse toward artistic unity, whose irrelevance to Absalom, Absalom! not only affected the book's early reception but also formed a detrimental "trend in its future development" (Engler 221). Terry Eagleton points out that, while celebrating democracy of interpretations. New Criticism's synthetic approach to texts paradoxically served the ideological status quo which, in an American racial context, took whites' discursive legitimacy for granted: "Pluralism was all very well, provided that it did not violate hierarchical order; the varied contin- gencies of the poem's texture could be pleasurably savoured, so long as its ruling structure remained intact. Oppositions were to be tolerated, as long as they could finally be fused into harmony. The limits of New Criticism were essentially the limits of liberal democracy: the poem, John Crowe Ransom wrote, was 'like a democratic state, so to speak, which realizes the ends of a state without sacrificing the personal character of its citizens.' It would be interesting to know what the Southern slaves would have made of this assertion" (43-44).

6 Masami Sugimori Racial Mixture, Racial Passing, and White Subjectivity

of physical boundary between whiteness and passing whiteness—by labeling as "passing interracial" those who show no bodily difference from "whites."'' Hence (apart from the occasional complication mentioned above) come the mostly stable "interracial objects" in the narrative space of the novel's white characters, as well as in the critical discourse of literary scholars, who have not seen the white-looking body firsthand but only heard/read of it (as "passing white") in the already loaded language.

While my first section illuminates Faulkner's exploration of racial pass- ing in terms of indeterminate body versus binarizing language, the following section demonstrates how the novel's central plot of mystery solving deepens his investigation. For, as Faulkner revolves Absalom, Absalom! around white character-narrators' attempts to find truth (and, accordingly, to claim their le- gitimacy as narrative agents), linguistic containment of racial passing at once enables them to become white subjects and hampers their epistemological enterprise, thus compromising that very white subjectivity. I will point out that, by repeatedly frustrating the white narrators' reconstruction of the past, Faulkner posits the paradox that language in its differentiating/distancing op- eration enables one to order the essentially "chaotic" world (exemplified by the endlessly obscure line between white and passing white) into comprehensible units and denies him/her access to the same world through inevitable reduction and distortion. Thus, Faulkner arranges the final chapters, which approach the heart of the Sutpen mystery "where there might be paradox and inconsistency but nothing fault nor false" (253), so that Quentin and Shreve have to abandon their subject position and merge with their narrative object: "now both of them were Henry Sutpen and both of them were Bon, compounded each of both yet either neither" (280). Only through such de-subjectification can the white narrators question a white-looking man's whiteness—a move that foregrounds the essential uncertainty of white/passing-white difference—though, as the last part of my paper will problematize, their eventual interracialization of Bon faus to embrace this uncertainty.

While Faulkner explores racial passing as regards the conflict between differentiating language and difference-proof body, the narrative setting of Absalom, Absalom! favors the former for the most part. For, having seen few personages of the Sutpen legend firsthand, the white character-narrators re- construct the past referring not to physical evidence but to yet another set of

••With such a binarizing function built into the very medium of representation, even those works that feature passing characters to question racial hierarchy have drawn upon the same hierarchy unwittingly. Gayle Wald's study of twentieth-century American "passing narratives" illustrates how they as a genre build upon, rather than undermine, the distinction between white and black. She points out that, as a discursive act of stepping from one to the other binary division, racial passing predicates itself upon "a negotiation of categories that are authorized by racial ideology": "whereas passing is conditioned on the radical instability of the racial sign, the fluidity of race that it appropriates is a function of its (socially produced) stability in marking out the binary possibilities of the national narrative. As my readings of various passing narratives have demonstrated, representation is the means by which race establishes social power—hence the metaphor of a dividing 'line' between black and white identities; yet it is through representation that we are able to envision challenges to the color line's authority" (187). As I will argue in this paper, Absalom, Absalom! indi- cates Faulkner's struggle with this entrapment by making infinitely unclear the very existence of passing.

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narratives which, transmitted in language, have already contained the actual indeterminacy of white-looking bodies.^ A typical example comes from the story of Bon's "octoroon" mistress, passed down from General Compson, a contemporary, to Mr. Compson and then to Quentin. Despite her passable "magnolia-face" reported ft-om General Gompson's firsthand observation (157), the whites' consistent use of "the octoroon" in their reference translates her misleading skin color into a definite marker of racial mixture and thus sup- presses the possible uncertainty of her race. Here, as I have proposed above, white subjectivity contains the racially elusive body to recertify itself through a circular process; the term "octoroon" self-explanatorily interracializes the woman despite her white-looking body and allows the speaker to establish his white subjectivity as opposed to this differentiated/distanced "interracial ob- ject," which retroactively endorses his initial application of the "mixed-race" la- bel* Protected by this discursive self-sufficiency, Mr. Gompson manages to ap- propriate racial passing itself for his own narrative purpose. When he develops his "bigamy theory" for Bon's mysterious death by replacing Judith—whose picture the dead Bon's locket holds in Rosa's eyewitness account—with the "passing" octoroon (75, 114), this narrative operation carries an ideologically

'Henry Louis Gates, Jr. regards race as "the ultimate trope of difference" (5) which does not signify substantial reality but only introduces a fictive order to the infinite diversity of human beings. He claims that such an arbitrary language of race reaffirms itself as authoritative classification through representational "popular usages" which repeatedly "inscribe" in one's thinking the figuratively "described" racial differences: "The sense of difference defined in popular usages of the term 'race' has both described and inscribed dif- ferences of language, belief system, artistic tradition, and gene pool, as well as all sorts of supposedly natural attributes" (5). Mr. Compson's use of "the octoroon" shows that Gates's theory applies also to mixed-race as a racial category. Supposedly describing a physical feature of the woman, the term of address at the same time inscribes and thus imposes a stable interracial identity on her confusing "magnolia-colored" body.

'Accordingly, the narrators' storytelling skips the question whether she is really mixed-race, and in- stead concerns how to picture an already mixed-race character. Constructed as an "interracial object," she undergoes a fully subjective portrayal influenced by common stereotypes about mixed-race females. Look- ing for the cause of Henry's murder of Bon, Mr. Compson conceives of her as "a woman with a face like a tragic magnolia, the eternal female, the eternal Who-suffers" (91) saved from slavery but sexually exploited by Bon. When Mr. Compson highlights her sexuality by referring to her as "a woman created of by and for darkness whom the artist Beardsley might have dressed, in a soft fiowing gown designed not to infer be- reavement or widowhood but to dress some interlude of slumbrous and fatal insatiation, of passionate and inexorable hunger of the fiesh" (157), his description fits into the mold of

the "tragic octoroon," an Anglo-American stereotype before the Civil War, [who] was usually a beautiful girl with only the slightest trace of Negro blood and no dialect; a conventional victim, threatened by the slave owner's lust— The beauty and innocence of the fated mixed-race heroine are, of course, a male fantasy, inevi- tably seeking to invest the object of desire with an exciting element of forbidden fruit. Behind the innocence (her whiteness) lies the temptation of the sexually exotic (her blackness). (Malchow 174)

In Mr. Gompson's imagination which assumes Bon's whiteness, "the octoroon," a woman "created of" dark skin "by" the dark deeds of white men, is fatally "created for" the same deeds by whites like Bon. Here, some- what betraying his own "male fantasy," the narrator renders her potentially misleading "magnolia"-color as "darkness," thus foregrounding her "sexually exotic" African part ("passionate and inexorable hunger of the flesh") rather than her desexualized paleness appropriate for "bereavement or widowhood." And, as a refer- ence point for later narrators, this cliche-ridden depiction by Mr. Compson in turn controls Quentin and Shreve's reconstruction; tossed about by whites' affairs—of Bon, his mother (both considered as white at this point) and their scheming lawyer—"the octoroon" appears in the story repeatedly as a suffering figure, wailing over the loss of her guardian lover (249) and then over the poverty it causes (271).

8 Masami Sugimori Racial Mixture, Racial Passing, and White Subjectivity

disruptive implication as it assumes the visual homogeneity between white and passing-white women. However, with "the octoroon" already objectified as a stable Other, Mr. Compson has no trouble turning the debunked white/pass- ing-white difference into a narrative device with which to tell a plausible story and, by doing so, reinforce his subjectivity.

Such narrative formation of interracial object, however, betrays its ñctive- ness when the white-looking body directly confronts the white observer to in- validate the linguistically constructed difference. Faulkner suggests this when Mr. Compson, drawing upon his father's firsthand account, reports Judge Jim Hamblett's confusion about Charles Etienne's racial identity. As the pass- ing "olive face" (164) of Charles Etienne leads the justice to believe his being "a white man" and include him in "we [white Southerners]" (165), General Compson's corrective gesture fails to exert an immediate effect: "he [Hamblett] looking at the prisoner now but saying 'white' again even while his voice died away as if the order to stop the voice had been shocked into short circuit, and every face in the room turned toward the prisoner as Hamblett cried, 'What are you? Who and where did you come from?" (165). Hamblett's "shock" at the white-looking man's possible racial mixture and the resulting "short-circuit" dysfunction of his discursive censor ("the order to stop the voice") cause him to let the word "white"—a marker of sameness—escape his lips one last time. Faulkner suggests the ideologically pernicious potential of Charles Etienne's body by making the judge, an instrument of the Southern legal system, overre- act with the anachronistic language of slavery (" What are you? Who and where did you come from?") where a mixed-race body belongs to the white master as a literal object.

Jn contrast, Mr. Compson, with no access to Charles Etienne's physical body but only to stories about him, can ignore the question of whether the light-skinned man is white or passing white. Unlike Jim Hamblett, Mr. Comp- son manages to picture Charles Etienne as a mixed-race man who happens to have the passing white look, rather than as a white-looking man who may or may not be mixed-race. Therefore, in chapter 6, Mr. Compson's critique of the fictionality of race begins with the already interracial Charles Etienne (whom the "one-drop rule" fictively classifies as black) and skips the deeper-level fic- tionality of his white-looking body being interracialized with no substantial evidence. Accordingly, Mr. Compson finds Charles Etienne's predicament in the fact that his blackness overshadows his whiteness under Southern racial ideology, not that his body resists any signification of the black. For instance, the white narrator refers to Charles Etienne's outfit at Sutpen's Hundred as "the delicate garments of his pagehood already half concealed beneath that harsh and shapeless denim cut to an iron pattern and sold by the millions—that bur- lesque uniform and regalia of the tragic burlesque of the sons of Ham" (159- 60). Here, Mr. Compson shows his sense of racial mixture as a simple sum of white and black, not as a threat to whiteness as a distinct category which has en- abled his subjective rendering of racial mixture in the first place. Consequently, in Mr. Compson's somewhat stereotypical configuration, Charles Etienne's

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identity problem manifests itself as an awkward coordination between his original "delicate garments" made of white silk and "that harsh and shapeless denim" emblematic of the black race, not between his white-looking body and the problematic signs of racial hybridity he has to wear.

Significantly, when Mr. Compson does mention Charles Etienne's visual appearance through dramatization of him "examining himself" in a shard of broken mirror, the narrator does not foreground Charles Etienne "himself"— i.e., his white-looking body—but his no longer "white" clothing which, cov- ering the racially indeterminate body, signifies his loss of whiteness: "who to know what hours of amazed and tearless grief he might have spent before it, examining himself in the delicate and outgrown tatters in which he perhaps could not even remember himself, with quiet and incredulous incomprehen- sion" (162). Objectif)'ing Charles Etienne as interracial and claiming his dif- ference this way, Mr. Compson enables himself to exert narrative subjectivity with which to recount the unknown. Mr. Compson's acknowledgement of the inaccessibility to the scene ("who to know") does not keep him from telling Charles Etienne's inner feelings but rather opens to him a free narrative space to fill with his own perspective, as registered by the adverb "perhaps."'

Thus, in Absalom, Absalom! white narrators' general lack of direct sighting allows them to treat racial passing solely in language and ignore the white- looking body and its subversive implication to their subjectivity. Conversely, in rare cases of immediate confrontation such as Hamblett's with Charles Eti- enne, the white-looking body nullifies the observer's sense of difference and his discursive dominance predicated on it. Eaulkner furthers this paradigm by applying it even to Clytie who, with her "coffee-colored" skin and publicly known parental origin, otherwise occupies a stable interracial position. By do- ing so, Faulkner suggests that, just like the "octoroon" label, the "coffee-color" epithet does not faithfully reflect the reality of her body but rather carry the speaker's will to differentiate. In chapter 6, Shreve checks with Quentin about the excursion to Sutpen's Hundred during which the boy Quentin and his friends see Clytie,

'Just as with his "octoroon" mother, Charles Etienne as Mr. Compson's mixed-race narrative object undergoes a stereotyping peculiar to the nineteenth-century Anglo-American discourse on "half-breeds." Describing him as "the boy with his light bones and womanish hands struggling with what anonymous ava- tar of intractable Mule, whatever tragic and barren clown was his bound fellow and complement beneath his first father's curse" (162), Mr. Compson juxtaposes Charles Etienne with the "Mule" which bears a symboli- cal association with racial hybridity: "The most common analogy [concerning racial hybrids] drawn from agricultural breeding practice was that of the mule [mulatto itself may be derived from the Spanish word for mule), a useful but ill-tempered and, of course, infertile, beast, fit for its task but awkward to handle" (Malchow 179). Somewhat informed of Charles Etienne's adulthood, e.g., his emotional instability as well as begetting of a mentally challenged son, Mr. Compson tries to authenticate his version by presenting these stereotypes as the character's deep-rooted attribute ("his bound fellow and complement") that determines his future life. Also, Mr. Compson's depiction of Charles Btienne's "light bones and womanish hands" bases itself upon the contemporary stereotype of mixed-race emasculation: "The half-breed man . . . was often represented as somehow feminine in his emotional/biological instability" (Malchow 183).

1 o Masami Sugimori Racial Mixture, Racial Passing, and White Subjectivity

watching you with eyes like two shoe buttons buried in the myriad wrinkles of her coffee- colored face, who just looked at you and said without even removing the pipe and in a voice almost like a white woman's: 'What do you want?' and afler a moment one of you said 'Nothing' and then you were all running without knowing which of you began to run first nor why since you were not scared, back across the fallow and rain-gutted and brier-choked old fields until you came to the old rotting snake fence and crossed it, hurled yourselves over it, and then the earth, the land, the sky and trees and woods, looked dif- ferent again, all right again. (174)

While Rosa's preceding reference to Clytie's "coffee-colored face" (109) leads Shreve (and presumably Quentin, when he first told Shreve about the epi- sode) to repeat the same color description, Clytie's voice "almost like a white woman's" renders the confused boy Quentin and his friends unable to cast the mixed-race woman in the stereotype of frightening "mixed-breed": they run away "without knowing... why since [they] were not scared"^ Faulkner attri- butes the boys' puzzlement to Clytie's ideologically disruptive "sameness" in the metaphorically charged second half of the quotation; the boys manage to collect themselves only when they cross "the old rotting snake fence"—a half- wrecked boundary that barely splits their ordinary world and the world of the Other—back into the former sphere where, tellingly, things "looked different again, all right again!'

Faulkner suggests that firsthand—and so not linguistically mediated— experience of the supposedly passing body can disrupt the circular process of white subjectivity formation. He does so most dramatically in chapter 5, where Rosa narratively revisits her post-Civil War life at the Sutpen mansion in stream-of-consciousness style, giving us some direct access to her prediscursive psyche.' Rosa's report of her confrontation with Clytie (who"passes" for Henry to the eye of Rosa who, '^'running out of the bright afternoon" into "the dim lighf [109J, has yet to adjust to the darkness) testifies unwittingly to a tension be- tween her transfixion with Clytie's visual sameness and her defensive impulse to name the woman "interracial Other." And, through his portrayal of Rosa's discursive struggle against bodily sensation, Faulkner foregrounds how, even as language helps a white subject differentiate himself/herself from the con- structed "interracial object," the visual homogeneity created by racial passing can complicate this dichotomizing function of language.

'Malchow's analysis of Victorian cultural imagination finds the same Gothicizing mechanism in the making of vampire and that of "half-breed": "there is also lurking in the vampire the powerful suggestion of an explicitly racial obsession—that of the 'half-breed.' Both vampire and half-breed are creatures who transgress boundaries and are caught between two worlds. Both are hidden threats—disguised presences bringing pollution of the blood. Both may be able to 'pass' among the unsuspecting, although both bear hidden signs of their difference, which the wary may read" (168). In the quoted scene, Faulkner has Clytie transcend such a Gothic horror in the boys' mind, thus suggesting how the white-dominant discourse on racial mixture fails to comprehend the issue in its bodily dimension.

'J. G. Brister points convincingly to the pre-linguistic, pre-subjective, "semiotic" quality of Rosa's nar- rative in the chapter: "Rosa is presented as a subject 'in process' and 'on trial,' as her long middle chapter of italicized monologue attests. . . . Rosa's italicized monologues are also an incursion of the semiotic on the narrative level" (46). Here, yet to gain stable subjectivity with which to signify the world and put it in order, Rosa has little linguistic control over the chaotic reality she experiences. .

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Rosa's mental process during her face-off with Clytie illustrates this dis- ruption, as she rushes into the mansion without knowing what has happened there,

and saw the Sutpen face and even as I cried 'Henry! Henry! What have you done? What has that fool [Wash Jones] been trying to tell me?' realised that I had come, not too late as I had thought, but come too soon. Because it was not Henry's face. It was Sutpen face enough, but not his; Sutpen coffee-colored face enough there in the dim light, barring the stairs: and I running out of the bright afternoon, into the thunderous silence ofthat brooding house where I could see nothing at first: then gradually the face, the Sutpen face not approaching, not swimming up out of the gloom, but already there, rocklike and firm and antedating time and house and doom and all, waiting there (oh yes, he chose well; he bettered choosing, who created in his own image the cold Cerberus of his private hell)—the face without sex or age because it had never possessed either: the same sphinx face which she had been born with. (109)

Rosa's confusion of Clytie with Henry shows the former's passing "white" look in this particular scene. The way the passage registers the confusion also in- dicates that Clytie's "coffee color" reflects Rosa's interested preconception as much as the body's physical attribute. For, at first referring to what she finds as "the Sutpen face," Rosa cannot attach "coffee-colored"—a marker of racial hybridity—until she realizes that "it was not Henry's face" but Clytie's. Des- perate to neutralize her mistake and reestablish difference, Rosa translates her misrecognition into that of race-free time (she "had come, not too late as I had thought, but come too soon") and deduces it illogically from a sudden reassertion of difference: "Because it was not Henry's face." In contrast with Mr. Compson's logic-controlled representation of racial mixture from a secure subject position, Rosa's direct sighting of the passing body de-subjectifies her and thus makes her rendition a chaotic, self-contradictory assortment of im- ages. For instance, Clytie, whom Rosa has just positioned on a timeline to claim Henry's difference, later transcends time {"antedating time") as the white nar- rator tries to objectify her as "rocklike andfirmr Rosa intends her "Cerberus" metaphor (juxtaposed with Sutpen's masterly "choosing' which had equated Clytie's slave mother with "the other livestock" in Mr. Compson's account [48] ) to objectify Clytie through Cothicizing and bestializing of the "half-breed." However, developing the image into a "Sphinx," another Greek mythological figure, Rosa unwittingly emphasizes the visual sameness of Clytie's passing face. For, though the human-animal hybrid composition of a "Sphinx" can suit her desire to solidify Clytie's "half-breed" Otherness, the whole passage's exclusive reference to face attests that in the dark house Rosa can only see the monster's face {"the same sphinx face") which, unlike its body of a lion, belongs to generic woman.

In this scene, Faulkner also implies that, as temporally and spatiaUy distanced narrators objectify passing characters more easily, physical dis- tance goes hand in hand with conceptual differentiation in white subjectiv- ity construction. When Rosa finds the distance violated by Clytie's stopping her from going upstairs, despite her racially binarizing reference to Clytie's

12 Masami Sugimori Racial Mixture, Racial Passing, and White Subjectivity

''black arresting and untitnorous hand on my white woman's flesh" (111), Rosa cannot help realizing that the physical touch, in its bodily directness, exposes the two women's sameness (as a "flesh" and another "flesh") and dissolves the hierarchical "caste and color" on which her black-and-white description predi- cates itself: "let flesh touch with flesh, and watch the fall of all the eggshell shib- boleth of caste and color too" (112). Thus, desperately resisting the nullification of difference, Rosa's interjection strives to distance (physically) and differenti- ate (racially) Clytie's body at the same time: "Take your hand off me, nigger!" (112). Faulkner suggests that this interrelation between physical distance and categorical difference also has a social dimension. For, as the disintegration of Southern slave system forces Rosa, Judith, and Clytie to live close together (they, for example, "slept in the same room" [126]), whiteness and mixed race, and even the three women's selves, become indistinguishable. As Rosa admits, "Clytie . . .in the very pigmentation of her flesh represented that debacle" (126) of the South, which has brought the post-Civil War situation where " [ i] t was as though we were om being, interchangeable and indiscriminate" (125).

In Absalom, Absalom! as I have demonstrated, Faulkner deploys the fac- tor of racial passing to expose a discursive circularity built in white subjectiv- ity formation. Here, with no substantial reference point for difference, one names/fabricates an "interracial object" against which to define himself/herself as a "white subject," but in its discursive arbitrariness this strategy depends already upon the very white subjectivity that it has to establish. As exemplified by Mr. Compson's representation of "the octoroon" and Charles Etienne, this procedure works for those narrators whose dependence upon already narrativ- ized materials helps avoid dealing directly with the passing body. As in Rosa's direct sighting of Clytie, however, v/hen whites do encounter the white-looking body of reputedly mixed-race individuals, its visual invalidation of the white/ passing-white difference unsettles the former's narrative agency including that which enables them to name the latter "passing mixed-race" in the first place. Through comparison between these cases, I have pointed out that, in Faulkner's observation, language as a naming/binarizing medium, just as physical media- tion in time or space, functions to the advantage of the Southern racial system by distancing the white-looking body—whose physical sameness would other- wise neutralize white subjectivity as a distinct entity—into a fictive "interracial object" position.

On the level of the racial ideology under which whites in Absalom, Absa- loml perform discursive activity, their mostly successful objectification of racial passing means an empowerment for becoming independent "white subjects." However, on the narrative level, where the goal is to elucidate the Sutpen saga full of irrationality and inconsistency, the fictive nature of their subjectivity and of the narrative reconstruction it executes works against the whole en- terprise. For instance, as I have shovv̂ n, Mr. Compson's ordering rendition of Charles Etienne's racial mixture (as a logical sum of white and black) endorses and is endorsed by the narrator's secure subjectivity, but his portrayal, unlike Judge Hamblett's shocked speech, fails to capture the difference-defj^ing reality

The Faulkner Journal Spring 2008 13

of the passing body.'" On the other hand, though in total disarray, Rosa's ret- rospective monologue about her confrontation with the "passing" Clytie does register the two women's "actual," if "contradictory" and thus rationally un- acceptable, homogeneity as "the two abstract contradictions which we actually were"{111). I shall argue in this section that, by setting the white narrators' truth-seeking efforts as the novel's thematic centerpiece, Faulkner develops his investigation of racial passing and points out a paradox that surrounds the differentiating operation of subjectivity, narrative, and ultimately, language. For, while ordering the essentially "chaotic" world (exemplified by the end- lessly indeterminable white/passing-white difference) into comprehensible bi- naries, such an operation at the same time denies one access to the same world through inevitable reduction and distortion.

Indeed, Faulkner draws a parallel between the passing body and chaotic reality by alluding to a binary paradigm's limitation in capturing their lack of order. While temporal and spatial distance enables the narrators to objectify the world they recount, Faulkner implies that, just as the passing body denes the white/passing-white dichotomy, the unordered universe resists the fictive differentiation between North and South, present and past—and by extension that between subject and object which relies upon distance." The North/South difference does not inhere in the continent's topography but only comes from fictive categorization, as evidenced by the Mississippi River which, impervious to measuring lines, "is very Environment itself which laughs at degrees of lati- tude and temperature" (AA 208). The distinction between past and present, too, betrays itself as a doomed attempt to order the intrinsically amorphous fiow of time; Faulkner foregrounds the disintegration of the dichotomy by de- scribing Quentin in 1909 as "still breath [ing] the same air in which the church bells had rung on that Sunday morning in 1833" (23).

Predicated upon such fictive difference and distance, narrative subjectiv- ity itself turns out fictive and thus insufficient to comprehend reality in its pristine disorder. Inevitably imposing its own perspective to create mean- ing, consistency, and teleology, subjectivity-based reconstruction cannot but suppress real-life complexities while providing a rationally organized inter-

"Tzvetan Todorov points to the "scientific mode of thinking" at work in racial categorization which puts to reasonable order the chaotic diversity of humanity: "on the one hand human beings differ in physi- cal appearance, and on the other they differ in social behavior. Racism begins when one proceeds to reason that the two series cannot possibly be independent of one another; the first must vary as the second, or vice versa. Now, this is a typically scientific mode of reasoning, since science consists in the effort to replace chaos with order" (3721

"Betina Entzminger's study of whiteness and homosexuality in Absalom, Absalom! perceptively locates a continuity between the dissolution of difference in narrative and that in cultural identity such as race: "Ab- salom, Absalom! emphasizes the lack of definitive borders between black and white (Charles passes for white and the reader and characters 'discover' that he has black blood only near the end of the novel), between the past and present (the narrative shifts in time without demarcation or warning), between individuals (the narrative also shifts without demarcation or warning from one narrative voice to another), and even between thoughts themselves (as sentences are often unpunctuated and blend into one another). Through these tech- niques, the narrative's blurring and crossing of boundaries unsettles the cultures insistence on seeing other types of difference, such as those related to race, gender, and sexuality, in black and white" (91).

14 Masami Sugimori Racial Mixture, Racial Passing, and White Subjectivity

pretation.'^ Thus, in Absalom, Absalom! the narrators' mostly stable subjectiv- ity distanced/differentiated from the fictively created narrative object serves paradoxically to frustrate their truth-seeking efforts. While taking advantage of their secure subject position in exerting imagination, the narrators—whose ultimate goal is to reveal the truth, not a story, of the Sutpens' lives—find themselves repeatedly reminded of their limitation in retrieving actual human actions which defy logical reasoning, especially in the personae's extreme situa- tions. As the characters of the Sutpen saga "in life had acted and reacted to the minimum of logic and morality, [and] dying had escaped it completely, [and] dead remained not only indifferent but impervious to it" (225), Mr. Compson locates the root of his narrative impasse in human inability to "know" what is "incredible" and "does not explain": "It's just incredible. It just does not ex- plain. Or perhaps that's it: they dont explain and we are not supposed to know" (80). Somewhat drawing a parallel between the epistemological chaos of pass- ing body and of human action itself, the Rosa-Clytie homogeneity {"the two abstract contradictions which we actually were" [111]) echoes Faulkner's anno- tation on the rationality-defying "love" factor, on which Quentin and Shreve finally zero in as the key to solving Henry's mysterious murder of Bon: "love, where there might be paradox and inconsistency but nothing fault nor false" (253)."

In tandem with his critique of subjectivity, Faulkner arranges the novel's final chapters, which approach the heart of the Sutpen mystery, so that Quen- tin and Shreve have to abandon their subject position and fuse with their nar- rative object. Qnly through such de-subjectification can the narrators ques- tion a white-looking man's formerly taken-for-granted white identity—a move that exposes the fictiveness of white/passing-white difference. In chapter 8, by merging Quentin and Shreve with Henry and Bon, Faulkner confiscates the narrators' subjective vantage point and instead provides them with a direct access to key events of the Sutpen legend. Faulkner's meticulous description of different modes of such merging indicates that the novelist intends the tech- nique to represent Quentin and Shreve's varying levels of access to the unme- diated reality. Initially "the two" in a detached subject position, Quentin and

'̂ In her study of postmodern historiographical metafiction, of which critics have rightly called Absa- lom, Absalom! a modern precursor, Linda Hutcheon aptly argues that the genre's problematization of history construction amounts to that of narrative itself, especially its "imposition of meaning and formal coherence on the chaos of events": "many theorists today have pointed to narrative as the one concern that envelops all of these [subjectivity, intertextuality, reference, ideology], for the process of narrativization has come to be seen as a central form of human comprehension, of imposition of meaning and formal coherence on the chaos of events" ( 121 ).

"Anticipating the Derridian "signifying chain," Faulkner also ascribes language's incapability of mir- roring reality to its self-contained circularity. According to Derrida, in an endless series of differentiative deferments, a signifier refers not to a real presence but only to another signifier: "One could call play the absence of the transcendental signified as limitlessness of play" (50). The "shadows" Quentin and Shreve retrieve in their narrative re-creation turn out to be not of physical bodies ("flesh and blood which had lived and died") but of yet another set of narratively evoked images ("what were . . . shades"): "the two of them creating between them, out of the rag-tag and bob-ends of old tales and talking, people who perhaps had never existed at all anywhere, who, shadows, were shadows not of flesh and blood which had lived and died but shadows in turn of what were (to one of them at least, to Shreve) shades too" (AA 243).

The Faulkner Journal Spring 2008 15

Shreve then come to share Henry and Bon's time and place as "the four" and see the scenes, including Bon's white-looking body, directly. Later "the four" confound further into a new form of "the two," where Quentin and Shreve directly experience Henry's and Bon's lives and perspectives and, thus drawing upon the subjectivity of their once narrative objects, abandon their distinct subjectivity.'''

For example, by putting themselves in the antebellum South and join- ing Henry and Bon as "the four," Quentin and Shreve manage to witness the youths' mysterious departure on the Christmas eve of 1860 ("not two of them there and then either but four of them riding the two horses through the iron darkness" [237]) as well as to see Bon's mother whose vindictive plot explains his approach to the Sutpen family. When Quentin and Shreve later come back to the Christmas eve as the second form of "the two," their fusion enables them to retrieve Henry's psychology in italicized interior monologue: "So that now it was not two but four of them riding the two horses through the dark over the frozen December ruts of that Christmas eve: four of them and then just two—Charles-Shreve and Quentin-Henry, the two of them both believing that Henry was thinking He (meaning his father) has destroyed us aïï' (267). Only by"exist[ing] in" Bon and approaching the world from his viewpoint can Quentin and Shreve restore the "love" factor in its pre-narrativized "paradox and inconsistency": each of the narrators

forgave condoned and forgot the faulting of the other—faultings both in the creating of this shade whom they discussed (rather, existed in) and in the hearing and sifting and discarding the false and conserving what seemed true, or fit the preconceived—in order to overpass to love, where there might be paradox and inconsistency but noth- ing fault nor false. (253)

However, given this strategy of critiquing the fictive subject/object, white/ passing-white differences and de-subjectifying the truth-seeking plot, it seems highly contradictory that Faulkner arranges the ending so that Quentin and Shreve finish their reconstruction by reverting to the initial binary frameworks. Why does Faulkner allow the white narrators to reject the permanent inde- terminacy of Bon's white-looking body, to objectify him instead as "passing interracial," to reestablish Southern racial hierarchy which this "passing" Bon

'••The 1960s and '70s saw the dominance of the school that, regarding the chapter as a case of "success of imagination," "tended to accept the Quentin/Shreve version on the sheer strength of its imaginative force and evocativeness" (Engler 234-35). Engler rightly points out the school's theoretical problem in privileging particular narrators' imagination over others': "If they assert the hypothesis that 'history is not "out there," but is a function of the consciousness of the historian' (See Henderson 247), they should also concede that all reconstruction is but subjective conjecture, exhibiting only the prejudices of its author" (238). As my reading goes, Faulkner's technique not only depicts Quentin and Shreve's exertion of imagination but more specifically follows the process in which they overcome narrative distance to reach real-life occurrences. Indeed, Faulkner makes a careful distinction tsetween imaginative re-creation and direct sighting when Mr. Compson portrays Sutpen's troops in such a way that "it seemed to Quentin that he could actually see them" (154). Tellingly, Quentin soon realizes that the imagined picture has already reduced the complex original accessible only to those present at the scene: "he could see it; he might even have been there. Then he thought No. Iflhadbeen there I could not have seen it this plain" {\55).

16 Masami Sugimori Racial Mixture, Racial Passing, and White Subjectivity

has allegedly violated, and thus to reclaim their white subjectivity (as opposed to the interracial object) with which to complete a coherent narrative? This double-sided treatment by Faulkner, I will argue, indicates a dilemma inherent in the author's novelistic activity, i.e., having to use language—a medium intrin- sically unfit for capturing the chaotic, signification-proof world—to finalize a book of truth seeking. Indeed, Faulkner prevents this predicament of language from undermining his work by sneaking Quentin and Shreve's subjective in- tervention into the very moment their de-subjectified narrative merging helps retrieve the unmediated past. By so doing, he subtly transfers the problem to the level of Quentin and Shreve's reconstruction and holds them responsible for the failure to recoup the true past in its original disorderliness.'^

The following passage exemplifies this. Here, as "four of them," Quentin and Shreve share the same space with Bon's mother and note her "parchment- colored skin"—a marker of possible racial mixture:

. . . four of them who sat in that drawing room of baroque and fusty magnificence which Shreve had invented and which was probably true enough, while the Haiti- born daughter of the French sugar planter and the woman who Sutpen's first fa- ther-in-law had told him was a Spaniard (the slight dowdy woman with untidy gray-streaked raven hair coarse as a horse's tail, with parchment-colored skin and implacable pouched black eyes which alone showed no age because they showed no forgetting, whom Shreve and Quentin had likewise invented and which was likewise probably true enough).... (268)

Despite the "four of them" narrative setting that features direct sighting, Faulkner implies Quentin and Shreve's subjective intervention by referring to the woman's retrieved figure not only as an "invention" but also as "prob- ably true enough," thus insinuating the working of a standard for likelihood and acceptability. By doing so, Faulkner sets the report's authenticity level as no higher than General Compson's imaginative re-creation. When Sutpen's storytelling makes General Gompson feel as if "he had just seen her too for a second by the fiash of one of the muskets," the evoked image of Sutpen's future wife has "a white slender arm," reñecting the listener's presupposition of her whiteness (201). Making Quentin and Shreve's departure from General Gompson's master account sound not like a correction (based on substantive counterevidence) but like a rereading (of what is formerly considered "white"

'̂ This strategy foregrounds Faulkner's own subjectivity comparable to his character-narrators' desire to control their narrative object. Indeed, as Philip Weinstein perceptively points out, one can detect such a parallel in Faulkner's "ovvin subjective lineaments writ large in the lives and landscapes of his shaping," since his "masculine urge toward self-ratification appears everywhere in the novels themselves, aggressively in the dynastic ambitions of a Sartoris or McCaslin or Flem Snopes, but just as often defensively as the need for sanctuary . . . or as the intensifying narrative desire for completion" (1). For Weinstein, with all its potentially "subject-altering" critique of the ideologically endorsed objectification of Othej-ness, Absalom, Absalom! rather ends up "subject-constituting" in that the very critique serves to structure "Faulkner" as an authoritative représenter/représentative of Southern ideologized discourse: "Absalom's 'illimitable courage for rhetoric' {SL 188) registers less the subject-altering encounter with the voice and body of the Other than the subject-constituting drama of'Faulkner' (through his various but kindred-voiced narrators) quarreling with—but more deeply insisting upon—the terrible beauty of his trope-saturated inheritance" (142).

The Faulkner Journal Spring 2008 17

as "parch-ment color"), Faulkner subtly undermines the epistemological in- tegrity of the youths' narrative operation.'*

Faulkner makes the narrators' subjective bias undermine the direct specta- torship licensed by "four of them" fusion also when, just before the coexistence of "the four" at the scene develops into the compounded "two," Shreve refutes Mr. Compson on who got wounded at Pittsburg Landing:

Because your old man was wrong here, too! He said it was Bon who was wounded, but it wasn't. Because who told him? Who told Sutpen, or your grandfather either, which of them it was who was hit? Sutpen didn't know because he wasn't there, and your grandfather wasn't there either because that was where he was hit too, where he lost his arm. So who told them? Not Henry, because his father never saw Henry but that one time and maybe they never had time to talk about wounds and besides to talk about wounds in the Confederate army in 1865 would be like coal miners talking about soot; and not Bon, because Sutpen never saw him at all because he was dead;—it was not Bon, it was Henry. (275)

Despite the "four of them" setting that would allow him to see and check by himself, Shreve's rebuttal depends not upon visual counterevidence but upon a lack of testimonial, and thus discursive, evidence: "So who told them?" With this Faulkner implies that Shreve's revision of preceding narratives, just as that of Bon's mother, is not a correction based on direct experience of the real past but yet another reading of the same, already narrativized material. Quite fit- tingly, Shreve's discursive move serves to translate the essentially chaotic and indeterminate world, where Bon's white-looking body dissolves difference and makes him interchangeable with Henry (so it could be Henry who got injured), into a differentiating assertion (that it ¿5 Henry). Tellingly, to justify his claim of interchangeability, Shreve compares the ubiquity of wounded soldiers to that of sooted "coal miners," evoking the image of darkened and de-individual- ized whites. While the visual homogeneity between a white master and "wild niggers" (4) shocks Rosa when she witnesses the mud-plastered Sutpen and his black slaves "distinguishable one from another by his beard and eyes alone" (28), Shreve's subjectivity covertly at work allows him to appropriate the disin- tegration of visual—and by implication racial—difference as a rhetorical tool for advancing his own interpretation.'^

"Faulkner's use of the symbolically charged "parchment color," echoing Joe Christmas in Light in August, indicates his observation of race, especially racial mixture, as cultural inscription rather than bodily feature. As Doreen Fowler points out, "Faulkner's choice of parchment-color skin denotes that otherness is not determined by skin color (or any other physical trait) but by what other people project onto physical characteristics. Parchment is a sheet of writing material prepared from the skin of a sheep or a goat, and Joe's parchment-colored skin symbolizes that Joe is a blank slate on which others write, that his identity as racial other is culturally inscribed" (171). Indeed, Quentin and Shreve's reading of "parchment color" into the "white"-looking body of Bon's mother, opening up the possibility of passing, lays the ground for their later inscription of "interracial otherness" and construction of a culturally and ideologically acceptable discourse.

"Not only the "four of them" state but also its further fusion into "the two," which would allow Quentin and Shreve to experience scenes of the mid-nineteenth-century South from Henry's and Bon's perspectives, shows the narrators' paradoxical reliance upon distinct subjectivity. Compounded into "just two—Charles-Shreve and Quentin-Henry" (267), they restore Henry's thoughts as regards repudiating his

18 Masami Sugimori Racial Mixture, Racial Passing, and White Subjectivity

In this way, Faulkner foregrounds Quentin and Shreve's narrativization— and thus spoilage—of their direct experience of the original, disorderly past. By doing so, he manages to claim language's fundamental inadequacy in capturing chaotic reality and use language to elaborate a truth-seeking plot (in which he has to make that claim). This method operates most fully in the climactic "revelation" of Bon's ancestry at the Carolina encampment:

They were both in Carolina and the time was forty-six years ago, and it was not even four now but compounded stul further, since now both of them were Henry Sutpen and both of them were Bon, compounded each of both yet either neither, smelling the very smoke which had blown and faded away forty-six years ago from the bivouac fires burning in a pine grove, the gaunt and ragged men sitting or lying about them, talking not about the war yet all curiously enough (or perhaps not curiously at all) facing the South. (280)

Fitting to the ultimate "two of them" setting, the Quentin-Shreve-Henry-Bon fusion comes not only with the 1909 narrators' direct sensation of a "smell" from 1865 but also with a stylistic transformation from roman type to italics signaling a pre-discursive dimension. However, as the parenthetical addition and its diction of a third party {"perhaps"" curiously") indicate, the passage does not faithfully register Henry's or Bon's perception. On the contrary, its logic suggests Shreve's narrative control over what appears an unmediated presenta- tion of inner truth. The "curiosity" the quote mentions indicates the working of Shreve's perspective, since the Confederate Army's paradoxical habituation to wartime anomaly such as its "facing the South" has attracted particular at- tention from the Canadian native, for whom the Civil War is "something my people haven't got" (289). And, indeed, Shreve's theory of Henry's injury in- spired by the wartime ubiquity of wounds—another extraordinariness that has aroused his curiosity—makes its way into the same conversation between Sut- pen and Henry that interracializes Bon: " You were hit at Shiloh, Colonel Willow

birthright (which were inaccessible to the "four of them" in their prior visit to the same scene [237 j ) through italicized interior monologue:

So that now it was not two but four of them riding the two horses through the dark over the frozen December ruts of that Christmas eve: four of them and then just two—Charles-Shreve and Quentin-Henry, the two of them both believing that Henry was thinking He (meaning his father) has destroyed us all, not for one moment thinking He (meaning Bon) must have known or at least suspected this all the time; that's why he has acted as he has, why he did not answer my letters last summer nor write to Judith, why he has never asked her to marry him; believing that that must have occurred to Henry. (267)

Here, though the Charles-Shreve, Quentin-Henry fusion gives a direct access to Henry's mental process on the Christmas eve of 1860, Faulkner describes their epistemological move as "believing"—an act that entails subjective agency. Indeed, at the very moment of retrieval, the passage has already edited what Henry actu- ally said to himself ("He has destroyed us all") to fit into the story Quentin and Shreve prepare. In order that the interior remark will not belie their version of Henry, Quentin and Shreve clarify the originally ambigu- ous "he" reference with a parenthetical annotation that assigns "his father," and exclude the likely possibility of "Bon." The statement that "He must have known or at least suspected tbis all tbe time" existed nowhere in Henry's mind because it is what Henry was "not for one moment thinking." Juxtaposed and thus contrasted with this forged content, what Henry actually thought comes to bear connotations—such as his naive trust in Bon—that are compatible with Quentin and Shreve's ongoing reconstruction.

The Faulkner Journal Spring 2008 19

tells me, Sutpen says" (282).'* Thus manipulating the narrative situation of the scene, Faulkner avoids settling Bon's essentially indeterminable race except on a doubly discursive level—i.e., Shreve's narrative invention of Sutpen's verbal disclosure (283) and of Bon's self-"nigger"-ing (285,286) to Henry.'*

As I have demonstrated, Faulkner's dual treatment of the de-subjectified narrative situation in Absalom, Absalom! indicates his paradoxical attempt to point out the predicament of language and prevent the same predicament from compromising his own novelistic narrative. To finish his book of truth seeking while claiming truth's imperviousness to ordering language, Faulkner transfers this impasse to his character-narrators and holds them responsible for the fail- ure to recoup the true past in its original disorder. Thus, while communicating the message that no narrative can finalize the racial origin of white-looking Bon nor his and the Sutpens' actions and motives, Faulkner manages to give the novel a sense of closure, which, ironically, has led readers to accept Bon's racial mixture uncritically. Indeed, just as Quentin and Shreve redefine their white subjectivity circularly as opposed to a fabricated narrative object (i.e., Bon as "passing interracial" and, by extension, the whole, rationally acceptable version of Sutpen legend that they have invented), Faulkner scholarship has sustained itself as an authoritative body of critical discourse by presupposing the mixed-race Bon as its object of investigation. And, as Engler argues, such a "dubious assumption" (253) has at the same time affected interpretation of Absalom, Absalom! because it does not reflect the novel's actual open-ended- ness.̂ "

The same dilemma faces Quentin and Shreve just after their conclusion. For, with all their "solution" to the Sutpen mystery, its—and their regained subjectivity's—inevitable fictionality constantly comes back to frustrate them. Though Jim Bond's mental disability, "saddle-colored' (173) skin and resulting "nigger" position had earlier enabled Shreve to objectify him casually into a discursive construct (calling Jim's mind "what you (not he) would have had to call his mind" [174]), in chapter 9 the white narrators realize that the mixed- race character is beyond their epistemological comprehension and will not fit into "the whole ledger" (302) of their reconstruction: "You've got one nigger- left. One nigger Sutpen left. Of course you cant catch him and you dont even

"Absalom, Absalomfs revision process also attests Shreve's virtual control of the bivouac scene. For, before publication, Faulkner reassigned the segment from Shreve to the compounded viewpoint without changing its content much: "In this chapter Faulkner made a final change in the viewpoint of narration. In the manuscript the account of the Confederate retreat was part of Shreve's narration In the book this passage—an italicized interruption of Shreve's recital—is presented as a shared visualization of the action instead of an oral account of it" (Langford 39).

"Once it interracializes Bon, Shreve's imagination significantly limits the character's subjectivity, which had earlier operated in the form of interior monologue, to that of "seeing": "Bon pauses and looks at Henry; now he can see Henry's face" (284). What little epistemological agency Bon keeps, however, suffers a further discursive containment, since Shreve's representation makes Bon see "the whites of Henry's eyes" (285), thus symbolically foregrounding tbe "whiteness" of Henry's gaze that now differentiates Bon as racial Other.

^"Faulkner suggests the permanent indeterminacy of tbe book also tbrough Quentin's 1909 interview with Henry in the final chapter. Tbe conversation, far from clarifying Henry's motive for murdering Bon, turns out a circular, near-palindromic exchange of sentences which, symbolizing tbe impossibility of a straightfor- ward causal chain, goes no deeper than Henry's will "to die" (298) keeping his inner truth never verbalized.

20 Masami Sugimori Racial Mixture, Racial Passing, and White Subjectivity

always see him and you never will be able to use him. But you've got him there still. You still hear him at night sometimes" (302).

Thus developing the character of Jim Bond as a subtle symbol of dys- functional white subjectivity, Faulkner furthers his deconstruction of white- ness. While Quentin and Shreve intend their conclusion of interracial Bon to reestablish the white/passing-white difference, at another level this narrative operation serves to blur that very difference by drawing upon the proposition that any white-looking person can be passing mixed-race. Faulkner charges Jim with this paradox when the "saddle-color" epithet does not completely dis- qualify the character for passing; the 1909 confrontation at Sutpen's Hundred activates Quentin and Jim's possible interchangeability so that the third-per- son narrator has to clarify his pronoun reference (e.g., "he (Quentin) hurried forward" [297])—as he did to name two out of the "four ofthem" fusion: e.g., "It did not matter to them (Quentin and Shreve) anyway" (236). The closure- defying presence of Jim naturally reminds Shreve that, in interracializing Bon's white-looking body, he has unwittingly opened up the possibility of his own passing. Thus, at the ending oí Absalom, Absalom! Shreve cannot help imagin- ing that "whites" like himself, a seeing subject ("I who regard you"), can always be in fact "passing interracial" and thus "have sprung from the loins of African kings"—though his language barely suppresses its pernicious implication by setting the time "in a few thousand years" (302) and manufacturing a temporal distance from the chaotic scenario.

University of Kansas

The Faulkner Journal Spring 2008 21

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