Narrative Miscegenation

Absalom, Absalom ! as Naturalist Novel, Auto/Biography, and African-American Oral Story

Bibliographic Data

ID12794387
AuthorsAlex Vernon (corresponding author)
Year2001
Volume31
Issue2
Pages155-179
Publication date2001-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Narrative Theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1548-9248 • E-ISSN: 1549-0815
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/jnt.2011.0080
OpenAlexW2170734388
LanguageEN
References cited17

Narrative Miscegenation: Absalom, Absaloml as Naturalist Novel, Auto/Biography, and African-American Oral Story Alex Vernon Charles Darwin's evolutionary ideas, especially as disseminated by Herbert Spencer, profoundly affected literary criticism at the end of the nineteenth century, with genres treated like biological species to the degree that at least one critic wrote about "a struggle for existence among genres" (Pizer 82). A century later, in "The Law of Genre," Jacques Derrida repeatedly expresses this law—that "genres are not to be mixed" (51)—in naturalist terms. He remarks that genres have been treated in a system akin to "race, familial membership, [and] classificatory genealogy" whereby to mix genres is, by convention, to "risk impurity, anomaly, or monstrosity" (57, 53). It is to commit a kind of miscegenation. Yet his essay finally finds such intermixing inevitable, an inevitability he calls "the law of the law of genre" (55). William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! also employs naturalistic language in its various accountings of the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen. While the story turns on the historical Southern taboo of racial intermixing , Faulkner artfully incorporates generic miscegenation into the novel's structure. The narrative structure of Absalom, Absalom! can be viewed as a "cross-breed" of several literary forms, including (among others) the naturalist novel, biography, autobiography, and the oral tale largely associJNT : Journal of Narrative Theory 31.2 (Summer 2001): 155-179. Copyright © 2001 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. 156 JNT ated in the American South with black culture. This essay will explore how the novel employs Darwinian language; how it builds evolutionary theory into its very structure; how it participates in post-Darwin Victorian culture and literature; how it brings together issues of memory, narrative, evolution, adaptation, and auto/biographical constructions of the self; and how its narrative miscegenation ultimately unsettles the South's erroneous yet fundamental insistence on strict black-white speciation. Naturalism, and Then Some Cynthia Russett has observed that manifestations of American literary naturalism ranged "from the simple use of animal metaphors to the acceptance of a full-fledged philosophy of determinism" (174). A few decades later, armed with historical perspective on his literary forbears, William Faulkner extended this range to what we might call the meta-naturalism of Absalom, Absalom! in pushing beyond the conventions of naturalism by invoking a more thoroughly Darwinian evolutionary aesthetic. The novel's meta-naturalism comments on the limits of naturalism as a philosophy through the narrative's more accurate evolutionary design and through the major (white) characters' inability to survive the text. Critical consideration of William Faulkner as an inheritor of naturalism is well-established, and is but one literary tradition linked to Faulkner and Abaslom, Absalom!. Only a handful of scholars, however, place Faulkner in an explicitly Darwinian context.1 Of the 1925 Scopes "monkey" trial, Fred Hobson has written that "virtually every thoughtful Southerner had some response to the occurrences at Dayton" (148). Faulkner had more than just a passing interest in the debate. The year after the novel's 1936 publication, Faulkner "discussed Darwin with Mac, who had now begun reading in biology and anthropology under the spur of his stepfather's interest ," and Faulkner gave him a copy of The Origin of Species for Christmas (Blotner 389, 396).2 Even more than the original naturalists, many of whom had never read Darwin, Faulkner could talk the talk. In Abaslom, Absalom! he hangs most of his Darwinian language on Thomas Sutpen and his progeny. Sutpen builds his dynasty "plank by plank and brick by brick out of the swamp" (28), working naked and covered in mud, the primal ooze, with "his band of wild niggers like beasts half tamed to walk upright like men" Narrative Miscegenation 157 (4). References to his emergence from the swamp and mud pervade, such as Rosa's of "that man who had struggled through a swamp with nothing to guide or drive him . . . and blundered at last without warning onto dry solid ground and sun and air" (134). His slaves are constantly made into beasts; one is stumbled upon in "the absolute mud like a sleeping alligator " (27). In this novel fictionally composed in 1910 and looking back into a

Art · Art history · Biography · Epistemology · Literature · Narrative · Narratology · Naturalism · Novella · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · History · Philosophy · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Short Stories in Global Literature

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