Fact And Fiction: A Tentative Reading Of Race In William Faulkner’s Major Novels

Traditional, conservative as William Faulkner once was as a Southern white ’ writer, he indeed depicted a great gallery of Southern blacks in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, and made them an indispensable cornerstone of his own literary cosmos. Too many critics and scholars wonder whether Faulkner can ever enter the black consciousness or render black lives accurately, and many others argue that Faulkner, as his speeches and public letters reveal, is an actual racist who abhors integration but embraces a gradual redemption of segregation in the South. Based on previous studies on the race issues in Faulkner’s fictional works and in his actual life experience, this thesis, by a detailed analysis of Faulkner’s major novels and his public statements on race issues, intends to explore the source of Faulkner’s black-awareness, his treatment of his black and mulatto figures in his major novels, his non-fictional personal statements made on race in his later life, and foremost, the very close and equally enigmatic interrelationship between his fictional approach to and his factual standpoint on race issues in his native South.The thesis mainly falls into five parts with the first and the last sections as the introduction and the conclusion. The introductory part makes a general review about and then a comparison of the previous studies that have been done on William Faulkner’s treatment of race issues in his novels. The following Chapter 1 makes a New Critical analysis of several major novels by Faulkner and demonstrates how race, as a pivotal issue in understanding Faulkner, actually functions in these novels. The focus is laid especially on the novels of Faulkner’s "major years", like The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses, because, as the following Chapter 2 shows, these novels were composed when William Faulkner was literarily and psychologically puzzled by and involved in the Negroes in his homeland.Chapter 1 also ventures to draw a roadmap of the development of Faulkner’s black-awareness.Chapter 2 deals with the de facto race issues that have inhabited, infected and deteriorated the American South. Yoknapatawpha is born in this piece of land as it is in William Faulkner’s imagination, and the birth of Yoknapatawpha marks a great breakthrough in Faulkner’s literary terrain and lends him a new perspective to perceive the people living there, both the black and the white. Faulkner is deeply involved in the conservation of his ideal "old South", and he as a humanist and a Southern white liberal endeavors to maintain a middle-ground between the white segregationists and the black Civil Rights activists, and he is doomed to lose his ground for time has come for the Negroes to liberate themselves in the United States.Chapter 3 first explores Faulkner’s limits as a writer who deals with race issues in his novels as well as in his real life, and then points to his own redemption in the making of his Yoknapatawpha County which affords a great landmark both in time and in space for readers to appreciate and commemorate the "love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice" of common people. Real black voices are foregrounded to confront the futile efforts made by Faulkner and his peer Southern white moderates, and certain apologies for Faulkner’s standpoint are made to account for his embarrassed and frustrated public image in his time.The final section comes to a conclusion that William Faulkner is pardonable in his posturing publicly as one who struggles against the immediate integration of blacks and whites, for he is also a complex combination of historical, economic, psychological, and social forces and a product of his time and place. However honest and honorable, or despicable and ridiculous he renders his black characters to be in his fictional works, and however arrogant and inconsiderate his public statements on the race issue are in his later years, William Faulkner deserves our sympathy, understanding and appreciation for his great artistic and creative genius in picturing one of the most universal and immortal themes of human life: recognition and reconciliation between two distinct races. Writing over half a century ago, Faulkner never could congenitally please an audience of today who are too readily sensitized to the subtleties of racial prejudice.