Bill O'Reilly, Wrong Again

I love this:

Hat tip.

Sullivan on Faulkner and Race

A perceptive paragraph from near the end of John Jeremiah Sullivan's piece on Absalom, Absalom!, which I read and loved about a month ago as part of what's turning out to be a year of Faulkner for me:

No surer sign exists of the book’s greatness than how it seems to reconfigure itself and assume a new dimension, once we feel we know it, and these shifting walls of ambiguity were designed by Faulkner himself. They allow the text a curious liquid quality, so that it can seem alive, as if it might be modified by recent history too. I found it fascinating to read the book with a president sitting in the White House who comes from a mixed-race marriage, and with the statistic having just been announced that for the first time in U.S. history, nonwhite births have surpassed white ones. Some of the myths out of which the novel weaves its upsetting dreams appear quite different, like walking by a familiar painting and finding that someone has altered it. This is a strange time to be alive in America, in that regard. Close one eye, and we can seem to be moving toward a one-race society; close the other and we seem as racially conflicted and stratified as ever. Racism is still our madness. The longer that remains the case, the more vital this book grows, for Faulkner is one of the great explorers of that madness.

I agree with Sullivan's argument that Faulkner is a great explorer of the madness of racism, as well as his acknowledgment that Faulkner himself was tainted by this madness—as, indeed, are all of us Americans.

John Cassidy and the Real Scandal

Over the past six months, in all the noise and commentary on the economy and the election, I've come to find the voice of the New Yorker's John Cassidy, on his blog Rational Irrationality, exceptionally sane, clear, and insightful.

This passage from a piece published today, stood out for me as particularly sharp: 

If you managed to buttonhole the big campaign contributors, many of them would say they are simply expressing their support for candidates and principles they believe in, and that they aren’t seeking any rewards or favors in return. In some cases, this may be true. But it would take a very credulous person to believe that there isn’t an element of quid pro quo involved. Almost all wealthy businessmen have some some dealings with the government, and some interests they would like to protect. 

Take hedge funds, a key source of donations to candidate Obama in 2008. Since then, President Obama has signed a law that forced these unregulated investment vehicles to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission, a step many fund managers resented. He has also promised to enact the Buffett Rule, which would force many hedgies to pay a tax rate of thirty per cent instead of fifteen per cent. And lo and behold, hedge fund employees are now big backers of Romney, who isn’t committed to the Buffett Rule.... 

All this, of course, is perfectly legal and aboveboard; that is the real scandal. In a better world, the Supreme Court would be looking at what it has wrought and reconsidering its 2010 decision, but there is no chance of that. The Justices have been too busy deciding whether it’s constitutional for a duly elected President and Congress to try and guarantee affordable health care to everybody in the country. 

Rodney King and Dr. Dre

This morning on the way to work I heard an NPR story about the death of Rodney King. It was unexpectedly sweet, and moving. A few details stuck with me: He still had headaches as a result of the beating he received from the LAPD and a surgery he had afterwards in which the doctors pulled his eye out of its socket and put in a metal plate. He received over $3 million from the civil trial stemming from his beating, enough to buy himself and his mother nice houses. Even though he recognized that his plea "Can we all get along?" became something of a a joke or cliche, and some criticized him for saying it, he maintained his belief in the sentiment.

Rodney King was 47. (He was a month shy of his 26th birthday when he received his infamous beating.) A man who loved water—swimming and fishing were among his favorite activities—he was found dead by his fiancee in his swimming pool.

Poking around on Wikipedia later today, I noticed that Dr. Dre is also 47. Dre's track "The Day the Niggaz Took Over," from his 1992 album The Chronic (considered a masterpiece by some), is about as far from "Can we get along?" as one can imagine. The song is a celebration of violent rebellion and looting, interspersed with narration of the LA riots that erupted in response to the acquittals in the criminal trial of the officers charged in King's beating. Dre has gone on to a storied and highly lucrative career in the music business.

Realizing that Rodney King and Dr. Dre were virtually the same age, I found myself wondering if they ever met or talked. What did Dre think of King's "get along" comment? What did King think of "The Day the Niggaz Took Over"? Does Dre feel any differently about that track in 2012 than he did in 1992? King seems like he was a gentle, thoughtful person. I wonder if Dre would seem similar in an NPR interview at the age of 47.

For Ray Bradbury

A friend's lovely blog post about the death of Ray Bradbury caused me to stop and reflect on Bradbury's influence on my own reading life. It was Bradbury who first introduced me to the short story form in an extensive way. Since I first picked up a library copy of Bradbury's stories at the age of 14 or 15, the short story has become a big part of my life—I read stories obsessively, have a bookshelf devoted to collections of them, teach students to write them, and have written some of my own.

Truth be told, I haven't written much fiction in recent years, but here's a hundred-word story I wrote today in class after giving the hundred-word story assignment to my summer enrichment students. 

I think it has a bit of Bradbury in it.

Homecoming

Pierre von Staed was coming home, after 500 years.

In his spaceship, he had hibernated in a chamber that slowed his aging and woke him only for short periods to explore planets in deep space.

His mission: to seek life.

Pierre’s spaceship landed gently now. He woke from dreamless oblivion, opening his eyes upon a wasteland—hot gray skies, wrecked buildings.

He activated a device which could scan an entire planet for life. Within minutes it beeped: NO LIFE FORMS.

Pierre re-entered his ship and blasted off. His search would continue, but with a new goal: to find a home.

Hip-Hop and the N-Word

For the past year and half, I've been making an effort to listen to hip-hop because I felt I needed to be able to talk about it intelligently in my African American Voices class. I spent a day on it in the class this past year, and am planning to do at least one, maybe two days this fall. I think it has been an important, even a necessary addition to my curriculum.

Some of this music I have come to like quite a bit—particularly the work of Kanye West and, to a lesser extent, that of Jay-Z. But my consumption of hip-hop has generally had to take place in private. I don't feel comfortable listening to it in my home in front of my kids—and even my wife will look askance at me at times when she hears some of the language that West, Jay-Z, and others use. In particular, the word nigger concerns me—I don't want my kids hearing it, and I feel uncomfortable when I'm listening to the music (even a song that I consider deeply moving and beautiful, like this one) that uses that word within others' earshot (my family, my friends, my students in a non-academic context).

This situation has struck me as curious in the past—that hip-hop artists would intentionally make their music resistant to being played in certain circumstances. Reading Randall Kennedy's 2002 book Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word this evening, however, I came across an analysis that made a lot of sense to me:

Roping off cultural turf is another aim of some blacks who continue to use nigger in spite of its stigmatized status. Certain forms of black cultural expression have become commercially valuable, and black cultural entrepreneurs fear that these forms will be exploited by white performers who will adopt them and, tapping white-skin privilege, obtain compensation far outstripping that paid to black performers. This is, of course, a realistic fear in light of the long history of white entertainers' becoming rich and famous by marketing in whiteface cultural innovations authored by their underappreciated black counterparts. A counterstrategy is to seed black cultural expression with gestures that are widely viewed as being off-limits to whites. Saying "nigger" is one such gesture. Even whites who immerse themselves in black hip-hop culture typically refrain from openly and unabashedly saying "nigger" like their black heroes or colleagues, for fear that it might be perceived as a sign of disrespect rather than one of solidarity.

Kennedy's argument makes me see that the word nigger essentially inoculates some hip-hop music against being made commonplace. You'll probably never hear Kanye's "Family Business" playing over the sound system in a grocery store, on a commercial for some life insurance company—or at a family party in my white middle-class home, either. And that's part of the point. This music may retain its aura, its edge, its attraction because it can't be turned into sonic wallpaper, covered ad nauseum by white artists.

The Accidental Progenitor

An interesting comment from n+1 about the place of David Foster Wallace in recent rhetorical history:

The accidental progenitor of the blogorrheic style is David Foster Wallace. What distinguishes Wallace’s writing from the prose it begot is a fusion of the scrupulous and the garrulous; all of our colloquialisms, typically diffusing a mist of vagueness over the world, are pressed into the service of exactness. To a generation of writers, the DFW style was the sound of telling the truth, as — in an opposite way — the flat declaratives and simplified vocabulary of Hemingway were for a different generation. 

Everything You Do

In this post, Richard Brody quotes a profound and intimidating passage from the autobigraphy of the pianist Hampton Hawes:

Everything you do is important and connected with everything else whether you’re playing piano, harp at St. Peter’s gate, or checkers in the park. The way you get up in the morning, smell the leaves, have your juice or something funny like a jelly sandwich and a malt, scratch a dog’s head and say hello to some kids, drive your car, go to the can, feel the sun—that’s where imagination and soul come from.

The Best Number of Kids

I found this Elizabeth Kolbert article about the ethics of having children interesting, especially this passage, since it concludes by affirming my own procreative fate:

According to Caplan, a professor at George Mason University, the major mistake that parents (or prospective parents) make is overvaluing the present. This is a common enough error. Workers in their twenties and thirties don’t save enough money for retirement because it seems such a long way off. Then their sixties roll around, and they wish they’d spent less on S.U.V.s and HDTVs and put more into their 401(k)s.

Couples, he argues, need to think not just about how many children they might want now, when they have better things to do than microwave Similac, but how many they will want to have around when they’re old and lonely and watching “The View.” Caplan recommends what he calls the “take the average” rule:

Suppose you’re thirty. Selfishly speaking, you conclude that the most pleasant number of children to have during your thirties is one. During your forties, your optimal number of kids will rise to two—you’ll have more free time as your kids assert their independence. By the time you’re in your fifties, all your kids will be busy with their own lives. At this stage, wouldn’t it be nice to have four kids who periodically drop by? Finally, once you pass sixty and prepare to retire, you’ll have ample free time to spend with your grandchildren. Five kids would be a good insurance policy against grandchildlessness. 

Caplan does the math and concludes that in this case “the best number of kids is three.”

Reading Fiction

From Ann Patchett's compelling piece about the disappointments of a year with no Pulitzer Prize for Fiction:

Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes us more empathetic beings. Following complex story lines stretches our brains beyond the 140 characters of sound-bite thinking, and staying within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone, two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps.

I've posted lots of sentiments like this before, and this isn't necessarily the most original formulation of them—but I do agree with her (this is a big part of why I do what I do as an English teacher), and her essay as a whole is quite thoughtful and worth reading.

What Caro Knows About LBJ

I was impressed by the sweep of Charles McGrath's summary of what Robert Caro has learned about LBJ in this paragraph from his long NY Times article about the biographer, and I was amused by McGrath's final detail:

In his years of working on Johnson, Robert Caro has come to know him better — or to understand him better — than Johnson knew or understood himself. He knows Johnson’s good side and his bad: how he became the youngest Senate majority leader in history and how, by whispering one thing in the ears of the Southern senators and another in Northern ears, he got the Civil Rights Act of 1957 through a Congress that had squelched every civil rights bill since 1875; how he fudged his war record and earned himself a medal by doing nothing more than taking a single plane ride; how, while vice president during the Cuban missile crisis, his hawkishness scared the daylights out of President Kennedy and his brother Robert. Caro has learned about Johnson’s rages, his ruthlessness, his lies, his bribes, his insecurities, his wheedling, his groveling, his bluster, his sycophancy, his charm, his kindness, his streak of compassion, his friends, his enemies, his girlfriends, his gofers and bagmen, his table manners, his drinking habits, even his nickname for his penis: not Johnson, but Jumbo.

MLK and the Modern Republican Party

This passage from a 1964 essay by Martin Luther King, Jr., succinctly describes and predicts the emergence of the Republican Party as we have known it for the last 40 years or so, and it comments as as well on the basic sentiments that are activated to rally against President Obama:

For some Americans deluded by myths, the candidacy of a Goldwater seemed a solution for their ills. Essentially he identified big government, radicalism, and bureaucracy as the cause of all evils. Civil rights legislation, in his view, is not a social necessity—it is merely oppressive big government. He ignored the towering presence of discrimination and segregation, but vividly exaggerated crime in the streets. The poverty of the Negroes, he implied, is due to want of ambition and industry. The picture that emerged to delight the racist was that of undeserving, shiftless, criminally dangerous radicals who have manipulated government for their selfish ends, but whose grievances are largely fanciful, and will wither away if left to the states.

—"Negroes Are Not Moving Too Fast"

I Know a Man

I know a man—and I just want to talk about him a minute, and maybe you will discover who I'm talking about as I go down the way because he was a great one. And he just went about serving. He was born in an obscure village, the child of a poor peasant woman. And then he grew up in still another obscure village, where he worked as a carpenter until he was thirty years old. Then for three years, he just got on his feet, and he was an itinerant preacher. And he went about doing some things. He didn't have much. He never wrote a book. He never held an office. He never had a family. He never owned a house. He never went to college. He never visited a big city. He never went two hundred miles from where he was born. He did none of the usual things that the world would associate with greatness. He had no credentials but himself.

He was only thirty-three when the tide of public opinion turned against him. They called him a rabble-rouser. They called him a troublemaker. They said he was an agitator. He practiced civil disobedience; he broke injunctions. And so he was turned over to his enemies and went through the mockery of a trial. And the irony of it all is that his friends turned him over to them. One of his closest friends denied him. Another of his friends turned him over to his enemies. And while he was dying, the people who killed him gambled for his clothing, the only possession that he had in the world. When he was dead he was buried in a borrowed tomb, through the pity of a friend.

Nineteen centuries have come and gone and today he stands as the most influential figure that ever entered human history. All of the armies that ever marched, all the navies that ever sailed, all the parliaments that ever sat, and all the kings that ever reigned put together have not affected the life of man on this earth as much as that one solitary life. His name may be a familiar one. But today I can hear them talking about him. Every now and then somebody says, "He's King of Kings." And again I can hear somebody saying, "He's Lord of Lords." Somewhere else I can hear somebody saying, "In Christ there is no East nor West." And then they go on and talk about, "In Him there's no North and South, but one great Fellowship of Love throughout the whole wide world." He didn't have anything. He just went around serving and doing good.

This morning, you can be on his right hand and his left hand if you serve. It's the only way in.

—Martin Luther King, Jr., "The Drum-Major Instinct"

St. Louis Slavery, St. Louis Freedom

Back in November, I wrote an essay about the Mary Meachum Freedom Crossing site on the St. Louis Riverfront Trail. I explored St. Louisans' historical amnesia about our city and state's role in slavery.

The November piece focused on slaves who attempted to escape from Henry Shaw. Today at the Occasional Planet I have a kind of sequel to that earlier piece. Based on a fascinating talk I went to in Tower Grove Park on Sunday, this new essay explores another route to freedom many St. Louis slaves attempted: the freedom lawsuit.

I'd be delighted if you took a look at it.

Founding Father

A fascinating passage from Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family:

The terrible predicament the Jeffersons, and other couples, faced—marriage with no birth control—pitted Jefferson's own sexual desires against Martha Jefferson's health, and Martha lost. Jefferson, it must be said, acted in accordance with the mores and expectations of the time. Martha Jefferson probably did as well, for she and Thomas were raised in a society where husbands were expected to have unfettered access to their wives' bodies, and girls were raised to submit. This is not at all to suggest that Martha did not benefit in her sexual life with her husband, that she was not a sexual being herself. The reality was, however, that she and other women had to think about sex in a different way than their husbands. As an elderly man, Jefferson remembered his marriage as "ten years of unchequered happiness." But he had survived his marriage, and we cannot simply assume that Martha Jefferson, who did not survive, felt the same about it—that she was unequivocally happy to have to endure nine months of pregnancy, six times within ten years, and to be brought to death's door nearly every time. For practically her entire marriage she was either pregnant or lactating. Her body was not her own. Women of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ... expressed exasperation with constant childbearing. In fact, women have rather dramatically shown the world, and everyone inclined to romanticize perpetual pregnancy, how they really feel about the matter. In every society where they have had the choice, they have dropped the birthrate down to at or below the replacement level. After all her struggles with childbearing, Martha Jefferson died at age thirty-four, when she did not have to. Jefferson understood this, and it fueled his agony.

Writing: A Miraculous Technology All Its Own

As an English teacher and a devotee of the written word, I was interested and disquieted by this essay by Robert Moor in n+1, and this passage from it in particular:

The problem with Our Choice [a recently published multimedia "book app"] is that among the elephantine hi-def images and infographics, the text gets buried. Reading it feels like flipping through a coffee table book: grazing the lush images, you avoid eye contact with the daunting gray bricks of text. If this is the future of the book, then the book is indeed doomed. Writing is a miraculous technology all its own—a code that, when input through the optic nerve, induces structured, coherent hallucinations. An equivalent experience does not exist. Words have shape and musicality. They almost have a flavor. But they are too easily drowned out by stronger stimuli.

Fictional Gloss and Brutal System

Faithful longtime readers of this blog know that one topic I've returned to multiple times is the HBO series The Wire. One of the topics I've considered on numerous occasions is the show's portrayal of African Americans. (See, for example, "Watching the Detectives," "Black American Lives and The Wire," and "The Wire and Winter's Bone.")

I thought of The Wire and those posts this evening when I read this paragraph in Michelle Alexander's 2010 book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Era of Colorblindness.

We may think we know how the criminal justice system works. Television is overloaded with fictional dramas about police, crime, and prosecutors—shows such as Law & Order. These fictional dramas, like the evening news, tend to focus on individual stories of crime, victimization, and punishment, and stories are typically told from the point of view of law enforcement. A charismatic police officer, investigator, or prosecutor struggles with his own demons while heroically trying to solve a horrible crime. He ultimately achieves a personal and moral victory by finding the bad guy and throwing him in jail. That is the made-for-TV version of the criminal justice system. It perpetuates the myth that the primary function of the system is to keep our streets safe and our homes secure by rooting out dangerous criminals and punishing them. These television shows, especially those that romanticize drug-law enforcement, are the modern-day equivalent of the old movies portraying happy slaves, the fictional gloss placed on a brutal system of racialized oppression and control.

I want to think more about the extent to which Alexander's point applies to The Wire.

Light in August in Winter

This past month, I've continued my preoccupation with Faulkner, re-reading his 1932 novel Light in August along with a couple of my colleagues, one of whom is teaching it to his junior Honors English class.

Faulkner scholar Theresa M. Towner writes that "Faulkner shared some of the racial prejudices of whites in his region, but he came to see those prejudices as self-delusional and unjust; indeed, his fiction is ahead of its time in representing the warping effects of racist ideology."

Light in August supports Towner's claims, as it demonstrates powerfully the warping effects of a variety of racist ideologies, which take on the character of religious belief for many characters in the novel (and indeed are often combined with warped religious belief).

We're nearing the end of the novel, and I've been considering some of the various cover images that have accompanied various editions of the book over the years.

One way of looking at the novel is as the story of a lynching—with an incredible amount of backstory and context, so that you might not realize this is the story of a lynching until you're well into the experience. The image on this cover creeps up on you in the same way: only after thinking about it in connection with the novel do you realize that the silhouetted image of a window resembles a gallows.

Faulkner has a way of combining the cartoonish with the dramatic and profound, and I think this cover captures that aspect of the novel nicely:

This one, another Vintage International edition of the novel (and the one I'm currently using), is lovely and evocative, but perhaps a bit too sepia-toned and pastoral for a novel that is, after all, pretty disturbing and violent.

I like the concepts of these next two Penguin Classics covers, but I feel that the execution leaves something to be desired. The wild multifariousness of this one does a good job of suggesting how many different characters and worldviews the novel will incorporate:

And the rough-hewn, folksy feeling of this one—combined with the modernist Picasso vibe—is also quite appropriate to Faulkner's aesthetic:

I think this image is from the first edition of the novel. Perhaps it's meant to represent the home of the disgraced minister Gail Hightower, where Joe Christmas meets his end in all of its Christian echoes of crucifixion.

This cover appears to portray Joe Christmas himself, though he seems too imposing and solid, too definite in identity for a tormented and, at bottom, vulnerable soul like Joe.

My favorite, though, may be this one. Abstract and symbolic like the window/gallows image above, it seems less limited than that one. The telephone poles in the distance may be crucifixes (Joe Christmas), yet they may also be connections between human beings (Lena and Byron). The road goes two ways, and though it may be soiled and cracked, there's more than a hint of green in the landscape, and a sky that seems poised equally between cloudy and sunny.

This dense, huge, rich book—Malcolm Cowley and others consider it perhaps Faulkner's greatest novel—gives us so many indelible images. I can see why it's inspired so many different cover designs. It's hard to capture the complexity of the novel in one single image.

Postscript: Faulkner and Race

I'm still mulling over the subject of my last post. Per a reader's recommendation, I've ordered from the library Haki Madhubuti's memoir Yellowblack, but in the meantime I also checked out Faulkner's Selected Letters, edited by Joseph Blotner. In it, I found a fascinating and troubling letter from Faulkner to Paul Pollard, a black man who had worked for the Faulkners in Charlottesville. Pollard had written to Faulkner asking Faulkner to subscribe for him a lifetime membership in the NAACP.

Faulkner's reply expresses many of the same sentiments about racial inequality in the South that Gavin Stevens expresses in Intruder in the Dust. Here is what he wrote, in 1960:


I cannot send you this money. I will try to explain why. In the past I contributed indirectly to your organisation, since I believed it was the only organisation which offered your people any hope. But recently it has seemed to me that the organisation is making mistakes. Whether it instigates them, or merely condones and takes advantage of them, it is anyway on the side of, in favor of, actions which will do your people harm, by building up to a situation where the white people who hate and grieve over the injustice which your people have to suffer, will be forced to choose either for or against their own people, and they too, the ones which your people consider the best among my people, will have to choose the side of the rest of the white people.

I agree with your own two great men, Booker T. Washington, and Dr. Carver. Any social justice and equality which is compelled to your people by nothing but law and police force, will vanish as soon as the police force is removed, unless the individual members of your race have earned the right to it. As I see it, your people must earn by being individually responsible to bear it, the freedom and equality they want and should have. As Dr. Carver said, "We must make the white people need us, want us to be in equality with them."

I think that your organisation is not doing that. Years ago, I set aside a fund of money which I am using, and will continue to use, in education, to teach the people of your race to earn the right to equality, and to show the white people that they are and will be responsible to keep it. In Dr. Carver's words, make, compel, the white people to want them equal, not just to accept them in equality because police or military bayonets compel them to, and that only until the bayonets are removed again.

As I see it, if the people of your race are to have equality and justice as human beings in our culture, the majority of them have got to be changed completely from the way they now act. Since they are a minority, they must behave better than white people. They must be more responsible, more honest, more moral, more industrious, more literate and educated. They, not the law, have got to compel the white people to say, Please come and be equal with us. If the individual Negro does not do this by getting himself educated and trained in responsibility and morality, there will be more and more trouble between the two races.

This letter was later reprinted in the New York Times, on August 3, 1967. I don't know why or under what circumstances. 1967 was also the year that Madhubuti published Think Black. I don't know if Madhubuti read this letter before writing the preface to his book, but I'm sure that this letter would have only reaffirmed his determination to destroy Faulkner as a literary or political influence.

I do know that, in the future, I will use Faulkner's letter to explain to my students the rage toward Faulkner that comes out in Madhubuti's writing. The letter is an arresting primary source, one that I think will be very interesting for my students to read, having studied Booker T. Washington earlier in the course (and perhaps knowing Faulkner from previous courses).

What ironic and poignant and tragic about it, too, is that this is the same Faulkner who, also in Intruder in the Dust, could write this passage, which is so stirring that Eddy Harris quotes it approvingly in South of Haunted Dreams:

Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash; your picture in the paper nor money in the bank either. Just refuse to bear it.

It seems that the tangled ideologies of race confused Faulkner into thinking that somehow the injustices and outrages and dishonors and shames of racism had to be borne until black people had somehow "earned" justice and equality.

Faulkner and the Black Arts Movement

1.
Teaching the Black Arts Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s this past semester, I shared with my students the introduction to Think Black, Haki R. Madhubuti’s 1967 collection of poetry. In this aesthetic and political manifesto, Madhubuti (born Don L. Lee in 1942) sets out a boldly racial vision of himself as an artist:

Black. Poet. Black poet am I. This should leave little doubt in the minds of anyone as to which is first. Black art is created from black forces that live within the body.

He then presents a succinct formulation of the goals of the Black Arts Movement:

Black art will elevate and enlighten our people and lead them toward an awareness of self, i.e., their blackness. It will show them mirrors. Beautiful symbols. And will aid in the destruction of anything nasty and detrimental to our advancement as a people.

For example, Madhubuti writes, “We must destroy Faulkner, dick, jane, and other perpetrators of evil.”

This is obviously not a literal threat of destruction, a fatwa like the one declared against Salman Rushdie in 1989. Faulkner died in 1962, five years before Madhubuti published this declaration. Madhubuti is calling for a more literary destruction. Yet his singling out of Faulkner strikes me as noteworthy and curious. Of all the “perpetrators of evil” Madhubuti might have targeted, why Faulkner?

2.
Was Faulkner truly a perpetrator of evil? A racist?

According to Arnold Rampersad’s 2007 biography of Ralph Ellison, the author of Invisible Man was shocked and disappointed when Faulkner, a writer he deeply admired, was quoted in a magazine in 1956 saying that he was ready to shoot blacks in the street if necessary to save the Old South. (Ellison himself would have a complicated if not antagonistic relationship to the Black Arts Movement. In the same introduction that calls for Faulkner’s destruction, Madhubuti also asserts that the “black forces” that live within the body “can be lost at any time as in the case of Louis Lomax, Frank Yerby, and Ralph Ellison”).

According to the chronology included in the Library of America editions of Faulkner’s novels, however, in the 1950s Faulkner wrote letters to editors advocating school integration and publicly spoke against segregation. He disavowed the sentiments that so shocked Ellison, saying “They are statements which no sober man would make, nor it seems to me, any sane man believe.”

So Faulkner blamed his racially offensive comments on booze. Realistically, though, how could someone who grew up in Mississippi in the first half of the twentieth century not be in some way influenced by the mindset of racism?

But surely there were plenty of less ambiguous racists. The question remains: Why single out Faulkner?

3.
The subject of race in Faulkner’s novels and stories has been well covered by the academy, and while I can’t claim to have read a lot of this scholarly work, it seems to me that John Cooley’s overview of its critique is as good as any:

… most of Faulkner's African American characters represent stereotypic categories: the tragic mulatto, the Mammie, the faithful retainer, the rebellious marginal man. [Bernard] Bell and other African-American critics have also observed that Faulkner's blacks are defined in relationship to his whites, and that they frequently express white, rather than black, cultural values. White life and racial perspectives remain the primary orbit of action and thought for black characters, rather than attention to their own goals and strategies.

Yet Faulkner also wrote some of the most incisive fictional portraits ever created of the pathologies of white racism. “Dry September,” for instance, delivers a multifaceted dramatization of the horror of lynching. Stories like “Pantaloon in Black” and “That Evening Sun” display great empathy for the pain of black characters as well as pitiless eviscerations of white characters’ callous blindness to their suffering.

In The Unvanquished, black Ringo may be white Bayard’s faithful retainer, but he’s also usually two or three steps ahead of Bayard. Even Bayard’s father, the Confederate colonel John Sartoris, believes that Ringo is smarter than his son.

As noted in the Appendix to The Sound and the Fury, in contrast to the dysfunctional and self-destructive white Compson family, their black servants “endured”—including Luster, “A man, aged 14. Who was not only capable of the complete care and security of an idiot twice his age and three times his size, but could also keep him entertained.”

In his groundbreaking collection The Portable Faulkner, which helped to bring Faulkner out of obscurity in the mid-1940s, Malcolm Cowley identifies in Go Down, Moses what he calls “one of Faulkner’s most impressive themes: the belief in Isaac McCaslin’s heart that the land itself has been cursed by slavery, and that the only way for him to escape the curse is to relinquish the land.” This sounds not too far from the idea of reparations for slavery—an idea that one might think would endear Faulkner to someone like Madhubuti.

On the other hand, Faulkner’s 1948 novel Intruder in the Dust, appears to present a liberal version of the classic Southern resistance to “outside agitators” for civil rights. Gavin Stevens, the lawyer who often seems like a mouthpiece for Faulkner himself (and who, in this novel, is defending a black man against those who would wrongly convict and lynch him for murder) talks about “the outlanders who will fling [the black man] decades back not merely into injustice but into grief and agony and violence too by forcing on us laws based on the idea that man’s injustice to man can be abolished overnight.” Stay out, Attorneys General and National Guardsmen: “the injustice is ours, the South’s. We must expiate it and abolish it ourselves, alone and without help nor even (with thanks) advice.”

Did Madhubuti wade through all these abstruse novels and stories, though? Did he parse Faulkner’s fiction this closely to tease out, underneath it all, the truth about Faulkner’s racial attitudes? Was Madhubuti thinking about any of this when he called for Faulkner’s destruction?

4.
Or was it about what Faulkner symbolized for Madhubuti?

For any writer in 1967, Faulkner must have represented an image of literary excellence. A Nobel laureate, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, a recently deceased American legend whose final comic novel, The Reivers, capped a monumental career, Faulkner had composed a corpus epic in scope though mostly limited to a single Mississippi county.

The map that Faulkner drew of Yoknapatawpha County for his 1936 novel Absalom, Absalom! lists that county’s population as 6,298 whites and 9,313 blacks. A white man, Faulkner was writing about a society in which blacks were the majority. And his portrayal of that society was no doubt given considerable credence as an accurate depiction of reality.

To black writers especially, Faulkner’s work must have represented a daunting challenge. In David Levering Lewis’s When Harlem Was in Vogue, Lewis writes of the struggles of black writers during the Harlem Renaissance to create great black art—and he uses Faulkner as the yardstick. “Where, in the fiction of the Renaissance,” Lewis writes, “was there a character portrait to equal Joe Christmas in William Faulkner’s Light in August?”

If the writers of the Renaissance strove to compete with Faulkner, as Lewis suggests, then it stands to reason that the writers of a subsequent literary flowering, the Black Arts Movement, would also strive to do so.

Perhaps we can understand Madhubuti’s desire to destroy Faulkner as another instance of Harold Bloom’s anxiety of influence—the writer’s Oedipal need to kill off his literary father in order to make room for himself to create.

Killing off Faulkner, the (great white) Father, probably seemed even more necessary for Madhubuti because of race—because Faulkner’s depictions of black characters were at once indelible, given Faulkner’s powers as a writer, but also limited, ultimately, because of who Faulkner was.

The black writer Eddy L. Harris, in his work of literary nonfiction South of Haunted Dreams: A Ride Through Slavery’s Old Backyard, uses a motorcycle journey through the South as an opportunity to reflect on race, writing, and America. Near the end of the book, he has a realization:

I see now why certain themes are not only expected from black writers, but why black writers themselves feel compelled to explore them…. No one else but a black man knows their contours. It doesn’t have to be, but a black man’s point of view—a black writer’s point of view—is different precisely because he is black.

Faulkner knew the contours of race in the South pretty well, I would argue, and he dramatized them more powerfully and thoroughly than perhaps any other writer in American history.

Yet, for those very reasons, someone like Madhubuti must have felt a strong need to destroy Faulkner. Without doing so, without rejecting the authority of Faulkner’s imposing body of work, how could black artists gain the self-assurance to explore the contours of black experience with the authority of their own eyes and voices? For all of its rhetorical excess, Madhubuti’s introduction is ultimately a call to arms, an exhortation to a new generation of black writers to shake off the weight of white literary tradition and to breathe new life into their own tradition.

5.
Three years later, Toni Morrison would heed Madhubuti’s call with her first novel, The Bluest Eye. Morrison begins her novel by destroying “dick and jane,” as Madhubuti demanded. In a series of three increasingly degraded iterations of the schoolhouse primers featuring these generic white characters, Morrison suggests their inadequacy to reflect and instruct the lives of people like her protagonists. Taking a tip from Whitman’s declaration that “He most honors my style who learns under it to destroy the teacher,” Morrison, who had done her master’s thesis on Faulkner, would go on to win the Nobel Prize by transforming his style to dramatize more directly the black lives that often occupied only the periphery of Faulkner’s world.

Morrison’s novels do not destroy Faulkner. They do, however, destroy any notion that his works present a complete truth about the lives of African Americans, and they occupy a towering place in the literary tradition that Madhubuti sought to invigorate.