Sex and Violence

We talked about this in class.

(And by the way, who feels or why is it at FC that you need a black person to teach African American Literature? Isn't that just a furthering of the stereotypes that literature strives to bust through? Isn't that against the law? Let me at 'em. Blythe or Tamara could teach it in a heartbeat. Probably you too, Brandon. A black person now has no more claim to universal suffering...oh, I could go on and on. I mean, I hope no one calls on me to teach white literature because I'm so white and blue-eyed and blonde, for that would mean an awful lot of things, most of which upset me a great deal -- and so on and so forth and infinity. I mean, what about Flora Brown? Isn't she black? Don't tell me that she wouldn't teach it. But, whatever. The whole notion that a black person must teach African American literature is preposterous, and it leads me to passionate declarations about the evolution of prejudice which upon hearing most people roll eyes, sigh loudly, and send me away on errands. Philosophy and practicalilty -- the race line is alive and well and unsatisfactorily defined, my friends. Yes, let's put them in a ring blindfolded until they kill eachother, and we'll charge to view it. I should write a paper. Maybe I'll write on Invisible Man for my next one. The symbology is endless, and is no less relevant today. Which reminds me, I need to go see Black Snake Moan -- a young white woman and an old black man and the blues. I could have given birth to it myself. )

Back to the start, of sex and violence, in the beginning.... The first few chapters of the Bible, interpreting the dawn of man, sex, birth, fratracide, incest, and eventually half-human-half-gods who dominate women and men, and go around with so much force that God decides to wipe them out personally, for the sake of whole-humans. This is what Absalom is all about. These types of things. I just finished reading a passage where Bon is describing his feelings for his "octoroon" wife and subsequent child, who is what, one-sixteenth black? Is that white? Sigh. Faulkner's character speaks of women in three classes: ladies, courtesans, and slaves. When Henry calls Bon's mixed-race wife a whore, he gives a long speech about women. He speaks and I don't understand all of it -- can one ever, with Faulkner? but Bon seems to be referring to the belief that when the Puritans understood the Fall to be about lust and sex, then they began to serve lust and sex because whether to embrace it or decry it one serves it. "But though men, white men, created her, God did not stop it." White men created a black woman-slave, and God did not stop it, as he stopped the Nephilem from populating. And I can't tell if this is an expostualtion or what. "Not whores. Not even courteseans...but the only true chaste women...virgins, in America...true and faithful to that man until they die."

I'm trying to wrap my mind around it.

Violence. Henry trying to preserve his sister's virginity. Faulker discussing how the virginity of the Southern Lady is a farce? Something more to do with pride? Trying to get to the primordial, as he calls it, root of the feminine? Are any of the women an embodiment of all three castes, the lady, the courtesean, and the slave? Can any be? Maybe Rosa. I'm curious if the whole institution of slavery has more to do with white women than anything else. It's possible that white women have been the whole problem all along. Addie was the nexus of As I Lay Dying, and Judith seems to be the center of Absalom, as maybe Tamar was of that original power struggle.

It's white women, yo! And Addie, getting off on whipping the kids. The pleasure/pain principle. Stunning, how I can say so much without saying anything at all. And William, making me look up words like suzerainty, laughing at my attempts to comprehend how he superimposes all color while asking me to see the yellow and the green independently. Bastard (with love). A lesson in slavery? A lesson in calling a spade a spade, but from both sides, from both dimensions, because what is white in the world is also black, and the light needs the dark to exist, the light that the Invisible Man needs to make him black, black the absence of light and light the simultaneous imposition of color, and how we are all that which we are not, and you can only be neither with God, who is neither.

So Henry does not react well to this light, or this darkness, whichever you prefer. And even still, even still, what does the marriage to Judith mean to Bon? Is it the worldliness, the desire, the fashion, the wealth? There is something in the text about it being a reflection for him, Henry and Judith, a reflection of his worth or his purpose. I'm trying to be a good girl and not go back. How does Faulkner adopt so many different voices in the text? The tangents seem calculated, but they could have been stream of conciousness, because it seems like the story has to keep coming back to the voice of the character supposedly speaking. It's like when things start getting too Faulknery and he has to go, oh wait, there is a definite character speaking here. It's like the charaters go into a trance and then this omnicient persona takes over -- maybe that's okay, maybe that's what Faulkner was trying to acheive all along, the characters existing as just names and movements connected with and channeling this bigger picture, and the more they can lose themselves in the story, the better. That's what he was doing, anyway. He was trying to get this story out through characters, and somehow all the voices start to meld. It's actually pretty scary when I try to visualize it. It's like, ghostly, almost. He must have been a haunted man. Haunted by the South. When I think of "the South," I think of spanish moss and heat and humidity, and lemonade. It's such a farce. What I love is that Faulkner knew the South for the micro cosmos it truly was. I don't think that most people I know, especially on the West Coast, really think about the Civil War. It wasn't that long ago. I mean, people my age know all about life on Tatooine, but ask about the South, and they're like, huh? And I start to think that, you know, we talk about how the U.S. has never been attacked, but we attacked ourselves. We were mostly the same religion, many of us related, and we blew ourselves to bits. What a brave man to try to look inside that hideous growth on the spine of America.