File spoon-archives/phillitcrit.archive/phillitcrit_2000/phillitcrit.0008, message 10


Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 18:53:05 +0300 (EET DST)
From: Fredrik Hertzberg LIT <fhertzbe-AT-ra.abo.fi>
Subject: Re: PLC: Faulkner


On Wed, 2 Aug 2000, Howard Hastings wrote:

>  1. The question of Faulkner's racism, as I raised it, does not turn 
>     around whether an individual character made racist comments or not.
>     No one who has studied and taught much literature  assumes that
>     characters speak directly for an author. Were that the case, then
>     what is one to do with a novel in which some characters speak for
>     racism and some against? 

Well, as they say, "part of him" may resist racism, "another part" may 
secretly hold views that (regrettably) may turn out to be racist (racism 
isn't a clinically separable mindset - ideology works a lot deeper than 
that). People - you and me - are divided, ambivalent, disturbed. The 
struggle against racism is/ shd. be a struggle with oneself as well as 
with others. Faulkner may play out different views against each other by 
assigning them to different characters

> Is there anyone out there who will assert that because characters in a
> novel do not verbalize their author's views, the author's views therefore
> do not get communicated, that his/her fundamantal assumptions about human
> and social nature do not find their way into the work and perhaps even
> shape other peoples beliefs, judgement, sensibilities?  And might not they
> find their way into the work most subtly where that work is describing
> reality, the way people and things "really" are?

The issue as I see it it preciesly 'communication'. A literary work does 
not simply communicate views that are mechanically received by a reader, 
rather the reader by reading a novel brings something of him/herself to 
the novel, own experiences, thoughts, reflections, etc. That attending to 
racist content is something which can be taught attests to the fact that 
the seeds are there in all of us, we're not just empty vessels, easily 
duped, or waiting to be filled with information, possibly misinformation>
 
> My reference was not to a character's "observation" but to an odor
> registered in stream-of-consciousness, i.e. registered through senses
> responding "naturally" to a stimulus and provoking an associational
> response which allows the character to "recognize" that odor.  And this
> association is thuse portrayed not as a belief or political opinion, but
> as something designed to "ring true" for readers in the same way that
> reference to the odor of frying bacon might to a character (or real life
> person) approaching a campfire.  

Well, the ringing is in the ear of the beholder. There may be racism (or 
at least a questionable ideology) in the belief that a bad odor is, in 
itself, naturally, bad.

> and he is drawing on his own experience of "reality" to do this.  By his
> own lights, he is simply drawing his reader a picture of life, and his job
> is to be true to that task without reference to any particular ideology or
> system of beliefs at all.  And when he is finished with all that, it is
> not his fault if black people have a noticeable odor and white people
> don't.  

I agree. As Oscar Wilde once wrote, "There is no such thing as a moral or 
an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all." 

Fred


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