Date: Fri, 4 Aug 2000 19:49:45 -0400 (EDT)
From: Howard Hastings <hhasting-AT-osf1.gmu.edu>
Subject: PLC: Fairness to Faulner


On Wed, 2 Aug 2000, Barron wrote:

> I know this sounds petty going back to this odor business but I think it can
> be illuminating. Faulkner often describes an odor peculiar to the poor
> working blacks. This is frequently not just a character's observation or
> stream-of-consciousness but narrative. I would hate to have to uncover every
> occasion of this observation for proof, but in general Faulkner does not
> describe the odor as offensive, just different. 

Of course.  Not bad, just different. And just the odor of black people,
not white.

  In fact, I remember several
> episodes where the odor is reassuring and comforting to a white character
> (which, of course proves nothing).

Oh no, it proves something.

> Now, from abundant, subjective, real life experience I can tell you that
> black and white people have different odors. Such odors are not necessarily
> 'bad' as someone pointed out. (On a personal note, a sweaty unwashed white
> man has the edge on olfactory offensiveness in my book.)  This is simply to
> say that Faulkner is dead-on accurate in his description. He doesn't say for
> instance 'stinky' or 'noxious', he describes an odor with precision enough
> to almost physically reproduce it in a reader who has experienced the odor,
> which, (again) from personal experience is not offensive. Faulkner has
> described it with craft and often with tenderness.

I think I understand your argument here. Both black people and white
people have an odor.  So if Faulkner describes the odor of black people
while creating both black and white characters, he is just doing his job
well.  Dead-on accurate.

So I am unfair when raise the issue of

> >A description of a black person's odor in a racist society which often
> > degraded black people by such assertions

because when Faulkner elects to describe black people, never white, by
this "well documented" odor he does so with craft and tenderness. And the
white characters find it comforting. 

> and I think, based on the body of Faulkner's work this is an unfair and
> unsupportable assertion and judges Faulkner by the society and time he lived
> in and not by his writing. Was he racist,? Maybe (probably). Can we find
> racism in his work? Probably, and I'm sure you can site it. But this odor
> business, which can produce a rapid, moral and indignant response if taken
> out of context does not support Faulkner's racism.

But the remarks are understood in context once we realize that both white
people and black people have distinct odors? And that is why the odor of
blacks, not whites,  is effective "dead-on accurate description." Not
because whites commonly refered to the odor of blacks as part of a general
denigration. It would be unfair to see Faulkner's choice to describe the
odor of blacks and never of whites as connected somehow to this more
general racial stereotype.  Do I understand you correctly here?
 
> So, big deal. If the smell thing doesn't prove it, surely other things will.
> That is what gets my dander up though. This is where good scholarship _can_
> look like a witch hunt. It seems so obvious, a Southern, white (would-be)
> aristocrat points out that a black person has a funny odor in a society that
> used such observations to suppress blacks. It seems like clear cut racism
> but it isn't. It is an unfair judgement 

Right. So it just "seems" like clear cut racism. But it is not because it
would be unfair to Faulkner to think so because you can't build
such a case on one typical passage. Though Faulkner probably was a
racist and one can find traces of this in his work.  

  and when it comes to making
> judgements like 'racist', anti-semite, misogynist, homophobe etc, I think
> the accused is entitled to the benefit of the doubt. To stigmatize a
> writer's works with such a moniker requires exacting scholarship, in my
> opinion.

Doesn't that depend on the author and the degree of "racism" or whatever
one is distinguishing in or asserting about the work?

> I think this is perfectly valid and I'm not really accusing you of arriving
> at such a conclusion based on a single passage. I simply used your
> observation to point out what I think are pitfalls of this type of criticism
> especially when impressionable students might be exposd to it (at what ever
> level).

Seems to me my comments already show adequate care with regard to such
pitfalls.  And you have no scholarly grounds for assuming that a remark
made in passing and supported by an example (because I like to support
such assertions with an example) is the extent of my case--as if
the goal of my orignal post were to indict Faulkner rather than nodding in
his direction on the way to making a point about Truth and National
Socialism. 

 I also feel that if we are ingenious enough we can dig up almost any
> "-ism" in a writer's work if we look hard and passionately enough. 

Igenuity works both ways.  We can excuse and ignore and otherwise oppose
recognition of how racism may be built into the institution of
literature (i.e., the writing, study, and teaching of it), especially
where it seems evidence a writer is just describing the way things are. 

Ideology always appears outside ideology, as nature--the way things
really are--, or it is ineffective as ideology.

I have a strong suspicion that one ground of the disagreement between us
is that we conceive racists and racism differently.  Faulkner is not what
ML King would have called a "rabid segregationist" like Bull Connor.  He
is, rather, that species of white liberal who found social order more
important than social justice.  And he follows in a tradition of Americans
who were "sympathetic" to black people's suffering while still thinking of
them as substantially "other" than white people.  Lincoln would be another
example.  Some think it unfair to characterize Jefferson as racist, since
he suffered mental anguish over the fact he owned slaves. 

  It is
> only through the test of wide and vigorous peer review that such scholarship
> stands as valid (some value implied here) criticism or falls as mere
> ideological windmill tilting.

"Peer review" certainly plays a role in what "stands", as in what gets
published and taught and considered professional.  It by no means
guarantees that "valid criticism" is separated from "ideological windmill
tilting."   

hh
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