Date: Sun, 06 Aug 2000 20:39:17 -0400
From: Barron <gebarron-AT-InfoAve.Net>
Subject: Re: PLC: Fairness to Faulner


On 8/4/00 7:49 PM Howard Hastings wrote:

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

You may assume Faulkner didn'y describe the color of whites but you'd just
be plain wrong. He did. Often derogatorily. Is this racist? Does it balance
his discriptions of black's odors?

> Oh no, it proves something.

What does it prove Howard? Don't be afraid to throw out another assumption
about Faulkner. I'll let you know if it is unsubstantiable like the last
one.

> 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.

Yes, that is an accurate summary of what I said. What of it?

> 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.

Yes, you are not only unfair but inaccurate.  He does describe the odor of
whites. I can site several clear examples that should be sufficient, at
least to refute "never".

> 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."

Is this the substance of your argument? I hope not because _once again_, he
does describe the odor of whites, and yes, with dead-on accuracy. And just
to state the mundane and obvious, an individual rarely is aware of his own
odor, it is typically some _others_ odor that is noted either through
narrative or character observation. Faulkner was, after all, white.

> Not
> because whites commonly refered to the odor of blacks as part of a general
> denigration.

AGAIN, you are judging Faulkner by the society he lived in, not by his work
or his life. (I am, as I have been, limiting my argument to this odor
business which seems to bother us all so much, but that IS the crux of my
argument, NOT whether he was a racist or not.)

> 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?

Obviously not. I never framed this argument based on the erroneous
assumption that Faulkner never described a white's odor.

> 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.

Right. That is what I said, with the implication that it can be made to
'seem' racist even more so by poor scholarship and an incomplete knowledge
of the author's work. You have kindly exposed this pitfall yourself.

> Seems to me my comments already show adequate care with regard to such
> pitfalls.

I disagree. See above and above.

>> 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

>And you have no scholarly grounds for assuming that a remark
> made in passing and supported by an example

Didn't I make allowances for this? Did you read the text that you quoted me
on? I included it above, in green, if not.

> 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 don't care what the goal of your original post was. You casually made an
indictment of Faulkner based on a single example. I felt it was unfair and
extrapolated that in general such unfair indictments were easy to make and
often indefensible and as a result of overly biased and poor scholarship.
And the fact that you have so tenaciously stuck by your "remark made in
passing" and exposed incorrect assumptions about Faulkner's work seem to
lend creedance to my assessment.

> 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.

Yep.

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

Okay.

> 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.

No, it sounds to me that we are in agreement on this. I think I should point
out once again that my argument has never been that Faulkner was not a
racist. I just think that some scholarship that makes these claims is
shoddy.

>> 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."  

You are right of course. I should not have said "only". And you are also
right, there is no guarantee at all, and in fact, time will judge the
validity of criticism positively and negatively, much like a fad.

-- 
Barron





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