"A Strange Nigger": Faulkner and the Minstrel Performance of Whiteness (Critical Essay‪)‬

Despite the assertions of many racist characters in Yoknapatawpha County, William Faulkner's fiction repeatedly illustrates that race is not a simple matter of essence or biology but is always mediated by performance. Faulkner particularly makes visible an opening between racial and cultural identity through certain reflections on the racist construct "nigger." During his year at Harvard, Quentin Compson comes to realize that "a nigger is not a person so much as a form of behavior" (SF 86). In Go Down, Moses, we see a trickster Lucas Beauchamp who, when the need arises, can manipulate threats from the white world by becoming "not Negro but n****r, not secret so much as impenetrable," who masks his intelligence "in [an] aura of timeless and stupid impassivity almost like a smell" (58). But if Faulkner opens a space between black performance and racial essence through the depiction of certain African American characters, he is equally aware that not all Caucasians are fully white in a South that wishes to absolutize all racial difference. What I wish to emphasize is the performativity of whiteness in Faulkner, deriving from his figurative use of two distinct but not unrelated theater traditions: not simply American blackface minstrelsy but an older European whiteface minstrelsy as well. The result is a fictional world in which one sees, by turns, a dizzying variety of masking: whites in blackface, blacks in blackface, whites in whiteface, and blacks in whiteface. Clearly, such multiple performative possibilities serve to unhinge the Southern binary that would oppose whiteness to "the Negro." My thinking in this essay is indebted to Toni Morrison's work on the Africanist presence (as well as the use of figurative blackness) in texts by canonical white American novelists and to Susan Gubar's work on "racechange," forms of racial metamorphosis in art, which she sees emerging in the twentieth century as a "crucial trope of high and low, elite and popular culture, one that allowed artists from widely divergent ideological backgrounds to meditate on racial privilege and privation as well as on the disequilibrium of race" (5). Despite drawing on Morrison and Gubar, I do see limitations to their projects inasmuch as they always identify white writers' engagements with blackness as a problem or a failure. Morrison typically identifies a failure in aesthetic design, while Gubar sees the failure more in ethical terms. For Gubar, in the last instance, every white appropriation of blackness can only be a net loss in the search for a more ethical understanding of race. (1) And of course Morrison and Gubar are correct: there are aesthetic and ethical shortcomings to be identified in a white writer's appropriation of blackness. But they may be only half right, because there is also something potentially productive in such appropriations. In Faulkner's case, there are in-between characters--Caucasians who instantiate blackness in ways that complicate the Southern racial binarism. These presumptively white characters come to embody black culture, where "black" is not exactly race any longer, but (because it is the South) it is not exactly not race either.