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The Southern Literary Journal 38.1 (2005) 135-141



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Interpreting Faulkner in a Postmodern Age

Games of Property: Law, Race, Gender, and Faulkner's Go Down, Moses. By Thadious M. Davis. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. 339 pp. $21.95 (Paper); $64.95 (Cloth)
Faulkner and the Politics of Reading. By Karl F. Zender. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2002. 179 pp. $29.95

Thadious M. Davis's Games of Property: Law, Race, Gender, and Faulkner's Go Down, Moses and Karl F. Zender's Faulkner and the Politics of Reading represent the two poles of contemporary literary theory and practice. Davis's study is informed by poststructuralist thought; that is, it mines the text as the site of competing ideologies. Zender's work, on the other hand, questions and seeks to redress imbalances posed by ideological readings that are "primarily oppositional in . . . orientation" and that valorize "context over text and . . . margin over center." Since Davis's stated objective is to read the margins as center in an attempt to "deconstruct power, in particular, white racial power," her book seems to qualify as exactly the kind of "oppositional," politicized text that Zender targets. Together, the two books make for provocative, if contentious, reading as they signify on one another.

Games of Property is an extended "meditation" on the role of race in Faulkner's 1942 novel. While it has long been critically recognized that the black and white genealogical lines of the McCaslin-Beauchamp family tree are interlocked, it is also true that the black family members, like William Faulkner's own black cousins, have been nearly invisible. By foregrounding marginalized black characters, specifically, Tomey's Turl, Tomasina, [End Page 135] Eunice, Lucas Beauchamp, and Jim Beauchamp's granddaughter, whose marginalization structures white male privilege, Davis "exercises [her] authority as a reader," revises white dominance, and makes visible the repressed subtext. Her reading constitutes a valuable, even necessary corrective to interpretations that conform to the dominant white master narrative; in her words, it formulates "not merely an act of resistance but one of liberation from typical paradigms of power." To pursue her project of deconstructing racial power, she applies two paradigms, games and law, which she defines as oppositional: "Games, I take to be liberating and democratic. Law, I take to be constrictive and arbitrary."

Davis's decentering reading of Go Down, Moses poses Tomey's Turl, not Isaac McCaslin, as the text's pivotal character. As a "figure of transgression and hybridity," Tomey's Turl successfully challenges a racial hegemony that defines him as property. Davis begins by reviewing the legal codes in the 1800s that constricted Tomey's Turl; then she turns to the games that function to overturn law. Observing that, in games, the laws of society are suspended, she argues that Tomey's Turl devises his own game, the game of "run-away," so as to create a space in which to exercise his own will. The card game played to decide his fate, on the other hand, is a white man's game, but, by dealing the cards, Turl inter-venes in it and effectively negotiates his own agency. At the end of "Was," on the surface, white hegemony remains intact: Turl is still the slave of the McCaslins, but, Davis notes, "with a difference": "Not only does he return with the woman he has courted, Tennie, who will become his wife, but also he returns marked as an adult. The game has been a rite of passage."

In the second chapter, "The Objects of Property," sadly, there are no empowering games, and we are left with laws written by whites to constitute white power. This chapter reads intertextually two fictions: the codified legal fiction that slaves have no right to their own bodies and the tragedies of Eunice, a slave purchased by Old Carothers to be his concubine, and Tomasina, her daughter by Old Carothers, who is impregnated by her master-father. Citing case after case, which upheld the same ruling—slaves who rebelled against a master's sexual tyranny were summarily executed (see, for...

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