Faulkner in Baghdad, Bush in Hadleyburg: Race, Nation, and Sovereign Violence

In mid-November 2003, six months after President George Bush declared his Iraq "Mission Accomplished" and amidst a deadly, spreading insurgency, National Public Radio reporter Guy Raz wanted to know: What were Baghdad's writers and intellectuals reading?¹ Around tables at an art gallery, Raz found a group of English-speaking "outcasts, intellectuals and Baghdad bohemians" chain-smoking over thick coffee. Many testified to a widespread exhaustion. As one said: "people in Iraq are tired ... and need to rest a long time." Nonetheless, they shared a keen interest in William Faulkner, especially his 1951 novel Requiem for a Nun. Literary critic Adel Kamel spoke of rereading this "universal writer" for the ways he vividly represented his region's history, in particular "the problems of reconstruction." To Kamel, it seemed as if Faulkner himself "was an Iraqi." In contrast, Safeen Oman, a young university student, told Raz that reading Requiem enabled him to "imagine the [American] South in front of me" and "myself a character, a character observing" that region's complex and fragile social fabric, especially its racial tensions and differences from the North. All agreed that Faulkner's "sense of history" would "resonate" with contemporary Iraqis; they approved when Kamel quoted lawyer Gavin Stevens' famous line from Requiem: "The past is never dead. It's not even past" (Faulkner 80). Listening to Raz's report, one wanted to ask how his "bohemians" came to such a close knowledge of that Faulkner novel. In the 50 years after it was published, American reviewers and critics have paid it only scant attention, generally dismissing Requiem as a thematically ambitious yet aesthetically flawed novel. Europeans have followed Camus in rather admiring it, and Iraq's literati probably came to Requiem through such influences.²

Speaking from a defeated and occupied Iraq lacking the basic apparatuses of national sovereignty—no standing army, legislature, or judiciary, its borders unprotected, and prisons thrown open while its elective head of state remained a wanted man—the "Baghdad bohemians" had made a canny reading choice. Their turning to Requiem for a Nun helps us also to see how its overarching theme is America's survival as a sovereign nation. Indeed, if Requiem for a Nun typically seems, in Noel Polk's phrase, "one of the idiot siblings of the Faulkner canon" (10), then this is probably a consequence of how the story is so overdetermined in pressing Faulkner's case for why American sovereignty stands on the brink. The novel insistently poses this theme as a raced and gendered anxiety: panic over threats to the US as a white ancestral homeland because of immigration, communism, and nuclear annihilation, worries about the fate of regional customs in a southern state such as Mississippi when federal challenges to Jim Crowed institutions force whites to cede states' rights, and fears that white men harried by a mongrelizing modernity are losing individual sovereignty in their communities and families. Moreover, Faulkner loaded these themes onto a domestic melodrama pivoting on the legitimacy of state-sponsored retributive justice: the pending execution, by hanging, of a black servant-woman for smothering a white infant in her care. Small wonder that Requiem has appeared to crack under those thematic burdens.

While finding no reasons to second Polk's nomination of Requiem as "a major work in the Faulkner canon," I nonetheless agree with him that critics have erred in failing to see it as "a powerful and complex novel" (Polk xiii). I get there, however, by setting aside Polk's strange conclusion that this is not "a novel about race relations" (209). Indeed, I find Requiem's alleged faults radiating precisely from the troubled, Cold War ideologeme at its core, a core also visible in the 1952 film High Noon. In both texts, race, nation, and sovereign violence assume antidemocratic and even proto-fascist guises common not only to other American "classics" from circa 1930–80 but to contemporary expressions as well. This formation, I argue, remains deeply ingrained in the American imaginary.

Thus on 28 June 2004, National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice handed the President a...