The Bible in Black and White

Struggles over the Word: Race and Religion in O�Connor, Faulkner, Hurston, and Wright. By Timothy P. Caron. Macon, GA: Mercer UP, 2000. 162 pp. $26.95.

In Struggles over the Word: Race and Religion in O'Connor, Faulkner, Hurston, and Wright, Timothy P. Caron offers fresh insights on two of the oldest themes in the study of the literature of the American South—race and religion. Using the Bible as the common thread, Caron attempts to span the division that Thadious Davis has described in which "whites in the South become simply 'Southerners' without a racial designation, but blacks in the South become simply 'blacks' without a regional designation." After noting that many recent anthologies and critical studies have called for an end of this separation of region and race, Caron says, "It is time to move beyond simply calling for an integrated study of the South's literary culture and actually begin to sketch out what the new landscape will look like." The method he chooses to accomplish this end is to exam the Bible and "its attendant interpretive institutions and discourses as intertextual sources in selected white and black Southern writers." The various ways that southern writers use biblical texts "reveal the ways in which, despite the strident claims of Southern fundamentalists, the Bible is not a transparent text, but is one which is always interpreted and received in very specific historical circumstances." In particular, he examines how the shared conviction that the individual believer is free to interpret the Bible led black and white churches to very different biblical texts and interpretative practices and how these differences are encoded in literary works.

The first work that Caron examines is Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood, not a work that most readers would immediately associate with issues of race. He chooses this novel, rather than works such as "The Artificial Nigger" or "Everything That Rises Much Converge" that do deal more directly with race, in order to show how white southern interpretive strategies for reading the Bible "deflect concern away from societal considerations toward matters of personal piety and salvation." Borrowing a term from Samuel S. Hill, Caron sees the white southern emphasis on personal salvation as "verticalist," a term that "emphasizes the dominant relationship of the white South's theology, a relationship plotted along a vertical axis between a morally requiring God and sinful humans." Thus, the absence of racial and social issues in O'Connor's novel is a reflection of the religious values in the novel, and these values are in turn a reflection of an evangelical white South where "racial injustice is not a matter of individual piety but simply a worldly injustice to be endured."

In contrast to O'Connor, Caron sees the dialogue between Faulkner's Light in August and the Bible as "a powerful literary and cultural criticism, which forces readers to reexamine the ways the white South appropriated the Bible to justify its racism." While Faulkner's MacEachern seems to embody the verticalist approach to salvation found in O'Connor, the male Burdens and Doc Hines represent a tradition of Southern biblical interpretation that found justification for slavery and racism in biblical tales such as the myth of Ham. Caron sees Faulkner questioning this racist reading of the Bible by his use of pervasive and unorthodox Christian imagery in Light in August. Faulkner's intertextuality creates "an ironic gap between his reworking of the Christian stories and the actual debased practices for which these same stories are employed in the Southern gospel of racism." Within this context, Caron examines the significance of the parallels between Joe Christmas and Christ with great subtlety and insight. In the end, he sees Faulkner challenging the South's racist biblical interpretation "by demonstrating how the region's Old Testament zealousness and scapegoating is not tempered by a New Testament grace."

Having looked at how the white South's strategies of biblical interpretation are reflected and...