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1 Beyond Oedipus William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust But it is not enough to stand on the opposite riverbank, shouting questions, challenging patriarchal, white conventions. . . . At some point, . . . we will have to leave the opposite bank, the split between the two mortal combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera Read for its latent meanings, Intruder in the Dust traces the cause of racial lynchings to a model of identity formation based in exclusionary tactics. At this symbolic level, the novel’s two central developments, the mob frenzy to lynch Lucas Beauchamp and the murder of Vinson Gowrie , appear to be driven by an oppositional, either-or logic. Disguised by doubling and distanced by undeveloped characters and a convoluted plot, the novel’s project is to mount an inquiry into the fundamental problem at the crux of the psychoanalytic master narrative of identity, namely, that the boundaries that support self-identity—in particular, white, male identity—appear to be insecurely secured by the dialectics of domination. Stripped to its essentials, this identity narrative works from the premise that one term’s ascendancy is guaranteed by the marginalization of another. But Faulkner’s novels accept no first principle as a given; rather, they relentlessly expose and question a system of signification that exalts the domination of others—like the lynching of Lucas Beauchamp—as the foundation of cultural meanings. Faulkner’s bewildering novel Intruder in the Dust is a fiction about burial and retrieval. By my count, various bodies are buried and exhumed five times, and the novel’s narrative technique mirrors this plot motif; that is, the text withholds or buries meanings, retrieves them, and quickly reburies them. For example, ostensibly, Intruder in the Dust is a murder Fowler, final pages.indd 21 Fowler, final pages.indd 21 2/21/13 10:31 AM 2/21/13 10:31 AM 22 Drawing the Line mystery, but few who have read it can recall the identity of either the murderer or his victim. In fact, the murderer is Crawford Gowrie, and he kills his brother, Vinson—a murder that should horrify us but does not, because the text works to withhold or bury this fratricide. In effect, their story is never told; or, more accurately, it is displaced onto another, the narrative of a relationship between a fourteen-year-old boy, Chick Mallison, who is identified as white, and an elderly, dignified man, Lucas Beauchamp, who is both father figure to Chick and culturally defined as “black.” This narrative of a father-son relationship, like its double, the murder of Vincent Gowrie by his brother, also centers on burial and retrieval . As the novel opens, Lucas is about to be lynched. His offense, the novel insistently tells us, is refusing “to be a nigger” (18), that is, refusing to play a culturally assigned subordinate role that is defined by the word “nigger.” The work of the novel is to avert this lynching; and, in a move that seems to defy credibility, Chick can only save Lucas by digging up a buried corpse. These events, burial and disinterment, are, I suggest, symbolic. Speci fically, they symbolize the way we compose polarized meanings in language . Binary meanings seem to depend on exclusionary tactics: we advance one term in a binary by subordinating, or burying, another. Burial symbolizes an effort to displace and deny so as to construct dominant and subordinate positions in a polarized opposition. Disinterment, on the other hand, symbolizes an end to burial in a restoration to a former equal footing that burial disturbed. In psychological terms, burial figures repression , and disinterment signifies the return of the repressed. The psychoanalytic account of identity formation exalts repression (a shutting out) as enabling self-identity and differential cultural meanings, even as it neatly sidesteps, or represses, Freud’s finding that repression always instigates the return of the repressed, no matter the resistance. If we read the events of Intruder in the Dust for a symbolic meaning , then, the text’s improbable insistence that Chick must dig up a buried corpse to stop a lynching seems to suggest that this lynching and, by implication, all socially repressive acts like lynching can only be averted when we retrieve the buried term—that is, when we stop socially enforcing exclusive either/or oppositions. Of course, the alternative to cultural meanings defined by domination seems to be a...

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