Faulkner's "Negro": Art and the Southern Context by Thadious M. Davis (review)

Studies in American Fiction111 Wilson then devotes two chapters to analysis of the theme of self-projection in the Romantic hero's view ofthe beloved, concentrating the motifofincest (aided by Peter Thorslev's important article on "Incest as Romantic Symbol") and again representing "dark" American Romanticism (Brown's Wieland, Poe's Usher, Hawthorne's Leonard Doane, and Melville's Pierre) as quintessential figures in pointing up the Romantic critique of solipsism, for in America solipsism wasconceived as"antithetical to that kindofvoluntarycooperation among citizens demanded by emergent democracies" (p. 167). The book then ends with a chapter on Emerson's awareness ofthe failure ofactual heroes to realize the concept ofheroism (Representative Men beingthe key prooftext here), followed by a coda-like conclusion that draws some further inferences, especially from the example of Emerson, aboutthe instability ofthe Romanticheroicideal anditsinevitablemutationintothe modernist concept of anti-heroism. The book as a whole is frequently unsatisfying at the micro-level. Its broad scope and extreme condensation (only 196 pages of text) result in some glib pigeonholing ("tied by his choice ofname . . . to the biblical wanderer, the narrator ofMoby-Dick bears direct affinities to heroesin the romantic maldusiècletradition: the Mariner, Harold, René, Werther" [?. 91]). There are an inordinate number offactualerrors,e.g. the repeatedidentificationoftheprotagonist of Shelley's poem as "Alastor." The analysis of individual figures and texts is often pedestrian ("rarely does the Poe narrator make any attempt to distinguish fantasy from reality" [p. 123]). These deficiencies keep the book from becoming first-rate. Nevertheless it is, I believe , an important work, particularly for Americanists, because ofits attempt to re-center the study of Romanticism by identifying its American avatar as quintessential if not as paradigmatic . The argument fordoing so on cultural grounds seemsto reduceitselftothe following syllogism: major premise—the Romantic heroic ideal has a strong social and moral dimension to it; minor premise—in American Romanticism, for cultural reasons, the emphasis on the corporate dimension of individualism and and on the possible extreme of solipsism is especially strong; therefore American Romanticism must be central to the study ofRomantic heroism . (I hasten to add that Wilson does not advance this thesis in so crude a form as my summary.) Both premises may perhaps be challenged, and Wilson introduces no major evidence that has not been introduced before by literary and intellectual historians, but his synthesis of his sources is sufficiently resourceful and well-documented as to constitute a noteworthy contribution to the study ofthe relation between American culture and Romantic tradition, a study that will remind Americanists of the need to know more about American literature's European roots and analogues and will challenge Anglo-Europeanists to think twice before omitting America from future studies of comparative Romanticism. Oberlin CollegeLawrence Buell Davis, Thadious M. Faulkner's "Negro": Art and the Southern Context. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1983. 266 pp. Cloth: $25.00. Thadious Davis' Faulkner's "Negro" is remarkably helpful. It provides insightful new readings of essential novels, especially The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and Absalom , Absalom! It shows the real centrality ofthe black characters in much ofFaulkner's fiction and Faulkner's tendency to use them and their positive social and religious relationships as contrasts to the relationships of the white characters. And it manages to discuss, forthrightly, Faulkner's understanding of both "black" and "Negro" culture and character. 112Reviews Davisopens her study, in fact, byestablishingthe differences in thoseterms: black, used in a general descriptive sense; Negro, "specifically in regard to Faulkner's characters and to southern attitudes or precepts which antedate black as a nomenclature of self-definition." To use the outmoded term Negro is an attempt to reflect Faulkner in a certain "sociohistorical context,"that ofthe 1 920s and 1 930s, a period in manyways closerto the Civil Warthan to the contemporary period. Davis admits that Faulkner's creation ofNegro characters was a white man's creation, an integral part of his concern with the South. Davis sees the progression of Faulkner's writing career as various attempts to come to terms with that South, and the conflicts of slavery and free people within it: From the time of his early novels of the twenties (Soldiers'Pay, Sartoris...