“As Out of a Seer’s Crystal Ball”: The Racialized Gaze in William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust

When Lucas Beauchamp appears on the creek bank in the early pages of William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust, it is by degrees—his boots, his legs, his overalls incrementally brought into focus until Chick Mallison, soaked and chilled in the willows below, finally “looked up at the face which was just watching him,” like an indifferent god-figure, “without pity [or] commiseration . . . just watching” (6–7).¹ In the wake of his fall into the creek, Chick’s waterlogged, almost feminized, limpness is counterpoised against the erect, provincial masculinity of his axe-wielding black redeemer, and that this particular Negro—the propertied and prideful bane of white Yoknapatawpha County—should be Chick’s savior promises to be more than the boy’s developing white manhood can bear. Indeed, as much as it is a work of detective fiction,² Intruder in the Dust is a racial bildungsroman, the story of Chick’s discovery of his own whiteness and his confrontation with the myth of its transcendence, or its sameness across and taxonomic authority over difference.³ This myth is tacitly understood elsewhere in Faulkner’s oeuvre, but whereas, in Light in August, for example, race is discursively constructed around a transcendent white center,⁴ Intruder in the Dust can be read as a decentering—a suggestion of dual construction of racial identity within the field of vision. Such multidirectionality challenges Chick’s sense of his whiteness as an ordering principle, for it empowers Lucas to shape not only the meaning of his own blackness but, as a consequence, whiteness as well. In the casting down of his gaze in this the first of several such encounters in the novel, Lucas unwittingly makes a spectacle of Chick at the apex of his vulnerability, thus inverting a cultural orthodoxy that governs the visual sphere, and setting in motion a struggle for domination that will pervade the narrative until its conclusion.

In Lucas, a pivotal figure of what many critics call Faulkner’s “late period” and what Margaret Walker refers to as his “Black trilogy,” we find the author departing from a whiteness-centered model of race production described by Thadious Davis as a system of “projections [from] white consciousness” (Walker 150; Davis, Faulkner’s 131).⁵ Though Gavin maybe said to represent the fixed white axis of racial production and his rhetoric to simulate discursive projection, by this time such rhetoric is meant, by Faulkner, to appear parodic;⁶ not even the white center holds any longer,⁷ and the author concedes the precariousness of all racial identity by revealing what Jay Watson calls “the construction and contestation of whiteness” (Watson x). We find in Lucas Beauchamp, then, not a passive object upon which blackness or ideas of blackness are imposed, but a self-defined participant in the processes of race formation and destabilization. He exemplifies the capacity of the black gaze—the “oppositional gaze”—to disrupt regimes of viewing power and, thereby, reconstitute racial identities (hooks 116). In what follows, I utilize bell hooks’s notion of the oppositional gaze and George Yancy’s Fanonian phenomenology to argue that, as Faulkner demonstrates with Intruder in the Dust a relaxed interest in securing the centrality of whiteness, he subjects the racialized gaze to disruptive inversions, positing dual power to construct race within the visual sphere. This critical shift signals the author’s own confrontation with the changing social landscape of the US South.

The Lucas Beauchamp of Intruder in the Dust has been variously read as icon and iconoclast, and while critics have separately accounted for Faulkner’s treatment of visuality throughout his work, the import of the gaze to Lucas’s subject position has gone largely unexplored.⁸ Masami Sugimori writes convincingly about the ambiguity of Lucas’s racial classification which liberates him from white-centered racial ordering as it also disrupts the system of naming power on which whiteness is situated (55–56), but the primarily linguistic study touches only briefly, in ways I will consider later, on Faulkner’s use...