Faulkner's Sexualities

Faulkner’s Black Sexuality

131 Faulkner’s Black Sexuality John N. Duvall In the latter half of the 1990s, two prominent African Americans from the world of arts and entertainment made startling and basically identical claims about the President of the United States. On the eve of the 1996 presidential election in which William Jefferson Clinton won a second term by defeating Bob Dole, comedian Chris Rock made the following observation on Saturday Night Live: “So we got a big election coming up. Who’s gonna win? Bill or Bob? Bob or Bill? I like Clinton. Know why I like Clinton? Because he’s got real problems. He don’t got president problems. He got real problems like you and me, like running out of money, his wife’s a pain in the ass, all his friends are going to jail. I know Bill Clinton. I am Bill Clinton!”1 Two years later, Nobel Prize–winning author Toni Morrison, tongue in cheek, made explicit what Rock broadly implied: African-American men seemed to understand it right away. Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas. And when virtually all the African-American Clinton appointees began, one by one, to disappear, when the President’s body, his privacy, his unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the persecution, when he was metaphorically seized and body-searched, who could gainsay these black men who knew whereof they spoke?2 In 2002 Rock and Morrison’s shared conception of Clinton’s blackness becomes institutionalized when Clinton became the first (and so far only) white inductee into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame.3 This outing of Bill Clinton’s “true” black identity speaks directly to the kind of thinking about racial impersonation and figuration that my essay engages. There are two ways of thinking about Clinton’s relation to blackness. One could say, dismissively, that Clinton was engaged in a kind of cultural blackface, a bad faith appropriation of blackness. Such a 132 j o h n n . d u va l l claim, however, presumes that there is an authentic white Southern identity lurking beneath a calculated performance of blackness by the man from Hope, Arkansas. Moreover, such a claim overlooks the reality of Bill Clinton’s upbringing. As a poor white who lived among poor blacks, Clinton could never engage in a metaphorical blackface minstrelsy because there was no conscious intent to parody or demean black culture. This leads us to the second way of thinking about Clinton’s racial performance . Rather than blackface, Clinton’s racial enactment was (and still is) a pastiche performed in whiteface. As president, Clinton projected a white face to America while performing cultural blackness. Or perhaps more accurately, he performed the culture of impoverished rural Southerners , black and white, where his class difference as “white trash” meant that he was never truly a White Southerner in the first place. It is then Fig. 1. “Pierrot Standing.” From William Faulkner, The Marionettes. Introduction and textual apparatus by Noel Polk. Charlottesville: Bibliographic Society of the University of Virginia by the University of Virginia Press, 1977. Between pages 6 and 7. By permission of the Bibliographic Society of the University of Virginia. 133 Faulkner's Black Sexuality this whiteface performance that fascinates me because of its potential to generate all sorts of cultural misrecognitions. It is precisely this liminal space of “Caucasian but not White” that is the focus of my discussion of Faulkner’s black sexuality. As I see it, Bill Clinton’s relationship to blackness plays out in the full light of postmodern media culture the masked presence that William Faulkner almost obsessively developed in his modernist fiction from the 1920s to early 1940s. That trope is the whiteface minstrel, the individual who appears white even as he performs cultural blackness. (I use the masculine pronoun here and elsewhere because I see Faulkner’s whiteface minstrels primarily as male.) Faulkner’s creation of racially inverted white characters almost always complicates a Southern worldview that quite literally would see the world in terms of black and white. I would therefore like to...