"As Though We Were Kin": Faulkner's Black-Italian Chiasmus

A telling if scandalous revelation offered by Joel Williamson relates a significant feature of William Faulkner's ambivalent relationship to his deeply conflicted personal and cultural history: "he never openly recognized his mulatto kin, but in March, 1956, when he was abandoning his campaign for racial sanity in the South and vomiting blood in Oxford, his second cousin [the mulatto] Faulkner Hughes was preparing to reign as Queen at the annual cotillion of the Me-De-So Club in Baltimore." (1) The obvious personal and social denial at work in this constellation of affairs retains a startling similarity to the prevailing treatment of racial matters in the greater corpus of Faulkner's works. Although Faulkner never publicly acknowledged his "shadow" kin, he persistently created fictional figures whose lives are made problematical by racial and social contradictions similar to those present within his own family. This literary trend is reason enough to call into question the conceptual alignment between the personal and the political informing Faulkner's ambivalent responses toward miscegenation. Faulkner's personal reaction to the hypocrisy of a racialized society and his fictive portrayal of its corrosive effects are both permeated by a significant theme of loss and regret, what Irving Howe calls a "hidden weight of despair" (273). Such social discomfort haunts Faulkner's characters in numerous situations as they confront a racial agon involving unstable identity and cultural marginality. The issue of non-disclosure that Williamson raises over Faulkner's disquieting silence is likewise present in one way or another in the racially conflicted lives inhabiting Faulkner's fictive universe. Lucas Beauchamp, Charles Bon, and (perhaps) Joe Christmas are all mulatto figures negotiating a denied, doubtful and/or hidden family origin. Each character must hazard the conditions of despair that Howe considers, and each is finally subjected to persecution and/or rejection based upon the denial operating within a family resisting disclosure of a mixed-race heritage. Given Faulkner's detailed, psychically complex, and socially anomic fashioning of these characters' experiences, it is possible to question whether the kind of "confession of failure within the society" (273) that Howe suggests is characteristic of Faulkner's rhetoric is not also a carefully constructed, if at least partially unconscious, personal confession of Faulkner's hidden relationship to the miscegenation in his own family. Faulkner's "tragic mulatto" figures may well imply an attempt to balance his own account with the repressed guilt surrounding his "shadow" kin. The argument I make here is that by taking a certain perspective on a particular set of configurations involving Faulkner's life, and his personal and fictive discourses, it is possible to recover a compelling view on the issue of non-disclosure about his "shadow" relatives. Surprisingly enough, this perspective takes an unexpected route through a number of representations involving Italian Americans. Faulkner's curious strategy for dealing with issues of ambiguous racial identity employs a double-voiced articulation that proceeds by way of a chiasmus, in which the identities of blacks and Italian Americans are assimilated and reversed in a signifying arrangement involving both displacement and substitution. Faulkner's attempts to negotiate the problems afforded him by his family secrets and his public role as a writer treating racial politics led to his staging an anxious literary surrogacy, with Italian Americans covertly enabling Faulkner's confession of his unspoken kinship with African Americans. As Joel Williamson points out, 1956 was a pivotal time for Faulkner concerning a number of personal and public issues. Confronted that year with the prospect of a major incident erupting over the admission of a black student to the University of Alabama, and the possible ensuing intervention of federal troops, Faulkner announced that he would fight for Mississippi against the United States should similar problems spread onto his native ground (306). …