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Sagnes (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade-Gallimard, 2001), vol. 1, 1011, and letter to Louis
Bouilhet of February 10, 1851, in Oeuvres complètes de Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance,
deuxiéme série (1847 1852), Paris: Conard, 1926, 298 99; Guy de Maupassant, La vie er-
rante, 119, 121, 122; Giovanni Comisso, Il grande ozio (Milan: Longanesi, 1964), 246. In
1819, after just two months of being on display in the collection of the Prince Regent (George
IV, a year later), Canova s The Fountain Nymph (now in the Queen s Collection) had to be
protected from similar attentions by means of a spiked brass fence.
28. Plinio, Storia naturale, Mineralogia e storia dell arte. Libri xxxiii-xxxvii, ed. and trans.
Antonio Corso et al. (Turin: Einaudi, 1988), vol. 5, 21.546 49; Lucian, Affairs of the Heart,
in Lucian, trans. M. D. MacLeod (London: Heinemann, 1967), vol. 8, 13 16, 171 75. André
Chénier subsumed this motif in his Jeune homme fou par amour, in Oeuvres complètes, ed.
Gérard Walter (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade-Gallimard, 1959), 521.
29. The present occasion does not permit extending this discussion to fire, the comple-
mentary traditional metaphor applied to the woman. See my Faulkner, ancora, 112 14,
passim.
Almost Feminine, Almost Brother,
Almost Southern: The Transnational
Queer Figure of Charles Bon in Faulkner s
Absalom, Absalom!
Elizabeth Steeby
Perhaps more than any of his other works, William Faulkner s 1936 plan-
tation novel Absalom, Absalom! is a global tale mapped onto scenes of inti-
macy. In this novel, Faulkner s penchant for blurring lines of longitude and
latitude, for merging stories with histories, has far-reaching implications.
My focus here is on that tension between the intimate and the worldly, the
local and the foreign, which structures how and where characters come
to be locatable within this text. Desire and narrative work to produce one
another, both within the novel and in the larger historical context that
frames it. This dialectical relationship between desire and the discursive
has particular implications for two of the novel s most crucial elements:
Haiti and Charles Bon. Through Haiti and Bon, Faulkner constructs nar-
ratives of desire that work to queer the relationship between the local and
the foreign(er). Like the novel s narrators, I will return to Bon throughout
as the cosmopolitan queer who continually evades an easy reading and who
explodes this sutured body of stories throughout.1 In performing a queer
reading of Bon and the symbolic meaning of his ties to Haiti, I stress the
value of mining the texts of Faulkner and other members of the Southern
canon for their representations of the multiplicity and intersectionality of
identity, for thinking of ways in which the almost quality that so charac-
terizes Charles Bon might continue to invigorate debates about identity
and language.
My discussion of Charles Bon necessarily begins with a recontextuali-
zation: the significant, but not often considered historical events involving
Haiti that surrounded the publishing date of this novel. Absalom, Absalom!
was published in 1936, on the heels of the United States nearly twenty-year
military occupation of Haiti, which began in 1915 and ended in 1934. Mary
Renda characterizes this as a time when U.S. Americans who presided
over, visited, or read about Haiti found opportunities to reimagine their
own nation and their own lives as they appeared to be reflected by and
151
152 eli zabeth steeby
refracted through Haitian history and culture. 2 Faulkner s novel then joined
the ranks of popular cultural and literary texts whose narratives mapped
imaginary sites of burgeoning U.S. imperialism. Mary Renda claims that
the occupation of Haiti was an event that would not only determine the
fate of Haiti in the twentieth century but would palpably alter the ways in
which race, gender, sexuality, and nation were reformulated and deployed
within the U.S.
I situate the novel s nineteenth-century slave-era transplantation and in-
corporation of Haitians into a U.S. national framework (and in particular,
into a Southern regional framework) in relation to the twentieth-century
U.S. imperialism, which attempted to ingest a territory, or another nation
in the case of Haiti, without allowing it to become too obviously a part of
the nation or the national culture. 3 In Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner de-
picts Haiti as the site where the ur-planter Thomas Sutpen goes to make
his fortune, and more importantly where he goes to learn to manage a
plantation supported by violently policed slave labor.4 Rather than locating
Supten s training and his imperial plantation design in the nineteenth cen-
tury, I argue that he may be read as a twentieth-century U.S. marine, an
ambassador of U.S. military and culture, who looks to Haiti to provide re-
sources and raw materials in the service of U.S. empire-building. A wife,
Eulalia, and a son, Charles Bon, are to work in the service of that project
as the foundations of a family dynasty. Instead of fulfilling their roles, how-
ever, Bon and his mother ultimately complicate Sutpen s project as a result
of a misrepresentation of such a crass nature as to have not only voided
and frustrated without his knowing it the central motivation of the entire
design (211).5 Bon, rather than becoming a legitimate heir, becomes the
symbolic product of imperial desire whose ambiguous identity works to-
ward the dissolution of the very building blocks of empire itself.
As Renda acknowledges, two central discourses dominated depictions
and imaginings of Haiti during the occupation: the discourses of pater-
nalism and exoticism. These twentieth-century imperialist discourses in-
volved both disavowal of Haitian independence and right to self-rule and
misrecognition of racial, sexual, and gendered identities that defied nor-
mative white American heterosexual constructs. As this novel reminds us,
these imperialist practices of disavowal and misrecognition had histori-
cal roots in the system of slavery in the South. Within the polarized ra-
cial constructions of the antebellum U.S. South, slaves were discursively
rendered as children in need of white paternalism while the paternity of
mulatto slave children was systematically disavowed by white planters.
By the time of Absalom s publication in the 1930s, Jim Crow segregation
policies elided histories of miscegenation and the institutionalized rape of
Transnational Queer Figure of Charles Bon 153
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