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15. Judith Butler, Passing, Queering: Nella Larsen s Psychoanalytic Challenge, in Bod-
ies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), 176.
16. Ibid., 177.
17. Men Like That: A Southern Queer History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1999), 190.
18. The Civil War did not resolve the conflict for them, as perhaps the fatalist Bon imag-
ined that it might. We might also think about Bon s war service in relation to the proliferation
of conscription and militaristic discourses surrounding the twentieth-century U.S. occupa-
tion of Haiti. See Renda.
19. I would argue that the implicit plea is a repetition of Henry s earlier plea to Bon: I did
that for love of you; do this for love of me (92).
20. Butler, 182.
Fear of a Black Atlantic? African Passages
in Absalom, Absalom! and The Last Slaver
Jeff Karem
From anxieties about slave revolts in San Domingo, to plans for a sphere
of influence, to schemes for outright colonization, the United States has
looked to its southern neighbor, the Caribbean, with both horror and de-
sire, attributing to the region fecundity and refinement to be envied, but
also miscegenation, primitivism, and violence to be feared. In William
Faulkner s work, this connection is similarly conflicted, as the Caribbean
(particularly the Latin Caribbean) resonates both as a register of differ-
ence and as an uncanny double for the South. In recent years, with the
rise of globally directed American studies, many excellent critics, among
them Éduoard Glissant, Vera Kutzinski, and John T. Matthews, have di-
rected substantial attention to unraveling the role that the Caribbean and
the Black Atlantic, more generally, plays in Faulkner s work.1 Such schol-
arship usually claims that Faulkner offers a critique of hemispheric impe-
rialism in the islands (both European and American) comparable to his
searing examination of racial politics within his home region of Missis-
sippi. Maritza Stanchich finds that Faulkner s portrayal of Haiti . . . sol-
idly links the curse of Southern slavery with the curse of American imperi-
alism. 2 John T. Matthews argues that the Haitian connection in Absalom,
Absalom! signals a persistence of historical knowledge that survives even
the effort to shut one s eyes to it. 3 While I agree that Faulkner s Caribbean
and Atlantic glances do recall, in Matthews s words, hemispheric con-
nections that are often ignored, I assert that Faulkner s vision of the Ca-
ribbean and Africa simultaneously evades such specific historical knowl-
edge, in favor of a mythic projection of guilt that is symbolically rich but
historically impoverished. I present archival findings from the manuscript
history of Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and the screenplay The Last Slaver
(1936) to show how Faulkner s handling of the Caribbean and the Black
Atlantic both recalls and obscures these regions.
In Absalom, Absalom! the Caribbean is both overdetermined and under-
represented at the same time. The dangerous and fertile Caribbean is both
Sutpen s mentor and his nemesis, a source of wealth and a source of con-
tamination: there he learns the slave trade and passes into manhood, and
162
Fear of a Black Atlantic? African Passages 163
there he fathers the (possibly) mulatto son who will later ruin his plans for
a Southern dynasty. At the same time, the Caribbean past within the text
is disembodied, abstract, and unvoiced not a single unmediated word is
transmitted from those episodes; rather it descends through many layers of
Compson family narrators.4 The attenuated origin of the West Indian story
cautions us against treating these passages as Faulkner s attempt to evoke
a reliable historical reclamation of that regional connection. Similarly, crit-
ics should resist the temptation to use Sutpen as a figure intended to repre-
sent the South as a whole. Although Stanchich and Matthews situate Sut-
pen s Haitian past as emblematic of the conflicted relationship between
the U.S. and the Caribbean,5 Sutpen is presented as an outsider and ar-
rivisté in Absalom, Absalom! Using a marginal white figure like Sutpen to
establish this West Indies connection confirms a connection between the
wealth of the U.S. and that region, while evading the direct historical juxta-
position of Caribbean and Southern slavery that might result from com-
paring a Haitian plantation to that of the Compsons, the Stevenses, or
some other first family of the region.
At first glance, there may seem to be a distinct tension here between
Faulkner s use of Haiti as both an overdetermined proving ground and an
underrepresented, or even unrepresentable, Other, but these two quali-
ties are actually complimentary: it is precisely because the region is not lo-
catable as a historical space within the novel (indeed, it is a historical im-
possibility Sutpen could not have been serving as a plantation master
in Haiti, where slavery had been outlawed in the Haitian Constitution of
18046) that it can serve as such a capacious symbolic reserve. Faulkner s
process of revision surrounding these Caribbean passages confirms a de-
sign to use the region as a kind of New World unconscious, a place that is
resonant but unvoiced. His revisions of the West Indies section form a set
of precise subtractions that make the region and Sutpen s time there more
shadowy and underrepresented. One might say that Faulkner revised not
for clarity in his handling of the Caribbean, but for carefully orchestrated
obscurity.
Most of these key revisions center on the siege scene of Sutpen bar-
ricaded in the sugar planter s house, where he performs the vigorous de-
fense of the family that earns him his fortune, his bride, and, perhaps, his
curse. In the original manuscript, Faulkner treats the actions of the black
Haitians as a political revolt. For example, when Sutpen shoots his musket,
in the original he does so into the Haitian darkness where the insurrect-
ing niggers crept and hid and howled and sang. 7 The manuscript shows
that Faulkner crossed out that passage, and, in the first published version
164 j eff karem
of Absalom, Absalom! (1936), all references to insurrection disappear.
Sutpen simply fired through the windows and there is no mention of the
Haitians outside or their sounds.8 In a similar vein, the period of waiting is
described in the original as a war scene: during the 7 or 8 nights while they
were besieged (Langford 257). In the published version, it is rendered as
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