黑人氣味與南方羞恥:以情動力閱讀威廉·福克納《八月之光》與《墳墓的闖入者》

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(1). 國立台灣師範大學英語系碩士論文. Master’s Thesis Department of English National Taiwan Normal University. 黑人氣味與南方羞恥: 以情動力閱讀威廉·福克納《八月之光》與《墳墓的闖入者》 The Smell of the Negro and the Shame of the South: An Affective Reading of William Faulkner’s Light in August and Intruder in the Dust. 指導教授：李秀娟博士 Advisor: Dr. Hsiu-chuan Lee 研究生：蔡佩芳 Pei-fang Tsai. 中華民國 107 年 8 月 August 2018.

(2) i. 中文摘要本論文旨在探討威廉·福克納《八月之光》與《墳墓的闖入者》中種族與情動力複雜的交互作用與相互影響。種族在福克納的作品中一直扮演著重要的因素。福克納的小說展現了他對種族議題的關注與偏好—其作品主題多圍繞在南北內戰的鬼魅記憶、南方白人對種族通婚的恐懼，以及黑人在佃農制度下所受到的壓迫。不同領域的學者以不同的觀點與理論架構來探討福克納小說中的種族關係，而本文則提出以情動力的角度來閱讀《八月之光》與《墳墓的闖入者》中福克納如何處理與再現種族歧視和種族關係。透過與研究情動力學者們的對話，本論文主張情動力在種族建構上扮演著重要的角色，透過在日常生活情境中與他者和環境的互動，情動力得以鬆動種族界線。論文分成四個章節。第一章為論文概要，並回顧了福克納小說中種族建構的現有理論，以及情動力研究中幾個重要的觀點。第二章探討了《八月之光》中負面情動力與味道/氣味的交互作用。透過喬·聖誕與他人氣味相遇而引發出的情動力，我分析喬不安且混亂的種族身分認同。我認為味道/氣味能引出喬負面的情動力，如焦慮與厭惡；氣味也同時引出了喬自我認同中一直存在的他者性。第三章討論羞恥如何能對《墳墓的闖入者》中的白人男孩契克·莫里遜對種族歧視的看法產生影響。羞恥感不只能動搖契克自身的種族身分認同，透過他和黑人路喀斯·布香相遇的歷程，也進一步促使他重新認識種族與種族關係。最後一章我連結到當代的種族議題，並思考情動力其過去與現在複雜的糾葛如何能指向未來、如何能為種族歧視與固有的種族關係帶來改變。. 關鍵字：威廉·福克納、《八月之光》、《墳墓的闖入者》、情動力、種族.

(3) ii. Abstract This thesis aims to investigate the complexity and interplay of race and affect in William Faulkner’s Light in August and Intruder in the Dust. Race has been an important factor in Faulkner’s works as he demonstrates his thematic preoccupation with issues of race—from the haunting memories of Civil War, the white South’s anxiety over miscegenation, to the oppression of the black under plantation system. While the question of race and race relations in Faulkner’s novels has been explored by scholars of different fields and through various frameworks, the thesis proposes to read how Faulkner represents race in Light and Intruder through the lens of affect. By engaging in dialogue with different affect theorists, the thesis argues that affect plays a vital role in formulating race and challenging racial lines through dynamic interactions with others in the context of everyday experiences. The thesis is divided into four chapters. Chapter one serves as an introduction to the whole project and reviews both existing approaches to Faulkner’s construction of race and theories of affect. Chapter two looks into the workings of negative affect and its intersection with smell in Light in August. I delve into Joe Christmas’ troubled racial identity through his affective encounters with the smell of others. I argue that smell plays a crucial part in generating negative affect in Joe yet at the same time catalyzing his sense of being an other from within. Chapter three investigates what shame does to Chick Mallison, a young white boy, and his stance toward racism in Intruder in the Dust. I look into how shame not only unsettles Chick’s racial identity but also pushes for his new way of understanding race and race relations through his encounters with Lucas Beauchamp, a black man to whom Chick owes money. In the concluding chapter, I evoke contemporary issue of “Black Lives Matters” to see how affect speaks to current racial issues and to think about how the future-oriented effect of affect can challenge and unmoor current race relations. Key words: William Faulkner, Light in August, Intruder in the Dust, affect, race.

(4) . iii. Acknowledgements I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my advisor, Professor Hsiu-chuan Lee. I took Professor Lee’s seminar on race and cultural representation when I first entered MA program. Due to the course, I developed an interest in racial discourse, explored “race” through different approaches, and ended up writing a thesis on race and racism in Faulkner’s novels. I am deeply indebted to Professor Lee for her tremendous patience and tolerance. I appreciate the chance of being Professor Lee’s student as she patiently guided me through the year-long process of thesis writing. I have learned a lot from Professor Lee as she keenly pointed out my blind spots in writing and offered sharp insights into my thesis. I cannot thank her enough for her encouragement and guidance. I owe a lot to my committee members, Professor Ioana Luca and Professor Wen-ching Ho. Professor Luca had always been encouraging and supportive whenever I encountered difficulties. Without her encouragement, I wouldn’t have started my thesis. Also, Professor Luca’s advice on affect brings my attention to the subtleties and nuances between race and affect. Professor Ho’s expertise in Faulkner and his resourceful advice helps me improve the thesis and provides the possibility of extending my research by engaging in dialogue with Faulkner’s other works. I want to thank my friend, May Mei-ching Li, who inspired and supported me in various ways. We have been friends since we were college freshmen. I have been more than fortunate to have May as a friend, who not only accompanied me emotionally but also offered intellectual stimuli and timely assistance. I also want to thank Suzanne Yu-tsun Chen, my best partner in Yun-he study room. We had spent numerous desperate nights before deadlines in the study room. I still remember those chitchats about our anxiety of academic life and the problems we encountered during research and writing. Those tears and laughter, along with the taste of tea eggs bought from FamilyMart as night snacks, served an important emotional.

(5) iv. support in the enduring process of thesis writing and my graduate life. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to my family, who had been supportive throughout the years of study, especially during my first graduate year when I had to juggle work and study. Last but not least, I want to dedicate this thesis to my father, who always had faith in me..

(6) . v. Table of Contents. Chapter One: Introduction ---------------------------------------------------------- 1 Chapter Two: ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 19 The Smell of “Womanshenegro”: Negative Affect and Identity Instability in Light in August Chapter Three: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 38 Unsettling Racial Lines: Shame in Intruder in the Dust Chapter Four: Conclusion ----------------------------------------------------------- 57 Works Cited --------------------------------------------------------------------------- 60.

(7) 1. Chapter One Introduction. William Faulkner, a twentieth-century American writer, is primarily known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County in Mississippi, where he spent most of his life. Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers in American literature and Southern literature in particular. From the early 1920s to the late 1930s, Faulkner published thirteen novels and many short stories. Such a body of work formed the basis of his reputation and earned him the Nobel Prize at the age of fifty two. Faulkner’s prodigious output includes his most celebrated novels such as The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). In his Yoknapatawpha fiction, Faulkner tried to “create a cosmos of [his] own” (Stein 82), to proliferate characters, families and communities, with his imagination leaping from one possibility to the next. On the map of Yoknapatawpha, several characters Faulkner drew upon in his earlier works reappear in the novels of later years. For example, Sam Fathers of Go Down, Moses (1942), a collection of short stories on the genealogy of the McCaslin family, appears in “A Justice” (1931). Nancy Mannigoe of Requiem for a Nun (1951), is a central figure in “That Evening Sun” (1930). Flem Snopes, the central character throughout the Snopes trilogy—The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959)—appears in Flags in the Dust (1927) and As I Lay Dying (1930). In addition to the interconnectedness of characters within his works, Faulkner, in his “cosmos,” built a community as a given locality with a history and processes of its own. With most his major novels—Light in August and Absalom, Absalom! for instance—set in a period of time spanning from the antebellum years to the 1930s, Faulkner demonstrated his interest in depicting and situating race and racism in the South in a particular historical period..

(8) 2. The Sound and the Fury centers on the fall of the Compson family, former Southern aristocrats who are struggling to deal with the dissolution of their family and its reputation after the Civil War. The white Southerners’ anxiety and fear of “mixed blood” are manifest in Quentin Compson’s desperate attempt to claim false responsibility for his sister Caddy’s pregnancy. Since Caddy is unable to name the father of the child, Quentin feels that he has to protect his sister’s “purity” from the threatening miscegenation. In a similar vein, Faulkner placed the theme of miscegenation against the backdrop of slavery and the Civil War in Absalom, Absalom!. In the story of the Sutpen household in the antebellum South, miscegenation starts with Thomas Sutpen’s repudiation of his first wife and their son Charles Bon upon discovery of her Negro blood. Henry, Sutpen’s white son from his second marriage, upon realizing that Bon is not only his half-brother but also part Negro, murders Bon to prevent the union between Bon and his half-sister Judith, and to prevent the possible threat of miscegenation. The fear of mixed race in the white South continues to seep from the antebellum period to the Jim Crow era. Light in August narrates the tragedy of Joe Christmas, who is said to have black ancestry. Without knowing whether Joe murders Joanna Burden, the townspeople in Jefferson manage to hunt him down simply because Joe is a “nigger,” which makes a murderer and a rapist. It seems that Faulkner’s works, especially the aforementioned novels, represent a “condensed and concentrated version of a general racial system in the South” (Faulkner in the University 94). Indeed, in his Yoknapatawpha fiction, Faulkner was preoccupied with themes that reflect the mindset and concerns of the white Southerners in the 1920s/1930s, such as the defeat of the Civil War, the fall of the Southern aristocratic family and the anxiety over miscegenation. However, race in Faulkner’s “cosmos” does not end in his exposing racism in the Jim Crow South. What makes race in Faulkner’s fiction special and important lies in his delicate portrayal and imagination of how race relations and racism can be contrived, passed.

(9) 3. on and even transformed from generation (person) to generation (person). Through Faulkner’s novels, we can see that white men’s racist assumptions of the Negro—to view Negroes as inferior, sinister and menacing—are learned and passed on from families and the white community through psychical effects and affective structure. In Absalom, Absalom!, as Henry Sutpen identifies with his father and thus “inherits” from his father’s attitude toward racial mixing, Henry revolts against Bon, his mixed race brother, in a way that even the idea of the incestuous engagement between Bon and Caddy does not—on the day Bon arrives to marry Judith, Henry murders him in front of the gates of the Sutpen plantation. In Intruder in the Dust, admiring and identifying with his lawyer uncle Gavin Stevens, Chick Mallison assumes and takes his uncle’s white supremacist view toward the black and thus expects the Negroes he encounters to act according to a set of Southern racial codes. While race and racism in the South can be contrived and learned through psychical effects, the idea of race in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha may be transformed and changed through emotions and affect. In The Sound and the Fury, Quentin Compson, a displaced Southerner attending Harvard, is shamed by three boys due to his Southern accent. Quentin’s accent oddly positions him in the North as someone who “talks like they do in minstrel shows,” someone who talks “like a colored man” (120). With a sense of shame at his “racechange” and his year in the North, where black people are called colored people instead of “niggers,” Quentin’s view toward blackness/whiteness starts to change as he comes to realize that “a nigger is not a person so much as a form of behavior; a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives among” (86). Faulkner’s treatment of race, in this way, goes beyond the textual level that records and exposes racism in the white South. Although the conception of race and racism is continuously reproduced and inherited through affective bonds in families and the community, Faulkner’s “cosmos” proffer readers a possibility that the decades-long racist.

(10) 4. perspectives of the black might undergo a change through affective encounters with others. As Faulkner puts emphasis on the psychic and affective role when dealing with racism and race relations, this thesis aims to further explore the interplay of race and affect in fictional Yoknapatawpha and how racism is contrived or transformed through affect. I focus on two texts—Light in August and Intruder in the Dust—because the affect in Light and the affect in Intruder operate for different effects. Light in August depicts how Joe Christmas, a white man with alleged black blood, comes to learn the meaning of “niggers” and racism, and become “black” through the workings of negative feelings. After thirty years of wandering and searching for who he is, Joe still cannot anchor his identity. His search for a fixed racial identity is constantly deterred by the smell of disgust, fear and anxiety. Do these negative affects account for Joe’s wandering and prevent him from situating himself in one single identity? Besides, I’m intrigued by Faulkner’s recurring references to smell in the text, which assigns smell with women, men and Negros and coins several terms such as “pinkwomansmelling,” “mansmelling” and the smell of “womanshenegro.” Seeing that the smell of woman and Negro arouses Joe Christmas’ negative feelings, I become interested in looking into how smell and affect work together in Joe’s development of a racial identity. On the other hand, Intruder in the Dust dwells on how a white little boy Chick Mallison changes his view on race relations and racism embedded in the South through the feeling of shame. Chick, like Joe, is under the influence of affect; yet, unlike Joe, Chick seems to be pushed by the affect of shame and think differently in terms of the race relations in the South. I’m interested in how Chick’s shame is deployed in the entire narrative and how shame triggers a change in Chick and the South toward the end of the story. By bringing these two texts into discussion, I believe that more insights into the interaction and interplay between race and affect in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County will be gained. By studying Faulkner’s treatment of race and affect in Light in August and Intruder in.

(11) 5. the Dust, I wish to ask: what is affect? What has affect done to Joe and Chick? What is the relationship between affect and race? In this chapter, I will first review the existing scholarship on race in Faulkner’s novels. Then, I move toward theories of affect to examine the possible role of affect in the construction of identity and race.. I.. Race in Faulkner’s Novels Race has been an important factor in William Faulkner’s works. In his fictional. Yoknapatawpha County, Faulkner demonstrates his thematic preoccupation with issues of race—from the haunting memories of Civil War, the fall of Southern aristocratic families, the white South’s anxiety over miscegenation, to the oppression of the black under plantation system. Faulkner also creates unforgettable black characters like Dilsey Gibson, a brave black servant that plays an integral role in The Sound and the Fury. With characters like Joe Christmas, a man who cannot be easily categorized as black or white, and Charles Bon, a seemingly godlike creature who is admired by all until his drop of black blood is revealed, Faulkner has resolutely probed the deeply repressed dimensions of race, depicting in novel after novel the perplexing race relations in the South. Thadious M. Davis argues that the construction of race is central to Faulkner’s fiction, a remarkable literary achievement “for its insistent racial consciousness, for enabling discourses on race and racial transgressions and transactions not merely in the South but in the United States as a whole” (Games of Property 208). With race at the heart of Faulknerian project and his race-infused narratives, how does Faulkner represent race and tackle racism in his fictional Mississippi County? How can we understand Faulkner’s treatment of race and the meaning of such design? And how does his construction of race affect our perception of racial identity and subjectivity? The question of race/race relations in Faulkner’s novels has been explored by scholars of different fields and through various perspectives and frameworks. The biologistic view of.

(12) 6. race sees racial differences as part of a natural order of humankind. It equates race with distinct hereditary characteristics. In contrast, the socio-historical approaches, which challenge the social Darwinist and eugenicist assumptions of biologistic paradigm, understand race based on history and culture. According to Michael Omi and Howard Winant, the decade of the 1920s, during which Faulkner published his first four novels, marks a turning point in the orientation of American racial projects: biologistic accounts of race rooted in the nineteenth-century science were called into question by the Chicago socialists led by Robert E. Park and Progressivism led by Horace Kallen, whose approach became a key current of ethnicity theory. In other words, race began to move away from a biological absolute to “a social category,” “a formation process based on culture and descent” (Omi and Winant 15). In fact, a great deal of Faulknerian scholarship examines race in Faulkner’s novels as a socio-historical category and approach race/race relations through the lens of Southern historiography. W. J. Cash’s 1941 classic study The Mind of the South not only provides a historical background for understanding Faulkner’s two conflicting images of the South—the traditional Old South and the progressive New South—but also conducts a historical inquiry into Southern temperament/feelings (i.e. the sectional pride as frontiersmen and Virginians, or the group identity/mind of white Southerners). Following the analysis of Cash, both Eric J. Sundquist’s Faulkner: The House Divided and Thadious M. Davis’ Faulkner’s “Negro”: Art and the Southern Context believe that race has already been embedded in Southern history. Sundquist recognizes miscegenation as the “dynamic” of Faulkner’s fiction and identifies the issue of race at the center of the South’s troubled history. His work pays attention to the historical climate of Faulkner’s fiction and aims to examine Faulkner’s treatment of racial issues within relevant historical contexts. Davis’ Faulkner’s “Negro” also locates the issue of race and racial identity in the Southern historical context. Davis sees “the Negro” as part of.

(13) 7. an abiding pattern of Southern life and reads Faulkner’s “Negro” in the cultural contexts of the twenties and thirties. By concentrating on the post Reconstruction era and the Jim Crow South, when white supremacy was not merely ingrained patterns of Southern thought but also accepted institutions, Davis demonstrates that “to consider the social or the historical context of Faulkner’s fiction is to evoke the association of ‘the Negro’” (14). As the South and “the Negro” are irrevocably intertwined in history, “blackness” becomes an integral part in the collective identity formation of the white South. Although reading race through the lens of Southern historiography and culture offers thorough accounts of how race relations and “the Negro” are uniquely developed/formed through time and in the American South, the historical approach to race has its limitation. Such a historical/cultural view, similar to biological approaches, still treats race as something rooted in history and social practices, as something fixed and concrete. Seeing race as a historical fact, as the accumulation of history and culture, is thus to take blackness for granted without considering the possibility of moving beyond the fixed models of Southern whites vs. Southern blacks. What’s more, to view race/blackness as embedded in Southern historical and social contexts is to see blackness as something with a stable historical content, a content that can be represented and re-articulated again and again. As a result, scholarship which adopts socio-historical approach to race tends to center on the question of whether Faulkner accurately represented the black. Sundquist’s essay “Faulkner, Race, and the Forms of American Fiction” addresses the problem of representation by asking: can the black experience be formulated by a white writer? Scholars’ opinions vary on whether Faulkner’s depiction of black lives is flawed. Craig Werner’s “Minstrel Nightmares: Black Dreams of Faulkner’s Dreams of Blacks” argues that Faulkner frequently misperceived the underlying dynamic of Afro-American experience. Walter Taylor’s “Faulkner’s Reivers: How to Change the Joke without Slipping the Yoke” suggests that readers could learn little from Reivers of.

(14) 8. what really happened in the age of Jim Crow since historical events like the lynching of Nelse Patton are never presented in the novel. Rather, Faulkner asks readers to “accept a mind-bending version of history orchestrated to sanctify the social outlook of an archaic class” (128). Ned McCaslin’s comic characterization, Taylor contends, “beams the very loud political message that Jim Crow was not so bad” (128): if a vigorous and intelligent black like Ned could thrive in that era, others could thrive as well. While critics demand for an “authentic” representation of Southern history and black reality, they are at the same time trapped in the somehow fruitless argument as to who among Faulkner’s characters are “stereotypes” and thus “anti-black,” and who are “individuals” and thus “humane and pro-black.” Other approaches to race, departing from the historical perspective, think of race as abstraction, trope, and metaphor. Lee Jenkins’ Faulkner and Black-White Relations takes a psychoanalytic approach to race in Faulkner’s fiction. Jenkins bases his analysis on the premise that in the minds of whites (especially white men), “the black” has become the mythic personification of repressed impulses and desires of whites since the black-white racial lines are projections from fractures in the white ego. Davis’ Faulkner’s “Negro,” in addition to reading race as historical product, tackles race from the question of form: she argues that “the Negro” functions not only as character but also as an artistic abstraction, as an aesthetic and cultural form, a disembodied myth in the South’s psyche, from which derives Faulkner’s creativity. Lothar Honnighausen’s “Black as White Metaphor: A European View of Faulkner’s Fiction” is aware of the metaphoric dimension of Faulkner’s character drawing: by studying Quentin Compson’s stream of consciousness in The Sound and the Fury. Honnighausen observes a white imagination at work, which generates black metaphors. The black, especially in Faulkner’s earlier novels, appear as a cultural metaphor, as “a form of beharvour,” and as “an indicator of the moral condition of white society” (196)..

(15) 9. James A. Snead, Philip M. Weinstein, and Theresa Towner all deal with race and race-bound identity through language practices. Snead’s “Light in August and the Rhetorics of Racial Division” believes that Faulkner’s racial construction lies not in his actual black/white characters but in his rhetorical modes: by studying the role of racist tropes in Faulkner’s discourse readers are able to see how Joe Christmas resists the signification of either black or white. Weinstein’s “Race” suggests that race in Faulkner’s fiction is a mode of writing, a discursive dynamic. Both Weinstein’s essay and Towner’s Faulkner on the Color Line examine the racialized language in Faulkner’s fiction and focus on Lucas Beauchamp’s subjectivity and racial identity by analyzing “the language games” (Weinstein 65). Also, both Weinstein and Towner pay attention to how Faulkner revisits his materials, submits them to new perspectives: he rescripts his materials, sees them as “objects with no inherent meaning but rather capable of taking on new meanings when inserted within new signifying economies” (80). That is, Faulkner’s writing and rewriting lead to the understanding that subjects are produced in and by language, and to the discovery that racial identity may be a matter more of discursive practice than of biological destiny. Laura Doyle’s “The Body against Itself in Faulkner’s Phenomenology of Race” discusses the phenomenology of race in Light in August by studying the slippages of the novel’s narrative form and Joe’s race. Aside from the central textual loophole of the murder scene, the narrative keeps eliding Joe’s racial identity and leaves such a narrative gap as the blank moment onto which the social body projects its problematics. Race in Faulkner’s work, Doyle argues, is exposed as “an empty category, undefinable and unverifiable, projected on the ‘coloured’ or ‘white’ body from the outside” (340). John N. Duvall’s Race and White Identity in Southern Fiction reads the relation between blackness and whiteness through the performance of race: by investigating Faulkner’s use of the minstrels in whiteface (i.e. white characters perform blackness), Duvall suggests that “blackness” is never an essence but a.

(16) 10. cultural trope for otherness and dissonance. The blackness of Faulkner’s white characters is often associated with their problematic relation to other categories of identity, such as sexuality or class, with a variety of non-heteronormativity (e.g. homosexual, bisexual, incestuous) that defies cultural taboos. Therefore, blackness as figuration, unhinged from “the Negro,” does not belong to any one individual or group. Instead, individuals or groups appropriate this nuanced racial signifier in order to circumscribe its boundaries or to exclude other individuals or groups. Approaching race as an abstraction, as a metaphor, as discursive practices, or as a cultural trope suggests that race is not something fixed and stable but a form/signifier with no inherent meaning. In this way, reading Faulkner’s construction of race as figuration challenges the taken-for-grantedness of blackness as a result of historical formation, and questions the rigid binary of black and white. In other words, race as trope/metaphor brings us to rethink what it means by blackness and its relation to whiteness. The creation of minstrels in whiteface in Duvall’s Race and White Identity, for example, exhibits the ambiguity of black-white opposition: Faulkner’s use of figurative blackness to imagine a way to perform Southern white male identity indicates “the fissures in the white-Negro opposition” (27) and calls the existing binary racial model into question. In this thesis, to continue existing scholarly efforts to de-essentialize racial categories, I move toward the theories of affect and propose to approach Faulkner’s construction of race through the lens of affect, based on my readings of two novels: Light in August and Intruder in the Dust. The affective approach to race continues to question in Faulkner’s texts the Southern racial thinking that opposes blacks to whites, and to reveal the fact that the racial divisions are ambiguous and unstable. In addition, the affective approach complicates the relation between race as historical category and race as trope. Through affect, an important but often neglected element in race/race relations, we are able to discover that race is not just.

(17) 11. a historical product or an abstraction but an intricate entanglement/interplay of history and form. The study of affect provides further insights on Faulkner’s construction of race: affect not only highlights the interstices between historical and figurative dimension of race but also demonstrates its capacity to actively intervene in the representation of black-white relations; affect proffers a possibility to move beyond historical models of racial relations, and to imagine racial boundaries/lines not as premised upon genealogy or historical formation but as a sense of affiliation. Before delving into how affect can better inform the racial complexity in Faulkner’s fiction, I will first discuss the specific qualities of affect and how these qualities may open up an affective perspective on racial discourse.. II.. Affect and Race Both Patricia Ticineto Clough’s The Affective Turn and Ruth Leys’ “The Turn to Affect”. observe an “affective turn” in humanities and social sciences. Such a focus on affect is in fact in line with some of the existing trends in research that challenges how the mind and body, reason and the passions have been thought to operate. Clough suggests that the focus on the body, which has been extensively advanced by feminist theorists such as Judith Butler and Elizabeth Grosz, is also the concern of affect theorists. In a similar vein, Leys highlights the significance of affect in forming judgments. Drawing from Brian Massumi’s account that “affects must be noncognitive, corporeal processes or states [. . .] prior to intentions, meanings, reasons, and beliefs” (437), Leys argues that philosophers and critics (Kantians, neo-Kantians, Habermasians) have overvalued the role of reason and rationality and “largely neglected the important role our corporeal affective dispositions play in thinking, reasoning, and reflection” (436). In fact, Massumi’s “The Autonomy of Affect” and Parables for the Virtual have proffered a thorough discussion on the relation of affect and reasons and argue that “affect is.

(18) 12. irreducibly bodily and autonomic” (Parables for the Virtual 28). He defines affect as nonsignifying, nonconscious experiences of bodily energy/intensity, disconnected from the subjective, signifying, functional-meaning making axis. Although affect is registered in the bodily experiences, it is nonconscious in that it is outside the individual’s conscious awareness. There is a gap between affect system and intention/meaning/cognition. In other words, affect is a matter of autonomic responses to the stimuli impinging on the body; such responses precede cognitive processing. The specific quality of affect as autonomous calls the self-determination of individuals into question. The autonomy of affect is beyond the ability of any individual to direct or control, posing a direct challenge to the autonomy of the individual. In other words, affect challenges the humanist concept of “man” as a subject that possesses free will, a subject that can freely determine his/her actions through reasoning. Massumi’s “The Autonomy of Affect” problematizes individual’s free will, suggesting that will and consciousness are “limitative, derived functions that reduce a complexity too rich to be functionally expressed” (90). Indeed, affect supersedes the polarized system of human free will and “unfree” drives: affect’s forces, prior to intentions and reasons, are not subject to individual’s will but help determine actions. Silvan Tomkins also suggests that in terms of affect, human beings should be thought of as a “feedback system rather than a communication system” (Sedgwick and Frank 36). Affect therefore pushes us to rethink what it means by individuality, and to contest the idea of autonomy and free will. In addition to questioning the concept of an individual who acts at its own will, affect theories continue to explore the question of self in relation to the social. While affect is autonomic, involuntary and physiological, it is also inseparably intertwined with the social. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth’s “An Inventory of Shimmers” identifies affect as “in-between-ness:” a body’s capacity to affect and to be affected. Seigworth and Gregg.

(19) 13. consider affect synonymous with force-relations or forces of encounter. Affect thus is not self-contained individual feelings but derives from bodily responses to the environment and circulates among bodies. In other words, affect is found in the passages of forces/intensities between bodies, moving in and out of a body as a response to the environment. In this ever-gathering accretion of force-relations lie the real powers of affect: affect can drive a body, marked in its various encounters with forces, to shift its affections (its being-affected) into action (capacity to affect). That is to say, affect moves beyond its bodily autonomic response and can become its own extra-bodily force, in relation to a world populated by other beings and things. Affect is thus a body’s processing of and responding to social conditions. Teresa Brennan’s The Transmission of Affect further delves into the sociality of affect, its bodily processes in relation to social phenomenon. Like Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth, Brennan sees affect as mobile force that moves across bodies, and thus argues that affect is transmittable: one can feel the others’ affect or the “atmosphere.” Transmission of affect captures “a process that is social in origin but physical/biological in effect” (3): the energetic affect of others enter the person, and the person’s affect, in turn, is transmitted to the environment. Thus, affect does not only arise within a particular person but also comes from interactions with other people and an environment. How does the sociality of affect challenge the idea of a racial identity as intact and distinct from others? What does Brennan’s theory on the transmission of affect push one to reconsider the relation between selves and others? First, the transmission of affect, Brennan argues, indicates that our affect is not exclusively ours and that there is no secure distinction between individuals and their surroundings since affect continuously flows in and out of both. That is, the idea of transmitted affect undermines and breaches the dichotomy between the individual and the environment. Second, as the taken-for-granted boundary between an individual and the environment is called into question, the fluidity/mobility of affect, as.

(20) 14. Brennan claims, challenges “the self-contained Western identity” (12). Brennan’s historical inquiry shows that the transmission of affect did not fade from the history until the idea of self-contained individual came to the fore. Indeed, ideas of transmitted affect were current in premodern European history. They lost ground only after the seventeenth century, when the development of the concept of self-contained self and individual rationality denied that an individual was indebted to what is beyond the boundary of a physical body. The new “free” individual was born at the expense of the operation of affect. Brennan further demonstrates that such a “self-contained Western identity” is formed by the self’s “projecting outside” unwanted affects such as anxiety and depression in a process commonly known as “othering.” That is, identity is based on forming “boundaries” by projection. Brennan terms such a projection of unwanted, negative affect onto the other—usually a woman, a subjugated race—as “the foundational fantasy.” For Brennan, this foundational fantasy governs Western modernity, creating the binary divisions between selves and others, subjects and objects. In contrast, by highlighting the transmission of affect, Brennan brings up a new paradigm: the mobility and sociality of transmitted affect is able to bypass the foundational fantasy and proffer a possibility to see identity not as premised on self-containment but as a dynamic interaction with other people and the surroundings. By challenging the self-contained identity and calling the boundaries between selves and others, subjects and objects into question, the theories of affect shed new light on the construction of race. Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion shows how racism, or relations of othering, works through emotions. She considers racism a dynamic of affect, an affective form of contact. When a white racist subject encounters a racial other, he/she may experience an intensity of emotions (fear, hate, disgust and pain): the intensification involves moving away from the body of the other, or moving towards that body in an act of violence. The moment of contact is influenced by past histories of contact (e.g. legends, stories, and.

(21) 15. history), which allow the proximity of a racial other to be perceived as threatening. Ahmed takes Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks for example to show how a white little boy’s fear of a Negro passing by—the fear that “the nigger’s going to eat me up” (63)—is generated by rehearsing the past associations (i.e. the anecdotes of “the Negro” the child learned in the past). Yet, affect is not simply defined in relationship to the past, nor as a mere reaction to fixed accounts of the other’s being; affect may instead move/slide across signs and bodies, and open up unexpected ways of perceptions and interactions with “others” in different everyday contexts. Ahmed takes Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches for example. In her critiques of racism against black women, Lorde writes powerfully that her anger of racism “express[es] and translate[s] into action in the service of [feminists’] vision [. . .] Anger is loaded with information and energy” (175). For Lorde, anger as an affect expresses and translates her experiences with racism into feminist knowledge and action. Anger is visionary. It pushes for one’s imagining a different kind of world in its very energy by energizing subjects to “move from anger into a different bodily world” (175). For Ahmed, who pays attention to how affect impacts on racism, affect is not always determined by the past; more often than not it evokes a movement toward the different and the future. As in Lorde’s case, wherein anger becomes an affective force to translate her racial experience into action, shame might be another affect that possesses such transformative power. Elspeth Probyn’s Blush: Faces of Shame discusses shame’s positive and productive role and proposes a possibility to challenge the ideals in shame. Probyn argues that the feeling of shame teaches us to recognize our relations to others, makes us feel proximity differently, and enables us to understand the body’s relation to itself. She suggests: “In shame, the feeling and minding and thinking and social body comes alive. It’s in this sense that shame is positive and productive, even or especially when it feels bad” (34-35). Drawing on.

(22) 16. Silvan Tomkins’ study on shame, moreover, Probyn shows that shame and interest are intimately connected: we would not feel shame if we don’t care for the other, or ourselves. Once interest has been felt and when it has been ripped from us, the disappointment of loss would translate into shame that attacks our sense of self: the inside of who we think we are is suddenly displayed for all to judge. Thus, shame not only reminds us of what we hold dear, or what constitutes an essential part of ourselves, but also questions our value system. In this way, shame is productive and transformative in that it compels an involuntary and immediate reassessment of self. With the aforementioned discussions on affect, I would like to ask in my thesis: how can theories of affect shed fresh light on the construction of race in Faulkner’s fiction? By considering race and racism a dynamic of affect, as Ahmed has suggested, can race and race relations in Faulkner’s fiction be read as an effect of affect, or an affective form of encounter? In addition, could Brennan’s ideas of transmitted affect, which put emphasis on affect’s mobility and sociality, help provide an alternative for us to investigate racial identities in Faulkner’s texts not as premised upon self-containment, but as dynamic interactions with other people and the environment? As Ahmed demonstrates how racism works through emotions, affect, in some scenarios of racial encounters, is confined to past histories of contact (e.g. the white little boy’s fear of a Negro in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks); in other cases, affect may explore unexpected ways of everyday interactions and motivate subjects to imagine a different kind of relations of othering (e.g. Audre Lorde’s anger of racism). With affect’s complex relation with the past and present, the perspective of affect, I presume, can open up possibilities to situate racial relations in Faulkner’s fiction not simply within historical confinements but in the dynamics of everyday experiences. Such dynamics push for a different way of understanding race that is not fully determined by the past and points toward the future..

(23) 17. III.. Chapters This thesis consists of three main chapters. In this introductory chapter, I propose to read. how Faulkner represents race in Light in August and Intruder in the Dust through the lens of affect. First, I review existing approaches to Faulkner’s construction of race. Then, I move toward theories of affect. By engaging in dialogue with different affect theorists, I argue that affect plays an important role in formulating race and challenging racial lines through its dynamic interactions with others in the context of everyday experiences. Chapter two looks into the workings of negative affect and its intersection with smell in Light in August. I delve into Joe Christmas’ troubled racial identity through his affective encounters with the smell of others—the dietitian, Mr. McEachern, the black girl, Bobbie Allen, and Joanna Burden. I argue that smell plays an important part in generating negative affect—disgust, fear and anxiety—in Joe yet at the same time catalyzing his sense of being an other from within. I demonstrate how each olfactory encounter arouses Joe’s anxiety and disgust and pushes him off any stable self-identification. From these, I further attach the concept of “blackness” to the sense of self-uncertainty and identity instability. That being said, to examine Joe’s racial identity is to investigate the process of his becoming “black” through the interplay of olfaction, disgust, fear and anxiety. Chapter three investigates what shame does to Chick Mallison, a young white boy, and his stance toward racism in Intruder in the Dust. I look into how shame not only unsettles Chick’s racial identity but also pushes for his new way of understanding race and race relations through his encounters with Lucas Beauchamp, a black man to whom Chick owes money. I argue that shame as the affective force works to move Chick out of his original racial position and unmoors the boundaries of race and racial identity. I suggest that in Intruder in the Dust, shame is the ultimate binding force throughout the story, urging the protagonist Chick to take action. Shame not only confronts and re-formulates Chick’s sense.

(24) 18. of self and racial identity, but also changes his perception of race relations in Jefferson community. Such affective force compels Chick to save the wronged Lucas while his fellow townspeople refuse to do so. As in Light in August where affect works at the core of racial relations and the formulation of Joe’s racial identity, shame propels Chick’s changing perception of his racial position and demonstrates that racial lines are changeable through how one feels..

(25) 19. Chapter Two The Smell of “Womanshenegro”: Negative Affect and Identity Instability in Light in August. William Faulkner’s Light in August is a book of outcasts, of those who breach social, racial and gender codes in the white South of America. Set in the climate of racial segregation during the thirties, the story centers on two “foreigners” who come at different times to the small town of Jefferson in Mississippi. The novel in fact interweaves the stories of several white characters who are seen as strangers and outcasts in the community: Lena Grove, a pregnant young girl in search for her baby’s father; Reverend Gail Hightower, a forced retired minister leading an isolated life in the community; Joanna Burden, a spinster of forty, despised by Jefferson citizens because of her Yankee abolitionist father; and Joe Christmas, who is said to have black ancestry and thus receives scorn and contempt from Jefferson community. Eventually, Faulkner drew these characters into the mysteries revolving around Joe Christmas, who is accused of murdering Joanna Burden and is therefore shot by a white vigilante. As Eric J. Sundquist suggests that the Negro and the problem of miscegenation constitute the tragic center of Faulkner’s major work and the South’s troubled history, Joe Christmas, in particular, embodies the South’s anxiety over miscegenation and transgression due to his racial and even sexual ambiguity. When asked at the University of Virginia about Joe’s uncertain racial background, Faulkner ascribed Joe’s tragedy to not knowing what he was—“that was his tragedy, that to me was the tragic, central idea of the story—that he didn’t know what he was and there was no way possible in life for him to find out” (Gwynn and Blotner 72). Indeed, it is hard to pin down who Joe is since his racial ambiguity is “at the root of many of his problems and the problems of those who try to define him” (Robinson 119)..

(26) 20. Yet, critics have tried to interpret and make sense of Joe’s identity from different perspectives. Philip M. Weinstein suggests that ideological narratives construct Joe’s race: major characters such as McEachern and Joanna Burden play crucial roles in forming Joe’s racial identity in that these people are “not so much single human beings as ideological sites” (124) that bespeak the long-established Southern norms. Laura L. Bush and Lisa K. Nelson identify both biblical mythology and the black rapist myth as crucial factors in constructing Joe’s racial and gender identity. While Bush reads Joe with biblical allusions and sees him as a Christ-like victim, Nelson argues that Faulkner critiques such myths by having Joe perform within both ideological narratives but at the same time refuse confinement by either narrative. Sharing a similar view with Nelson, Seongho Yoon reads Joe Christmas as an undecipherable sign of race in the South: on the one hand, he is raced since his body could project all the racial anxieties of the South; on the other, he is unraced since he is a trope of “nothing” that calls into question the presuppositions of fixed and stable racial identity. Other critics such as Krister Friday, Owen Robinson, and Michael Cobb examine Joe’s identity through its relation with language and time. Friday sees race in Light in August not as an ontology but as a temporal condition and a means of figuring an always unfinished relationship to the past. While Robinson suggests that to consider Joe’s identity is to engage with a network of voices to “write” him since his life is framed by the constant use of key terms such as “Negro” and “nigger,” Cobb argues that Joe’s blasphemous rhetoric of religion confuses and challenges the temporal taxonomy of black and white (i.e. whites live in historical narratives of progress whereas blacks live outside of Western historical events). Most critics attend to Joe’s “rootlessness” right from the start and read Joe’s identity as a troubled construct, a construct by ideological narratives, by racial anxieties, by the rhetoric of Southern racial codes or by temporality. Continuing with the perception of Joe’s identity as a construct, I intend to look into the construction of his race-bound identity through the role.

(27) 21. affect and smell play in his encounters/interactions with other characters. In Light in August, Faulkner devotes a great length to depicting Joe’s past, his history of encountering with other people. In fact, Joe Christmas is one of the most thoroughly portrayed characters in Faulkner’s work: the “history” of Joe—from his childhood days at the orphanage and in his foster father McEachern’s house, to the relationships with Bobbie in his teens and Joanna in his thirties—goes on for hundreds of pages in the novel. Weinstein even remarks in Faulkner’s Subject, “there is no body in Faulkner’s work more patiently depicted, none more variously abused, than Joe Christmas” (124). What’s more, the detailed depiction of Joe’s encounters with others are mostly mediated by smell and the affect evoked by smell: Joe constantly experiences negative affect such as anxiety and disgust when he is in contact with “womansmelling” and “negro smell.” What does such smell do to Joe? Why would smell generate anxiety and disgust in Joe? How have Joe’s affective encounters with the smell of others influenced the development of his racial identity? The attention to the effect of smell in Light in August is significant also because the study of olfaction has received so far little attention in philosophical, scientific and literary studies. Danuta Fjellestad traces the references to smell in the philosophical discourse and notices that few philosophers hold positive views on smell. Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View even dismisses smell as the most dispensable organic sense, which produces the act of aversion and the feeling of nausea and disgust. Both Fjellestad and Constance Classen attribute the marginalization of smell to the Enlightenment project of deodorizing the public space and privilege the intellect over the body. What’s more, regression of smell is seen as a must of the development of human civilization by some psychologists. For example, Sigmund Freud in Civilization and its Discontents posits a direct connection between olfaction and sexuality, and claims that the gradual atrophy of smell is.

(28) 22. coupled by an increased role of visual stimulation in sexual attraction.1 In addition, in the realm of literary criticism, smell is one of the most neglected subjects in comparison with other senses. So far the only book-length investigation into literary imagination of smell, Fjellestad suggests, is Hans J. Rindisbacher’s The Smell of Books: A Cultural-Historical Study of Olfactory Perception in Literature published in 1992. The lack of critical investment in the representation of smell in literature shows that the body in Western culture is gendered, raced and classed but remains odorless. Despite the absence of literary criticism, there are plenty of references to smell in literature. Fjellestad suggests that while the sense of smell rarely plays a structural and thematic role in pre-modernist literary texts, in modernist literature the olfactory surfaces as an essential element of the plot in the novel. She lists various modernist novels, such as Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Joyce’s Ulysses and Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, where odors and smell occupy an important place. Rindisbacher even sees the olfactory as the defining feature of modernism.2 In particular, Faulkner’s use of multiple senses across several of his novels has gained a growing attention in Faulkner studies. Paul Carmignani sketches out the recurrence and convergence of smell and scents across Faulkner’s multiple texts in his “Olfaction in Faulkner’s Fiction.” Carmignani classifies Faulkner’s olfactory language into three categories: smell as the sense of reminiscence (childhood scents), smell as carnal (odor di femina), and smell as moral judgment (fragrances and miasmas). Terri 1 In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud notes the “organic repression” of the role of smell. As man assumed an upright position, his visual sensations replaced the olfactory as the primary source of sexual stimulation. When man’s nostrils moved from their close proximity to the ground, and therefore to intermittent odors of menstruation—odors which regulated sexual functions—the role of smell became less important. Man’s rise resulted in a more constant sexual process based on visual stimulus.. 2 Hans J. Rindisbacher’s The Smell of Books: A Cultural Historical Study of Olfactory Perception in Literature suggests that it is sufficient to define modernism from the phenomenological angle in that “the surfacing of the olfactory is an essential element in [modernist] writing” (146). Authors such as Hugo (1802-85), Baudelaire (1821-67), Zola (1841-1902), Huysmans (1848-1907), Wild (1854-1900), and a little later, Proust (1871-1922) and Joyce (1882-1941) all use the olfactory element in their oeuvres. The above list of authors demonstrate the olfactory as an important component in their textual strategies to an extent unimaginable for their bourgeois realist and Victorian predecessors..

(29) 23. Smith Ruckel’s dissertation expands our understanding of the senses by showing how Faulkner’s repeated incorporation of smells in his texts reveals his resistance to Enlightenment thinking that has privileged mind over matter. Following Carmignani’s categorization, Ruckel delves into how smell is connected to memory, sexuality and ethical response to the Other. A more recent dissertation by Laura R. Davis focuses on how smell and other senses are used to divide and identify the race, class gender and queer, and to unify members of the same identity categories. Briefly, in Faulkner’s novels, male and female, white and black are categorized by smell, which is used to maintain power structures and dominance in the South. While these three scholars all engage with the categorization and connotations of smell in Faulkner’s fiction, what smell does to each character and the affective response smell generates remain largely unexamined. Instead of seeing smell as an indication of the boundaries of racial and gender identity, I intend to explore the affective role of smell in Light in August. I argue that smell plays an important part in generating negative affect—disgust, fear and anxiety—in Joe which further catalyzes his sense of being an other from within. As Faulkner has suggested, Joe’s tragedy lies in his not knowing what he is. The novel’s frequent references to the “parchment color” of Joe’s skin keeps reminding the reader of the uncertainty of his racial identity. Alfred Kazin even sees Joe as a “tabula rasa, a white sheet of paper” (248) that can be written out any identity. Without knowing his “core,” Joe, as “a white sheet of paper,” spends his life seeking for a secure and stable identity and continues to experiment on who/what he is with people he encounters. In what follows, I will probe into the passages of Joe’s identity search and the development of his “black” identification through his olfactory encounters with the dietitian, his stepfather McEachern, the black girl, a black neighborhood, Bobbie Allen and Joanna Burden..

(30) 24. I.. The Dietitian Joe’s earliest understanding of who he is comes from the smell of the dietitian at the. orphanage, his feeling of disgust and the word “nigger.” At first, he associates “womansmelling” with the dietitian’s “pink worm coil smooth and cool” toothpaste (112). For him, the paste, as well as the dietitian, is sweet. As a five-year-old child, Joe links the dietitian with something pleasing—young, smooth, pink-and-white—which also makes his mouth think of something pinkcolored, “something sweet and sticky to eat” (112). However, such a “pinkwomansmelling” (114) association with the dietitian is transformed into disgust, a bad taste, after Joe’s accidental encounter with the dietitian’s lovemaking with the young intern doctor in the orphanage. Once, as he sneaks into her room to steal some of her toothpaste as usual, the dietitian and her companion enter the room, which drives Joe to hide behind a cloth curtain, among soft womangarments. While listening to the dietitian’s tense whispering voice and other sounds he does not know, Joe squeezes and ruins the entire cylinder tube, automatically smearing one “cool invisible worm” of paste after another into his mouth. The overwhelming sweet paste, intertwined with the “soft womansmelling garments and shoes” (113) and the strange rustlings, sickens Joe: he begins to sweat as he forces himself to smear another worm of paste which his stomach does not want. Eating too much, Joe feels the swallowed paste inside him is “trying to get back out” (114) into the air. What is within him becomes something unfamiliar and unrecognizable, an object which threatens to break the boundary between inside and outside. Eventually, he vomits. The dietitian drags him out of his “pinkfoamed” vomit behind the curtain: the paste now is no longer sweet. It has transformed from sweetness into vomit, into disgust, and the dietitian’s pink-and-white face, which used to have pleasing associations, has changed into a furious woman hissing him as “little nigger bastard” (114). In this way, the dietitian’s sweet paste is no longer an object of love and pleasure but of “astonishment, shock, outrage” (117). The.

(31) 25. “pinkwomansmelling” dietitian now does not arouse Joe’s desire for candy but disgust and aversion. While the dietitian afterwards tries to bribe Joe with a silver dollar to prevent him from telling the director of the orphanage what he has seen, the dollar she offers only evokes in Joe “ranked tubes of toothpaste” and therefore his whole being “coil[s] in a rich and passionate revulsion” (117). Why does Joe feel disgusted? How do the toothpaste and the dietitian turn from Joe’s object of love, of pleasure, into an object of aversion? How does this incident relate to the formulation of Joe’s racial identity? Before I move on to answer these questions, it is important to first unpack the meaning of “feeling disgust.” Generally, disgust, which etymologically means “bad taste,” derives from bad objects that we are afraid to incorporate. We assume such quality of “badness” is inherent in the objects. However, the question of what “tastes bad” is bound up with the question of familiarity and strangeness: objects that appear stranger-than-me, or stranger-to-me might trigger disgust. The badness, or the “offensiveness” of an object, therefore is not an inherent quality but is attributed to the object. It is also a question of proximity: the proximity of the bodies of others is the cause of our sickness. The object must have got close enough to make us feel disgusted. Oftentimes, disgust is provoked by smell or food not only because disgust is a matter of taste and touch, but also because smell and food are “inhaled” and “taken into” the subject’s body. The fear of contamination that provokes the nausea of disgust reactions hence makes food and smell the very “stuff” of disgust. In other words, disgust happens within the mouth/lungs of the one who tastes/smells, within the “inter-corporeal encounter of incorporation and ingestion” (Ahmed 83). Sarah Ahmed further complicates the idea of disgust. She suggests that disgust is deeply ambivalent: it involves a desire for, or an attraction by, the very objects that are felt to be repellent. On the one hand, disgust pulls us away from the object, a pulling that feels almost involuntary. On the other hand, a desire would pull us towards the objects, and opens us up to.

(32) 26. the bodies of others, “keep[ing] the orifices of the body open” (83). That is, disgust involves not simply distantiation (recoiling), but also the intensification of bodily contact that “disturbs” the skin with the possibility of desire. Other scholars also demonstrate that desire and disgust “are dialectically conjoined” (Ngai 333). As William Miller notes, “even as the disgusting repels, it rarely does so without also capturing our attention. It imposes itself upon us. We find it hard not to sneak a second look or, less voluntarily, we find our eyes doing ‘double-takes’ at the very things that disgust us” (x).3 We can now return to the dietitian’s case. Joe’s encounter with the dietitian vividly demonstrates how one’s desire is turned into disgust. Joe’s disgust originates from his desire and attraction to something sweet to eat and the “pinkwomansmelling” dietitian. With his witness of her lovemaking with the intern doctor in a close distance, with the sweet paste transformed into vomit, and with the pink-and-white dietitian changed into a woman with “wild and disheveled hair” (114) bashing at him, Joe’s desire is reversed into disgust, along with shame and terror. After the incident, when offered a dollar by the dietitian, Joe cannot help but feel repulsive: the feeling of disgust pulls him away from her and makes him exclaims, “I don’t want no more” (117). In addition, Joe’s disgust at the dietitian also indicates a sense of self-disgust—the disgust directed at his object of love is also directed at himself. Hence, the dietitian’s hissing him as “nigger bastard” for one thing links Joe with “nigger” and for another associates “nigger/Negro” with the feeling of disgust. Through Joe’s olfactory encounter with the dietitian, the sign of “nigger,” coupled with disgust and fear, is attached to his own identity. Such a connection between him and “nigger” and disgust persists in Joe’s other encounters later on, and contributes to his becoming “black” as the narrative moves on. 3. What Miller brings up here is derived from Freud’s discussion on the relation between disgust and desire. Miller suggests that “the disgusting itself has the power to allure,” particularly as an object created by social taboos and prohibitions (111). Disgust “acts as a barrier to satisfying unconscious desire. [. . .] a reaction formation, in which role disgust joins with shame and morality to work as a dam to hold back the sexual instinct” (109)..

(33) 27. II.. McEachern Being adopted by Mr. and Mrs. McEachern at age five, Joe tried hard to follow his. foster father as McEachern attempts to mold Joe into his own design, his belief of what a Southern man should be. Harsh and ruthless, McEachern asks Joe to act in a certain way: to memorize the catechism, to work hard on the farm, and to avoid women. It seems that Joe has assumed the white male values McEachern passes on to him—being willful, strong, virile and ruthless. More than once, Joe expresses his solidarity and likeness with his foster father—how he and McEachern could always “count upon one another” (149)—despite McEachern’s constant corporal punishment and injustice on him. Even if whipped by McEachern’s harness strap, Joe seems to identify with the strap—“an odor of clean hard virile living leather” (139), which smells like the man smells. While Joe appears to internalize the white male code in the South, he shows extreme aversion and anger at Mrs. McEachern. Soft and timid, Mrs. McEacher has always been kind to Joe. As a silent, cringing and somewhat invisible presence in the family, she tries to earn her son’s love and respect by countering her husband’s violence with excessive doting and kindness. Whenever Joe is punished by his foster father and not allowed to eat, Mrs. McEachern would bring him a tray of food, which Joe takes and angrily dumps upside down in the corner. It seems that it is not Mr. McEachern and the stern punishment he hates, but Mrs. McEachern, his foster mother, “that soft kindness which he [Joe] believed himself doomed to be forever victim of and which he hated worse than he did the hard and ruthless justice of men” (158). In fact, Joe’s aversion and anger are not directed at Mrs. McEachern but at what she does. She acts the opposite of the white male code, of what Mr. McEachern has taught him—to be strong, willful and ruthless. Just as his foster father imposes on Joe an identity of a white Southern male, Mrs. McEachern demonstrates to Joe, by treating him with her excessive kindness and by secretly breaking the rules Mr. McEachern sets, that there is.

(34) 28. another set of codes to perform. Yet, without a concrete identity from the outset, Joe does not know if the identity Mrs. McEachern suggests is what he wants. As Joe manages to identify himself with Mr. McEachern, with the “odor of clean hard virile living leather” and to assimilate the white male values, Mrs. McEachern’s attempt terrifies and unsettles him. In order to secure his identity as a white man, he reacts with violence and disgust: he throws away the food his foster mother brings him with revulsion, and accuses her that “‘she was trying to make me cry. Then she thinks that they would have had me’” (158). Joe’s aversion and disgust at Mrs. McEachern thus works as his defense mechanism to secure the identity he assumes and the racial codes he upholds.. III.. The Black Girl As Joe identifies himself as a white Southern man, links the (white) male smell with the. quality of cleanness, sternness and virility, and acts accordingly, it seems that Joe finally pins down what he is. However, his contact with the smell of the black girl shows otherwise. At the age of fourteen, Joe and the other farm boys lure a young black woman into a darkened shed to have sex. When it is Joe’s turn, he enters into the shed: At once, he was overcome by a terrible haste. There was something in him trying to get out, like when he had used to think of toothpaste. But he could not move at once, standing there, smelling the woman, smelling the negro all at once; enclosed by the womanshenegro [. . .] Then it seemed to him he could see her—something, prone, abject: her eyes perhaps. Leaning, he seemed to look down into a black well and at the bottom saw two glints like reflection of dead stars. [. . .] He kicked her hard, kicking into and through a choked wail of surprise and fear. She began to scream, he jerking her up, clutching her by the arm, hitting at her with wide, wild blows, striking at the voice perhaps, feeling her flesh anyway, enclosed by the.

(35) 29. womanshenegro and the haste (emphasis mine 147). Upon entering the black shed, Joe is stepping into an unfamiliar contact zone with the black girl. Enclosed in the shed, he is encompassed by black air and black smell, which overcome him with “a terrible haste.” Then, the smell of the “womanshenegro” is taken into Joe’s body through his sensuous proximity with the black girl—he is moving and his foot touches her. Once the smell permeates into his entire body, the fear of contamination prompts Joe to react: feeling disgusted, he tries to expel the smell of womanshenegro by kicking the black girl repeatedly. The fear of incorporation, of being “enclosed by the womanshenegro” and by “the black well” generates Joe’s feeling of disgust and his eagerness to secure the borderline between his body and “the abject.” However, it is Joe’s attempt to maintain the border that suggests the insecurity of the boundary: there is “something in him” trying to get out as soon as he “smells” the black girl. As disgust also involves with a desire for, an attraction by the very object that is felt repulsive, Joe’s olfactory contact with the black girl seems to elicit his ambivalent desire—his attraction to the women and the black, or to be more precise, to the womanliness and blackness. With Kristeva’s concept of abjection, what Joe abjects and disgusts—the undesirable quality of weakness and submissiveness—comes from within rather than from without. Like the pink worms of toothpaste that threaten to get out, the smell of womanshenegro generates both Joe’s repellence and attraction to the womanliness and blackness within him. With Ahmed’s discussion on the relation between disgust and borderline, I intend to push forward: Why is Joe attracted to, or prone to the impact of “blackness” and “womanliness”? What do blackness and womanliness suggest? Studying the ambivalence of the borderline between subjects and objects, Ahmed argues that disgust at once strives to maintain the distinction and undo the boundaries in the moment of encounter. We’ve learned that disgust operates in the contact zone: it is not that the object has the quality of “badness”.

(36) 30. but the proximity of the object to the body is felt as bad. It is through such a sensuous proximity that the object is felt offensive and “over takes the body” (85). In other words, proximity renders the body/subject a certain vulnerability, “an openness to be affected” (89). While the subject seeks to secure the border through pulling away as a response of being disgusted, it also indicates that what makes the boundary insecure is the possibility that what is “me” can slide into what is not me, a slippage that would threaten the ontology of being “apart” from others. Drawing from Silva Tomkins’ Affect, Imagery, Consciousness: The Negative Affects, Ahmed concludes, “anything which has had contact with disgusting things itself becomes disgusting” (87). In the case of Joe, as Ahmed suggests, in the moment of proximity of the smell of the “womanshenegro,” the intimate contact renders Joe’s body vulnerable to certain extent: it opens up the body to be affected by the object, “keep[ing] the orifices of the body open” (83). The contact zone thus becomes contagious as Joe’s body is prone to all kinds of forces and smell. However, in addition to the proximity, the uncertainty of Joe’s identity subjects him even more to the impact of affective forces and of womanliness and blackness. That is, Joe’s attraction and susceptibility to womanliness and blackness stem from the fact that he is not sure of his racial identity. Although Joe tries to stick to the identity as a white man, not being sure of what he is, his contact with the smell of “womanshenegero” triggers his anxiety, arousing his fear of not being white enough. Joe’s turning away in disgust, in order to secure the boundary between subject and the “womanshenegro,” between his “whiteness/manliness” and her “blackness/womanliness,” demonstrates that the border of self and other is insecure in the first place. Ahmed pinpoints that in the moment of proximity, the insecurity of the boundary is manifested in the slippage that what is “me” can slide into what is “not me.” In Joe’s encounter with the black girl, his racial uncertainty not only indicates that he is prone to the influence and attraction of blackness and womanliness but also suggests that what is “not.