Narrative Miscegenation: “Absalom, Absalom!” as Naturalist Novel, Auto/Biography, and African-American Oral Story

Posted in Articles, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive on 2011-12-19 15:53Z by Steven

Narrative Miscegenation: “Absalom, Absalom!” as Naturalist Novel, Auto/Biography, and African-American Oral Story

Journal of Narrative Theory
Volume 31, Number 2 (Summer, 2001)
pages 155-179
DOI: 10.1353/jnt.2011.0080

Alex Vernon, Associate Professor of English
Hendrix College, Conway, Arkansas

Charles Darwin’s evolutionary ideas, especially as disseminated by Herbert Spencer, profoundly affected literary criticism at the end of the nineteenth century, with genres treated like biological species to the degree that at least one critic wrote about “a struggle for existence among genres” (Pizer 82). A century later, in “The Law of Genre,” Jacques Derrida repeatedly expresses this law—that “genres are not to be mixed” (51)—in naturalist terms. He remarks that genres have been treated in a system akin to “race, familial membership, [and] classificatory genealogy” whereby to mix genres is, by convention, to “risk impurity, anomaly, or monstrosity” (57, 53). It is to commit a kind of miscegenation. Yet his essay finally finds such intermixing inevitable, an inevitability he calls “the law of the law of genre” (55).

William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! also employs naturalistic language in its various accountings of the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen. While the story turns on the historical Southern taboo of racial intermixing, Faulkner artfully incorporates generic miscegenation into the novel’s structure. The narrative structure of Absalom, Absalom! can be viewed as a “cross-breed” of several literary forms, including (among others) the naturalist novel, biography, autobiography, and the oral tale largely associated…

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