Thadious Davis is a Professor Emerita of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She is one of the leading Black scholars of the work of William Faulkner. She is the author of Faulkner’s “Negro”: Art and the Southern Context (1982), and Games of Property: Law, Race, Gender, and Faulkner’s Go Down Moses (2003). Here are two snippets from Faulkner’s “Negro” that I want to share with you:
“ Faulkner has created a mythical region out of his own imagination and his creative understanding of the South, her traditions and legacies. Since then he has scrutinized his created world and set it forth in minute detail which ultimately magnifies the most significant aspects of the human situation. His characters (the Sartorises, and Compsons, Dilsey and Nancy, the Sutpens and Snopeses alike) are people caught in the act of life, and they are distinctly southern, not incidentally but by dint of his conscious, repeated design. His intense probing of the human condition urges the reader to interact imaginatively in translating the experience of the exposed people of the South into symbolic meaning.”
“Unfortunately, his (Faulkner’s) ‘ Negro’ has often received critical attention solely because of the sociological implications relating to southern society. The focus is on discovering Faulkner’s ‘real’ feelings or attitudes toward blacks, at the expense of viewing his people as characters. In addition, identifying Faulkner the Mississippian too closely with his individual characters or narrators has resulted in some hysterical and misleading writing on the race issue in his fiction.”
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