As Out of a Seer’s Crystal Ball: The Racialized Gaze In William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust
The inverse, as I will demonstrate, is also true; the body that is viewed is regarded as black and the body that views is regarded as white. [...]the gaze has racing power.14 Chick Mallisons powerlessness under the dominant gaze of Lucas Beauchamp, illustratively, is a vivid inversion of the orthodo...
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| Published in: | The Faulkner journal 2016-10, Vol.30 (2), p.19-40 |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | eng |
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| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | The inverse, as I will demonstrate, is also true; the body that is viewed is regarded as black and the body that views is regarded as white. [...]the gaze has racing power.14 Chick Mallisons powerlessness under the dominant gaze of Lucas Beauchamp, illustratively, is a vivid inversion of the orthodox subject/object relationship: 'Get the pole out of his way so he can get out'-just a voice, not because it couldn't be anybody else but either Aleck Sander or Edmonds' boy but because it didn't matter whose: climbing out now with both hands among the willows, the skim ice crinkling and tinkling against his chest, his clothes like soft cold lead which he didn't move in but seemed rather to mount into like a poncho or a tarpaulin: up the bank until he saw two feet in gum boots which were neither Edmonds' boy's nor Aleck Sander's and then the legs, the overalls rising out of them and he climbed on and stood up and saw a Negro man with an axe on his shoulder, in a heavy sheep-lined coat and a broad pale felt hat such as his grandfather had used to wear, looking at him and that was when he saw Lucas Beauchamp for the first time that he remembered or rather for the first time because you didn't forget Lucas Beauchamp; gasping, shaking and only now feeling the shock of the cold water, he looked up at the face which was just watching him without pity commiseration or anything else, not even surprise: just watching him. The portrait presents a gaze more pronounced in its implacability and, as a result, more threatening in its ability to disrupt Chick's notions about racial identity. Because we are dealing, now, with the gaze of an inanimate object, namely the image of Lucas, there is no potential for natural aversions such as blinking. [...]the 'facts' are invented, discursively disseminated, randomly internalized, fatally acted upon_The only thing visible here-glaring, highlighted as though in infrared-is the virulent power of a shared racist discourse" (52). [...]Radhika Mohanram gives a convincing argument that links blackness with philosophical ideas about immobility, and such an argument is consonant with Fanonian phenomenology. [...]the kind of mobility that Lucas's property makes possible has a whitening effect and consequently produces racial anxiety on the parts of Intruder in the Dust's white characters. 18"[T]he African American sharecropper became a visual spectacle in these types of images but not a fully conceived person" (Boylan 132). |
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| ISSN: | 0884-2949 2640-1703 2640-1703 |