Natural Aristocracy: History, Ideology, and the Production of William Faulkner
232
Natural Aristocracy: History, Ideology, and the Production of William Faulkner
232eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817386351 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 07/15/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 232 |
| File size: | 585 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Natural Aristocracy
History, Ideology, and the Production of William Faulkner
By Kevin Railey
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 1999 The University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8635-1
CHAPTER 1
Faulkner's Mississippi
Ideology and Southern History
The textual real should be conceived as the product of signifying practices whose source is history itself. —Ramon Saldivar, Chicano Narrative
The past is not dead. The past is not even past. —Faulkner, The Unvanquished
The word ideology has a complicated history. In Ideology (1991), Terry Eagleton traces and describes six different origins and uses of the term. Although a comprehensive review is not needed here, a brief explanation of how this concept will be understood is necessary because it has come into such wide, and in many ways such indiscriminate, use. Two of Eagleton's six definitions are relevant to my purposes. One is sociological, concerned with the function of ideas within social life; Eagleton labels it the affective account of ideology. The affective account confronts the significant question of subject formation, and Faulkner's subject formation will be the focus of the next chapter. A second definition concerns epistemological questions, notions of true and false cognition, which Eagleton calls the rationalist account of ideology. The rationalist account is concerned with the relationship between ideas/values and class structure as well as with the power and influence of ideas and values within a given society; these will be the focus here.
The rationalist account of ideology stems originally from the contrast between ideology and science, or ideology and truth. Marx defined ideology as the system of ideas and representations that dominate the mind of a social group. For Marx, those whose thinking was affected by ideology—bourgeois intellectuals—believed in falsehood or illusion, while those agents of historical materialism—the proletariat—were able to see truth. Since this early formulation there has been much heated debate about historical materialism as a science and about the distinction between ideology and science; most important, Marx's early belief in the ability of human subjects to think in nonideological terms has been discredited. Nonetheless, this rationalist account has led Marxist thinkers to articulate nuanced and careful descriptions of the relationship between ideas/values and social class and the ways in which ideologies come to have power over people's thinking. This account has led, in the work of Raymond Williams (1977), to the concepts of dominant, residual, and emergent ideologies, and, in the work of Antonio Gramsci (1988), to the concept of hegemony.
Briefly, a dominant ideology is that relatively organized system of values and representations that upholds and maintains a social system beneficial to the ruling class. This dominant ideology, if effective, persuades, convinces, and seduces people from all classes in society to ascribe to its values, to identify with its representations of how the world should and does function. (The divine right of kings and equal pay for equal work are two examples of assertions about reality, though they stem from different ideological perspectives.) The subtle and intricate means through which this ideology gets produced and distributed involve what Althusser (1971) has labeled ideological state apparatuses: religion, educational systems, family, laws and law enforcement, media, culture—all the ways in which ideas and values get promulgated and distributed throughout a society.
The concept of hegemony relates both to the ways in which an ideology becomes a dominant influence on people's thinking—the whole social process involved in an ideology's dissemination and maintenance—and to the degree of success a dominant class has in persuading others in society to see the world its way. If a society is wrought with tension, conflict, and violence, the dominant ideology has not established hegemony; in short, people question its truth and its validity, and its dominant status is in jeopardy. If, however, the day-today life of a society proceeds relatively uninterrupted, and people do not vociferously question or rebel against the principles on which the society rests, a dominant class and its ideology can be said to have achieved hegemonic status. People have, in essence, accepted this ideology as their own. The bourgeois class and its ideology of equal rights and opportunities and reward based on merit have obviously enjoyed a hegemonic status in America for some time.
Ideology is a productive force in society; upholders of the dominant class work to develop and maintain hegemony constantly. Thus, history and class structure are not static; they are in constant motion. A dominant class's hold on hegemony is always in flux, and at various historical moments there is no dominant class and no hegemonic ideological formation. In these societies there is more tension than consensus. Also, opposing forces to dominant classes can be chaotic and random, very small minority voices that are almost unheard in public debate, or they can be relatively unified and consistent, demanding attention from figures in power. The two notions, residual and emergent ideology, attempt to describe these other relatively unified but nondominant systems of values and representations.
A residual ideology derives from past social formations, from a previously dominant class whose values still have influence on the way some people think. Many, especially those who resist a newly dominant ideology, who feel left behind, may identify with another time and its values and cling to a residual ideology. (My claim will be that Faulkner experienced this phenomenon.) An emergent ideology, on the other hand, denotes a set of values and beliefs that does not serve as a haven for the alienated but one that actively pushes for change in the present system. An emergent ideology seeks to define a future based on a different social vision than the one in dominance. Whether it will have its desired effect or be co-opted into the dominant order is always an open question, but there is generally more active tension between an emergent and a dominant ideology than between a dominant and a residual one. (The present push for a multicultural perspective within the definition of America is an example of an emergent ideological formation.) Moreover, all of these ideologies exist simultaneously in any given society, competing for people's allegiances.
As Jonathan Wiener has indicated: "There are periods in history when fundamental issues of class relations do not arise, but the immediate post [Civil] war South was not such a 'hegemonic' epoch. Social conflict was explicit and often intense" (1978, 5). In the following discussion I seek to delineate these social conflicts and to elucidate the ideologies that supported people's actions in the development of Mississippi society after the Civil War.
Faulkner lived in Lafayette County, Mississippi, for most of his life. This county overlaps both the North Central Hills section of poor soil and the Brown Loam and Loess Hills section of very good soil and stands between areas that then possessed the largest and lowest percentages of black Americans in Mississippi. Faulkner's map of Yoknapatawpha County, his fictional county, gives only one reference to actual Mississippi geography—the Tallahatchie River. This reference would make it appear that Yoknapatawpha overlaps sections of Panola and Yalobusha counties, with sixty-five percent black population, Lafayette County itself, and Pontotoc and Calhoun counties, with less than thirty-five percent black population. The geographical links between Mississippi and Yoknapatawpha parallel those between the sociological composition of each as well—populations of both ranging from planters, merchants, bankers, and lawyers through independent farmers, small shopkeepers, and businessmen to tenant farmers, both white and black. The materials of Faulkner's fiction thus connect very much to his historical environment. Although Faulkner wrote through the 1950s, the artistic depiction of ideological formations within his work derives from the formations that existed during this time period, roughly from 1870 to 1930.
Conflicts and struggles in Mississippi had particularly acute manifestations exactly because of the state's geography and social composition. The southwestern sections of Mississippi consisted of some of the richest soil in the entire South. These lands, referred to as both the Delta and the Black counties, were the location of very wealthy plantations before the Civil War, and the potential wealth from cotton crops remained immense after the war. Other sections of the state, tilled by smaller landowners who had maintained, before the war, a yeomanlike existence with few slaves, were never as productive nor did they have the potential to bring prosperity to the state. The people there, however, had been an essential part of the South's heritage from Jefferson to Jackson and would continue to be so—unlike the very poor subsistence farmers of the hill counties who were never an active part of Southern life. Connected to these features has been Mississippi's racial mix: more populated by blacks than whites, with the counties in the southwestern sections, especially after the war, containing the vast majority of the blacks in the state. There, blacks outnumbered whites by as much as 15 to 1, whereas in northeastern and southeastern counties whites always outnumbered blacks. As Kirwan (1951) has noted, there were rich and poor, educated and uneducated, cultured and uncultured in all regions of Mississippi; the state was not simply divided between the large landowners of the Delta with their black populations and the small landowners of the hill country who were exclusively white; nonetheless, these two classes did exist, and the directions Mississippi would take in its process of rebuilding was influenced by both groups (41–42).
This social and geographical composition relates closely to ideological formations. At the heart of Southern ideological history during most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the conflict between two opposing ideologies—paternalism and liberalism. Although these two words have come to be used in various, general ways, I use them to describe very specific conceptions of distinct and coherent world views. Adopting James Oakes's formulations (1982), I view paternalism as a social order that is stable, hierarchical, consciously elitist, and therefore fundamentally antithetical to liberalism. A paternalist assumes an inherent inequality of men; some are born to rule, others to obey. A liberal espouses a far different social fiction: all men are created equal. A paternalist stresses the organic unity born of each individual's acceptance of his or her place in a stable, stratified social order. A liberal stresses individualism, social mobility, and economic fluidity within a society that promotes equal opportunity. Whereas paternalism takes as its model the extended, patriarchal household, liberal societies move more and more toward the private, nuclear family. Paternalism establishes men as moral examples, and paternalists hold a sense of honor in their dealings with others, even those they consider below them, and feel a sense of responsibility toward society. Liberalism encourages men to strive for profit in the marketplace and places women in the role of moral exemplars. Responsibility here is to the development of oneself. Thus, paternalism and liberalism are intrinsically antagonistic. (Oakes 1982, xi–xii.)
Different sections of Mississippi were relatively unified by one or the other of these ideologies. Rooted in a tradition of slavery and plantation building, the Black counties were affiliated with a paternalist social vision in which poor whites were only a bit above black slaves. Powerful, upper-class plantocrats firmly held that they were indeed better men who deserved their social position and wealth due to inherent qualities and more sophisticated abilities. As Michael Wayne explains, "many members of the planting elite ... had developed a decided class consciousness and a belief in the superiority of their own lineage and way of life" (1983, 2). During the nineteenth century, these plantocrats were the ruling class in Mississippi. Although their hold on hegemony may have been tenuous, they maintained a social order that served their interests. They did this by pitting poor white against black and by aligning poor whites with themselves. They placated poor whites in various ways, mainly by offering them some social and political freedom, but only under extreme conditions did this entail social mobility on a grand scale—the social order was fairly static. Thus, their paternalism had both a class-based and a race-based element, but racial paternalism was heightened by an allegiance among all white men. In this atmosphere, though the ruling class had a self-consciousness about its attitudes toward both poor whites and blacks and thus could have a wider range of feeling, pointed (and vicious) racial paternalism became more prevalent, especially among the poor white population. It certainly left its mark more deeply on Southern society than class-based paternalism.
Not all people in Mississippi identified with the plantocrats and their belief systems, however, and other sections of Mississippi were unified by a liberalism that led men to believe they had a right to equality and opportunity—that they deserved an even chance in the marketplace. These two ideological belief-systems were able to coexist for many years because agricultural and economic conditions allowed most to feed and house their families and to maintain a degree of independence. There were also some examples of poor whites who moved to the frontier and became successful: opportunity, people on both sides could argue, was there. And planters granted whites various freedoms that they did not grant to black slaves. Nonetheless, this coexistence was fragile. When conditions changed after the Civil War and the precarious balance of ideological forces tilted, the opposing views influenced social conflict in definitive and different ways.
The first group able to re-form itself after the war was the planters. Though not easily or smoothly, planters in the Delta were generally able to keep their social and political power because of the congressional decision against land confiscation, and they began to make moves toward determining Mississippi's future. They recognized the need both for capital investment in their land and for cheap labor and tried to get Reconstruction governments to establish policies that would encourage investment in their lands. These were slow in coming because of the generally bankrupt condition of the state, the efforts toward reform, and the taxation policies of Mississippi's second Reconstruction government. What were not slow in coming were efforts to expand the pool of cheap labor.
Planters immediately recognized the need to develop working relationships with the newly freed black Americans; without the technology for large-scale machinery, cheap labor was essential to the planters' rebuilding efforts. They also wanted to establish arrangements that kept control in their hands. Soon after the end of the war, planters attempted to hire blacks to work plantations in labor-gangs and planned to pay them in cash. Although this situation would have changed the South in some definite though unpredictable ways, it never developed. Planters could not get the necessary cash, and blacks, although poor and uneducated for the most part, knew they had been freed and refused these efforts to reinstitute a new kind of slavery.
Ideally, black Americans wanted to own land, and their best chance to accomplishthis was through renting at a fixed price and marketing cotton themselves. Whatever profit was made could then be saved to buy their own land. This goal was sternly looked down upon by most whites, and although a few planters rented land to blacks, the practice did not become widespread or popular. At times, planters who rented land to blacks would find their barns or houses burned to the ground.
Nevertheless, black Americans refused simply to work for wages because in that scenario they had little control over their time, over their way of life. They wanted land and some semblance of family life and independence. The result was that sharecropping was established: planters would rent blacks a certain amount of land and supply them with food and tools in exchange for a share in the crop. Freed slaves would obtain a degree of independence unknown to them before and a degree of power to determine how their families would work and be organized. Planters would be relatively assured that the sharecroppers would grow cotton because they had incentive to be as productive as possible. Sharecropping, then, became the most widespread arrangement for blacks in the Delta for some time.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Natural Aristocracy by Kevin Railey. Copyright © 1999 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Part One: History, Ideology, Subjectivity
1. Faulkner's Mississippi: Ideology and Southern History
2. Faulkner's Ideology: Ideology and Subjectivity
Part Two: Faulkner, Paternalism, Liberalism
3. The Sound and the Fury: Faulkner's Birth into History
4. Sanctuary: The Social Psychology of Paternalism
5. As I Lay Dying and Light in August: The Social Realities of Liberalism
Part Three: Faulkner's Authorial Ideology
6. Absalom, Absalom! and Natural Aristrocracy
7. Absalom, Absalom! and the Southern Ideology of Race
Part Four: Faulkner's Social Vision
8. The Snopes Trilogy as Social Vision
9. The Reivers: Imaginary Resolutions and Utopian Yearnings
Notes
Works Cited
Index