Faulkner and Mystery by Trefzer Annette;Abadie Ann J.;

Author:Trefzer, Annette;Abadie, Ann J.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi

Critical Intruders: Unraveling Race and Mystery in Intruder in the Dust

ESTHER SÁNCHEZ-PARDO

William Faulkner opens Intruder in the Dust (1948)1 by immediately undermining the certainty of the white racial knowledge that has just landed Lucas Beauchamp, his black protagonist, in jail: “It was just noon that Saturday morning when the sheriff reached the jail with Lucas Beauchamp though the whole town (the whole country too for that matter) had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man” (3). As we soon discover, the sheriff, the town, and the country are in fact all wrong: what they think they “know” about Lucas’s apparent act of murder (he is accused of having shot the white Vinson Gowrie in the back) turns out to be completely erroneous. In this deceptively simple opening sentence, Faulkner is asking us to examine, and indeed reject, the white southern legal system’s presumption of black male criminality.

The problem of false knowledge—and particularly the unreliability of received white narratives—becomes a central motif in a text that is in part a detective novel in which Chick Mallison will have to uncover the mystery of who killed Vinson Gowrie but that is also a coming-of-age narrative in which Chick will attempt to uncover the “mystery” of Lucas Beauchamp himself. “[Chick] knew Lucas Beauchamp too,” the narrator tells us, “as well that is as any white person knew him” (3–4). The mystery at the heart of this “detective” novel is not necessarily who killed Vinson Gowrie—Faulkner reveals that the true culprit is Crawford Gowrie, Vinson’s brother and business rival, at the midpoint of the novel—but rather what precisely is going on in the mind of this black man whose individual subjectivity resists being categorized, contained, and understood by whites.

Where conventional crime fiction emphasizes conformity, social disruption as aberration, and a reinscription of order through resolution, Intruder in the Dust decenters those conventions in favor of a nonhegemonic point of view, an idea that sees social disruption as symptomatic of racial and political oppression, and a problematic inscription of order—or a sense that no order should be expected. The genre is clearly altered and, more importantly, perceptions of justice are altered as well. Intruder in the Dust is thus part of that Faulknerian universe that refuses Manichean dichotomies of good/evil, margin/center, criminal/crime-solver in favor of the understanding that “traditional” narratives and a “conventional” sense of social justice are bound to an arbitrary dominant order. That order, in one way or another, influences and affects all that come under its gaze; however the complex reflection that results from this specific novel offers us the means by which we can shield ourselves from that powerful gaze and from the privileged vantage point we get, we may imagine another form of justice.

In his book Faulkner, Mississippi (1996), Caribbean writer Edouard Glissant notes that Intruder “tells of a moment in the education (the initiation) of a young white male, the decisive player in the story,” but then asserts that the novel “is also a

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