Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T14:25:56.935Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Black Culture in William Faulkner's “That Evening Sun”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Dirk Kuyk Jr ,
Betty M. Kuyk  and
James A. Miller
Dirk Kuyk Jr
Affiliation:
professors of English, formed the Southern Studies Research Project at Trinity College in Hartford
Betty M. Kuyk
Affiliation:
an historian and a visiting lecturer,Trinity College in Hartford
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

When a white writer portrays a black character, racial stereotypes and literary patterns almost always reveal their power. The portraits of blacks take forms that are by now archetypal: the mammy, Stepin Fetchit, the buck, the unspoiled primitive, the member of the oppressed black proletariat…. Such forms come all too easily to white writers; but “modern realism,” as Erich Auerbach called it, comes hard. Thus, white writers can seldom present a “tragically conceived life” of a black character and set that life solidly in a black culture. In portraying blacks, white writers tend toward the sentimental, the satiric, and the didactic rather than “objective seriousness, which seeks to penetrate to the depths of the passions and entanglements of a human life, but without itself becoming moved, or at least without betraying that it is moved” (Auerbach, 457 and 490). Although William Faulkner often tumbles – and sometimes leaps – into those pitfalls, occasionally he avoids them altogether. When he does so, however, readers find his work particularly hard to understand. His story “That Evening Sun” is a case in point.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 20 , Issue 1 , April 1986 , pp. 33 - 50
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abrahams, Roger D.Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative from the Streets of Philadelphia. Chicago, Illinois: Aldine, 1970.Google Scholar
Abrahams, Roger D.Positively Black. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1970.Google Scholar
Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953.Google Scholar
Blotner, Joseph. Faulkner. New York: Random House, 1974.Google Scholar
Botume, Elizabeth H.First Days among the Contrabands. New York: Arno Press, 1968 (first pub., 1893).Google Scholar
Brearley, H. C. “Ba-ad Nigger.” The South Atlantic Quarterly, 38 (01, 1939), 75–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brooks, Cleanth. A Shaping Joy. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1971.Google Scholar
Brown, May Cameron. “Voice in ‘That Evening Sun’: A Study of Quentin Compson.” Mississippi Quarterly, 29 (1976), 347–60.Google Scholar
Coburn, Mark D. “Nancy's Blues: Faulkner's ‘That Evening Sun,’” Perspective: A Quarterly of Modern Literature, 17 (Winter, 1974), No. 3, 207–16.Google Scholar
“Concerning Negro Sorcery in the United States.” Journal of American Folklore, 3 (1890), 281.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cullen, John B.Old Times in the Faulkner Country. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1961.Google Scholar
Dance, Daryl C.Shuckin' and Jivin': Folklore from Contemporary Black Americans. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978.Google Scholar
Dougherty, Molly C.Becoming a Woman in Rural Black Culture. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978.Google Scholar
Doyle, Mary Ellen. Personal letter to the authors. 15 09 1983.Google Scholar
Faulkner, William. Go Down, Moses. New York: Random House, 1940.Google Scholar
Faulkner, William. “That Evening Sun.” Collected Stories of William Faulkner. New York: Random House, 1977.Google Scholar
Garrison, Joseph M. Jr, “The Past and the Present in ‘That Evening Sun.’” Studies in Short Fiction, 13 (1978), 371–73.Google Scholar
Grier, William H., and Cobbs, Price M.Black Rage. New York: Bantam Books, 1969.Google Scholar
Gutman, Herbert G.The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom. New York: Pantheon Books, 1976.Google Scholar
Gwynn, Frederick L., and Blotner, Joseph L.Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia, 1957 1958. New York: Random House, 1959.Google Scholar
Hall, J. A. “Negro Conjuring and Tricking.” Journal of American Folklore, 10 (1897), 242–43.Google Scholar
Herskovits, Melville J. “A Letter to the Editors: Some Comments by Professor Herskovits.” The South Atlantic Quarterly, 39 (07, 1940), 350–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977.Google Scholar
Jackson, Bruce. “Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim like Me”: Narrative Poetry from the Black Oral Tradition. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1974.Google Scholar
Kuyk, Betty M. “Seeking Family Relationships.” Negro History Bulletin, 42 (07–09, 1979), 60.Google Scholar
Malcolm, L. W. G. “Short Notes on Soul-Trapping in Southern Nigeria.” Journal of American Folklore, 35 (1922), 219–22.Google Scholar
Manglaviti, Leo M. J. “Faulkner's ‘That Evening Sun’ and Mencken's ‘Best Editorial Judgment.’” American Literature, 43 (1971–1972), 649–54.Google Scholar
Oliver, Paul. The Meaning of the Blues. New York: Collier Books, 1972.Google Scholar
Powdermaker, Hortense. After Freedom. New York: Atheneum, 1969 (first pub., 1939).Google Scholar
Rawick, George P., ed. The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography. Supplement, Series I. Vol. 6: Mississippi Narratives, Part i; and Vol. 8: Mississippi Narratives, Part 8. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1977.Google Scholar
Reed, Joseph W. Jr, Faulkner's Narrative. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1973.Google Scholar
Ruel, Malcom. “Witchcraft, Morality and Doubt.” Odu, 2: 1 (07, 1965), 3–27.Google Scholar
Slabey, Robert M. “Quentin Compson's ‘Lost Childhood.’” Studies in Short Fiction, 1 (Spring, 1964), 173–83.Google Scholar
Steiner, Roland. “Observations on the Practice of Conjuring in Georgia.” Journal of American Folklore, 14 (1901), 173–80.Google Scholar
Steiner, Roland. “Braziel Robinson Possessed of Two Spirits.” Journal of American Folklore, 13 (1900), 226–28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thompson, Robert Farris. African Art in Motion. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974.Google Scholar
Vickery, Olga W.The Novels of William Faulkner: A Critical Interpretation. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964.Google Scholar
Zahan, Dominique. The Religion, Spirituality, and Thought of Traditional Africa. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1983 (first pub. 1978).Google Scholar