Faulkner's Southern reflections: the black on the back of the mirror in "Ad Astra." - William Faulkner - Section 1: Black South Culture

African American Review, Spring, 1993 by Reginald Martin

Relatedly, the complexity of the subadar's situation stipulates the complexity of the narrative, which is periodic and dystaxic. Faulkner's purposefully convoluted narrative is constructed in an obvious stylistic attempt to evoke in the reader the emptiness and loneliness of World War I Europe as well as the emptiness in the lives of those who joined of their own volition in a "War to End All Wars" rather than be labeled. cowards and losers at home. Rather than be labeled a loser and a member of an "inferior" race by associating himself with his conquered homeland, the subadar has chosen to adopt the race, culture, mores, education, and war of his people's conquerors. In this way he believes he has seized power, since he has made a conscious choice to seize control of his life; he is unable to bear the truth that his choice is still derivative, still the choice of a defeated spirit.

In story after story in the early part of Faulkner's career - e.g., "Sunset" (1919), "Red Leaves" (1920), and "Dry September" (1921) - we see this pattern re-enacted. The characters of color try to establish a place in a white-ruled society only to fail dreadfully or to have their choices pejoratively filtered through the perceptions of those with power. Thus, in the early stage of Faulkner's career, when he was developing only short stories, the theme of social displacement based on color was already explicit, the trope did not have to be the focal point of the later novels, all of which are absorbed with race as a subtext (consider, for example, Go Down, Moses and Intruder in the Dust, 1948). Having already posited the way his characters were to be read, Faulkner freed himself to move the scheme of color to the background - still present, still the catalyst, but a shadow - and thus seem to write about other, larger issues of the American South. It is my assertion that there was no other subtextual scheme for Faulkner except the Southern trope of pejorative color perception.

The omniscent narrator, who is actively involved in channeling "Ad Astra" to fit Faulkner's stipulating intentions, includes this description of Bland, as the subadar looks on longingly: "He was blond and tall. When he passed through a room where women were he left a sighing wake like a ferry boat entering the slip" (409). This is the microcosm that stipulates the macrocosm of the subadar's place in a Eurocentric world. Thus, this indirect quote represents much more than the subadar's envy of the sensuous latitude granted Bland around women who look much like Bland and little like the subadar.

Bland serves as the subadar's untouchable other: Both are graduates of Oxford (Bland, too, was a Rhodes scholar); both have appealing courage and compassion, but because of the darkness of his skin, and the different religious base and culture from which he comes, the subadar is denied the same acceptance that Bland receives. The harsh facts of this reality are preposterous to anyone of the intellectual bearing of the subadar. Thus, even as he tells himself that he is white, in his psychologically dissonant state he makes an even more preposterous mental leap: He invents platitudes that are no more than desperate attempts to rationalize his existence and give him, the darker-skinned other, a place of superiority in his social situation:" A man sees further looking out of the dark upon the light than a man does in the light and looking out upon the light ..." (409). Thus, ironically and futilely, the subadar attempts to refute Bland's whiteness and his own blackness. In removing his own blackness, he inversely proves the Faulknerian subtext again: Without the Southern trope of blackness, there is no strength.