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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
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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

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