Doom and Deliverance: Faulkner’s Dialectical Indians

Abstract

Most critics and historians agree that Faulkner’s Indian characters are outrageous mystifications drawn from popular misperceptions and unspoken ideologies. While he famously admitted that he “made up” his Indians, numerous scholars have wondered whether such a shrewd student of Mississippi history could have ignored the facts entirely. This chapter suggests that the reality lies somewhere in between—purposefully and revealingly so. Faulkner’s Indians occupy the dialectical space between the wreckage of the South’s colonial histories and the rapacities of the capitalist future; they are despicably “other” even as they are uncannily, frighteningly kindred. Departing from the standard focus on Faulkner’s so-called “Indian stories,” this chapter instead uncovers the obscure, uncanny Indians that lurk unseen in his major texts and within his most prominent families and novels. Collectively, these Indians comprise a surprisingly active and pertinent contingent in Faulkner’s modern South: specimens of America’s most luminous possibilities and haunting failures.