Lucas Beauchamp's Black Modernity: Agonistic Identities and the Ethics of Sympathy in Intruder in the Dust

Faulkner’s heroes take many forms. We see an archetype of an adventurous, ruggedly individualist, though ambiguous, nineteenth-century heroism in the Sartoris family. There are also the Bundrens who, to lesser and greater degrees, struggle to maintain contact with the land and their poor white traditions when the modernity of the big town beckons, and Ike McCaslin, who rejects his corrupt patrimony. There is heroic nobility in Joe Christmas’s attempts to forge a personal identity outside the racist social norms that seek to delimit and dehumanize his being, in Tomey’s Turl’s intransigent rebellion against plantocracy codes, and in Eunice’s valiant suicide. However, Lucas Beauchamp epitomizes a particularly Faulknerian vision of heroism and nobility. Lucas provides, I argue, the closest thing to a consummation of the emancipatory labors of his Black predecessors. His success derives from the way he draws upon and activates his Black modernity, the traditions preceding him out of what Paul Gilroy has named the Black Atlantic that work to reveal the plurality of his own agonistic identity together with that of the society he inhabits. Lucas as a figure shines a light on the constructed nature of racial identity, on the irreducible pluralities that materially constitute persons and geographies. Once revealed, these perspectives entirely belie the myth of unitary essence and so, in bringing them to light, Lucas discomforts the white societies of his time. The simple evidence of his plurality unseats the racial hierarchies and the codes of white belonging upon which those societies are based and in defense of which they are willing to reinforce Black subjugation and white supremacy via ritualized acts of violence. Not despite but because of the white discomfort Lucas inspires, in those white people less invested in racial supremacy and their own whiteness he is also able to trigger an investment in an ethics of sympathy by which charac-