"(Obvious now)": Forgetting How Race Works in Requiem for a Nun

Two recent volumes of Faulkner scholarship, Michael Gorra’s monograph The Saddest Words and the edited collection Faulkner and Slavery, have relatively little to say about Requiem for a Nun. To those familiar with Faulkner studies this is likely not a surprising state of affairs, as Requiem is typically regarded as a curious dud of an attempt at narrative experimentation. Many of the extended critical accounts of the relationship between slavery, race, and Faulkner’s fiction that I find most fruitful, Thadious Davis’s Faulkner’s Negro, Richard Godden’s Fictions of Labor and An Economy of Complex Words, Edouard Glissant’s Faulkner, Mississippi, and the smattering of references to Faulkner contained across Hortense Spillers’s writing as collected in Black, White and In Color, likewise have little or nothing to say about Requiem for a Nun. Further complicating matters, most extended discussions of Requiem for a Nun have little to say about slavery. Noel Polk, for example, calls slavery’s presence in Jefferson “ominous” without much elaboration (44). These silences strike me as odd given the fact that Requiem contains perhaps the single most comprehensive account of the political and economic history of Yoknapatawpha County and one of Faulkner’s most straightforward attempts to do legibly racially liberal work by confronting and undermining, “demystifying” in Deborah Barker’s account, the racist cultural trope of the Mammy in his depiction of Nancy Mannigoe (71). One might conclude from the preponderance of critical attention that Requiem is not particularly suited for thinking slavery, and therefore not fit for a certain contemporary iteration of “the work of anti-racism.” In this essay I read Requiem as an anxious and regressive rewriting of the historical contradictions contained under what Hortense Spillers calls “the sign of race” previously worked through in Faulkner’s earlier and more critically prominent novels (348). “‘Race’ alone bears no inherent meaning,” Spillers writes, “even though it reifies in personality, but gains its