What Is Telling? The Racial Dimensions of Narrative and Cognition in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and Toni Morrison’s A Mercy

Abstract:This article compares Toni Morrison’s A Mercy and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! in terms of what their experiments with narrative telling can reveal about the impact of race on cognition. Bringing these novels into conversation with recent neuroscience on the predictive brain, and the pioneering cognitive, phenomenological work of Black feminist critic Sylvia Wynter, the essay addresses the current lack of attention to race in cognitive literary criticism. It argues that Faulkner and Morrison not only use telling to portray the cognitive habits of racism, but also to experiment with new ways of imagining beyond them.