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By identifying the flaws in American society, William Faulkner’s work refutes the American Dream. To be specific, Faulkner’s work brings to light the inequalities of the poor and oppressed people in America’s south and the corruption of the rich oppressors.

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Source 1: Faulkner’s Criticism of Modern America

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Source 1: Faulkner’s Criticism of Modern America

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Faulkner writes  “The American Dream: What Happened to It.” In order to address how American Society in the south does not live up to the promise of the so-called American Dream. “For the blacks and for the poorer whites, the American Dream had remained a largely unfulfilled promise. Southerners in general, even those in better economic circumstances, had intellectual reservations about the American Dream.” (vrqonline) In this article, the author speaks on how Faulkner and his work presented American society in the south. During the time, the so-called American Dream was not something attainable for a large majority of the people in the south, especially African Americans. This quote highlights this by citing the American dream as an “unfulfilled promise”, even for those who were not in poor economic situations.

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Source 2: Boxing Yoknapatawpha: Faulkner, Race, and Popular Front Boxing Narratives

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Source 2: Boxing Yoknapatawpha: Faulkner, Race, and Popular Front Boxing Narratives

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In this essay, Joseph Bain highlights Faulkner’s use of the “Boxing Narrative” in order to present the fight between African Americans in the south and their oppressors. Specifically, “many critics and writers of the 1930s saw the boxing ring as a microcosm of the conflicts between working-class whites, African Americans, and the dominant capitalists who profited from the conflict among various disenfranchised groups… his "moral economy" provided great material for many writers… more overtly modernist writers like Faulkner, who are impossible to pigeonhole politically.” (GALE ONEFILE) This idea of a “Boxing Narrative” is used in many of Faulkner’s works in order to present the racial inequalities faced by African Americans in the south. Specifically, it highlights how the dominant groups capitalized off of the conflict in order to make more money and continue to snub the chance of those in a lower socioeconomic class getting a chance at the American Dream. The boxing ring is an allegory to the battle between African Americans trying to achieve the American Dream and the oppressors who prevent it.

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Cultural and literary critics find the boxing ring a rich arena for social signification. As Gerald Early characterizes it, boxing "is a remarkable metaphor for the philosophical and social condition of men (and, sometimes, women) in modern mass society" (xiv). Within the prize ring, one can establish independence, individuality, and most importantly a clear triumph over another individual. The prizefight offers the hope of fame and fortune earned with nothing but one's own hands. Of particular cultural interest are the boxing narratives of American Naturalists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and American Popular Front writers of the 1930s and 1940s. (2) Naturalist writers drew on the figure of the Great White Hope to bolster waning faith in modern masculinity and white racial superiority. Modernist writers of the Left were often more criticai of the sport, and drew on the boxing narrative to dramatize the plight of working class whites and African Americans, and to allegorize capitalist exploitation and the day-to-day brutality these groups experienced. Most crucially, many critics and writers of the 1930s saw the boxing ring as a microcosm of the conflicts between working class whites, African Americans, and the dominant capitalists who profited from the conflict among various disenfranchised groups. As Chris Vials so aptly states, these narratives express "a 'moral economy' that bundled racialization, acquisitive masculinity, consumer culture, and working-class suffering into a tight association" (36). This "moral economy" provided great material for many writers of the Left like Richard Wright, Clifford Odets, Dashiell Hammet, and Nelson Algren, but was not unnoticed by more overtly modernist writers like Faulkner, who are impossible to pigeonhole politically. (3)

Faulkner's work moves the typically urban boxing tale (Boddy 205) into rural settings. Transplanting the tale from the city to the country mirrors urban corruption in the social decay of the farms and rural hamlets many American writers tended to celebrate. Reading Faulkner's tales of racial combat in context with Popular Front boxing narratives reveals what Early calls the "classic dialectic of boxing," especially the duality found in the competing figures of the "con man and the homeboy, the country mouse and the city mouse" (5). Faulkner himself traversed the borders between rural and urban, between his Mississippi postage stamp and Hollywood boulevard, and was well aware of the pervasiveness of America's problems, especially regarding race. Johnson and Louis were both native southerners, and like Faulkner, knew all too well that small town troubles could follow a person to the big city.

While never an adherent to Popular Front aesthetics or cultural politics, Faulkner was not unaware of, nor was his fiction disengaged from, many of that movement's ideals and goals, and while he publicly distanced himself from the Left, his writing shows a keen understanding of the social and even political issues at stake. Matthews has demonstrated Faulkner's relationship to both right and left cultural politics, noting that while Faulkner avoids propagandizing or calling for redress of social injustice, he is not unaware of those injustices. In fact, Matthews argues, "[b]y intertwining the economic practices of the self-made agrarian capitalist with the epistemology that founds it, Faulkner conducts his search for the South's fatal flaw in a sphere occupied by writers to his left" (184). Most recently, Ted Atkinson has delved into Faulkner's relationship to the cultural and political moods and movements of the 1930s, particularly in light of the Great Depression. Looking to Faulkner's fiction as the most reliable source of the author's political views, Atkinson positions Faulkner as neither a detached high modernist nor a covert leftist, but instead as a writer whose texts act "as sites of intense ideological negotiation and political struggle" (11). I would like to turn now to Faulkner's subtle appropriation of boxing narratives as one textual indicator of this struggle, and of the noticeable evolution throughout Faulkner's work in the author's understanding of racial issues.

I do not mean to imply that Faulkner wrote his fiction primarily, or even partially, as a metaphor for the uproar Johnson and Louis caused in the boxing ring between 1910 and 1937. Of course not. But Faulkner did pay attention to the sporting world, recognizing in sports the competition and will to dominance he saw as inherent to humanity. He even contributed two articles to Sports Illustrated , one covering a hockey match and the other covering a horse race, the only sport Faulkner claimed to be more universal than prize fighting (Hamblin 14-15). While there is no evidence Faulkner ever attended a fight, his coverage of the hockey match references the prize ring, as he observes the fervor among young boys for the thrill of the match, whom he likens to "the same little Negro boys whom the innocent 4 has seen shadowboxing in front of a photograph of Louis in his own Mississippi town" (Faulkner qtd. in Hamblin 18).

Faulkner evokes the prize fight in many passages, but rarely directly depicts it or refers to it. Instead, he evokes the boxing narrative as starting point to foreground larger struggles over race, masculinity, and democracy. Crucial passages of white and black conflict in Faulkner's work take on added dimension in light of the racial tensions surrounding the prize ring, and every passage is haunted by the ghost of Johnson. When Johnson fought Jim Jeffries in 1910 to solidify his claim as the first black heavyweight champion of the world, the British magazine Boxing declared the fight "not so much a matter of racial pride as one of racial existence" (Ward 164). When Johnson vanquished the badly out-classed Jeffries, the white world was shaken to its core, its crucial belief in its own superiority down for the count along with the former champ. Johnson's victory sent American trainers scrambling to find the Great White Hope, a combatant to reclaim the title and restore the pride of the white race. Jack London opined at the end of the match, "where now is the champion who will make Johnson extend himself, who will glaze those bright eyes, remove that smile and silence that golden repartee?" (502). This hunt would finally bear fruit in 1915, when after twenty-six rounds an aging and badly out-of-shape Johnson would lose by knockout to Jess Willard, in the last championship bout between black and white contenders until Louis took James Braddock's title in 1937.

Johnson calmly dispatched his white opponents, and Joe beats Lucas Burch for calling him "nigger," "his own breathing so quiet, so calm," (104) much like Johnson, so "cool" according to Jack London that "his fighting at times seems lackadaisical" (493). Johnson was also known to scuffle outside the ring, answering to charges of "assaults on various men who had purportedly insulted him or his wife" (Hietala 56). Joe is often drunk and belligerent, and "tricked or teased white men into calling him a negro in order to fight them," and fighting "the negro who called him white" (225). Joe Christmas acts in the novel much like Johnson did in real life, but it is the symbolic resonance each man assumed, Johnson for the nation and Joe for the town of Jefferson, Mississippi, that reveals Faulkner's understanding of national racial issues.

While the image of the black man beating the white man is crucial to both Johnson's real story and to Joe's fictional one, it is even more important to understand how each man became emblematic for white people of the entire black race. Most importantly, both Johnson and Joe Christmas take on this resonance as much for their affairs with white women as for their violent confrontations with white men. (5) As George Jean Nathan and H. L. Mencken observed, the white public entertained countless untried assumptions about black men, including that "all negro prize-fighters marry white women, and that they afterward beat them" (Mencken and Nathan qtd. in Hietala 49). This observation followed Johnson's notoriety in and out of the ring, and was but one mark of how Johnson's actions came to both challenge and justify white America's racial assumptions. These same notions pervade Faulkner's novel, especially after Joe kills Joanna Burden and burns down her house. For the people of Jefferson, "it was an anonymous negro crime committed not by a negro but by Negro and [they] knew, believed, and hoped that she had been ravished too" (288). The expectation, the desire , that romance between a white woman and a black man must end in rape and murder also plagued Johnson. Newspapers worked hard to portray the suicide of his second wife, Etta Duryea, as murder, though Johnson wasn't even in the building when she shot herself. When Johnson took up with Lucille Cameron, federal agents prompted her to accuse him of abduction under the 1910 Mann Act forbidding interstate transportation "for immoral purposes of women and girls" (Hietala 58; 60-65). For the generation following Johnson's defeat of Jeffries, Johnson was emblematic of all white culture assumed and feared. That Joe Christmas's story closely mirrors Johnson's in these crucial regards marks Faulkner's increasing engagement with his nation's neuroses.

Turning now to Absalom, Absalom !, we still see Faulkner ruminating on escalating racial tensions, particularly in light of Johnson's successor as Black Hope, Joe Louis. Over twenty years after Johnson's defeat by Jess Willard, Louis began his professional ascent and Faulkner was completing his most enduring work. In light of increasing racial tensions, the sporting public could only hope Louis would not become another Johnson. Painfully mindful of Johnson's reputation, Louis's trainer and managers very skillfully honed his public image. It helped that, unlike Johnson, Louis apparently had no taste for alcohol, and even encouraged his managers to go on the wagon. The up-and-comer was also respectful to opponents in and out of the ring, unlike Johnson, who enjoyed telling his opponents (and any reporters within earshot) where he was going to hit them next, before doing so. Louis was also soft-spoken and deferential in the presence of whites, which Johnson was never willing to be. But perhaps the most important difference was that Louis stayed away from white women. He married Marva Trotter, and though their marriage was not entirely harmonious, the public only cared that it was racially un-mixed.

In addition to Louis's "good" behavior, America was also trying to present a cleaner image, mostly by distancing itself from the extreme racial intolerance being practiced in Nazi Germany--racial practices many black writers and intellectuals, and a few whites, carefully pointed out were all too close to home. In light of all this, Louis's speedy first round triumph during his rematch with German fighter Max Schmeling in Madison Square Garden actually lent Louis some of the trappings of the Great White Hope: he was the shining example standing up against German corruption, the Raceman defeating the racial supremacist, and most importantly, the American vanquishing the foreigner. The Great White Hope hadn't died for America, it had simply crossed the race line. Sherwood Anderson, Faulkner's one-time friend and mentor, best characterized the nation's feelings toward Louis after his initial loss to Schmeling: "He was one of ours. He was a fellow who could do a thing superbly.... We all wanted something set right" (683). Anderson's desire for Louis to come back to defeat Schmeling uncannily echoes London's earlier call for the "champion who will make Johnson extend himself" (502). While American race relations had progressed slowly if at all since Johnson's day, Anderson's statement testifies to the radical change in possibility that occurred in just over twenty years.

Louis would eventually face Schmeling again, and put the lie to Nazi racial superiority by flooring him in just over two minutes. Similarly in Absalom, Absalom !, Charles Bon returns to confront Sutpen, the father who abandoned him and his mother, and in so doing will topple Sutpen's plans for dynasty. While attending the University of Mississippi, Sutpen's son Henry befriends the mysterious and cosmopolitan Bon, to whom he eventually betroths his sister Judith. Sutpen recognizes Bon, however, as his estranged son, born to Sutpen's Haitian wife Eulalia. After Sutpen reveals this secret to Henry, Henry takes Bon on a four year journey that encompasses a stint in the Confederate army following a trip to New Orleans, where Henry meets Bon's octoroon mistress and child. Charles Bon's final statement of intent to Henry--"I'm the nigger that's going to sleep with your sister" (286), was written in a world extremely mindful of Johnson's three marriages to white women. While Bon's taunt is reminiscent of Johnson, his usual calm demeanor is more akin to the carefully crafted public image of Louis, who spoke little and kept his private life as quiet as possible. That Bon could evoke shades of both black champions suggests the continuity many Americans saw between Johnson and Louis, and the anxiety lest Louis follow Johnson's path.

While looking backward at Johnson, however, Faulkner was also clearly mindful of Louis's potential as a national figure. In the closing chapters of Absalom, Absalom !, Faulkner suggests the Great Hope--White or Black--is not necessarily destroyed, but merely displaced. While Sutpen faces his black opponents in the first chapter, his two daughters, Judith and Clytie, one black and one white, watch from the loft above. The novel's ending recalls this early passage as Quentin Compson and Rosa Coldfield discover an aged Henry and Clytie and Charles Bon's mentally incapacitated son Jim Bond--Sutpen's remaining progeny--inhabiting the dilapidated Sutpen's Hundred manor house. The novel that begins with the Great White Hope ends, to paraphrase Yeats, with "the burning roof and tower and Henry Sutpen dead," as both Henry and Clytie perish in the blaze Clytie set. The racial politics Faulkner saw at work end in mutual destruction for both races.

Jim Bond escapes the fire, however, and, despite his disability, retains a deferred yet palpable potential. As Quentin Compson and Shreve McCannon try to piece the tale together in their Cambridge apartment, Shreve's final take on the Sutpen saga perhaps offers Faulkner's own take on the future "I think that in time the Jim Bonds are going to conquer the Western Hemisphere," Shreve tells Quentin:

   Of course it wont quite be in our time and of course as they spread
   toward the poles they will bleach out again like the rabbits and
   the birds do, so they wont show up so sharp against the snow. But
   it will still be Jim Bond; and so in a few thousand years, I who
   regard you will also have sprung from the loins of African kings.
   (302)

Faulkner's joke, of course, is that this has already happened. In a sense, both Quentin and Shreve have already sprung from the loins of humanity's beginnings in Africa. In a cultural sense, however, the African American had yet to "conquer the Western Hemisphere," but Faulkner definitely saw a day when miscegenation would be more the rule than the exception.

In keeping with Shreve's final pronouncement, Louis did not "show up so sharp against the snow," because his cultural image was somewhat bleached by his more important status as American. When Louis won his rematch with Schmeling in 1938, America cheered. It was more important to the nation that an American defeat a Nazi than that a white man defeat a black one. The Great White Hope as initially conceived was now no longer strictly white, as long as there was a more threatening enemy to face. Sutpen's early victories over his slaves, coupled with his participation in a war of oppression, clearly express Faulkner's anxiety over the looming specter of fascism in Europe and his acknowledgement that racial cooperation within the United States was necessary in light of this threat.

As in Light in August and Absalom, Absalom !, the definitive passage of "The Fire and the Hearth" concerns a confrontation between a white man and a black man; only in this instance, the black man wins. This passage takes place in Lucas's memory as he approaches Roth Edmonds' house and remembers the time he approached the house to confront Zack for taking Lucas's wife, Molly. Like the signal bout between Johnson and Jeffries, and the two matches between Louis and Schmeling, the confrontation between Lucas and Zack is imbued with historical and racial significance. As the two men face each other, Lucas tells Zack, "all you got to beat is me. I got to beat old Carothers" ( Go Down, Moses 53). Like Johnson and Louis, Lucas faces the entire history of black servitude in the face of Zack, "the man whom he had known from infancy, with whom he had lived until they were both grown almost as brothers lived" (54). Lucas's upbringing alongside Zack mirrors that of so many white and black relationships in the South, both before and after Emancipation. White boys of a certain class were typically raised by black women, often playing with black children until late adolescence separated them completely into master and servant. Lucas, facing Zack "across the bed and the pistol" (54), faces that history.

The actual physical conflict is relatively brief, but still evokes the image of the interracial bout. Like two boxers squaring off, Zack and Lucas let their hands do the work, and "did not move their forearms" (54). The only blow that lands is when Lucas "flung the white man's left hand and arm away, striking the other backward from the bed as his own right hand wrenched free; he had the pistol in that same motion, springing up and back as the white man rose too" (55). Not only does Lucas triumph in this physical contest, but his eerie speed, "striking the other backward" and grabbing the pistol "in that same motion" is reminiscent of Johnson, whose "mind works like chain lightning and his body obeys with equal swiftness" (London 497). Even more to the point, in this passage Faulkner is able to imagine a black man in both physical and moral victory over a white man, without suffering the expected backlash. Unlike Joe Christmas or Charles Bon, Lucas Beauchamp resists the white man's dominance and wins the battle, though not the war, since Zack has assumedly been forcing Lucas's wife to do more than take care of Roth.

Lucas shares much with the white public's perception of both Johnson and Louis. Like Johnson, Lucas is unwilling to bow and scrape for white men. He refuses to call white men "Mister," even the Edmonds men, who own the land he farms. Like Louis, Lucas carefully attends to his image, keeping his surface activities clean and morally upstanding. Even the white judge has to acknowledge Lucas's reputation when Lucas is charged with bootlegging--"Lucas Beauchamp.... With thirty pounds of whisky and a still sitting on his back porch in broad daylight? Nonsense" (71). Finally, and most importantly, Lucas gives up the hunt for buried gold that obsesses him throughout the story in order to save his marriage to Molly. He is even willing to call Roth Edmonds "Mister," to withdraw the bill for divorce Roth had filed on Molly's behalf (124). While this may seem a concession on Lucas's part, he retains his dignity and self-direction. After leaving the courthouse, he tells Roth Edmonds to "wait" while he goes to buy Molly a sack of candy. Although Edmonds tells him, "You've bankrupted your waiting," it does no good because "Lucas had gone on. And Edmonds waited" (125). The story's ending finds Lucas retaining his dignity and independence, despite his willingness to challenge and triumph over white men. Faulkner imbues Lucas with the best of both black champions, but he nevertheless remains uncertain of such a mans' place in society.

The final passage of the story, in Lucas's words, sums Faulkner's take on civil rights circa the 1940 publication of Go Down, Moses : "Man has got three score and ten years on this earth, the Book says. He can want a heap in that time and a heap of what he can want is due to come to him ... I am near the end of my three score and ten, and I reckon that money aint for me" (127). Lucas is literally speaking of buried treasure, but that treasure symbolizes his life's ambitions: he wants to be completely independent of the white man, and he sees the buried money as a way to get beyond his reliance on his McCaslin inheritance. In the end, he sees his social situation doesn't quite allow him this victory. In a larger sense, Faulkner acknowledges once again the imminent social ascendancy of the black man, but defers that to a later time. Lucas has come far, like Johnson and Louis were able to do, but from Faulkner's standpoint, the time is not yet right for social equality. That the story never entirely validates the existence of the buried money in the first place suggests Faulkner was unsure that equality could ever be reached. However, the end of the story still rings with a certain potential. While Lucas acknowledges, "I done waited too late to start," he also insists "That money's there" (127). Even though he has cried off the search, his son-in-law George Wilkins has acted as Lucas's apprentice for the entire story. Perhaps George and Lucas's daughter Nat--the next generation--have time for a successful search.

Ironically, the popular and almost exclusively urban boxing narrative finds its closest counterpart in Faulkner's work within the Big Woods of "The Bear." Here Faulkner engages most fully the conflicts between men and nature, civilization and savagery, and between men and men, that are the perennial themes of the Popular Front boxing narrative. Three key passages of "The Bear" reveal Faulkner's awareness of and debt to boxing narratives. The first and most obvious is the conversation between the train's conductor and brakeman and Boon Hogganbeck as he and Ike travel to Memphis for whiskey. While Ike dozes, the men "talked about Lion and Old Ben as people later would talk about Sullivan and Kilrain and, later still, about Dempsey and Tunney" (220). Here Faulkner's narrator steps briefly from the story's present to encompass a broader time frame, from the date of the Sullivan-Kilrain bout in 1889 to the Dempsey-Tunney fight in 1927. These historical references are symbolically appropriate to the mythical quality Faulkner lends to Old Ben and the Big Woods. Sullivan is widely recognized as America's first worldwide heavyweight champion, lending him a primacy status similar to Old Ben's. Dempsey, perhaps the last of the Great White Hopes, tried unsuccessfully to regain his title from Tunney, perhaps foreshadowing Old Ben's death and Ike's disillusionment with mythical heroes and champions. For Faulkner's contemporary audience, Sullivan, and to a lesser degree Dempsey, represent "men of yesterday vanished from the earth" (238), the mythical and inaccessible heroes of a Golden Age remembered from a fallen present.

Boon, rather than Ike, is the key figure in these passages. Like Joe Christmas, Boon is a bare-knuckle brawler, fighting "with his hard and furious fists" over his racial ancestry (218). In light of the boxing discussion during Ike and Boone's train journey to Memphis, however, Boon's brawls and especially his climactic bout with Old Ben take on added resonance. Despite the epic quality Faulkner's prose lends to the fight, the narrator's earlier reference to legendary boxers also transforms it into a recognizable variation of the prizefight. Boon clenches with Old Ben, taking him on hand to hand as the bear rears on his hind paws, standing erect like a fellow combatant. The "almost infinitesimal movement of [Boon's] arm and shoulder as he probed and sought" mimics the "stinging blows" Johnson landed to Jeffries' face "in one, two, three order" (London 499). When Old Ben falls, he takes "two or three steps toward the woods on its hind feet as a man would have walked and crashed down.... It fell of a piece, as a tree falls, so that all three of them, man dog and bear, seemed to bounce once" (231). The finality of this description evokes London's description of Jeffries' fall--"He who has never been knocked out was knocked out" (501)--and both fights dramatize the destruction of a myth. The blood on Boon's face parallels that of the weary but triumphant champion after the climactic bout, which of course this one is. That a plebian of mixed ancestry could bring down the mythological bear is as shattering to the narrative as Johnson's defeating Jeffries--the "grizzly giant" (London 493).

As a working class man of mixed racial ancestry, Boon encompasses both the racial and socio-economic dimensions typical to the Popular Front boxing narrative and often to Great White Hope stories as well. In Faulkner's story, our working class champion ends not as an exalted gladiator, but as a defeated and broken buffoon. The ending of "The Bear" finds Ike gazing on at Boon's frantic and futile attempt to fix his gun, all the while being taunted by the tree full of squirrels he hopes to shoot. The parallels between Boon's ending and those of most Popular Front boxing heroes are most apparent in the images of industrialization and capitalist accumulation emphasized in these final passages. Late nineteenth and early twentieth century arbiters of manhood bemoaned the emasculating effects of industrialized society, and turned to boxing as one method of reclaiming a fleeting manhood. As Michael Kimmel aptly states in Manhood in America (2006), "If men could not make things with the skill of their hands, they could at least destroy things, or others, with them" (94). Boon has indeed destroyed with his hands, and his triumph over Old Ben momentarily raises him from comic relief to epic hero. However, just as Popular Front writers were critical of the ring's ability to counter the effects of industrialization, Boon's triumph fades among the sounds of industry. Ike at first mistakes the sound of Boon hammering at his gun for the sounds of the railroad steadily encroaching into his beloved Big Woods. The sound is "loud and heavy and not rapid yet with something frenzied about it, as the hammerer were not only a strong man and an earnest one but a little hysterical too" (314). Like Popular Front proletarian heroes, Boon is strong and earnest, but the industrial sounds of metal on metal are the sign of his unmanning. The adjectives "strong" and "earnest" are undercut by the historically feminine descriptor "hysterical." Boon's broken rifle also represents emasculation, as a symbol of his broken manhood and also of the industrialization that has broken it. The story establishes early on that "Boon had never been known to hit anything" with a gun, and although he misses Old Ben five times with a shotgun at close range, he is able to bring him down with a knife. The gun, the trapping of civilization that Ike must discard before earning his first glimpse of Old Ben (197-98), is for Boon both a symbol and cause of impotence. Boon is Faulkner's final version of 'the natural man,' victorious over his opponent but totally defeated by the larger forces of modern society.

While Boon's exploits are the most tangible references to boxing narratives, the entirety of "The Bear" is replete with one-on-one conflict, either in fists or in words, and these confrontations also closely resemble key moments in Popular Front boxing narratives. For example, Ike's argument with his cousin McCaslin Edmonds over the land and its taint of slavery mirrors confrontations between exploited boxers and unscrupulous promoters. In this case, Ike becomes the advocate of a "moral economy" while McCaslin plays the role of corrupt capitalist. Faulkner's version, however, is far more complex and less clear-cut than those of typical boxing narratives. To begin, Ike is no rising proletarian, but instead is heir to a wealthy family. The wealth he repudiates has already been amassed through the exploitative process of slavery, rather than through any action of Ike. Finally, whereas the immigrant laborers of Popular Front narratives, such as the Italians or Irish, are often forced to choose between riches and fame and their family heritage, Ike repudiates his heritage along with its attendant wealth. Ike may be tempted by corruption, but his is not the plight of the urban laborer.

McCaslin, despite his cynical veneer, is also no immoral promoter. He mocks Ike's decision and attempts to dissuade him, but ultimately loses nothing by Ike's repudiation. This verbal sparring match between Ike and McCaslin touches on many of the key issues, not only of Popular Front boxing narratives, but of earlier boxing tales as well. Early novels detailing the exploits of boxers like John L. Sullivan and Jeffries tended to play into a mythology of the white male as supreme being, especially in reaction to up-and-coming black fighters like Johnson. Early has pointed out the adolescent quality of such tales, calling them "essentially a little boy's adventure-romance about how white civilization must be rescued in much the same manner that a princess is rescued from a dragon" (9). Ike's Big Woods mirror this adolescent mythologizing, ignoring the harsh realities of modern life in favor of "hounds and bear and deer and men of yesterday vanished from the earth" (238). Ike constructs an order in which the ritual of the hunt hides the exploitation of the land, both by those who hunt its game and by the encroaching railroad. His social order as well, in which he is the hunter ("Sam was the chief, the prince;" and "Boon, the plebeian, was his huntsman" [213]) creates an unquestioned and pre-ordained hierarchy that masks the racial and class antagonisms that seep into Ike's fantasy from the corrupt and mundane world outside the woods.

The ledgers open a crack in Ike's fantasy as he is forced to acknowledge the connection between his enjoyment of the Big Woods and the horrible abuses of slavery in his family's past. His solution, however, is as childish as his fantasy. By repudiating his wealth and offering financial restitution to the last descendent of his family's slaves, Ike attempts to make the big, scary world go away and he retreats to his hunting camp. Alas, as Matthews has shown, the accounts can never balance, and the easy equation of people with tools and livestock within the ledgers always manages to leave the human cost unaccounted (186). The biggest problem is that Ike still defers any racial understanding to the future. When he tracks down and offers Fonsiba her share of his inheritance, he tells her:

   [M]y people brought the curse onto the land: maybe for that reason
   their descendantsalone can--not resist it, not combat it--maybe just endure and outlast it until the curse is lifted.Then your peoples' turn will come because we have forfeited ours. But not now. Not yet. Dont you see? (Faulkner 266, emphases added).

By first separating the races' responsibilities, their "turns," Ike denies the possibility of racial cooperation. By deferring African Americans' "turn" until the future, until some mythical "Not yet," he defers the real work of change and racial cooperation required to heal the breach in American society.

Faulkner borrows from both the Great White Hope tradition and the Popular Front boxing narrative to create ambivalence about the future of racial conflict and equality. Joe Christmas, the supposedly black man, dies at the hands of Percy Grimm. Thomas Sutpen defeats his slaves in hand-to-hand combat and Charles Bon falis to Henry Sutpen's gun. As Faulkner's understanding of race progresses, his black or mixed-blood characters have their moments of triumph. Lucas Beauchamp triumphs physically and morally over two generations of Edmondses. In "The Bear," Boon Hogganbeck receives the momentary revitalization and glory of the epic hero. He rises above his working-class station and the social stigma of his mixed ancestry and triumphs over his adversary. And yet, as in Popular Front narratives, no victory is ever complete. None of Faulkner's narratives allows the comfort of the Great Hope. Joe Christmas's death leaves the community shaken. An impaired Jim Bond survives as the sole heir to Thomas Sutpen's great failed project, while Henry perishes in a fire and Sutpen himself dies at the hands of his laborer Wash Jones. Likewise, the black or mixed-blood characters with the most potential never actualize. Lucas's dreams of complete financiai independence remain buried with the gold. Boon remains the plebian, and despite his legendary fight with Old Ben, his final moments in the text are filled with impotent rage and the lust for empty accumulation. Faulkner denies his white audience the expected racial victory and cheats his leftist readers of easy moralizing against capitalist exploitation.

William Faulkner struggled with the complexities of the modern nation and the modernizing South, and constantly sought to push his own limitations as thinker and artist. The early twentieth century was a time of immense complexity and great social, cultural, and economic upheaval. Faulkner never shied from that complexity. Engaging with boxing narratives in light of Jack Johnson and Joe Louis allowed Faulkner one more avenue to search for the racial dividing line in the American consciousness, and to try to understand the barriers to progress on national, regional, and even personal levels.

Anderson, Sherwood. "Brown Bomber." 1937. The Sherwood Anderson Reader . Ed. Paul Rosenfeld. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947.

Boddy, Kasia. "The Square Circle in the City: The Boxing Tale as Urban Genre." Babylon or New Jerusalem? Perceptions of the City in Literature. Ed. Valeria Tinkler-Villani. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi, 2005. 205-223.

Early, Gerald. The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture. New York: Ecco Press, 1994.

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! 1936. New York: Vintage International, 1990.

--. Go Down Moses. 1940. New York: Vintage, 1990.

--. Light in August . 1932. New York: Vintage, 1990.

Gorn, Elliott J. The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prizefighting in America . Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986.

Hietala, Thomas R. The Fight of the Century: Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, and the Struggle for Racial Equality . Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2002.

Kimmel, Michael S. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford UP 2006.

London, Jack. "Reports on the James J. Jeffries-Jack Johnson Championship Fight." 1910. The Portable Jack London . Ed. Earle Labor. New York: Penguin, 1994. 492-502.

Matthews, John T. "Faulkner and Proletarian Literature." Faulkner in Cultural Context: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Series, 1995 . Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie, Eds. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 1997- 166-190.

Messenger, Christian K. Sport and the Spirit of Play in Contemporary American Fiction . New York: Columbia UP, 1990.

Ward, Geoffrey C. Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson . New York: Alfred A. Knopff, 2004.

(1.) See John T. Matthews's essay, "Faulkner and the Culture Industry" in The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner (New York: Cambridge UP, 1995) 51-74.

(2.) See John Dudley's "Inside and Outside the Ring: Manhood, Race, and Art in American Literary Naturalism," College Literature 29.1 (2002): 53-82; Kassia Boddy's "Cultivating Peripheral Vision: Ralph Ellison, James Joyce and the Fight of the Century," Literature Compass I (2004): I-6, and "The Square Circle in the City: The Boxing Tale as Urban Genre"; and Michio Arimitsu's "A Counter-Sign in the Punch Line: The TragiComic Blending of Identities in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man ," Journal of the American literature Society of Japan 5 (2007): 54-71.

(3.) While many African American writers have written about boxing, they have largely done so in scholarly or critical ways rather than fictional ones. See Gerald Early's Culture of Bruising (5-45) for an illuminating discussion.

(4.) The innocent in this case being Faulkner. "An Innocent at Rinkside" was Faulkner's title for his piece on the first hockey match he ever watched.

(5.) While outcries over Johnson's exploits were loudest in America, both in the North and the South, they were echoed in Great Britain, France, and Australia. Interestingly enough, during his years in exile, Johnson spoke most fondly of his reception in Germany, which was already beginning to foment as a hotbed of white supremacy.

Source Citation

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Boxing Yoknapatawpha: Faulkner, Race, and Popular Front Boxing Narratives

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Cultural and literary critics find the boxing ring a rich arena for social signification. As Gerald Early characterizes it, boxing "is a remarkable metaphor for the philosophical and social condition of men (and, sometimes, women) in modern mass society" (xiv). Within the prize ring, one can establish independence, individuality, and most importantly a clear triumph over another individual.

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Source 3: Faulkner's American Dream and Hightower

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Source 3: Faulkner's American Dream and Hightower

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Through this Excerpt, Robert Martin discusses Faulkner’s essay "On Privacy: The American Dream, What Happened to It," and how it displays his adamant refutation of the American Dream. Martin interprets Faulkner's belief based on his writing to be that the “American Dream, the mythic dream of freedom, opportunity, and equality, is merely a vision-a vision that is unsubstantiated in reality.” (jstor.org) As shown in many of his works, Faulkner constantly speaks on the corruption in the south and how it affects the American Dream. In addition to that, Faulkner now shows the effects of that corruption by listing the Dream as “unsubstantiated in reality” (jstor.org) This statement furthers Faulkner’s refutation as well as gives us insight as to just how far Faulkner believes we are from achieving this dream.

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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By, et al. “Faulkner's Criticism of Modern America.” VQR Online, 12 Dec. 2003, https://www.vqronline.org/essay/faulkner%E2%80%99s-criticism-modern-america.

Whitehouse, Anne. "Southern voice." Cobblestone, vol. 32, no. 6, July-Aug. 2011, pp. 14+. Gale OneFile: High School Edition, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A266845651/STOM?u=clar33415&sid=bookmark-STOM&xid=7faccf9e. Accessed 18 Feb. 2022.

Bain, Joseph Grant. "Boxing Yoknapatawpha: Faulkner, Race, and Popular Front Boxing Narratives." The Southern Literary Journal, vol. 46, no. 1, fall 2013, pp. 19+. Gale OneFile: High School Edition, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A356355483/STOM?u=clar33415&sid=bookmark-STOM&xid=b8d8f1f4. Accessed 18 Feb. 2022.

Martin, Robert A. “Faulkner’s American Dream and Hightower.” College Literature, vol. 12, no. 3, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985, pp. 282–85, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25111676.