Thomas Chatterton Williams
NPLUSONE - January 13, 2015
James Baldwin wrote that although William
Faulkner might not accurately be called a racist, the novelist “could
see Negroes only as they related to him, not as they related to each
other.” For Baldwin, Faulkner’s depictions of blacks had far less to do
with them as people than with “the torment of their creator” who was
“seeking to exorcise a history that is also a curse.”
In these nightmarish days in Paris since the astonishing massacre of
cartoonists, black and Arab police officers, and random hostages in a
Jewish épicerie, it is Baldwin whose words echo loudest in my
mind—more than Voltaire or Rushdie or Christopher Hitchens or any other
exemplar of satire and blasphemy to be repeatedly quoted (and misquoted)
in the press and on social media. In the above lines, taken from No Name in the Street,
Baldwin is writing not only about Faulkner, but about France and his
growing understanding of the country’s vexed relationship to its
homegrown underclass.
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