"They got . . .": Ernest J. Gaines's Semiotic Reversal of William Faulkner

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• “They got . . .”: Ernest J. Gaines’s Semiotic Reversal of William Faulkner
• Matthew Teutsch

David Lionel Smith argues that rather than creating a hierar-chical reading of authors like William Faulkner and Ernest J. Gaines, which would ultimately place Gaines in a subordinate position since he follows Faulkner chronologically, “we need an egalitarian hermeneutic, which would insist upon locating both authors as respondents to and participants in an on-going cultural discourse” (59). Both Gaines and Faulkner participate in the “on-going cultural discourse” of race in the United States, and specifically in the South. Drawing upon Smith’s assertion, this article examines the ways that each author uses a specific, third-person pronoun to explore the semiotic connotations between that word and issues of race and segregation.

Throughout his career, Gaines commented on the influence that Faulkner had on his writing. In 1969, Gaines told Gregory Fitzgerald and Peter Marchant that for “A Long Day in November,” he got the style “from Faulkner and from Joyce” (13). Speaking with Fred Beauford in 1972, Gaines commented on the way that Faulkner made him listen to people talk: “[T]his man taught me how to listen to dialogue; he taught me how to leave out. You can say one word and if you say it right and build up to it and follow through, it can carry as much meaning as if you had used an entire sentence.” While Faulkner taught Gaines structure, style, and dialogue, the Louisiana author had “no interest in Faulkner’s philosophy,” and this is where Gaines’s response to and reworking of the Mississippian come into play (19).

Through his use of the third-person plural pronoun “they,” Gaines directly confronts “Faulkner’s philosophy,” using the semiotic connections of the word to point out the ways that language works to render individuals invisible and construct meaning. In “Discourse in the Novel,” Mikhail Bakhtin points out that literature calls for “dialogic penetration into the word,” which “opens up fresh aspects in the word [End Page 437] . . . which, since they were revealed by dialogic means, become more immediate to perception” (352). Thinking about specific words and the connotations they inherently bring to mind, we can explore the ways that Gaines deploys the word “they” throughout some of his works and consider these instances in relation to Faulkner’s description of Dilsey and her family in the appendix to The Sound and the Fury (1929), which first appeared in Malcolm Cowley’s 1946 The Portable Faulkner.

After extensively chronicling the history of the Compson family from 1699–1945 and relating what happened to the Compson characters after the end of the novel, Faulkner’s appendix relegates a sentence apiece for TP, Frony, Luster, and Dilsey. He introduces this section by writing, “And that was all. These others were not Compsons. They were black” (270). He concludes the appendix with the “infamous” two-word sentence for Dilsey: “They endured” (271). Through the use of “they,” Faulkner strips Dilsey of her individuality and creates an essentialist representation of his African American characters in the novel, all of which converge in the image of Dilsey Gibson. Through his use of the pronoun “they,” Gaines turns the referent around, focusing its gaze on the white community, presenting white people not as individuals but as a singular entity that maintains power through oppression, subjugation, and surveillance.

While Dilsey does endure the downfall of the Compson family, we do not see her interiority as we do the Compson narrators’, and we do not see Dilsey apart from her role as housekeeper for the family, even during the final section of the novel as she is watching after Benjy. As Charles Nilon argues about Dilsey and other women servants in Faulkner, “Each of these women identifies herself with a particular white family and its fortunes and works as hard as she can to protect the family and its honor” (101). Gaines notes this when people ask him whether or not he had Dilsey in mind when writing The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971). He told John Lowe in 1994, “[T]he difference between Dilsey and Miss Jane Pittman is that Faulkner gets Dilsey...