Beyond Oedipus: Lucas Beauchamp, Ned Barnett, and Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust

Abstract

Read for its latent meanings, Intruder in the Dust traces the cause of racial lynchings to a model of identity formation based in exclusionary tactics. At this symbolic level, the novel's two central developments, the mob frenzy to lynch Lucas Beauchamp and the murder of Vinson Gowrie, appear to be motivated by a desire to identify and empower the self through the abjection of another. Disguised by doubling and distanced by undeveloped characters and a convoluted plot, the novel's project is to mount an inquiry into the fundamental problem at the crux of the psychoanalytic and psycholinguistic master narrative of identity, namely, that difference, in particular, white, male difference (what Lacan calls "the phallic distinction"), appears to be insecurely secured by repression. Stripped to its essentials, the identity narrative stipulates that alienation, or displacement, prevents culture's binaries, like male and female or black and white, from collapsing into one another. This narrative accepts as axiomatic that authority and autonomy are purchased by enforced subordination and that egalitarianism is a threat to differential meanings. Faulkner's novels, however, accept no first principle as a given; rather, they relentlessly expose and question a system of signification that exalts [End Page 788] exclusionary tactics—like the lynching of Lucas Beauchamp—as the foundation of meaning and identity.