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In this provocative study of those novels in which Faulkner deals most directly with relations between blacks and whites, Lee Jenkins contends that, much as he may have wished to, Faulkner cannot ultimately escape from the dynamics of racism characteristic of white culture generally and of Southern white culture specifically.
Basing his analysis of the dynamics underlying Faulkner's racism primarily on John Irwin's (1975) more extensive psychoanalytic study of Faulkner, Doubling and Incest: Repetition and Revenge. Jenkins, like Irwin, uses Otto Rank's classic description of the doubling that occurs in narcissism to explain the novelist and his techniques. Where Irwin sees Faulkner using the double in a variety of ways, Jenkins limits his attention to the way in which the novelist presents his black characters: They are presented as projections of the white characters' repressed fears and desires. He concludes that, much as Faulkner may have personally deplored this kind of racism, as a novelist he was unable to “conceive of blacks as the human equals of whites” (p. 28), and even at his best (Intruder in the Dust, ), he fails to treat them as anything but “the other.” This failure, according to Jenkins, stems from Faulkner's underlying fear of miscegenation, a fear which the analyst sees as analagous to the fear of incest.
Jenkins's work is valuable in that it makes a white reader's complacent reactions to the novels more problematic. It is certainly true that Faulkner does not allow his black characters to develop their full potential as human beings. Rather, at best they serve the whites in some way while remaining static themselves. They serve either literally, as Dilsey does in The Sound and the Fury, or figuratively as foils or catalysts, as Lucas Beauchamp serves the development of the white boy in Intruder in the Dust. That Faulkner may have acknowledged this limitation in himself is suggested by his comment quoted in Jenkins: “The white man can never really kno