Abstract

The smallest ambition of this essay is to demonstrate that Rider, the central character in William Faulkner’s short story “Pantaloon in Black,” cannot be understood. This may be of some interest to Faulkner specialists. But the fact that he cannot be understood has ramifications, because “Pantaloon in Black,” seems to be the anomaly of the book Go Down, Moses, which is either a collection of stories or a novel, depending on the success one has in integrating “Pantaloon in Black” into it. If Rider cannot be understood, then Go Down, Moses has an enigma at the center of its mysteries, around which it cannot be made to cohere.More important to nonspecialists is the question of why Rider cannot be understood, and, consequently, why Go Down, Moses disintegrates. To answer this I want to perform the logical operation modus tollens on Stanley Fish’s idea that interpretations are produced by interpretive communities: if interpretations fail, then it must be because interpretive communities fail. Of course, Fish everywhere argues that interpretations must always, on the contrary, succeed; the lesson of Is There a Text in This Class? is that interpretive communities produce texts inexorably and inevitably in their own image. But Fish’s idea of an interpretive community is something like the Modern Language Association, or the set of all English professors, or the Yale school—bigger or smaller machines perfectly programmed for producing texts out of theoretical presuppositions. What is, however, even English professors are members of communities that fit the definition of an interpretive community, by virtue of the fact that they speak through our readings, but which are not chiefly engaged in the manufacture of masterful criticism? Worse: what if these communities speak a different language from those to which we professionally belong? Worse yet: what is they are disintegrating even as the MLA, or the Yale school, endures, or prevails?The point is not that Fish is wrong; it is that he has oversimplified his sense of a text by reducing it to the instrument of communication used by professor speaking to other professors. But in “Pantaloon in Black,” Faulkner has formed a text in the image of a Southern Negro and invited us to join an interpretive community on the model of Yoknapatawpha County. Insofar as we take up that invitation, we fail to understand his story; insofar as we reject it, we also fail to understand his story. The paradox is the result of our being forced to join a community which does not cohere; to the degree that that community fails to cohere, so does our reading. What Faulkner says to Fish is that the American belief in the power of interpretive communities is akin to an idealist’s dream of an integrated South. John Limon is assistant professor of English at Williams College. He is currently working on a book, Half-Sight of Science, on the history of the American novel in relation to the history of science and science philosophy