Black Death, Social Death, and the Hunting Ritual in William Faulkner’s “The Bear”

In our second PhD work-in-progress seminar of the fall semester, Shiyu Zhang will present a section of his project on ritual in William Faulkner’s fiction. Shiyu will pre-circulate the paper (around 15-20 pages maximum) by 20 November, and we will begin with Shiyu introducing the paper and his project before opening up for questions and discussion. If you would like to attend, please contact me for a copy of the pre-circulated paper.

Abstract

“The Bear,” the fifth story within William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, stands as one of the most acclaimed hunting narratives in the U.S. literary canon. The story documents (white) men’s obsession with Old Ben, the mythical alpha male black bear, as it is manifested in a grand annual ritual: the bear hunt. The story culminates with the related deaths of Ben and Sam's fathers, a mixed-blood huntsman of both Native American and African American descent. Scholarship on Faulkner’s story has paired the deaths of these two “black” characters and noted the racialized discourse and racialized violence sustained in white men’s hunting adventures. Yet the hunting ritual’s systematic reenactment of the cultural strategies of social death, as a condition of ontological black death, remains largely overlooked. In this paper, I want to suggest that the hunt’s investment in perpetuating black social death is critical to scholarly understanding of how Faulkner interrogates the southern hunting ritual’s complicity in the ideology of race. I will investigate the implementation and intensification of “natal alienation” – for sociologist Orlando Patterson, the defining quality of social death – through the ritual of the bear hunt: in the tracking, hunting, and killing of Ben, and the death of Sam.