The wit and jokes which characters in “The Hamlet” by Faulkner elucidate a more problematic thought on performative masculinity and how it polices the “other.” Race and sex is tangled in the humor of his texts as he, according to Susan V. Donaldson is “Obsessed with defining and cataloguing the opposites of manliness,” in order to make up for his own shortcoming to masculinity. Its hard at first, to believe that humor in positive light could be harmful because it usually changes situations or relationships from formal to intimate and arguably flips official values of society on its head. Faulkner employs humor in his most masculine characters to entertain his white male audience. He, however, writes from the standpoint of a ruling while male community and this performance serves to reify, rather than challenge the hierarchy.

I understand hegemonic masculinity as an soup we all sit in which changes like the tide to the current socio-political context of the time. It makes sense then that the values of manhood have changed in order to maintain the hierarchy allowing white men to sit on the top. Manhood has been understood in the past as a the opposite of childhood. the trials and tribulations of what a boy goes through during puberty in order to grow into autonomy and responsibility of his power. however, this definition changed as masculinity became referred to a “set of behavioral traits and attitudes that were contrasted to the new opposite, femininity.” (Clarke,24) The turn of definition effectively allows the men on top to grant other men the title of masculine on their own subjective views and pigeon-hole ones they feel threatened by to remain effeminate by desexualizing or hypersexualizing their identity. Better said, it is much easier to “control a floating signifier” (Clarke,30) such as “masculinity,” than the essence of manhood which is rooted in self and not other’s perception of self.

This act of policing is done well in Faulkner’s works through humor to belittle the “others” into submission and rank and giving power to the ones who constructed the joke. For example, unable to read black performance, the characters in The Hamlet write Joe Christmas (a man believed to be part black) as a joke.

“[h]e never acted like neither a nigger or a white man. That was it…For him to be a murderer and all dressed up and walking the town like he dared them to touch him, when he ought to have been skulking and hiding in the woods, muddy and dirty and running It was like we was never a murderer, let alone a nigger too.” (Faulkner, 350)

in the eyes of the white men imposing an African American identity on Joe, joe did not act out his right role accordingly. The “right” role doesn’t exist for Joe because it was never established by the dominant cultural force of white hegemonic masculinity. Joe gives no laughs to the community so he becomes the joke itself for failing to be “black.”

The complex issues underling Faulkner’s jokes is that the world constructed is a game with players trying to take power and control amongst others. Race and gender are tied to the match as tools to control the audience-such as when they should laugh. Much like hegemonic masculinity, humor is performed in front of an audience. The need for an audience in hegemonic masculinity is essential because it becomes powerless if not constantly exercised and seen. This, matches the humorist’s need for an audience in order to be successful. Also much like masculinity,  Faulknerian humor must be acted in front of other men in order to create an identity of “men.” At its core, the act of humoring as a trait of performative masculinity is also a homo-social activity. While all it takes to be a man in front of a woman is an act of penetration, in order to establish a manly standing amongst a community of men, they must entertain their male friends at the expense of defining “others” through insults and innuendoes painted over by laughing to reduce their problems as jokes. The function of jokes becomes a weapon to contain brutality and horror in a vial of “sanity and human perspective” (Clarke, 31).

There are, however, moments when the performance is undermined and light is shone on what it truly is-an act. Sometimes even Faulkner sheds light to the true fragility of masculinity.  A furniture salesman retells the story of a man Bryon that is unable to perform during sex to his own wife. He finds Bryon’s lack of masculinity in sexual performance entertaining and by re-telling the story to his wife, he tries to assert his own success in this area. Lena however, used as much as Bryon is to satisfy the masculinity identity of his husband retorts by saying he should be ashamed to bring up the story, and instead says “You might have woken up the baby too.” (Faulkner,503) Lena turns the joke into one on her husband by making male sexuality unimportant to her. She ignores it to maternal concern. The truth about performative masculinity is highlighted in its ineffectiveness.

Humor is used repeatedly in Faulkner’s novels in order to consolidate positions of power and dominance establishing what it means to be a man. But to be a man at the expense of exploiting and objectifying everyone who is not man to the audience is counter-intuitive as it easily is broken down to how vulnerable masculinity is when the audience or object defies the roles which humor is used to assign them into.

Citations:

Clarke, Deborah. “Humorously Masculine—or Humor as Masculinity—in ‘Light in August.’” <i>Faulkner Journal</i>, vol. 17, no. 1, 2001, pp. 19–36. <i>JSTOR</i>, www.jstor.org/stable/24908298. Accessed 8 Aug. 2021.

-Amber Wang