WIL LIAM FAULKNER IN CO NT EXT

William Faulkner in Context explores the environment that condi-

tioned Faulkners creative work. This book provides a broad and
authoritative framework that will help readers to understand better
this widely read yet challenging writer. Each essay offers a critical
assessment of Faulkners work as it relates to such topics as the places,
historical times, and imaginative genres that conditioned Faulkners
writing. Although Faulkner dwelt in his native Mississippi through-
out his life, his visits to cities like New Orleans, Paris, and Hollywood
profoundly shaped his early career. Inextricable from the dramatic
upheavals of the twentieth century, Faulkners writing was deeply
affected by the Great War, the Great Depression, World War II, and
the civil rights movement. In this volume, a host of renowned scholars
shed light on this enigmatic writer and render him more accessible to
students and teachers alike.

j o h n t . m a t t h e w s is Professor of English at Boston Univer-

sity. His previous books include The Play of Faulkners Language;
The Sound and the Fury: Faulkner and the Lost Cause; and William
Faulkner: Seeing Through the South. Matthewss articles on Faulkner
and Southern literature have appeared in such journals as Texas Stud-
ies in Language and Literature, American Literature, American Literary
History, and Philological Quarterly.
W I L L I A M FAUL K N E R
IN CO NT EXT

edited by
JO HN T. M AT TH EW S
Boston University
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John T. Matthews 2015
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
William Faulkner in context / [edited by] John Matthews, Boston University.
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isbn 978-1-107-05037-2 (hardback)
1. Faulkner, William, 18971962 Criticism and interpretation. I. Matthews, John, 1950 editor.
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 Contents

Acknowledgments page viii

Notes on contributors ix
List of abbreviations xiv

Introduction 1
John T. Matthews

places
oxford, mississippi
1 Born there: Faulkner, Oxford, and Lafayette County 11
Philip Weinstein

the mississippi valley

2 Primeval, Goddam, and beyond: On Mississippi 23
Robert Jackson

the caribbean
3 A gulf society 35
Matthew Pratt Guterl
4 William Faulkners Caribbean poetics 46
Valerie Loichot

africa
5 What was Africa to Faulkner? 59
Keith Cartwright
v
vi Contents
cities of the modern
6 Cosmopolitan culture: New Orleans to Paris 71
Taylor Hagood
7 The Hollywood challenge 79
James D. Bloom

times
rural modernization between the wars
8 Topologies of discourse in Faulkner 91
Charles Hannon
9 It and Ole in 1930: The structural economy of Faulkners
complex words 100
Richard Godden
10 Modern sexuality 111
Kristin Fujie
11 The cage of gender 119
John T. Matthews
12 The world of Jim Crow 135
Leigh Anne Duck

the united states as world power

13 South to the world: William Faulkner and the American
Century 147
Harilaos Stecopoulos
14 Unsteady state: Faulkner and the Cold War 156
Catherine Gunther Kodat

genres
fictions of the plantation
15 Truth so mazed: Faulkner and US plantation fiction 169
Peter Schmidt
 Contents vii
modernism
16 Faulkner and the Modernist novel 185
Jacques Pothier
17 Faulkner goes to Hollywood 194
Sarah Gleeson-White

fictions of race
18 Reading William Faulkner after the civil rights era 207
Barbara Ladd

american gothic
19 Writing past trauma: Faulkner and the gothic 219
Lisa Hinrichsen

the market for fiction

20 Faulkner and the paperback trade 231
David M. Earle

after faulkner: a world of readers

21 Writing after Faulkner: Faulkner and contemporary US fiction 249
Jay Watson
22 Reading Faulkner: Empathy, distance, Tehran 259
Michael Kreyling
23 Faulkner and Latin America; Latin America in Faulkner 270
Emron Esplin
24 William Faulkner and Japan 279
Takako Tanaka
25 Faulkner as/and the postcolonial writer 288
Hosam Aboul-Ela
26 Translating Faulkner: Can a translator be androgynous? 298
Ikuko Fujihira

Index 307
 Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the contributors to this volume for their unfailingly gener-
ous collaboration. The several anonymous readers for Cambridge Univer-
sity Press also contributed importantly to the eventual design of the book,
and I want to emphasize that the volume reflects the thinking of a great
many experts about what readers might want to know as they engage with
Faulkners writing. I thank Ray Ryan for his commitment to the project
and confidence in my conception of it. Research support funded by Boston
Universitys College of Arts Sciences was indispensable, and I thank Dean
Virginia Sapiro and my chair in the Department of English, Gene Jarrett,
for assistance throughout. I am especially grateful to Greg Chase, a doctoral
student in English at Boston University, who served as research assistant in
the preparation of the manuscript. Gregs work was indispensable at every
stage, and conducted with supreme skillfulness and dispatch.

viii
 Contributors

hosam aboul-ela is Associate Professor of English at the University of

Houston and the author of Other South: Faulkner, Coloniality, and the
Mariategui Tradition (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), as well as
co-editor (with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak) of the new publication
series Theory in the World at Macmillan Publishers. He is also a
translator of Arab literature, and his current project is a study of the link
between literary culture and empire in the United States from World
War II to the present.
james d. bloom is Professor of English and American Studies at Muh-
lenberg College. He has written Hollywood Intellect (Rowan Littlefield/
Lexington Books, 2009), Gravity Fails: The Comic Jewish Shaping of
Modern America (Praeger, 2003), The Literary Bent: The Search for High
Art in Contemporary American Writing (University of Pennsylvania Press,
1997), and Left Letters: The Culture Wars of Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman
(Columbia University Press, 1992).
keith cartwright is Professor of English at the University of North
Florida. He is the author of Sacral Grooves, Limbo Gateways: Travels
in Deep Southern Time, Circum-Caribbean Space, Afro-Creole Authority
(University of Georgia Press, 2013) and Reading Africa into American
Literature: Epics, Fables, and Gothic Tales (University of Kentucky Press,
2004).
leigh anne duck is Associate Professor of English at the University of
Mississippi and the author of The Nations Region: Southern Modernism,
Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism (University of Georgia Press, 2006).
She has written widely on modern Southern literature, and her current
book project is a study of the US South in Hollywood movies.
david m. earle is Associate Professor of English at the University of West
Florida. He is the author of Re-Covering Modernism: Pulps, Paperbacks,
ix
x Notes on contributors
and the Prejudice of Form (Ashgate, 2009) and All Man!: Hemingway,
1950s Mens Magazines, and the Masculine Persona (Kent State University
Press, 2009).
emron esplin is Assistant Professor of English at Brigham Young Uni-
versity. His scholarship focuses on America in its hemispheric sense.
He has published comparative articles on Katherine Anne Porter, Nellie
Campobello, Pancho Villa, Edgar Allan Poe, and Jorge Luis Borges. His
current book project is entitled Borges Poe.
kristin fujie is Assistant Professor of English at Lewis & Clark Uni-
versity. Her research focuses on Faulkners early fiction, and she is the
author of All Mixed Up: Female Sexuality and Race in The Sound and
the Fury, in Annette Trefzer and Ann J. Abadie (eds.), Faulkners Sexuali-
ties: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2007 (University Press of Mississippi,
2010).
ikuko fujihira recently retired as Professor of English at Chuo Uni-
versity in Tokyo. She is the author of The Patchwork Quilt in Carni-
val Colors: Toni Morrisons Novels (Gakugei Shorin Publishing House,
1996, in Japanese) and William Faulkners America in Absalom, Absalom!
(Kenkyusha, 2008, in Japanese), and the editor of A Readers Encyclopedia
of William Faulkner (Shohakusha Publishing House, 2008, in Japanese).
She also translated the 1986 revised edition of Faulkners Absalom, Absa-
lom! into Japanese (two volumes) (Iwanami Shoten, Bunko Edition, 2011
and 2012).
sarah gleeson-white is Senior Lecturer in English at the University
of Sydney and the author of Strange Bodies: Gender and Identity in the
Novels of Carson McCullers (University of Alabama Press, 2003). She has
published several articles on Faulkners writing for Hollywood film, and
is preparing a scholarly edition of his screenplays, William Faulkner at
Twentieth Century-Fox.
richard godden is Professor of English at the University of California
at Irvine and the author of William Faulkner: An Economy of Complex
Words (Princeton University Press, 2007), Fictions of Labor: William
Faulkner and the Souths Long Revolution (Cambridge University Press,
1997), and Fictions of Capital: The American Novel from James to Mailer
(Cambridge University Press, 1990).
matthew pratt guterl is Professor of Africana Studies and American
Studies and Chair of the Department of American Studies at Brown
 Notes on contributors xi
University, and the author of several books, including Mother of the
World: Josephine Baker and the Rainbow Tribe (Harvard University
Press, 2014), Discrimination: Seeing Race in Modern America (Univer-
sity of North Carolina Press, 2013), American Mediterranean: Southern
Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation (Harvard University Press, 2008),
and The Color of Race in America, 1900-1940 (Harvard University Press,
2001).
taylor hagood is the Lifelong Learning Society Distinguished Pro-
fessor of Arts and Letters at Florida Atlantic University. He is the
author of Faulkners Imperialism: Space, Place, and the Materiality of
Myth (Louisiana State University Press, 2008) and Secrecy, Magic, and
the One-Act Plays of Harlem Renaissance Women Writers (Ohio State
University Press, 2010).
charles hannon is Associate Dean of the Faculty and Professor of Com-
puting and Information Studies at Washington and Jefferson College.
He is the author of Faulkner and the Discourses of Culture (Louisiana
State University Press, 2005).
lisa hinrichsen is Assistant Professor of English at the University of
Arkansas and the author of Possessing the Past: Trauma, Imagination,
and Memory in Post-Plantation Southern Literature (forthcoming from
Louisiana State University Press, 2015).
robert jackson is Associate Professor of English at the University of
Tulsa and the author of Seeking the Region in American Literature and
Culture (Louisiana State University Press, 2005). He has published widely
on interdisciplinary topics among literature, film and media, and social
history, and is at work on a book on race and Southern film.
catherine gunther kodat is Dean of the Division of Liberal Arts and
Professor of Humanities at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia,
and the author of Dont Act, Just Dance: The Metapolitics of Cold War
Culture (Rutgers University Press, forthcoming 2014). She has published
numerous articles on Faulkner, and written widely about the arts in
modern America.
michael kreyling is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of
English at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of numerous books,
including Eudora Weltys Achievement of Order (Louisiana State Univer-
sity Press, 1981), Figures of the Hero in Southern Narrative (Louisiana
State University Press, 1986), Inventing Southern Literature (University
xii Notes on contributors
Press of Mississippi, 1998), and The South That Wasnt There (Louisiana
State University Press, 2010).
barbara ladd is Professor of English at Emory University. She is the
author of Resisting History: Gender, Modernity, and Authorship in William
Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty (Louisiana State Uni-
versity Press, 2007) and Nationalism and the Color Line in George W.
Cable, Mark Twain, and William Faulkner (Louisiana State University
Press, 1996).
vale rie loichot is Professor of French and English at Emory University,
and the author of Orphan Narratives: The Postplantation Literatures of
Faulkner, Glissant, Morrison, and Saint-John Perse (University of Virginia
Press, 2007) and The Tropics Bite Back: Culinary Coups in Caribbean
Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
john t. matthews is Professor of English at Boston University. He is
the author of The Play of Faulkners Language (Cornell University Press,
1982), The Sound and the Fury: Faulkner and the Lost Cause (G.K. Hall,
1994), and William Faulkner: Seeing Through the South (Wiley-Blackwell,
2009), and the editor of A Companion to the Modern American Novel
1900-1950 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009).
jacques pothier is a professor of English and Dean of the Institute
for Languages and International Studies at the Universite de Versailles-
Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. He has written William Faulkner: essayer de
tout dire (Belin [Voix Americanes], 2003) and Les nouvelles de Flannery
OConnor (Editions de lUniversite de Versailles St. Quentin / Editions
du Temps, 2004).
peter schmidt is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English Lit-
erature at Swarthmore College. He is the author of Sitting in Darkness:
New South Fiction, Education, and the Rise of Jim Crow Colonialism,
1865-1920 (University Press of Mississippi, 2008), The Heart of the Story:
Eudora Weltys Short Fiction (University of Mississippi Press, 1991), and
co-editor (with Amritjit Singh) of Postcolonial Theory and the U.S.: Race,
Ethnicity, and Literature (University Press of Mississippi, 2000).
harilaos stecopoulos is Associate Professor of English at the Uni-
versity of Iowa. He is the author of Reconstructing the World: Southern
Fictions and U.S. Imperialisms, 1898-1976 (Cornell University Press, 2008)
and co-editor (with Michael Uebel) of Race and the Subject of Masculini-
ties (Duke University Press, 1997). He is currently working on two book
 Notes on contributors xiii
projects, one an examination of the relationship between US Southern
literature and US imperialism from the 1890s to the 1990s, and a second
on political dramas of the 1960s and 1970s.
takako tanaka is Professor of English at Nagoya City University
in Japan. She is the author of a book in Japanese, A Study of
Faulkners Fiction 1919-1931: Body and Language (Kaibunsha, 2002), and
numerous articles on Faulkner and other American writers, including
The Global/Local Nexus of Patriarchy: Japanese Writers Encounter
Faulkner, in Global Faulkner: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2006, Eds.
Annette Trefzer and Ann J. Abadie (University Press of Mississippi,
2009).
jay watson is Professor of English at the University of Mississippi and
Howry Professor of Faulkner Studies. He is the author of Forensic Fic-
tions: The Lawyer Figure in Faulkner (University of Georgia Press, 1993)
and Reading for the Body: The Recalcitrant Materiality of Southern Fiction,
1893-1985 (University of Georgia Press, 2012), and the editor of Faulkner
and Whiteness (University Press of Mississippi, 2011).
philip weinstein recently retired as the Alexander Griswold Cummins
Professor of English at Swarthmore College. He is the author of numer-
ous books, including Faulkners Subject: A Cosmos No One Owns (Cam-
bridge University Press, 1992), What Else But Love? The Ordeal of Race
in Faulkner and Morrison (Columbia University Press, 1996), Becoming
Faulkner (Oxford University Press, 2009), and Unknowing: The Work
of Modernist Fiction (Cornell University Press, 2005). He edited The
Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner, first edition (Cambridge
University Press, 1995).
 Abbreviations

AA Absalom, Absalom! (1936; New York: Vintage International,

1990).
AILD As I Lay Dying (1930; New York: Vintage International, 1990).
BW Big Woods (New York: Random House, 1955).
CS Collected Stories of William Faulkner (New York: Vintage,
1977).
EPP Early Prose and Poetry, ed. Carvel Collins (Boston: Atlantic/
Little Brown, 1962).
ESPL Essays, Speeches & Public Letters, ed. James B. Meriwether
(New York: Random House, 1966).
FA Father Abraham, ed. James B. Meriwether (New York:
Random House, 1984).
FAB A Fable (1954; New York: Vintage International, 2011).
FD Flags in the Dust [Sartoris] (1929; New York: Vintage
International, 2012).
FU Faulkner in the University, eds. Frederick L. Gwynn and
Joseph L. Blotner (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia
Press, 1959).
GDM Go Down, Moses (1942; New York: Vintage International,
1990).
H The Hamlet (1940; New York: Vintage International, 1991).
ID Intruder in the Dust (1948; New York: Vintage International,
1991).
JER If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem [The Wild Palms] (1939; New York:
Vintage International, 1995).
KG Knights Gambit (1949; New York: Vintage International,
2011).
LA Light in August (1932; New York: Vintage International, 1990).

xiv
 List of abbreviations xv
LG Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner
19261962, eds. James B. Meriwether and Michael Millgate
(New York: Random House, 1968).
M The Mansion (1959; New York: Vintage International, 2011).
MOS Mosquitoes (1927; New York: Liveright, 1997).
NOS New Orleans Sketches, ed. Carvel Collins (New York: Random
House, 1968).
P Pylon (1935; New York: Vintage International, 2011).
R The Reivers (1962; New York: Vintage International, 2011).
RN Requiem for a Nun (1951; New York: Vintage International,
2011).
S Sanctuary (1931; New York: Vintage International, 1993).
SF The Sound and the Fury (1929; New York: Vintage
International, 1990).
SL Selected Letters of William Faulkner, ed. Joseph Blotner (New
York: Vintage, 1978).
SP Soldiers Pay (1926; New York: Liveright, 1997).
T The Town (1957; New York: Vintage International, 2011).
U The Unvanquished (1938; New York: Vintage International,
1991).
US Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner, ed. Joseph Blotner
(New York: Vintage International, 1997).
 Introduction
John T. Matthews

Our book attempts to explore the range of environments that conditioned

Faulkners creative work and its transmission to his readers. Our goal
has been to provide a broad, authoritative resource that will help readers
orient themselves to this widely read yet challenging writer, who lived in a
place and time that newcomers to his imaginative world increasingly may
find unfamiliar. We hope to provide information about relevant frames of
reference for Faulkners writing itself, but also to suggest how his distinctive
imagination can alter our views of those contexts in representing less
familiar strains of modern American life, regional experience, historical
consciousness, and modernist artistry. The contexts for Faulkners fiction
hardly determined what he imagined, yet they surely furnished the material
his mind worked on during his nearly forty years as a novelist. Faulkner
dwelt in his native Mississippi throughout his life, and witnessed from
the perspective of a Southerner the crucial events of the first half of the
twentieth century that reshaped both his nation and region: the Great War,
the Great Depression, the Great Migration, a second World War, the Cold
War, and the civil rights movement, to name only the most prominent
social and political events of his age. This is not to say that Faulkner was
primarily a Southern writer. He once insisted to his editor that he did not
consider his writing to be expressly about his region in any narrow way:
Im inclined to think that my material, the South, is not very important
to me. I just happen to know it, and dont [sic] have time in one life to
learn another one and write it at the same time (SL 185).
A book like ours takes context to include many domains outside the
immediate time and place of the authors writing life. They encompass
imagined as well as actual spaces, natural as well as social terrains, cul-
tural as well as political institutions. As Pascale Casanova has shown in
her magisterial study of literary prestige, The World Republic of Letters,
even when Faulkner seemed to be writing about his South, he was doing
so as an ambitious modernist from the cultural periphery, bidding for
1
2 John T. Matthews
consecration from the arbiters of high literary culture long associated with
Paris. Such aims shaped Faulkners subject matter and style no less than
did his determination to depict his little postage-stamp of native soil,
as he otherwise once put his ambition (LG 255). Contexts are sites of
interplay, exchange, and mutual effect. They also must be understood as
textual material in their own right composed of documents and their
interpretations, and, like literary texts, subject to the constraints of verbal
representation, point of view, genre, and authorial desire. Many historians
of the South have acknowledged that their inquiries into the Southern past
have been conditioned by Faulkners vivid fictional accounts of it.1
The plasticity of Faulkners texts creates fictions that seem capable, often
uncannily, of reconfiguring their central subject matter in response to shift-
ing preoccupations among generations of readers world-wide, inviting us
today to think about his writing as a phenomenon of hemispheric affilia-
tions and global affinities. We find Faulkner in the twenty-first century as a
voice that continues to matter to writers the world over: he is read ardently
in parts of the Middle East and Africa, with special regard for his mas-
sive chronicle of rural modernization under market capitalism; he attracts
audiences in Europe curious with fresh urgency about the consequences
of racial and ethnic division, and others who discover his relevance to
small nations (Milan Kunderas term) determined to resist modern impe-
rialisms; and he continues to speak to global Souths to South America, to
a post-colonial Caribbean, to Asian ex-colonial states from double posi-
tions within New World plantation history: as at once national colonizer
and peripheral colonized, at once racial sovereign and regional subaltern.
Recent developments in American studies, Southern studies, and
Faulkner criticism itself have begun to secure these new ways of think-
ing about Faulkner as a world writer. The field-wide pivot toward the
hemispheric and transatlantic horizons of US literary culture has brought
aspects of Faulkners writing into view that are only now being appreci-
ated. In the last decade, important book-length studies have intensified
scrutiny of Faulkners fiction in the context of Latin American plantation
colonialism and its aftermath.2 Such investigations extend the pioneer-
ing efforts of a special issue of The Faulkner Journal in 1996 edited by
Michel Gresset that was devoted to Faulkner and Latin America. Contin-
ued explorations into the ways the African diaspora shaped US national
cultures, into the origins and permeation of Hispanic literary traditions in
the United States in the nineteenth century, and into common features of
international modernisms emerging from cross-currents of colonial resis-
tance and independence, to cite only a few examples, should create new
 Introduction 3
vantages on principal US writers such as Faulkner. Keith Cartwrights work
on the effaced presence of African cultural forms in American literature
locates convincing examples in Faulkner.3 Research into the widespread
disavowal of the Haitian revolution by slave-owning classes in Cuba and
Santo Domingo, such as that by Sibylle Fischer, should provide larger
contexts for the work already done on Faulkners mindfulness of hemi-
spheric US imperialism, plantation economics, and New World slavery.4
One recent social history of the American Gulf plantation world begins
with a rehearsal of Thomas Sutpens travels as an imaginary indication of
the transnational society that drew Havana and New Orleans into a once-
flourishing network of Caribbean agricultural production, trade, cultural
exchange, and social cosmopolitanism.5 Projects comparing Faulkner and
Toni Morrison with Francophone Caribbean authors such as Saint-John

Perse and Edouard Glissant, or setting Faulkner in the context of the black
Atlantic (the focus of the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference in 2013)
are beginning to suggest fuller transatlantic dimensions of post-plantation
modernity, while Hosam Aboul-Elas Other South has already transformed
our view of Faulkner as a writer expropriated to Third World situations
in the Middle East and South America.6
Such contexts reframe Faulkners fiction, even as the familiar concerns
of his imaginative world are being revolutionized from within. New schol-
arship in the history of the US South, for example, invites fresh attention
to the southwest, Appalachia, and the extended Mississippi Valley as they
figured in Faulkners sense of region; Jennifer Rae Greesons broad rein-
terpretation of the importance of Our South to national imaginings
should provoke further reconsideration of Faulkners Southernness in the
context of the American past; continued research on the Hollywood film
industry has deepened our appreciation of its cultural and intellectual pen-
etration into Faulkners imagination; new work on modern sexuality and
gender has begun to produce more sophisticated accounts of homosocial-
ness and homosexuality, and of the polymorphism of desire and identity in
Faulkners fiction; research in Cold War archives may lead to more projects
like ones underway on Faulkners travels to Japan, the Philippines, Iceland,
Greece, Peru, Brazil, and Venezuela under US Department of State spon-
sorship in the 1950s; rising appreciation for the importance of popular and
mass culture in the early half of the twentieth century has stimulated, for
instance, a challenging new look at the paperback publication history of
Faulkners fiction during the period of his once-assumed obscurity, before
the Viking Portable edition of his work appeared in 1946; philosophical,
psychological, material, and social histories of race continue to illuminate
4 John T. Matthews
Southern writers complex negotiation of political positions and cultural
traditions under racial apartheid (as in Leigh Anne Ducks account of the
segregated South as abject other to national modernity); more extensive
studies of Southern native Americans have brought Faulkners imaginary
Indians into sharper focus; eco-criticism has spawned reconsideration of
Faulkners preoccupation (unusual among US modernists) with the natural
environment, and animal studies may raise questions about how Faulkner
represents a range of effects deriving from the ownership of living beings.
Many of the scholars responsible for these new lines of thought are repre-
sented in the pages that follow, and the reader will find additional references
in their writing to specialized studies by other experts.7
I have divided the immediate contexts for Faulkners writing into three
major categories: Places, Times, and Genres. The pieces in Places develop
Faulkners imaginative (and in many instances personal) engagement with
the geographies that organize his fiction: the small towns of northern
Mississippi where his ancestral families flourished (Weinstein); the natural,
economic, and cultural force of the Mississippi Delta and the countryside
it dominated (Jackson); the international plantation society that linked the
Deep South to a cosmopolitan Gulf world for more than a century (Guterl);
the powerful afterlife of such Caribbean histories in the engagement with
his fiction of Francophone Atlantic writers like Glissant (Loichot); the
modern metropolises of New Orleans, Paris, Hollywood, and New York
that jolted Faulkners provinciality and offered him new ways of thinking
about what it meant to write as a modernist (Hagood, Bloom); his fictions
symptomatic Southern disavowal of the African presence in the plantation
states (Cartwright). These essays are not so much descriptions of the actual
features of locales that appear in Faulkners writing, as considerations of
the interchange between historical spaces and imagined places that engage
and inform his creative work.
Faulkners Times focuses on the sequence of transformations that grafted
a modern world onto his regions past. The essays in this section begin with
a consideration of the effects that rural modernization, the electrification
of small towns, for example, or national New Deal programs, had on
Faulkners methods of representation. The first prompted patterns of plot
and narration based on models of connectivity (Hannon), while the crisis
of labor in the 1930s that was reorganized around the question of wages
proves to be a trauma that manifests itself in the minutest linguistic details
of Faulkners thick description of his world (Godden). In the social sphere,
modern sexual mores changed with startling speed, exposing the violence
of traditional forms of sexual domination and ideologies of gender (Fujie,
 Introduction 5
Matthews); national practices of segregation finally began to yield to civil
rights activism over the first half of the twentieth century (Duck); the
emergence of US hegemony after World War II and into the Cold War
challenged the then-Nobel laureate Faulkner to imagine his writing as part
of the broadest international geopolitical contexts (Stecopoulos, Kodat).
The essays in Genres assess the range of imaginative modes Faulkner
understood himself to be working in at various turns in his career. Genre
constitutes a field of conventions, expected effects, precedent literature, and
opportunities for sale and publication that conditions individual artistic
creation. In novels like Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Unvanquished (1938),
and Go Down, Moses (1942), for instance, Faulkner engages self-consciously
with the plantation romance tradition he knew well (one renewed at sev-
eral historical moments before his own) (Schmidt). At other points in
his career he wrote mindfully in and against the generic conventions of
detective fiction, film noir, and tragic mulatto fiction. Essays in this group
concentrate on the features, history, and position in the field of imagina-
tive production of the genres Faulkner addressed. The ones illustrated here
are Anglo-European modernism (Pothier); commercial film romance and
epic adventure formulas (Gleeson-White); race fiction, a category newly
complicated by debates about the definition of African American literature
(Ladd); the American Gothic (Hinrichsen); and cheap paperback fiction,
a market for which materialized during Faulkners heyday (Earle).
In our last section, After Faulkner: A World of Readers, attention turns to
the question of how later readers receive Faulkners fiction. Readers, that is,
bring with them their own intervening contexts in the forms of the later his-
torical moments they occupy, the intervening cultural developments that
have shaped them, the books that have been written since Faulkner, and
the interpretive traditions and evaluative standards that have been decisive
to his present reputation in various parts of the world. The arc of the more
public phase of Faulkners post-Nobel career includes a three-week tour of
Americas defeated World War II enemy, Japan, at the request of the US
State Department. His visit deepened the special interest Japanese writers
had taken in his work even before the war, and promoted the development
of a sizable literary critical establishment devoted to studying and trans-
lating his writing (Tanaka, Fujihira). Several of these last pieces reflect on
other ways Faulkners writing matters today: directly, as in his continuing
stature as a writer reckoned with by successive generations of US writ-
ers (Watson), or in the longstanding dialogue of Latin American writers
with his fiction (Esplin). Efforts to popularize Faulkners aptness to readers
whose life stories are taken to resemble those of his characters, also raise
6 John T. Matthews
difficult questions about whether reading for such sympathetic identifica-
tion may distort Faulkners avowed devotion to literature not as commu-
nication with the many but as exceptional artifice for the few (Kreyling).
Perhaps one answer lies in the way Faulkners writing matters to so many
readers from underdeveloped countries around the globe less because it
actually depicts lives like theirs, than because it originated under similar
conditions of literary production from a disadvantaged periphery (Aboul-
Ela). From this standpoint, all participants in the mutual exchanges that
constitute reading writers, publishers, readers, critics, teachers, students
operate in contexts that condition meaning and value. Such a view sug-
gests that context is not an optional background to reading Faulkner, but
an essential factor in the transactions of all reading, both within and across
cultures.

NOTES
1 The historian Joel Williamson describes how he taught seminars in Faulkners
fiction early in his career, as he was working on his study of the South after the
Civil War (The Crucible of Race [New York: Oxford University Press, 1984]), and
how these led to his writing his biography William Faulkner and Southern History
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 4356. The historian Leon
Litwack began his course in Southern history at the University of California at
Berkeley by assigning Faulkners novel about the Civil War, The Unvanquished
(1938).
2 See, for instance, George Handley, Postslavery Literature in the Americas: Family
Portraits in Black and White (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000);
Deborah Cohn, History and Memory in the Two Souths (Nashville: Vanderbilt
University Press, 1999), and Look Away! The US South in New World Studies,
eds. Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004).
3 Keith Cartwright, Reading Africa into American Literature: Epics, Fables, and
Gothic Tales (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2004).
4 Sibylle Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age
of Revolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004); Eiko Owada, Faulkner,
Haiti and Questions of Imperialism (Tokyo: Tankobon, 2003); Barbara Ladd,
Nationalism and the Color Line in George W. Cable, Mark Twain, and William
Faulkner (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), and Richard
Godden, William Faulkner: An Economy of Complex Words (Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 2007).
5 Matthew Pratt Guterl, American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age
of Emancipation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).
6 Valerie Loichot, Orphan Narratives: The Postplantation Literature of Faulkner,
Glissant, Morrison, and Saint-John Perse (Charlottesville: University of Virginia
 Introduction 7
Press, 2007) and Hosam Aboul-Ela, Faulkner, Coloniality, and the Mariategui
Tradition (University of Pittsburg Press, 2007).
7 Jennifer Rae Greeson, Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National
Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); Peter Lurie, Visions
Immanence: Faulkner, Film, and the Popular Imagination (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2004), and forthcoming works by Julian Murphet
and Sarah Gleeson-White; Michael Bibler, Cottons Queer Relations: SameSex
Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 19361968 (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2009); John Duvall, Faulkners Marginal Couple:
Invisible, Outlaw and Unspeakable Communities (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1990); Harilaos Stecopolous, Reconstructing the World: Southern Fictions
and US Imperialisms, 18981976 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008); David
Earle, Re-Covering Modernism: Pulps, Paperbacks, and the Prejudice of Form
(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009); Leigh Anne Duck, The Nations Region:
Southern Modernism, Segregation, and US Nationalism (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 2009); Annette Trefzer, Disturbing Indians: The Archaeology of
Southern Fiction (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 2008) and Melanie
Benson Taylor, Reconstructing the Native South: American Indian Literature and
the Lost Cause (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012); a forthcoming study
of Faulkner and the Great Flood of 1927 by Susan Scott Parrish.
 Places
Oxford, Mississippi
 chapter 1

Born there
Faulkner, Oxford, and Lafayette County
Philip Weinstein

At the end of the outrageous Sutpen saga in Absalom, Absalom! (1936)

Quentin says to Shreve, You cant understand it. You would have to be
born there (289): the South as at once what you cant understand unless
you were born there and what Faulkners great work tirelessly seeks
to convey to convey, not to explain. Born there in 1897, Faulkner
does not explain the South. Instead, he enlarges the stakes of his cultures
flash points of distress and makes them more lucidly unbearable. Take
actual Oxford and Lafayette County away from Faulkner, and fictional
Yoknapatawpha vanishes. How should we describe the tensile relationship
obtaining between this writer and his place? It may be best to begin with a
capsule history of the place. In every way it precedes the writer, spurs him
by its recalcitrance to his most remarkable fictional moves.
White settlers populated, and the US government founded, Lafayette
County (in the northwest corner of Mississippi) in 1836.1 They did so
by way of a sustained act of violence, the expulsion of native Chickasaw
Indians to the Indian Territory (which would become Oklahoma). Over
the next decades the Indians were replaced, inexorably, by imported slaves
indispensable to a cotton economy that depleted the land (cotton was a
non-rotating crop) as aggressively as it enriched the planters. The young
state of Mississippi prospered; its university was founded in 1848, and the
city of Oxford boasted 1000 citizens by 1860. The racial politics of city and
county were indistinguishable. Blacks had to be seen as subhuman animals
requiring white surveillance and care, inasmuch as they were required
to do the subhuman labor in the fields that made the cotton economy
work. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Mississippis gleeful leap
into secession occurred only a few weeks after South Carolinas initial
break.
For a year and a half it remained a distant war, but the battle of Corinth
(October 1862) signaled change. Grant and Sherman, driving South after
Shiloh, were bent on capturing Vicksburg. As they advanced, they laid
11
12 Philip Weinstein
waste. Gone was the Union Armys earlier gentler strategy of attempting
to win over non-combatant Southerners. In its place was something grim-
mer: systematic punishment. Grant took Oxford in December of 1862,
and that winter as his army headquartered there plunder and violence
occurred on a daily basis. Eight months later, in a move to avenge Nathan
Bedford Forrests brazen raid on the Gayoso Hotel in Memphis, Union
General Whiskey Smith burned down Oxford. These were the stories
the young Faulkner grew up on some forty and fifty years later.
Don Doyle and others have persuasively argued that the South that
lost the first Civil War won in the late 1870s the second Civil War.
An exhausted President and Congress in Washington DC withdrew their
support, gradually and increasingly, from the newly freed blacks. Follow-
ing Grants refusal to send down federal troops to safeguard elections in
1875, Mississippis Republican governor Adelbert Ames noted with hor-
ror: A revolution has taken place by force of arms and a race are
disenfranchised they are to be returned to a condition of serfdom an
era of second slavery (quoted in Doyle, Faulkners County 289).
For the first half of the twentieth century Faulkners formative and
creative years the tenor of Mississippis racial politics was inalterably
hostile to a black population scarcely less unfree than it had been before
1861. Redneck politicians such as Theodore Bilbo and James Vardaman
worked hard to keep it that way. Soon after becoming governor in 1903,
Vardaman declared, Six thousand years ago, the Negro was the same in
his native jungle that he is today.2 A year later he expanded on his subject:
You can scarcely pick up a newspaper whose pages are not blackened with
the account of an unmentionable crime committed by a negro brute, and
this crime, I want to impress upon you, is but the manifestation of the
negros aspiration for social equality, encouraged largely by the character
of free education in vogue (quoted in Williamson, Southern History 157).
The closed society: essentially an entire culture was engaged in policing its
public utterances on race. In 1962, US marshals, a segregationist governor
(Ross Barnett), and the National Guard faced off in anger steps away from
lethal violence over the prospect of James Meredith being admitted into
the University of Mississippi Law School. Looking back at this moment,
Doyle writes: The violence and hatred that exploded in Oxford that fall
was the past living on in the present, determining every thought and
gesture (383). What does it mean that this is the history Faulkner was born
into?
He would at first like all children have missed most of it or have got
it wrong, taking as truthful the legendary narratives fed to him by the older
 Born there: Faulkner, Oxford, and Lafayette County 13
members of his Oxford family.3 The War would figure for him for many
years (and some dimensions of it forever) as the Lost Cause. The oldest of
four sons and apparently precocious from his earliest years he would
have sorted out his family history in dribs and drabs, in time imagining his
way into the hidden patterns by way of the visible pieces. His fathers surly
unease around his own flamboyant father: how long before William would
have begun to recognize a pattern repeating his grandfathers relationship
to his own father, the colorful, half-mythic Colonel W. C. Falkner? As a
self-orphaned child making his way in 1839 to Pontotoc, Mississippi, nine-
year-old W. C. Falkner had at first been accepted by his maternal aunt and
her husband, John Wesley Thompson, then later rejected by Thompson
from the latters flourishing law practice. Years thereafter, a veteran of the
Mexican War, W. C. Falkner married, begot a child, and lost his young
wife to illness. For reasons one can only speculate on, he gave up the
baby to the Thompsons, who apparently stipulated that he was never to
ask to have the child back. Seemingly he never did ask to have the child
back, instead remarrying and beginning a second family. Meanwhile, that
child J. W. T. Falkner grew up with his adoptive family and became
a successful Mississippi politician, banker, real estate owner, and railway
tycoon. Known as the Young Colonel, he never matched the larger-than-
life figure of his disowning father, the Old Colonel, and he may never have
forgotten that he didnt. What he did do, decades later and now a father
himself, was sell out his profitable railroad at precisely the moment 1902
when his eldest son Murry was efficiently running it and making sense of his
own life by doing so. This same Murry, Williams taciturn father, was known
by his sons suddenly at the sound of an approaching trains whistle
to stop whatever he was doing and stare into space: when might William
have begun to grasp the emotional resonance of that whistle? When would
he have figured out that fathers often find the most ingenious ways of
destroying their sons a dark insight that gives a bitter and foundational
flavor to some of Faulkners greatest fictions?4
The maternal lineage, though less spectacularly troubled than the pater-
nal one, was no less damaging. The childhood of Faulkners mother, Maud
Butler Falkner, had not been easy. Her father, Charles, had abruptly aban-
doned his family in the late 1880s, absconding with bank money, perhaps
eloping with another woman as well. Mauds dreams of higher education
yielded to the need to support her vulnerable mother an embittered
Leila Butler who not only moved into Maud and Murrys home in 1896
but apparently distrusted from the beginning the heavy-drinking and inar-
ticulate man that her fine-grained daughter had agreed to marry. Leila
14 Philip Weinstein
was to live with the Falkners until her death in 1907; her insistence on
addressing letters to her married daughter as Miss Maud Butler can only
have aggravated a marriage already steeped in misunderstandings. Both
Leila and Maud already knew what they knew about the weaknesses of
men; the Falkners union may have been half-doomed before it even got
underway. It may be unsurprising that marriages in Faulkners fiction rarely
prosper.
Colonel W. C. Falkner had even more to give to his hungry and
talented great-grandson, but first the young writer would have to get past
the sentimentalities encrusting the handed-down family portrait. In doing
so, William might have found his way into a further piece of concealed
family history: the possibility that the restless Old Colonel separated
from his second wife in 1863, having withdrawn from military action after
failing to be promoted may have fathered a child on a mulatto Falkner
slave living in his yard named Emeline. Some twenty-five years later, the
Old Colonel might even have pursued a sexual liaison with another young
mulatto woman, named Lena, plausibly the offspring of that same Emeline.
Is the notorious murder of the Old Colonel by Richard Thurmond in 1889
also a love mystery? Both Emeline and her daughter Fannie had lived in
Thurmonds household. W. C.s abuse of Lena if abuse there was might
have rankled Thurmond no less than the railroad and political imbroglios
we know were at play. All this is irremediably speculative, yet think of
the narrative grist it may have provided for Faulkners imaginative mill.
Old Carothers McCaslins incestuous rape of his own slave daughter in Go
Down, Moses (1942) acts as the breaking point for young Ike McCaslin. It
is the discovery in the decaying family ledger that drives Ike to repudiate
his inheritance. Is this moving fictional vignette seeded as much in private
family rumor as it is in public historical realities?5
The pertinent point is that, if Faulkner found his way into these insights
into his familys past, he would have done so indirectly, in piecemeal
fashion, over extensive time long after the events themselves had played
out. And he might thereby have grasped that ones learning arc itself is
hardwired into retrospectivity: one cannot know fully at once, in the present
moment. Faulkners childhood offered a treasure trove of materials and
insights into the distress of his larger culture, but it took him three novels to
figure out what had all along been waiting there for him, to realize that the
actual and the apocryphal are one and the same.6 Soldiers Pay (1926) and
Mosquitoes (1927) both explore experiences kept at an emotional distance
the Great War Faulkner had lied about participating in, the New Orleans
bohemian world he mockingly examined from an outsiders perspective.
 Born there: Faulkner, Oxford, and Lafayette County 15
Only in Flags in the Dust (written in 1927, truncatedly appearing as Sartoris
in 1929, posthumously restored and published in 1973) did his writing come
home, recognizing that the mysteries that mattered were lodged at home
some of them buried deep inside as well.
If becoming aware is necessarily retrospective what he would call (in
response to a students question at the University of Mississippi in 1957)
an affair of was then how does one do justice to the messiness of
present turmoil, of what (in that same response) he called is?7 How
does one acknowledge that is looks and feels nothing like the crisp and
clear constructions we later deploy when it has taken recognizable shape as
was? Is it even possible to write is? Something like this question propels
the extraordinary breakthrough of The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I
Lay Dying (1930). Lyrical stream-of-consciousness narratives that restlessly
move in present time from one interior voice to another, these two fictions
break new ground in two ways that are biographically resonant. Both
novels generate narrative out of the intimacies of childhood Faulkners
own, but anyones in the sense of childhood as a time when you participate
in dramas whose causes and consequences remain unknown to you. Both
novels take on an abiding challenge for the Southern writer as well. How
can one narrate Southern experience without falling into the pitfalls and
blandishments of the masters authorizing voice? The two breakthroughs
are joined at the hip: to not know in advance (to be immersed in is) is
perforce to lack masterly authority. It is to operate, often, in a speechless
territory where (as Faulkner put it in The Sound and the Fury) its [sic] not
even time until it was (178).
Faulkner knew such unpreparedness for the onslaught of experience
in ways that go beyond childhood and cut deeper. Crucial events of his
later life broke upon him in the form of crisis or shock of experience
as unnegotiable. There was, first, the question of marriage (in 1918) to his
childhood sweetheart, Estelle Oldham. At the sticking point they were
both barely twenty and her family was pressing her to marry the far more
eligible Cornell Franklin they could not agree to elope. Estelle married
Franklin. Grievously wounded, Faulkner fled to New Haven and then
Toronto, seeking to get into the Great War as a fighter pilot.8 Eleven years
later, Estelles marriage in tatters, she divorced Franklin; and pushed by
her and his own conscience Faulkner made right what he had not made
right the first time. That is, if it could be made right. Can a later marriage
erase the scar imposed by an earlier one that failed to materialize? Can
a thirty-one-year-old bachelor/writer reprise the ardor of a twenty-year-
old youth? Can a divorcee with two children marked by a decade of
16 Philip Weinstein
marital complicities ever align with her lovers Keatsean dream of a still
unravished bride?
A troubled marriage entered into in untimely fashion: to this one could
add the War not entered into at all, despite Faulkners urgent attempts, his
training with the Canadian RAF, and his decades of pretending that he had
seen action as a pilot over France, been wounded in the head and the knee.
The plane he did not know how to fly metamorphosed a decade later
into the plane he took secret lessons to learn how to fly. This plane then
metamorphosed into the expensive Waco that he bought (rashly) on earn-
ings anticipated from his potboiler Sanctuary (1931) earnings that never
materialized. Aggressively, now that he did know how to fly, he infected
his brothers with his passion; they became known in the early 1930s as the
flying Faulkners. Then, with fatal generosity, he sold (so cheaply that it
was nearer to a gift) the Waco to his youngest brother Dean in 1935. The
most talented pilot of them all, Dean was at loose ends; the Waco was
intended to help him make a living as a commercial flight instructor. Less
than a year after receiving the gift, Dean fatally crashed the plane an
unruly flight student having apparently prevented him from righting the
craft in time. No one ever blamed Faulkner for this freak accident; but the
lives of Deans pregnant wife, his mother Maud, and his brother William
were irrevocably changed.
Faulkners entry into literary stardom took shape as well, like these
other formative events, more as an act of violence than as a becoming.
The first four masterpieces (The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying,
Sanctuary, and Light in August) were published, all but unbelievably, in
just three years (between 1929 and 1932); they made Faulkner suddenly
the hottest fiction writer in America. I have created quite a sensation.
In fact, I have learned with astonishment that I am the most important
figure in American letters (quoted in Blotner, Biography 291), he wrote
from New York to an unbelieving Estelle, back home in Oxford. Bennett
Cerf of Random House and Alfred Knopf of Knopf were clamoring for his
attention; Tallulah Bankhead was pressing him to do a screenplay for her.
Immersed in a firebomb of editors adulation, he took refuge (not for the
first or last time) in out-of-control binge drinking. Achieving fame turned
out to be no less hectic than the other careening realities that penetrated
Faulkners life.
There remains one massive dimension of life in Oxford and Lafayette
County that could have come to Faulkner as no surprise one that he
experienced from infancy forward: the inextricable tangle of race relations.
It began with Mammy Callie, a relic of the Civil War, a fixture in his parents
 Born there: Faulkner, Oxford, and Lafayette County 17
family life since he was five years old, the caretaker of his own family from
1930 until her death in 1940. Warm and feisty (she went through four
husbands), Callie taught him the old virtues of rectitude and responsibility.
Perhaps more tellingly, she would have handled his childhood body, washed
and hugged him something that severe Maud Falkner seems to have been
less good at. Black and unlike him, she was other, a member of a group
that his people called niggers. Maternal and intimate, she was same, as
even his mother and siblings were not. This double vision of sameness
and otherness underwrites Faulkners unparalleled exploration of race in
his greatest novels.
Even here, however, Faulkners grasp of racial realities oscillated between
ingrained reactionary myopia and flights of liberating vision. The first six
novels have a relatively restrained interest in racial trouble; the magnificent
Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury is static, segregated from Compson manias
by her very sanity. But everything changes with Light in August (1932),
the novel in which Faulkner first seems to have wondered what actually
underwrites the segregation of the races. He discovered in the hypnotic
figure of Joe Christmas that perhaps nothing biological is even involved.
Southern racial turmoil drew its inexhaustible venom and violence from an
empty difference yet one fetishized by his culture for that very reason as
all-explaining. The Southern hysterias of racial touch and smell hysterias
normalized and afloat in the very air that he breathed during his Oxford
childhood arose, he was eventually to understand, out of a centuries-long
history of miscegenation, of the same blood illicitly coursing in both races.
The Negro-in-America is a form of insanity which overtakes white men,
James Baldwin once proposed.9 Insane because as Joe Christmas and
Charles Bon and Bons son all attest only cultural construction speaks
here, not natural fact. Treat a white boy in an orphanage as a nigger, and
he will agonize the rest of his life over the question of his racial identity.
Take a white-looking boy out of mid-nineteenth-century New Orleans,
transplant him in Yoknapatawpha County and call him a nigger, and he
will spend the rest of his life releasing the violence lodged in this abusive
appellation.
Yet, when it was a matter of race on the ground and embodied in
real human beings white and black rather than race as he could grasp
it within the capacious precincts of his imagination Faulkners under-
standing faltered repeatedly. At such moments his views echoed the more
predictable anxieties of Oxford and Lafayette County. When Civil Rights
turbulence struck the South in the 1950s, he was and was not prepared to
respond. On the one hand, his conservative plea to black leaders Go slow
18 Philip Weinstein
now could only strike them as useless, if not worse. And behind the
scenes (as opposed to courageous speeches and public utterances) his pri-
vate letters glossed what he must have meant by slow: [F]or the second
time in a hundred years, he wrote a concerned fellow Mississippian, we
Southerners will have destroyed our native land just because of niggers
(SL 391). Why wont they be patient, wait out a change that in time must
come once Southern whites accept that it has to come? For it to come
sooner than that which is of course how it did come, in violence, by way
of black leadership, and (reluctantly) backed by the authority of the US
government was something he could not bear to contemplate.
On the other hand, Faulkners outrage at his regions racial brutality was
not only consistent potentially dangerous for him as well but piercingly
eloquent. Learning (while in Rome) of the murder and mutilation of young
Emmett Till in September 1955, Faulkner wrote this letter to the American
press:

Perhaps we will find out now whether we are to survive or not. Perhaps
the purpose of this sorry and tragic error committed in my native Missis-
sippi. . . . is to prove to us whether or not we deserve to survive. Because if
we in America have reached that point in our desperate culture when we
must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we dont
deserve to survive, and probably wont. (ESPL 223)

He had little trouble identifying his position on his regions racial turmoil
as man in the middle a wry recognition that he was condemned both
to offend his Southern family and friends, for going too far, and to offend
Northern liberals and black leaders, for not going far enough. As Grace
Elizabeth Hale has argued, the middle stance of Southern liberalism lost
its viability after Brown v. Board of Education (1954).10 Thereafter you had
to be for integration or against it, and most Southern liberals reluctantly
retreated to a white moderate position. When the chips were down, they
would not turn against the prerogatives of a society founded on segregation.
Faulkner did turn against those prerogatives, but his was a lonely voice in
doing so. Yet one may wonder, some sixty years later, whether a grain of
somber wisdom did not lodge in Faulkners stance. He knew, none better,
that Southern racism wasnt going away any time soon. He knew as well
that no governmental antibiotics existed for such longstanding ills in the
body politic. Most of all he knew that he himself could articulate no cure
for the racial cancer that so undermined his countrys fondest ideals.
No cure indeed: perhaps this is the note to close on. Oxford and Lafayette
County gave Faulkner both what they had and what they lacked: regional
 Born there: Faulkner, Oxford, and Lafayette County 19
and family loyalty, pride in labor, determination to endure when the cards
seemed stacked against you; the confounding complexity of race relations
at once a cauldron of love and hatred, trust and mistrust, intimacy and vio-
lence; and finally, the experience of a proud region undergoing defeat and
sustaining (often with stoic dignity) the absence of any formula for turning
that defeat into victory. It is no accident that he became our countrys most
powerful writer of tragic dilemmas. His region, in all its bittersweetness,
demanded (unknowingly) no less of him. Stung into greatness by the gap
between innocent dreams and the maelstrom of unbearable reality (AA
124, italics removed), by the irresoluble tension between the tranquility of
was and the turbulence of is, Faulkner is our supreme writer of distress.
He writes the overcoming of defenses, the collapse of identity-sustaining
boundaries. He grasps in his race-focused masterpieces the abidingly
cultural resonance of individual pain. If he twists the conventional form of
the novel all out of shape, that is because it promises resolution and he is
bent on conveying unbearable trouble. Like the canary in the mine that is
the first to know disaster is coming but not how to avoid it Faulkner
outwits none of the problems his work so probingly explores. In an essay
of the 1950s entitled Mississippi, he wrote that one loves ones region not
because but despite. He is Oxford and Lafayette Countys greatest native
son not because but despite.

NOTES
1 This paragraph and the next two are indebted to Don H. Doyles extensively
useful Faulkners County: The Historical Roots of Yoknapatawpha (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2001).
2 Quoted in Joel Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 157.
3 My argument about retrospective understanding and unpreparedness for expe-
rience when it actually arrives is developed at length in my Becoming Faulkner:
The Art and Life of William Faulkner (New York: Oxford University Press,
2009).
4 John Irwins Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading
of Faulkner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975) is the locus
classicus for an exploration of the destructive relationship obtaining between
fathers and sons in The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! Judith
Sensibar, in The Origins of Faulkers Art (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1984), was the first to explore its counterpart in Faulkners family lineage as
well.
5 Drawing on Williamsons foundational work with obscure archival materials,
I explore this speculative history more amply in Becoming Faulkner.
20 Philip Weinstein
6 Faulkner used these terms the actual and the apocryphal in Jean Steins
celebrated interview William Faulkner: The Art of Fiction No. 12, published
in the Paris Review 12 (Spring 1956).
7 The larger passage is worth citing: maybe peace is only a condition in retrospect
when the subconscious has got rid of the gnats and the tacks and the broken
glass of experience and has left only the peaceful pleasant things that was
peace. Maybe peace is not is, but was. Quoted in Faulkner in the University,
p. 67. My Becoming Faulkner opens up both terms, extensively.
8 All biographies of Faulkner attend, of course, to these familiar and decisive
events. Blotner offers the most sustained discussion in Faulkner: A Biography
(New York: Random House, 1974); Andre Bleikasten and Jay Parini refine his
terms in, respectively, William Faulkner: Une vie en romans (Paris: Editions
Aden, 2007) and One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner (New York:
HarperCollins, 2004), while Sensibar proposes a revisionist reading, seeking
in Faulkner and Love: The Women Who Shaped His Art (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2009) to rescue Estelle from a narrative that, she believes,
tends to levy too much blame in her direction. In Becoming Faulkner I conclude,
with respect to their troubled marriage, that they both because of who they
were, in all their intricacy contributed to the marital suffering that they both
assuredly experienced (Weinstein, Becoming Faulkner 240n2).
9 James Baldwin, Stranger in the Village, in The Price of the Ticket: Collected
Non-Fiction, 19481985 (New York: St. Martins/Marek, 1985), p. 88.
10 See Grace Elizabeth Hale and Robert Jackson, Were Trying Hard as Hell
to Free Ourselves: Southern History and Race in the Making of William
Faulkners Literary Terrain, in A Companion to William Faulkner, ed. Richard
C. Moreland (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 2845.
The Mississippi Valley
 chapter 2

Primeval, Goddam, and beyond

On Mississippi
Robert Jackson

Quite early in his career, William Faulkner wrote: The beauty spiritual
and physical of the South lies in the fact that God has done so much for
it and man so little (ESPL 239). These sentiments, ingenuous though they
no doubt were, constituted an exercise in wishful thinking or, perhaps
more generously, in aesthetic idealism that had not yet precisely located
its subjects in time and place. For in fact by the time Faulkner put the
words to paper in 1924, man had done a great deal to transform Missis-
sippi from the primeval forest encountered by sixteenth-century European
explorers into its early-twentieth-century incarnation as a case study of
environmental engineering and a cauldron of human oppression. But by
as early as 1929, Faulkners intense sensitivity to the natural world around
him and deepening concern for the environmental degradation of his
home state inclined him to read its history against the grain of capital
accumulation and material progress. In numerous 1930s short stories and
in such later works as If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (1939), Go Down, Moses
(1942), and Big Woods (1955), he testified to the awesome power of nature
and brooded over the tragic implications of its slow, steady destruction
as a result of human greed, waste, ignorance, and hubris. Inherent in
Faulkners vision of Mississippi were these aesthetic, ethical, and moral
dimensions. This was no simplistic rejection of the detritus of industrial-
ism and modernization, but a complex, engaged appreciation of the nat-
ural and man-made forces competing for supremacy in his fast-changing
world. Faulkner was a modern conservationist by way of the elegiac mode;
Mississippi provided the soil, the past and present, the temperature and
temperament.
Faulkners attention to nature is everywhere on display in Yoknapataw-
pha County, his imaginative recreation of the actual Lafayette County,
Mississippi. Yet he also set several of his stories or significant parts of
them in the Mississippi Delta, creating the incorrect impression among
some readers that he actually lived in the Delta. The fact that the Delta has
23
24 Robert Jackson
long been a much misunderstood and mythologized part of the world only
adds to the difficulty of sorting through Faulkners complicated relations
with nature, Mississippi, and modern America.
Faulkners hometown of Oxford sits at an elevation of approximately
500 feet, placing it more squarely within the gently rolling piney hills of
the north-central part of Mississippi, a bioregion that serves as the point
of contact between the far southwestern foothills of Appalachia and the
alluvial floodplain of the Lower Mississippi Valley. Oxfords simultaneous
proximity to and remoteness from the Delta are discernible in the consid-
erable drop in elevation in the less-than-thirty-mile journey to Batesville,
a town in neighboring Panola County just beyond the eastern periphery
of the Delta. Batesvilles elevation is 230 feet, a mere fifty feet above the
normal level of the Mississippi River fifty miles west. Thus we might envi-
sion Faulkner surveying the Delta from the comparatively higher vantage
point of his Oxford environs, a sometime visitor who nevertheless lived
most of his life in a quite different ecosystem. The Mississippi writer David
L. Cohns famous dictum that the Mississippi Delta begins in the lobby
of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ends on Catfish Row in Vicks-
burg captures some of the geographical as well as cultural outlines of
the Delta;1 and Faulkners 1954 rephrasing of Cohn Mississippi begins
in the lobby of a Memphis, Tennessee hotel and extends south to the
Gulf of Mexico expresses an intuitive sense of the Deltas significance
in the states more general orientation and self-conception (Meriwether,
Essays 11).
What is known as the Mississippi Delta is not actually the delta of the
Mississippi River, which sits several hundred miles to the south, below
New Orleans, where the river meets the Gulf of Mexico. Nor is the Delta
shaped like a delta. It is pecan-leaf-shaped, moving inland from just south
of Memphis along a series of bluffs as far as Greenwood, then following
the course of the Yazoo River back towards the Mississippi at Vicksburg.
This area is about 200 miles long and, at its widest, seventy miles wide:
7 000 square miles of some of the most agriculturally congenial alluvial
floodplain in the world, with an average soil depth of 125 feet.2
Elevation represents a crucial fact in the lives of these places because of
the Deltas propensity for flooding. The Mississippi Valley as a whole, a
watershed covering 1.2 million square miles and stretching from the north-
ern Rocky Mountains to western New York State and comprising upwards
of 40 percent of the coterminous United States, is one of the five largest river
basins in the world. By the time most of this water reaches Memphis, at the
northern edge of the Delta, the Mississippi River constitutes an immense
 Primeval, Goddam, and beyond: On Mississippi 25
stream whose regular floods have defined the topography, flora and fauna,
human settlement, and culture of this bioregion for millennia. Hernando
de Soto encountered more than a month of flooding in the spring of 1543,
and travelers and residents have written of contending with major and
minor floods ever since. Every few years, the Greenville planter-poet-
paternalist William Alexander Percy wrote in his memoir Lanterns on the
Levee (1941), the river rises like a monster from its bed and pushes over its
banks to vex and sweeten the land it has made.3 The Lower Mississippis
inundations during Faulkners early life included various events in 1903,
1908, 1912, 1913, 1916, 1922, and 1927. The last of these generated flood
plains spanning up to eighty miles in width and wrought catastrophic
damage (including nearly 250 dead in seven states), prompting federal
legislative efforts, such as the Flood Control Act of 1928, to engineer the
Valley into submission through levees, spillways, and other flood-control
projects. The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 was the muse of not just
politicians and engineers, but also Delta blues musicians like Charley Pat-
ton, whose High Water Everywhere (1929) mapped its enormous reach
and devastation: And I tell the world the water/ Done struck through this
town/ Lord, the whole round country, Lord/ River is overflowed/ Lord, the
whole round country/ Man, its overflowed.4 It also served as the subject
of Old Man, one of two narratives in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, and was
likely on Faulkners mind during the writing of The Sound and the Fury
(1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930), two early Yoknapatawpha novels with
recurrent flood imagery.5
The deforestation of the Lower Mississippi Valleys magnificent bottom-
land hardwood forests, a process initiated more tentatively for agricultural
clearing before the Civil War, rapidly accelerated in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries as depleted northern forests turned the tim-
ber industry to the South. This transformation has likewise been a major
factor in the history of the bioregion, and for Faulkner a dubious mark of
modern mans relations with wild Mississippi. In Go Down, Moses, his most
explicitly ecocentric work, he wrote wistfully of that doomed wilderness
whose edges were being constantly and punily gnawed at by men with plows
and axes who feared it because it was wilderness (185). For many centuries
Native Americans derived economies and societies based on itinerancy and
on alternatives to monoculture farming, which requires significant clearing
and always risks flooding respecting the fact that, after all, the same
forests and floods were the basis of the Valleys (and especially the Deltas)
richness in soil, plant, and animal life. Since the arrival of white settlers and
the nineteenth-century removal of Native American tribes (by 1900, only
26 Robert Jackson
the Chickasaw and Choctaw remained in Mississippi in any numbers, and
the great majority of these tribes survivors now lived in Indian Territory),
however, human control of the river and floodplain has grown into an
increasingly central objective both locally and nationally, considered a nec-
essary part of the massive investment in staple cash crops like cotton. These
efforts have met with uneven results and a raft of unintended consequences.
Indeed, Faulkner displayed a kind of Native American consciousness in
Big Woods, ridiculing the mad and pointless merry-go-round in this ill-
advised domination of nature: the timber which had to be logged and sold
in order to deforest the land in order to convert the soil to raising cotton
in order to sell the cotton in order to make the land valuable enough to be
worth spending money raising dykes to keep the River off of it (166, italics
removed).
This distinct geography is matched by the bioregions outsized impor-
tance in American and world history during the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. When the Civil War began in 1861, the Mississippi Valley was
home to more millionaires per capita than any other part of the country,
beneficiaries of the rivers transportation network, compliant soil and 230-
day growing seasons, and a vigorous slave trade that had imported about a
million enslaved black laborers into the state over the previous four decades.
Thus the mid-nineteenth-century Delta figured centrally in the industrial
revolutions advancement by way of global capitalism, with its growing
patterns of international markets for credit and debt, large-scale resource
extraction and environmental engineering, and human exploitation.6 For
most of its history since the war, the Delta has maintained its agricultural
base (in sharecropping and, more recently, large-scale agribusiness), its vast
disparities between the economically privileged few and the impoverished
many, and its considerable African American majority. In these ways the
Delta might more constructively be compared to the small Caribbean
nation of Haiti than to many other parts of the United States or even
other parts of Mississippi. For the French colony of Saint-Domingue rep-
resented the New Worlds wealthiest colony for much of the eighteenth
century, built on monoculture farming (sugar, coffee, indigo, and cotton)
and a ruthlessly efficient slave system. Its profiteers, like many of those
in the Delta, developed this corporate model with such single-mindedness
that even Saint-Domingues food supply had to be imported from abroad
hence Napoleons interest, prior to the Haitian Revolution, in the Louisiana
Territory as a source of food crops. In contrast to this exorbitant wealth,
modern Haiti, which achieved independence in 1804, is the poorest nation
in the Western Hemisphere, deforested in large swaths to the point of
 Primeval, Goddam, and beyond: On Mississippi 27
desertification, and plagued with economic and political corruption a
raw manifestation of the headlong pillaging, mismanagement, and waste
it has endured for four centuries.
It is Haiti, of course, that plays an important role in the personal history
of Thomas Sutpen, one of Yoknapatawphas most important nineteenth-
century figures, in Absalom, Absalom! (1936). In Sutpens shadowy early
life, as reconstructed by several early-twentieth-century narrators over the
course of the novel, the connections between Haiti and Mississippi are not
merely metaphorical, but historical and literal, in the particular terms of
labor and race; he is assumed to gain in Haiti important work experience
and exposure to the explosive racial and sexual politics that will ultimately
topple Sutpens Hundred, his grandiose plantation-empire. Absaloms epic
proportions might thus be understood, at least in part, as emerging from
the liminal setting of Sutpens Hundred, which slouches towards the Delta,
with its majestic scales of ambition, wealth, trauma, and collapse, and its
links to the colonial economies of New World agriculture and slavery.
Indeed, on the map Faulkner drew to represent Yoknapatawphas geography
for the first edition of Absalom, Sutpens Hundred is tucked away in the
northwest corner of the county, not far from the banks of the Tallahatchie
River, as if to suggest the closest proximity possible to the Delta, and to
underscore the novels hybridization of bottomland and upland cultures.
To a greater extent than almost all of Faulkners other Yoknapatawpha
writings, Absalom is a Mississippi River novel, offering an expansive kind
of regional awareness of Mississippi Valley environmental, economic, and
cultural contexts of the sort generated by Mark Twain during and after
the 1880s. Faulkners engagement, through the river no less than through
Haiti, of Mississippis global connections, enabled him to register a critical
concern with American international relations questioning the logic
of local dependence on the volatile world cotton market as well as the
ideology of American imperialism in ways that revealed philosophical
debts to Twain as well.
Some of the events shaping Mississippis twentieth-century history
include the adoption of a new state constitution in 1890, grounding the
modern state explicitly in a white-supremacist political and social order;
the arrival of the boll weevil in 1907, and its devastation of cotton crops for
years to come; the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927; the Great Depression
of the 1930s, which many people in a state with such a history of economic
turmoil considered business as usual; the industrial boom of the World
War II years, which sped the procession critics thought it a treadmill
from the rural South to the suburban Sunbelt that would continue for the
28 Robert Jackson
rest of the century; the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, by
which the US Supreme Court set the legal precedent for desegregation,
and the near-instantaneous rise of the Delta-based White Citizens Coun-
cil, which devoted itself to the policy of massive resistance in reaction to
the prospect of civil rights; and, after 1954, a litany of violent events during
what might be considered the activist phase of the civil rights movement,
lasting through the late 1960s. In 1955, while visiting relatives in the Delta,
teenager Emmett Till was lynched for speaking to a white woman, his body
dumped in the Tallahatchie River. (Till was one of more than 500 black
lynching victims in Mississippi since the 1880s, but his death received far
more media attention than most.) In 1963, hours after President John F.
Kennedy delivered a nationally televised address on civil rights, NAACP
field secretary Medgar Evers was assassinated in Jackson, shot in the back in
his driveway by White Citizens Council member (and Ku Klux Klansman)
Byron De La Beckwith. In 1964, civil rights workers James Earl Chaney,
Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, who worked to register black
voters during that years Freedom Summer campaign, were killed in
Neshoba County by a group of white men with the collaboration of local
law enforcement officials, their bodies unearthed after a massive federal
investigation. Also in 1964, Delta native Fannie Lou Hamer participated in
the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Partys protest of the states all-white,
anti-civil-rights delegation at the Democratic National Convention. Is
this America, she asked incredulously, the land of the free and the home
of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks
because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent
human beings in America?7
Amid all this upheaval, the State of Mississippi simultaneously accumu-
lated a record of cultural achievement that presents a compelling case for
its recognition as the most important site of American cultural production
of the twentieth century. The fertile Delta provided the primary setting in
which African American musicians produced a blues culture that would
transform popular music around the world. Early figures like Son House
and Charley Patton, and subsequent ones like Robert Johnson, Muddy
Waters, Albert King, B. B. King, and John Lee Hooker, among hundreds
of others, contributed to the spread of the blues well beyond the South.
New Orleans-germinated jazz culture was also fundamentally informed by
this tradition, and as Louis Armstrong and his cohort gained popularity in
the interwar era in other parts of the world, they took the blues with them.
After World War II, and with Clarksdale native Ike Turners Rocket 88
(1951) as perhaps its best early exemplar, rock and roll extended the blues
 Primeval, Goddam, and beyond: On Mississippi 29
into newer formats, found new, often non-black and non-Southern, per-
formers and audiences, and traveled farthest of all to outer space, in the
form of Chuck Berrys Johnny B. Goode (1958), one of the songs on
the Voyager Golden Record which was included in the Voyager spacecraft
launch of 1977. Along with this stellar musical achievement, modern Mis-
sissippis literary success has been comparably prolific and intense. Along
with Faulkner, a list of the states significant writers includes the likes of
Shelby Foote, Anne Moody, Willie Morris, Walker Percy, Eudora Welty,
Tennessee Williams, Richard Wright, and, more recently, Larry Brown,
Richard Ford, Ellen Gilchrist, Barry Hannah, Lewis Nordan, Natasha
Trethewey, and Jesmyn Ward.
The efforts of all these artists have been vital in modern American culture
not least because Mississippi or, perhaps better, Mississippi has long
been a site ripe for the sort of typecasting rooted in nineteenth-century
minstrelsy. Hollywood has shown itself particularly fond here. From The
Mississippi Gambler (1929) and Mississippi (1935), which amounted to little
more than moonlit vehicles for screen idols Joseph Schildkraut and Bing
Crosby, to the civil-rights allegory Mississippi Burning (1988), whose generic
melodrama and regional scapegoating might invite the more appropri-
ate title Mississippi Roasting, to Quentin Tarantinos awesome revenge
fantasy Django Unchained (2012), with its Gone with the Wind-fonted
MISSISSIPPI scrolling massively and menacingly across the screen, film-
makers have had recourse to popular, if selectively historical, connotations
of Mississippi. Commenting wryly in this pattern, Houston A. Baker Jr.
and Dana D. Nelson noted in 2001: Every time a shocking act of racist
violence occurs in New York, Illinois, or Pennsylvania, you can bet another
movie on Mississippi will appear within six months.8 The great Faulkner
scholar Noel Polk, who grew up in a quiet Mississippi town he didnt
recognize in the narrow mass-media portrayals of his home state, likewise
marveled at the end of the century: I almost invariably see myself depicted
in the media as either a beer-drinking meanspirited pickup-driving redneck
racist, a julep-sipping plantation-owning kindhearted benevolent racist, or,
at best, a non-racist good ole boy, one of several variations of Forrest Gump,
good-hearted and retarded, who makes his way in the modern world not
because hes intelligent but because hes well, good-hearted and retarded
and simply doesnt know any better.9 With Mississippi playing these
derivative roles beyond the states borders, the works of Mississippis own
artists compose a crucial record.
Faulkner understood earlier and better than most of his white neighbors
in Mississippi that the states modern history would be tied up inextricably
30 Robert Jackson
with race. And a significant part of his literary achievement lies in his analy-
sis of racial constructions and identities in such works as The Sound and the
Fury, Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom!, Go Down, Moses, Intruder
in the Dust (1948), and numerous short stories. During the Cold War,
when he found himself increasingly called upon to address contemporary
American race relations, Faulkners ambivalence reflected both the uphill
struggle of white racial liberalism in a state that, especially after Brown v.
Board, had no tolerance for it and the hypersensitivity of native white Mis-
sissippians to the vast and growing catalog of stereotypes deployed against
them by the amorphous political, intellectual, and media contingent darkly
invoked during the civil rights movement as outside agitators. In 1955,
Faulkner implored his listeners at the Southern Historical Association to
live up to the highest American ideals by acting swiftly to bring equal-
ity to the Negro. If we had given him this equal right to opportunity
ninety or fifty or even ten years ago, he said, there would have been
no Supreme Court decision about how we run our schools (Meriwether,
Essays 150). Just a year later, however, in public letters published in Life
and Ebony, he advised African American activists and other supporters of
integration: Go slow now. Stop now for a time, a moment. You have the
power now; you can afford to withhold for a moment the use of it as a
force (87, 107). In these appeals, he imagined two distinct audiences, one
white and Southern, the other black. The line he found himself walking in
the last years of his life was also imaginary, as the freedom struggle offered
agonizing, stark choices for such self-professed moderates of Faulkners
vintage.
Faulkners 1962 death nearly coincided with the integration, and subse-
quent conflagration, of the University of Mississippi in Oxford. Two were
killed and hundreds injured in the campus violence that Faulkner did not
live to witness in his hometown. In 1964, as the civil rights movement saw
even more violent, as well as more hopeful, events, including the monu-
mental Civil Rights Act, the musician-activist Nina Simone talked back
to Faulkners cautionary advice in Mississippi Goddam, which became
something of an anthem for the movements participants: Dont tell me
I tell you/ Me and my people just about due/ Ive been there so I know/
They keep on saying Go slow! Yet for all these onrushing changes in
and beyond Mississippi, Faulkner might well have agreed with some of
Simones other lines, focused as they were, and as much of his own writ-
ings had been, not on the past but on the future, and on imagining a better
world than the present one: This is a show tune/ But the show hasnt been
written for it, yet.
 Primeval, Goddam, and beyond: On Mississippi 31

NOTES
1 David L. Cohn, God Shakes Creation (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1935),
p. 14.
2 For more on the Deltas environmental history, see Mikko Saikku, This Delta,
This Land: An Environmental History of the Yazoo-Mississippi Floodplain (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 2005).
3 William Alexander Percy, Lanterns on the Levee: Reflections of a Planters Son
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), p. 3.
4 Eric Sackheim (ed.), The Blues Line: Blues Lyrics from Leadbelly to Muddy Waters
(New York: Thunders Mouth Press, 1969), p. 193.
5 For more on this floods impact on Faulkner and particularly on his work on The
Sound and the Fury, see Susan Scott Parrish, Faulkner and the Outer Weather
of 1927, American Literary History 24.1 (Spring 2012), 3458.
6 For more on the pre-Civil War political economy of the Lower Mississippi
Valley, see Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the
Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013).
7 Quoted in Christopher Myers Asch, The Senator and the Sharecropper: The
Freedom Struggles of James O. Eastland and Fannie Lou Hamer (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2011), p. 4.
8 Houston A. Baker Jr. and Dana D. Nelson, Preface: Violence, the Body, and
The South, American Literature 73.2 (2001), 231.
9 Noel Polk, Outside the Southern Myth (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
1997), p. ix.
The Caribbean
 chapter 3

A gulf society
Matthew Pratt Guterl

Thomas Sutpen, the cruel archetype at the heart of William Faulkners

Absalom, Absalom! (1936), embodies a certain history of the Gulf South. A
young man with an insatiable desire for the wealth and grandeur of the
great planters, he sojourns through the Caribbean the great laboratory
of chattel bondage before arriving on the cutting edge of the American
frontier: the wild forests of the trans-Mississippi. He brings with him a
team of Haitian slaves and a beleaguered French architect, the means, as he
sees it, of his meteoric rise. A man driven by want and anxiety, he creates a
towering, terrifying monument to his own desperate desire to be important,
to be respected, to be a man of slaveholding honor. His creation, in the
end, is never precisely Southern or American, because it owes something
to the circum-Caribbean, to his West Indian proving grounds, and to
the material conditions represented by those slaves, that architect of
the building of his Sutpens Hundred. Sutpens eventual doom might
well be Faulkners plot, but the whole of the hemispheric is the authors
context.
The novel was written generations after the passing of the Old South
of Sutpens youth. But, still, there is something durable about this notion
of a globally circulating master class, at home in the Gulf South, in the
West Indies, and elsewhere in the warm waters of the Caribbean. The
idea of a South that was borderless, that drew deeply from the dark,
disturbing, hemispheric history of slaveholding, is worth reconsidering and
remembering as we set out to understand the context in the largest sense
of the term of Faulkners work. Perhaps the most interesting thing about
the Gulf South, though, isnt the striking parallels between the story of
Thomas Sutpen and the history of slaveholding in the circum-Caribbean,
but the enduring through-line that runs right to the present. The creation
of Sutpens Hundred, the French architect, the Haitian slaves, these are not
merely literary details they are also metaphors for Southern history, then
and now.
35
36 Matthew Pratt Guterl
Gulf South here refers, rather loosely, to the band of port cities, small
towns, and plantation communities found along the edge of the polyglot
Caribbean cities like Mobile, New Orleans, Galveston, and Key West,
for instance. It also refers, again loosely, to their closely linked partners:
Savannah, Charleston, and Havana, among many others. These bustling
port cities were nodes in a series of overlapping economic, social, and
political networks, linked by shipping routes, by rail and horse, and by an
imaginatively shared sense of time and space fostered by print culture and
a common history of slaveholding. People, material, and ideas drifted and
flowed, with great purpose, around this network, from node to node. By
the time of the fictional Thomas Sutpen, the Gulf South the northern
edge of this network was a mature counterpoint to the New England
states. By the dawn of the Civil War, the network itself was very nearly a
counter to the United States, yoking the slaveholding states into an infor-
mal, alternative relationship with an entirely different singularity that
aforementioned circum-Caribbean, or American Mediterranean. And by
the time Faulkner sat down to write Absalom, Absalom!, this globalized
Gulf South existed mostly but not completely in memory.1
To call this network of port cities and by extension the Gulf South
a singularity is to invoke other exceptions to American or Southern
exceptionalism, all of them traversing national boundaries and linguis-
tic divides: Paul Gilroys Black Atlantic, for instance,2 or Denise Cruzs
transpacific.3 Singularities are more than a network; they are, indeed, a
network come alive, suffused with a sense of itself as something distinct,
something that does a particular kind of political work, something that
imagines itself outside of the nation-state. At times, as was true of Gilroys
Black Atlantic, they can be sources of subaltern solidarity, of a counter-
modern sensibility. For Cruz, a singularity can both constitute the Filipina
as a border-crossing object and enable her much-studied crossings. Each
one is different, and each does very different work, aiding cultural pro-
ductions that are, at once, multiply rooted and always evolving.4 In the
case of the Gulf South, the singularity in question enabled the survival
of a particular form of white supremacy, coded to chattel bondage, and
allowed it to persist as a transnational alternative to what could be found
in free republics, north and south. It established a dialogic relationship
between what was Southern and what was Caribbean, facilitating a
loose confederation of cultures and interests. It created a sense that the
master class was cosmopolitan, multi-lingual, refined all that Faulkners
Thomas Sutpen envied, and that his son Charles Bon ironically embodied.
And when the South began to lose the Civil War, the transnational other
 A gulf society 37
could also be mobilized as a variant of the subaltern, giving rise, ultimately,
to the idea that Dixie was a downtrodden victim of Northern aggression.
The nodes in this network were more than switching points for capital
and labor; they were also sites of release and escape from what became
the menacing confinements of the US South. When, for instance, the
Confederate States of America began to crumble and its most prominent
citizens luminaries of the rebel government and its military wing found
themselves suddenly forced to re-envision their social place elsewhere in
the Americas, the destinations they imagined relocating to already seemed
familiar, theirs for the taking. While many US planters stayed and fought
a rear-guard action, and others hid and hoped for a pardon, a significant
number expatriated. When they ran, they fled to the deeper south, to
Mexico, Cuba, or Brazil, places they imagined were deeply sympathetic to
their cause, and that were, perhaps, more fertile ground for re-making their
world. If, like Louisianas Confederate Governor Henry Watkins Allen, they
went to Mexico, they would have travelled the overland route, pilgrims on
a trail headed towards a new mecca. If instead they chose Cuba or Brazil,
they took a steamer, or arrived by sail. In any case, they fled for their
lives.
The American Mediterranean in which the Gulf South loomed so large
was populated with slaveholders, slaves, and a dense stratum of in-between
types. At the aristocratic, racially authoritarian end of the spectrum, those
who self-identified with the network were a seemingly disconnected lot, but
many were bound together by New Orleans, a rival to Havana as the greatest
of nodes in the network. Judah Benjamin, West Indian emigre, railroad
enthusiast, and Louisiana planter, was a champion of the ideal. So, too, was
Andrew McCollum, another Gulf planter, who was interested in Brazil as a
possible colony of the greater South. And Eliza McHatton, a Scotch-Irish
settler on the edge of the Mississippi, just south of Baton Rouge, chose to
remove herself to Cuba during the Civil War rather than stay in the defeated
South. As a final example, there was Henry Watkins Allen, global traveller,
champion of chivalry, and Confederate Governor of the state of Louisiana,
who fled to Mexico when his state fell into Union hands, and opened up a
bilingual newspaper, becoming a champion of white settlement in Central
America. These were the Old Souths most mobile capitalists, antecedents
of todays globetrotting advocates of outsourcing and globalization.
If the Civil War looms large in this history, it is because the conflict
truly illuminated the connections between the Gulf South and the Amer-
ican Mediterranean. When, for instance, Confederate expatriates fled the
advance of the Union army, many sought temporary shelter in the hotels
38 Matthew Pratt Guterl
of Havana, that second South, where expatriate Sarah Brewer maintained
a prosperous, stylish, and highly sociable American-style hotel at #9
Teniente Rey Street. There, in the open courtyard, they plotted their
futures, and proposed to return to North America and vanquish their foes.
They did all of this under the supervision of Brewer, ever the gentle host,
a single Southern woman in the tropics, often described as a woman of
character from a good family. Widowed at a tender age, she had drifted
across the Gulf South, ending up in Havana, home to so many other cos-
mopolitans, where she created a relay point for those travellers who were
weary of Spanish food, and who wanted the creature comforts of home
even as their own permanent homes stood in ruins, their way of life altered
irrevocably. This narrative from a failed domesticity and a ruined home
to a successful career as a hostess for those in the process of re-envisioning
their own places in a world forever altered reminds us that the node in a
transnational network, for women, is hardly just a site of routine victimiza-
tion or danger, but that it can be a place of powerful remaking. But, then
again, neither is it an entirely safe place. Patriarchy is everywhere. And even
Sarah Brewer, having built herself a different, better life, had to negotiate
a social world where the rules had been written by and for the men who
championed their Lost Cause in her lobby.
Brewers relocation to the hotel as both an alternative home and business,
set in the circuits of the Caribbean, was an affirmation of the Gulf South
as a part of something much larger and older than the Confederacy: a
transnational network of republics, colonies, and territories, all of them
stitched together by common histories of slavery, of agriculture, and of
racial hierarchy. The history of such a network dates back to the sixteenth
and seventeenth century settlements in the region, with their slipshod
colonial pedigrees and their formal and informal exchanges. It matured
over the eighteenth century, as the British Atlantic established a formal
system for such exchanges, and as the slave trade expanded and knitted
together the region, and it persisted long after the French, American, and
Haitian revolutions. Fractured by the Civil War, it survived, though, in
ideal and in practice, right up to Faulkners day. One need not look hard
for proof of it, though one does need to set aside the sightlines of the
nation-state, to see outside of the dominant nation time of the dominant
United States.
The end of the Civil War seems like a great break in the narrative,
the moment at which the slaveholding American Mediterranean ceased its
function as a singularity. The Union navys encirclement of the Gulf South,
its severing of the vital roots and routes to the Caribbean, would seem to
 A gulf society 39
have broken the network. The end of slavery, the arrival of citizenship for
freedmen and freedwomen, and the foreclosure of herrenvolk democracy
(that is, government by an exclusively enfranchised ethnic majority) would
only have highlighted the new and profound distinctions between the
coastline of the South and the rest of the circum-Caribbean. In a thousand
ways, then, the end of slavery would seem to have marked the end of the
American Mediterranean.
Except that it didnt. Indeed, the Gulf Souths connections to the broader
Caribbean persisted, despite the absence of slavery, and despite the imposi-
tion of national authority. And this persistence makes Faulkners extraordi-
nary description of the Old South all the more interesting. Extraordinary,
I hasten to add, doesnt mean that Absalom, Absalom! is the sole instance
of such a representation of the global South. Indeed, Faulkners oeuvre is
replete with other examples of this attention to the port cities, cultural and
social networks, and hemispheric outlook. His body of work is an archive
of racial mixed-bloods, often with transnational family trees, their open
histories of mixed origins revealed in tension with the Souths refusal to
see the truth of its own relation to the hemisphere. The racial mixture
of Charles Bon, of Paul de Montigny in the short story Elly, or even
of Joe Christmas in Light in August (1932), is a metaphor for the hybrid-
ity of nation, region, and race. Within this archive, there are portraits of
decadent, decaying plantations, ghostly reminders of the slaveholding past,
and driven, willful men, all struggling to master a world divided by color,
complexion, and class. Faulkner returns repeatedly in his fiction to New
Orleans, a perpetual gateway to the West Indies, and regularly features
profiles of rough-necked, vagabonding bootleggers (as in Once Aboard
the Lugger or The Big Shot), the descendants of Confederate blockade-
runners, all of them cruder and less successful versions of Thomas Sutpen.
This material is there, ready for our interrogation as readers. But there is
a kind of knowledge, as John T. Matthews puts it, that can be held while
being ignored, a kind of vision that looks but does not see. We should
see Sutpen and his fellows as representatives of a Gulf South that owes
a founding debt to West Indian slave-based agriculture, [that] extracted
labor and profit from African-Caribbean slave trade, and [that] practiced
forms of racial and sexual control common to other hemispheric colonial
regimes.5 This is, perhaps, a Faulkner for our time, because his portrait
of a scrambling, determined, globally-oriented class of men, dominating a
vast world so that a small caste can triumph, still seems fresh, but it is also
the Faulkner who has always been there. We should see him this way, but
often we dont.
40 Matthew Pratt Guterl
In a recent essay in Salon on Southern poverty pimps a shorthand
for the political class that has been championing itinerant serfdom as a
part of comprehensive immigrant reform political scientist Michael Lind
paints with broad brushstrokes. The purpose of the age-old economic
development strategy of the Southern states, he stridently asserts, has
never been to allow them to compete with other states or countries on the
basis of superior innovation or living standards. Instead, for generations
Southern economic policymakers have sought to secure a lucrative second-
tier role for the South in the national and world economies, as a supplier
of commodities like cotton and oil and gas and a source of cheap labor for
footloose corporations. This strategy of specializing in commodities and
cheap labor is intended to enrich the Southern oligarchy. It doesnt enrich
the majority of Southerners, white, black or brown, but it is not intended
to. Contrary to what is often said, he concludes, the original sin of
the South is not slavery, or even racism. It is cheap, powerless labor.6
Linds provocations should give us pause, and make us wonder whether
the Gulf South of yore ever truly went away. In 1943 just seven years
after the publication of Absalom, Absalom!, in the midst of a global war,
and in a nation still recovering from a major depression central Floridas
Sugar Kings, the last Southern planters still dependent on gang labor, were
indicted by the US Attorneys office for the reproduction of slavery, a vio-
lation of laws against peonage. Despite the assurance of the industry that
seasonal labor constituted a relatively privileged class of agricultural work-
ers, the Department of Justice had found that offers of free transportation
to Florida were translated, once workers arrived, into a debt owed to US
Sugar, and that pay rates were dramatically different for black workers than
for whites. Rumors abounded about corporal punishment, about vainglori-
ous overseers, prone to use the lash, driving their more indebted labor into
the fields, where various dangers physical harm from machetes, snakes,
wild animals lurked.7
Once the legal threat was averted, the great planters of Clewiston turned
to a more reliable, and more pliable, labor force, one generally outside of the
juridical terrain of the Department of Justice. They turned to immigrants
from the Caribbean, who sat largely outside the control of the state, and
whose abundance, desperation, and political distance made them easy to
exploit. Their work in fields was quickly naturalized, so that planters might
point to long fingers and lean arms as evidence that this body of laborers
was born to cut cane. By the late 1980s, when journalist Alec Wilkinson
visited Clewiston, these laborers were drawn from Jamaica and Dominica
and Trinidad, locked up in pens at night veritable barracoons, built of
 A gulf society 41
concrete and chain link fencing routinely shorted on their wages, and
worked by their masters so hard that they often fell asleep while eating
dinner.8
Stephen Hahn once noted that if you re-frame the story of emancipation
to begin not with Fort Sumter in 1861, but with the passage of the Northwest
Ordinance in 1787 (which prohibited slavery in new states to be formed
west of the Ohio River), then the end of chattel bondage was, in the United
States, less like the flipping of a switch and more like the advance of a glacier.
Hahn wondered what it might mean to think of emancipation in the United
States as perhaps the slowest such process in history, even slower than in
parallel slave societies where gradual emancipation acts, forced indentures,
apprenticeships, and various other adjustments kept the institution alive,
if on life support, for decades. The myth of American exceptionalism long
celebrated the single, virtuous act of Lincoln to suddenly, decisively, even
impetuously, free the slaves, and with that grand gesture to commence
the process of emancipation. Following Hahns clever reversal, Lincolns act
loses some but not all of its majesty, becomes not merely a reflection of
one mans vision, nor really a reflection of liberal progress, but, instead, just
another notch on the national timeline, one detail in an already connected
and protracted process that was, the historian avers, more protracted [in
the United States] than anywhere else in the Americas.9
How do we tell the story of 1943? Or 1863? Of Yoknapatawpha County?
Or of Clewiston? Do we focus on the great turning point, or watershed
moment, that cannot be undone, and that changes everything? Or do we
push back against the idea that a single event, or moment, is anything other
than a reflection of long, deep context? Like Hahn and, to a lesser extent,
like Lind, we might want to screw around with the periodization here, and
more specifically with the end date. More like Pete Daniel, we should want
to talk about the metamorphosis, and not the abolition of, slavery.10
We should want to see 1943 or 1936 not as the ghost of slaverys past,
but as proof that the more subtle coercion of black bodies into the fields
represented an evolution of the peculiar institution, an evolution that
was hidden by the widespread (and misplaced) confidence that slavery was
no more. Faulkners awareness of the Souths neo-plantation system may
be seen in Go Down, Moses (1942), in which slaverys forms of economic
tyranny, racial subjugation, and mentalities of dependence and domination
continue as a modern ghost of the past.
As Wilkinson tells it, in the aftermath of the Civil War, labor in the
fields around the southern edge of Lake Okeechobee was drawn from the
local African American population, once enslaved and now free, but the
42 Matthew Pratt Guterl
brutality of the work regime meant that few would return for a second, or
a third, or a fourth season. Recruiters pushed their search for workers just
a little further outward each year, one step ahead of word-of-mouth, and
colored their descriptions of the job just a little bit more, to entice new
commitments. And, back in Clewiston and Belle Glade and elsewhere, the
planters maintained an oppressive penal apparatus, so that arriving laborers
couldnt simply flee after a week on the job. If, in the sugar house, new tech-
nologies began to appear, the environmental conditions on the ground
and in the soil more particularly made it difficult to modernize the
actual cutting of the cane. This meant that for decades the Sugar Kings
were forced to send out their recruiters across the black South, looking
for temporary, seasonal workers, veritable slaves who worked and lived
in conditions that were, in almost every way, unchanged from the mid
1850s. By 1943, these recruiters had practically exhausted their capacity to
bring any African Americans to the deeper South, to bring them back in
time to slavery and hold them there, for a long, hot summer of abuse and
exploitation.
Immigrants more akin to braceros than to huddled masses, yearning
to breathe free were easier. Easier to capture, easier to keep. Like Thomas
Sutpens captive Haitians, they had nowhere else to go, no refuge to which
to escape. They had no agent, generally, to lobby on their behalf against
the interest of the planters, and no rights that were more important than
the profit margins of the plantations. They were marked by accent and
language and color; locked up, their confinement was a legal extension of
their temporary stay on United States soil. Still, the work was hard enough
and dangerous enough that, to keep the cane cut, each year the recruiters
needed to work, once more, a little harder to find new bodies for the fields.
Their representation of the ideal working type shifted repeatedly where
first it was the African American who was born to cut cane, then it was
West Indians, and then it was Mexicans and Central Americans. And, at
every step, they were aided by exceptions to US labor laws, exceptions that
date back in jurisprudence to the New Deal, and which give agricultural
workers substantially fewer rights in the workplace. And they were aided,
just as certainly, by a more antique notion that gang work in the fields was
slave work, or work for prisoners, and certainly not the work of a white
citizenry.
It would be easy to see the events of 1943 the dismissal of the indict-
ment, the soft sanction of oppressive labor regimes, and the shift to a
foreign pool of workers as evidence of something new: a great switch
from Jim Crow to legal serfdom, from domestic to foreign workers,
 A gulf society 43
as Lind might put it, akin to the earlier shift from slavery to freedom in
1863. But such laboring crossovers have long been common in slaveholding
societies, and the South is no exception. In the West Indies, Chinese and
Indian indentured laborers were thought to be a bridge between slavery and
freedom, but so too were Galacians, Mayans, and the Irish. Immigrants,
coerced laborers, and indentured workers were structural adjustments to
Cuban slavery in the modernizing nineteenth century, allowing for job
specialization, and giving race-based slavery a chance to survive. And this
particular adjustment persisted after emancipation. In the South, after slav-
ery, there were efforts to bring the Chinese to cut cane and work the boilers
in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, efforts that were paired with new
restrictions on African Americans, like the Black Codes, the institution-
alization of debt peonage, the general criminalization of blackness, and
the slow emergence of Jim Crow. There were attempts, as well, to bring
Italians and Germans into the fields, to create teams of white laborers
neither yeomen nor slaves working in cotton and sugar, in productive
competition with freedmen. These various bodies were complements, not
opposites. And these adjustments werent conceived in a vacuum they
were the result of a broad-based policy exchange, rooted in travel and
collaboration across national borders.
And they still are. Most, but not all, of contemporary agriculture is
mechanized now, and the machines distract us from seeing places like
Clewiston. They make it hard to see the nobodies as John Bowe
classifies them in the very title of his study11 who labor like slaves.
That blindness confirms our sense that our post-slavery world is far
removed from the past. In modern citrus production, these nobodies are
most prominently represented in the proverbial Mexican migrant, picking
apples across the United States, moving with the seasons. In Florida, the
abuse of tomato pickers from Haiti, who were whipped with chains and
locked up in trailers at night, led to convictions that depended on early
post-emancipation jurisprudence, because present-day laws rarely address
slavery and peonage directly.12 Todays Mexican fruit-pickers and Mayan
cane cutters arent merely todays slaves, as Bowe calls them; they also
worked alongside yesterdays slaves. They are a part of the enduring history
of slavery. They arrive today not on the high-masted slave ships of yore,
accompanied by Cuban slavers and a polyglot crew, but in rusting, fetid
shipping containers, courtesy of companies with names like Giant Labor
Solutions, run out of Kansas, and owned by a group of Uzbeki nationals.13
The presence of these subaltern migrants today in Florida and across
the United States reflects a slaveholding past that was economically
44 Matthew Pratt Guterl
ambitious and globally aware. The master class of the past was, contra
Lind, a variegated, complex group, barely legible, if at all, as a single class
or oligarchy. But for some prominent members of this cohort those
along the Caribbean rim, those in the bustling port cities, those who moved
regularly across the West Indies todays mixing and matching of racialized
labor pools, drawn from the global South, broadly construed, would make
perfect sense. There is a genealogy here that needs to be unearthed, and
carefully brushed off and archived, a history of the elites Christopher Lasch
once pilloried as cosmopolitan, without country or commitment.14 One
thinks, immediately, of the past life of Thomas Sutpen, whose narrative
begins, after all, with a departure: I went, he remembered, to the West
Indies (AA 194).
Todays Fanjul brothers the Cuban ex-pats who own one of the largest
plantations in Clewiston were yesterdays McHattons the Baton Rogue
planters who left for Cuba in the same year that Lincoln issued his famous
proclamation. The practice of capital movement, the presence of old-
fashioned labor regimes dependent on easily exploited labor, the ethos
of elite dominion over the land, and the racial inflection of all of this,
continues to join the region to a larger singularity, a larger American
Mediterranean. Cuban planters and American planters, fictional masters
and shadowy real figures, black and brown workers from across the circum-
Caribbean, locked up and constrained: this is the Gulf South of today.
But it is also the American Mediterranean as William Faulkner knew it,
imagined it, and wrote it. His broader interest in the region as a well-worn
threshold to the Caribbean frames our own debates about border-crossing
illegals, shipped around the world in railway freight cars or shuttled
through tunnels.

NOTES
1 One might argue that the sense of an American Mediterranean had been
dramatically transfigured into the premise of national imperialism. United
States economic interests in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, for example,
led to military occupation of these states in the 1920s and early 1930s.
2 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
3 Denise Cruz, Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).
4 Here, I am drawing from Kirsten Silva Gruesz, Ambassadors of Culture: The
Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing (Princeton University Press, 2001);
Brent Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of
 A gulf society 45
Black Internationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); Michelle
Stephens, Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellec-
tuals in the United States, 19141962 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005);
Matthew Pratt Guterl, American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the
Age of Emancipation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008); and Guterl,
Refugee Planters: Henry Watkins Allen and the Hemispheric South, Ameri-
can Literary History 23.4 (Winter 2011), 72450.
5 John T. Matthews, Recalling the West Indies: From Yoknapatawpha to Haiti
and Back, American Literature 16.2 (2004), 238.
6 Michael Lind, Southern Poverty Pimps, Salon 19 February 2013, http://www.
salon.com/2013/02/19/southern poverty pimps/.
7 Twelfth Annual Report, United States Sugar Corporation, 30 June 1943.
8 Alec Wilkinson, Big Sugar: Seasons in the Canefields of Florida (New York:
Knopf, 1989).
9 Stephen Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 6.
10 Pete Daniel, The Metamorphosis of Slavery, 1865 1900, Journal of American
History 66 (June 1979), 8899.
11 John Bowe, Nobodies: Modern American Slave Labor and the Dark Side of
the New Global Economy (New York: Random House, 2008). See also Cindy
Hahamovitch, No Mans Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the
Global History of Deportable Labor (Princeton University Press, 2012).
12 Mischa Gaus, In Florida, Slavery Still Haunts the Fields, Truthout, 13 August
2010, http://archive.truthout.org/in-florida-slavery-still-haunts-fields62296.
13 News Release, Office of the United States Attorney, Western District of
Missouri, 27 May 2009, http://www.justice.gov/usao/mow/news2009/
giantlabor.ind.htm
14 Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (New
York: Norton, 1996).
 chapter 4

William Faulkners Caribbean poetics

Valerie Loichot

The publication of William Faulkners Absalom, Absalom! (1936) closely

follows the end of the American occupation of Haiti and of the Dominican
Republic (respectively 191534 and 191624). In the novel, the planter
and patriarch Thomas Sutpen abruptly appears in Jefferson, Mississippi
in 1833 flanked by a French architect from Martinique and a horde of
enslaved Africans supposedly acquired in Haiti in the 1820s. These examples
seem to demonstrate that the West Indian historical and political context
directly shaped the fictional representation of Faulkners Yoknapatawpha.
However, readers inevitably realize that the function of the Caribbean
in Faulkners work escapes mere contextual and political influence, and
betrays basic rules of historicity. Indeed, Sutpen could not have acquired
slaves in a country that proclaimed radical emancipation and independence
following the Haitian Revolution in 1804.1 This historical incongruity
should not be attributed to Faulkners error, however, but rather to the
very function that the Caribbean plays in his work, which, through the
ambiguity of the regions representation, opens up a space of dialogue with
New World history.2 Faulkners Caribbean is more complexly poetic and
structural than simply contextual.3 In Absalom, Absalom!, for instance, there
are not one but many Caribbeans: the land of riches of young Sutpens
fantasy; the dark and fatal land associated with Sutpens negroes; the
sophisticated Martinique of the French architect; the womblike synthetic
Porto Rico/Haiti of Charles Bon; and the voluptuous city of New Orleans,
its northernmost outpost. Further, I contend that Faulkner performs a
Caribbean poetics akin to creolization, which, in turn, generates a full-
fledged movement of Faulknerian writing in the Caribbean.4
My definition of Faulkners Caribbean poetics is threefold. On a basic
level, I examine the representation of Caribbean Creole spaces such as
Haiti, Martinique, and, arguably, New Orleans, and their interaction
with Faulkners Mississippi plantation. I then move on to what poets

and philosophers Wilson Harris and Edouard Glissant qualify as Faulkners
46
 William Faulkners Caribbean poetics 47
Caribbean worldview. Glissant identifies the Caribbean in Faulkners works
not as the result of a fantasy but as a manifestation of the socio-cultural
reality that the plantation produced across the Americas. For Glissant, the
Caribbean social fabric itself is Faulknerian. Finally, I survey the enormous
Faulknerian influence on Caribbean writers, evident not only intertextu-
ally, but also, more importantly, through a generalized practice of Faulkne-
rian writing in the Caribbean. Ultimately, Faulkners rapport with the
Caribbean is a practice and poetics of relational and reciprocal influence.

I. Faulkners Caribbean spaces

The presence of the Caribbean in Faulkners novels is most developed in
Absalom, Absalom! (1936), in which Faulkner locates the problematic roots
of the Mississippi plantation in post-revolutionary Haiti. At first sight,
there seems to be a polarization between the wild Africans Haiti and
the French architects Martinique. This dichotomy reproduces colonial
representations of the West Indies whereby Martinique, a French colony
known as the Paris of the Antilles, was used as an example of civilization
in opposition to the demonized vodouist independent nation Haiti. The
anachronistic and ahistorical Haiti from which Sutpen returns is depicted
as both a place of savagery, animality, and non-speech, and a site of extreme
order where planters ride peacefully above the turmoil of revolting lands
and humans. Martinique, on the opposite end of the spectrum, is embod-
ied by the overly fancy dress and sophistication of the French architect
(AA 26). Both the abject savagery of Haiti and the effeminate sophisti-
cation of Martinique threaten the measured masculinity of the Southern
planter gentleman. However, these truths are quickly turned on their heads.
The sophisticated French architect becomes as bare as a raccoon and loses
the hat that was the only warrant of his humanity (207). The enslaved
Africans, first perceived as unruly and pre-linguistic, are acknowledged to
speak a sort of French (27). They gain control of the land by surviving
in the swamp with the use of mud as technology (28). The West Indies is
thus built on unstable extremes that dissolve as its subjects acclimate to the
Yoknapatawpha world.
The West Indies oscillates between a world of fantasy and a ground for
ethical and political consciousness. Young Sutpens schoolbook presents
the islands as a place floating away from geographical or historical context
to which poor white men [go] in ships and [become] rich (195). Similarly
for Charles Bon, whose Haitian mother could have come from that Porto
Rico or Haiti or wherever it was he understood vaguely that he had come
48 Valerie Loichot
from like orthodox children do of heaven or the cabbage patch (239), the
Caribbean is a fantasy devoid of context. Mr. Compsons political portrayal
of Haiti contrasts with this fiction of interchangeability. Steeped in justice
and ethical thinking, it may provide the sharpest criticism of slavery to be
found in Faulkners fiction: a soil manured with black blood from two
hundred years of oppression and exploitation . . . as if nature held a balance
and kept a book and offered a recompense for the torn limbs and outraged
hearts even if man did not (202).
Within the novel, New Orleans, a liminal port of the circum-Atlantic
par excellence, also functions as a Caribbean space. Geographically, New
Orleans is the northernmost city of the Caribbean, historically and cultur-
ally a high site of creolization.5 The city provides Faulkner with a space
of creolization within the limits of the United States, only a few hours
away from Yoknapatawpha. Charles Bon, resident of the port city, with his
fluid creolized identity, sexual opacity, elusive and mysterious mixed-race
mother Eulalia, and mysterious past and ambiguous intentions, metonymi-
cally represents the creolizing city of New Orleans that threatens the airtight
seals of Yoknapatawpha rules based on absolute binaries. New Orleans is
foreign and paradoxical, with its atmosphere at once fatal and languorous,
at once feminine and steel-hard (86).
Beyond Absalom, Absalom!, the plantation space of the Yoknapatawpha
novels links Faulkners geography to the Caribbean, and more extensively to
what Glissant calls the Plantation Americas, as masterfully demonstrated by
George Handley.6 In Orphan Narratives,7 I explored the deep connection
between Faulkner and the circum-Atlantic Creole world of Light in August.
The 1932 novel, aside from a reference to Joe Christmas alleged Mexican
father, does not contain any explicit reference to Latin America or the
Caribbean.8 However, I have argued that the allegedly mixed-race character
of Joe Christmas, and the impossibility of naming him in a way other than
a constant rebounding between black-and-white categories, is precisely
what calls for a Caribbean intervention in reading Faulkners world. It is
also precisely through what I have called a situation of general orphanage
in the aftermath of slavery, a situation in which familial and cultural
orphans gain agency to restructure new forms of kinship and narratives,
that William Faulkner is akin to African American writer Toni Morrison,
to his Guadeloupean contemporary, the white Creole poet Saint-John Perse
(18871962), and to Glissant, a descendant of African slaves, who sees in
Faulkner a putative, albeit problematic, literary father. It might not come
as a surprise then, that for Glissant, Faulkner and Saint-John Perse look
alike in their air of superiority and dignity.9 For contemporary Martinican
 William Faulkners Caribbean poetics 49
writer Patrick Chamoiseau, Perse and Faulkner both carry the weight of
slavery and are obsessed by it.10 Perse and Faulkner share a world built
by a global plantation economy and thus a world shaped by the abrupt
cultural and material juxtaposition of deported Africans and transplanted
Europeans. These two white planter poets with a consciousness, one in his
deep South postal stamp of Yoknapatawpha, the other on his islet of the
Guadeloupean archipelago, stand above the racial turmoil and injustice
they witness, above the humanitarian catastrophe of slavery thanks to
their ancestral social and class positions, as well as to the luxury of the aerial
narrative perspective available to all authors. The unstoppable force of
creolization, which leaves no chance for dynastic fantasies, linear patriarchal
genealogies, rigid structures of power, or straightforward narratives, shapes
their fictional and poetic universe.

II. Faulkners Caribbean poetics

Glissant contends that [i]n all of Faulkners works, the clashing mess of
names, the forced or willing miscegenations, the double (black and white)
lineages, relentlessly reproduce . . . the extended-family style that has con-
tributed for so long to the building of the Caribbean social fabric. Its no
accident that Sutpen met his fate in Haiti.11 How should we understand
the claim that Faulkner imitates the Caribbean and that his narratives
reproduce its social structures? It is a fabric greater than the social and the
familial, and greater than the narrative that shapes the plantation world.
Glissant has designated it by many names: the rhizomatic, the composite,
the relational, or the opaque. In the plantation global South, Western and
Cartesian ideas of a single root, filiation, or transparency are compromised
by the intervention of external cultural elements that lead to creolization.
Creolization is the process through which the abrupt contact of African,
Indigenous, European, and Asian cultures in the Americas formed complex
and fluid identities. For Glissant, creolization diffracts. It is a form of mix-
ing whose result goes beyond the sum of its parts and is unpredictable.12
This is precisely why Glissant, who, significantly, always read Faulkner in
French, spent his literary life relentlessly reflecting on his relationship to
his problematic literary father. Glissants monograph Faulkner, Mississippi
is more than a mere literary analysis. Extensive readings of Faulkners
novels, short stories, and letters are prefaced or deferred by Glissants pro-
jection of his own situation within Faulkners fictional Yoknapatawpha.
Written while Glissant worked in Baton Rouge as a distinguished profes-
sor at Louisiana State University, the book begins with Glissants visit to
50 Valerie Loichot
Faulkners plantation home, Rowan Oak, a penetration into a tragic and
irremediable thickness, marked by an indefinable, engulfing menace (7).
Signs of segregation and racism such as an unwelcoming honky-tonk joint,
three crosses reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan, and thick woods baring
the entrance to the big house mark the authors journey to Rowan Oak.
Upon arrival, Glissant faces frontally the insurmountable distance between
him, a black Antillean, and the white Mississippi planter, whose intimacy
he refuses to see: We sit down on the narrow staircase that leads up to
the bedroom. I have no desire to go upstairs, an utter lack of interest in
the personal (15). All the while, he recognizes in Rowan Oak the familiar
world that shaped both of them: The configuration of the Plantation was
the same everywhere, from Northeastern Brazil to the Caribbean to the
Southern United States: casa grande e senzala, the big House and the slave
hut, masters and slaves (10). Glissants brimming insights on Faulkners
novels are irremediably tangled up in this shared but separate world
experience.
The rest of Glissants oeuvre, from its inception to its twilight, abounds
with references to Faulkner. In his last book, Philosophie de la Relation,13
the relationship with Faulkner reaches an unprecedented familial intimacy.
Sensing his approaching death, and searching for his own birth home,
Glissant wanders about in his own Martinican landscape as if in Faulkners
fiction: If you get lost like this in a postage stamp (for example, Faulkner
in his Yoknapatawpha), it means you really know it is yours (142).
Glissant also cites the prevalence of opacity in Faulkners works, which
is akin to a Caribbean way of seeing the world in terms of unavoidable
cultures built on the abrupt hierarchical coexistence of humans. In Poetique,
he distinguishes positive from negative opacity. Negative opacity is the
refusal to relate to the other, as in racism or xenophobia. Glissants negative
opacity corresponds to the narrative shadows evoked by Toni Morrison
in Romancing the Shadow that define a mainstream white American
literary tradition in which African American characters, as well as African
American readers, are expelled from the imaginary of the text. Positive
opacity, on the other hand, is an ethical relation to the other that entails
the recognition of a particularity that cannot be comprehended by a system
that would lead to the assimilation of the others speech into ones own
discourse. Faulkners narratives go both ways. For instance, the fact that the
idiot Benjy in The Sound and the Fury owns his own interior monologue,
while most African American characters do not, could, for Glissant, be
a sign of negative opacity, i.e. the xenophobic refusal to understand the
racialized other. This would be exemplified, for instance, in Pantaloon in
 William Faulkners Caribbean poetics 51
Black in which the sheriffs deputy contends that black men can talk and
you can understand them and you think they are understanding you, at
least now and then. But when it comes to the normal human feelings and
sentiments of human beings, they might just as well be a damn herd of
wild buffaloes (GDM 14950). On the other hand, Faulkners reluctance
to insert the intimate speech of African American characters could be a sign
of respectful opacity which would resist the temptation to reduce and
usurp the speech of the other as ones own. This is perhaps what renders the
relation between Glissant and his white predecessor so complicated, and
what explains his tortured admiration for the Mississippi man. In positive
opacity, Glissant adds, we can love others without comprehending them
(Poetique 204).
It is also precisely through opacity, or through what he terms an insensi-
ble community in dark lights that Guyanese poet and critic Wilson Harris
attaches Faulkner to the extended Caribbean landscape.14 The community
that haunts Faulkners writing resides in his opaque and poetic language,
and in the buried intuition of an African and Caribbean presence. Harris
identifies patterns of claustrophobia in Faulkners Intruder in the Dust
(1948) that signal the presence of alien cultures and alien elements buried
at the heart of their own world (69). It is precisely in the foreignness
buried within ones own world, in a difference that inhabits and creolizes
sameness that Harris meets Glissant on Faulkner. While Harris does not
use the term creolization in relation to Faulkner, he identifies creolized
forms of being-in-the-world in Faulkners novels, such as the prevalence
of voodoo culture in Intruder in the Dust. For Harris, Faulkners voodoo
structures and aesthetics are marked by a continuous liminal relationship
between the living and the dead. Harris interprets the trope of the return
of the dead through the open grave as a manifestation of Faulkners uncon-
scious knowledge of voodoo, generalized in a poetics of the threshold:
It seems that Faulkner was not consciously aware of such a threshold
or how strangely his imagination had been pulled into coincidence with
a black theater of psyche, the expedition or lenvoi mort that a notable
scholar Alfred Metraux defines in his work on Voodoo in Haiti (934).
This presence is a half-excavated, half-reluctant, living strata (91), a zom-
bie of sorts, which requires the reader to frequent Faulkners texts through
a practice of excavation. Harris also finds in Faulkners works the concept
of twinship, prevalent in the vaudou imaginary as the manifestation of at
least two parallel cultures that coexist: Twinship can be defined as the
unrealized synchrony between two or more cultures which, at first sight,
seem remote in time and circumstance (73).
52 Valerie Loichot
These subterranean poetic practices, for Harris, allow Faulkners Yokna-
patawpha county to leave its provincialism in order to attain a form akin to
Glissants creolization: a strange light, I find, arises through which provin-
cialism relinquishes its powers and a body of harlequin features rooted
in many cultures comes into play and points to a universe of unsus-
pected diversity, correspondence, and potential (90). This copresence of
multiple cultures is never a celebration of difference, but rather a preser-
vation of opaque shadow zones: [a] potential heterogeneity, and arching
through European, African, and pre-Columbian hidden antecedents to
which Faulkner refers the whole sum of their ancestral horror and scorn
and fear of Indian, and Chinese, and Mexican and Carib and Jew (923).
It is precisely this awareness of the multiplicity of the world, resisting a flat-
tening universalism, but also slipping into xenophobic tendencies, which
allows Harris to list Faulkner in the company of a series of cosmopolitan
authors grounded in their lands and fears, whom he calls native/universal
spirits such as Herman Melville, Wole Soyinka, or Alejo Carpentier who
contribute to a philosophy of history in the Caribbean correlative to the
arts of the imagination (176). For Harris, then, it is Faulkners native uni-
versalism, dotted with subterraneous flashes and shadows and luminous
and reactionary insights, rather than an anchoring in a greater-Caribbean
plantation space, which qualifies Faulkner as a Caribbean writer.

III. Faulknerian writing in the Caribbean

It is perhaps the constant state of ambivalence, opacity, and creolization
in Faulkners texts that renders his influence on writers of the Americas
monumental. Deborah Cohn discusses the immense legacy of the South-
erner to Spanish American authors,15 explaining this influence in part by
Faulkners 1954 and 1961 visits to Latin America, and also by Faulkners
creoleness: Faulkners world is of the same blood as this America and
its history; it, too, is creole (Jorge Luis Borges, quoted in Cohn 506).
Faulkners influence on Caribbean writers is so pervasive that it resists
exhaustive treatment. Caribbean texts, like Faulkners, are marked by a
troubled temporality; an impossible clash of cultures and families; com-
plex, layered, heterogeneous and conflicting narratives; the dethroning of
an absolute author; the mysterious agency of the ledger; the ambivalence,
irony, and repetition of naming; and the depths and secrets of buried,
irretrievable histories. Jamaican Michelle Cliffs 1984 Abeng, which chal-
lenges linear narratives and shifts between standard English and Creole
speech, resembles the code switching between standard English and the
 William Faulkners Caribbean poetics 53
rural Mississippi parlance of Faulkners world. Wilson Harriss 1960 Palace
of the Peacock, in its complex opacity, reads like Faulknerian narrative fab-
ric. Glissants 1964 Quatri`eme si`ecle has a niece named after her uncle, as
in Faulkners The Sound and the Fury. Maryse Condes 1989 Traversee de la
Mangrove, revolving around a series of narratives about a dead body, imi-
tates the multivocal narrative structure and the liminality of life and death
in As I Lay Dying. Haitian writer Marie Vieux-Chauvet locks up the char-
acters of her 1968 novella Love in a Faulknerian plantation complete with
interracial family secrets and romance. Haitian-American writer Edwidge
Danticats 1998 The Farming of Bones is built on the metaphor of sugar
cane as human bone similar to Mr. Compsons evocation of Haiti in which
the black blood, the black bones and flesh and thinking and remembering
and hopes and desires serve as fertilizer (AA 202). So too is Aime Cesaires
1939 Cahier dun retour au pays natal in which the soil cultivated by Mis-
sissippi, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama slaves relates them by blood to the
Caribbean land (red earth, sanguine earth, consanguine earth).16 While
Chamoiseau recently deplored the lack of texts by Faulkner in Martinican
bookstores Whats a countrys worth if none of its bookstores carry any
single book by Faulkner? (Un Dimanche 146) he defines Faulkner as an
indispensable local author, in the sense that, like Saint-John Perse, Fanon,
Cesaire, and Glissant, he transmuted the horror and inhumanity of the
dungeon-plantation into the magnificence of his poetry (341).
A pressing question remains: can we in all honesty claim that Anglo-
phone, Creolophone, Francophone, and black or white Caribbean writ-
ers all practice Faulknerian writing? Couldnt we conclude instead that
Faulkner and Caribbean writers are simply shaped by the same world? In
short, are Caribbean writers Faulknerian or is Faulkner a Caribbean writer?
These questions shall remain open since simply stating that Caribbean
authors write in a Faulknerian style would give too much weight to a
unilateral sense of influence, and too much credit to a writer, who, after
all, was a member of the white plantocracy. We have to beware of this
perspective, as George Handley has warned us, and examine instead the
network of multifarious and reciprocal influence that would avoid the
trap of reproducing the master/slave power structure in the realm of the
literary. We have to read the imprint of Glissant, Harris, Conde, and
Chamoiseau in Faulkner, the same way we read Faulkner into their works.
On the other hand, claiming solely that Faulkners writing is a product
of its global Caribbean plantation context would deny Faulkners genius
and signature that shaped not only Caribbean, but also world literature.17
This propensity to be adopted, adapted, and creolized on a global scale is
54 Valerie Loichot
perhaps what best defines Faulkner. For Glissant, the South of Yoknap-
atawpha County encounters many other regions of the world, erupting
or slumbering, chaotic or torpid, Polynesias or Switzerlands, continents
or archipelagoes, meandering their way into the enormous Relation of
world-totality (Philosophie 262). Nevertheless, Faulkners Caribbean poet-
ics remain one of his privileged modes of expression.

NOTES
1 See John T. Matthews, Recalling the West Indies: From Yoknapatawpha to
Haiti and Back, American Literary History 16.2 (Summer 2004), 23862.
2 See Chris Bongie, Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Liter-
atures (Stanford University Press, 1998); George Handley, Postslavery Literatures
in the Americas: Family Portraits in Black and White (Charlottesville: University

of Virginia Press, 2000); Barbara Ladd, William Faulkner, Edouard Glissant,
in Faulkner in the Twenty-First Century, eds. Robert Hamblin and Ann Abadie
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), pp. 3149; Deborah Cohn,
History and Memory in the Two Souths (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press,
1999); and Michael Dash, Martinique/Mississippi, in Look Away! The U.S.
South in New World Studies, eds. Deborah Cohn and Jon Smith (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 94109.
3 Maritza Stanchich sees the Caribbean in Faulkner as following an economy of
stereotypes; see The Hidden Caribbean other in William Faulkners Absalom,
Absalom!: An Ideological Ancestry of US imperialism, Mississippi Quarterly
49.3 (Summer 1996), 60317. Jeff Karem asserts that Faulkners Caribbean is
symbolically rich but historically impoverished; see Fear of a Black Atlantic?
African Passages in Absalom, Absalom! and The Last Slaver, in Global Faulkner:
Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2006, eds. Annette Trefzer and Ann J. Abadie
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009), pp. 16273.
4 My chapter mostly concerns the Francophone, Creolophone, and Anglophone
Caribbean.
5 See for instance Ned Sublette, The World That Made New Orleans: From
Spanish Silver to Congo Square (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2008) and
Nathalie Dessens From Saint-Domingue to New Orleans: Migrations and Influ-
ences (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010).
6 George Handley, Post-Slavery Literatures in the Americas (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2000).
7 Valerie Loichot, Orphan Narratives: The Postplantation Literature of Faulkner,
Glissant, Morrison, and Saint-John Perse (Charlottesville: University of Virginia
Press, 2007).
8 For more on the relationship between Faulkner and Latin America, see the
essay by Esplin in this volume.

9 Edouard Glissant, Faulkner, Mississippi (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), p. 3.
10 Patrick Chamoiseau, Un Dimanche au cachot (Paris: Gallimard, 2007),
pp. 1447. This and all subsequent translations are mine.
 William Faulkners Caribbean poetics 55
11
Edouard Glissant, Poetique de la Relation (Paris: Gallimard: 1990), p. 70.
12
Edouard Glissant, Metissage et creolisation in Discours sur le metissage,
ed. Sylvie Kande (Paris: LHarmattan, 1999), p. 50.
13
Edouard Glissant, Philosophie de la Relation (Paris: Gallimard, 2009).
14 Andrew Bundy (ed.), Selected Essays of Wilson Harris: The Unfinished Genesis
of the Imagination (London: Routlege, 1999), pp. 6974, 908.
15 Deborah Cohn, Faulkner, Latin America, and the Caribbean, in A Com-
panion to William Faulkner, ed. Richard Moreland (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006),
p. 499.
16 Aime Cesaire, Cahier dun retour au pays natal (Paris: Presence africaine, 2000),
p. 46.
17 See the essays in this volume by Tanaka, Aboul-Ela, and Fujihira.
Africa
 chapter 5

What was Africa to Faulkner?

Keith Cartwright

Countee Cullens Heritage and its evocations of Africa by a descen-

dant three centuries removed / From the scenes his fathers loved remains a
touchstone of African American anxieties of identity and (counter)cultural
affiliation.1 I reference Cullens New Negro centerpiece to suggest that
William Faulkners work may hail from even more closely and anxiously
sensed ties to an African Americanity. No matter how much Faulkners
white kin worked to engineer systemic removals from (and of ) African
agency, his Mississippi remained a creolized environment of densely
entwined, mosaic originations. As cultural historians keep revealing,
Southern (and American) cultures drew profoundly from African agri-
cultural, culinary, linguistic, musical, religious, architectural, and other
expressive traditions. Africa in its real and imagined impacts was so
formative of Faulkners Yoknapatawpha genius that his texts muddy the
associations North Americans tend to make between race, culture, and
heritage.
The woman charged with helping to raise both Faulkner and his daugh-
ter Jill (Caroline Barr, born and matured in bondage) was likely only
a generation or two removed from Africa. Congo, the Gold Coast,
Senegambia, and Liberia marked the mental maps of Faulkners fore-
bears, many of whom hailed from spaces where people born in Africa
outnumbered those born in Europe. As I argued in Reading Africa into
American Literature,2 we may even trace a certain Senegambian imprint
on Faulkners narrative heritage from the Afro-creole fables of Callie
Barr and Joel Chandler Harris to the Bugs Bunny cartoon episodes
that emerged during Yoknapatawphas unfolding formation. Go Down,
Moses (1942) presents an exasperated county commissioner blurting out,
Confound it, Carothers . . . what the hell kind of Senegambian Mon-
tague and Capulet is this anyhow? (62). The short story Crevasse takes
Faulkners readers through a French WWI tunnel into the yawning black-
ness of a different contact space where torchlight exposes skeletons in dark
59
60 Keith Cartwright
tunics and bagging Zouave trousers . . . Senegalese troops of the May fight-
ing of 1915, surprised and killed by gas (CS 472). This kind of homegrown
Africanist familiarity was hardly unusual in Faulkners South. Indeed, tales
of the Senegambian Prince Ibrahima abd al Rahman and of Liberian repa-
triations of ex-slaves circulated widely in Mississippi. Andrew Lytle, who
came from a Tennessee Episcopalian background similar to that of Faulkner,
included a Senegalese character in his story Jericho, Jericho, Jericho and
insisted to me that enslaved Senegalese were often entrusted with supervi-
sory plantation roles and were known for Arabic literacy, ethnic aloofness,
physical beauty, and specific skills brought with them from Africa. Like
Faulkner, he was aware of the presence of Senegalese soldiers in WWI
France (and reminded by mixed-race Sewanee author Ely Greens memoir).
Africa figures complexly as home and destination in one of Faulkners
early, Garvey-era narrative efforts. Sunset, published in the New Orleans
Times-Picayune (1925), opens with a news epigraph: a report of a blacks
running amuck, a renegade believed . . . insane who terrorized this
locality for two days before succumbing to National Guard machine
gun fire (NOS 76). Faulkner provides a backstory a man who jest wants
to go to Afica (77) from the New Orleans docks:

Ah wants to go back home, whar de preacher say us come from.

Where do you live, nigger?
Back up yonder ways, in de country.
What town?
Aint no town, suh, ceptin Mist Bob and de fambly and his niggers.
Mississippi or Louisiana?
Yessuh, I speck so.
Well, lemme tell you something. You go back there on the first train you
can catch. This aint no place for you. (78)

This African is bound to be on his way, moving with alacrity (80) past
Mist Bobs domain. The journey home does not take him downriver to
the Gulf, however, but upriver towards Natchez. After being fleeced of
his money by the boat captain, our pilgrim is pointed shoreward: Africa
is about a mile across them fields yonder (81). Yonder turns out to
be a Cajun farm at nightfall where he mistakenly shoots one of the farm
animals, kills three people in self-defense, and experiences the machine gun
barrage that kills him as a rivening of himself into tattered and broken
leaves (85). With the protagonists face turned to the cold, cold stars,
the story concludes via interstellar perspective on local and global souths:
Africa or Louisiana: what care they? (85). It is crude apprentice work, but
 What was Africa to Faulkner? 61
Sunset assembles a liminal Afro-blue tropology found in Faulkners more
mature works of tragic fiction: from Red Leaves and That Evening Sun
to Twilight (the title on the first page of the manuscript that became The
Sound and the Fury).
The action of Red Leaves displays such ritual and structural kinship
to Wole Soyinkas tragic drama Death and the Kings Horseman (1976) that
Faulkners Mississippi narrative could be considered an uncanny mount
(or possession-host) of Afro-creole djinn/genius. As in Soyinkas Nigerian
play, the sacrificial protagonist of Red Leaves must join his dead rulers
horse and dog in the grave at a moment when the peoples rites (and cul-
tural systems) face losses of efficacy and colonial intrusions a challenge
theorized by Rene Girard as the sacrificial crises.3 Red Leaves features
a Guinea man from Kamerun who leads his Chickasaw enslavers on a
marooning chase through one of Yoknapatawphas creek bottoms where
the storys soundtrack emerges from Afro-Chickasaw drums made of hol-
lowed cypress knees, normally buried in the mud on the bank of a slough
(328), brought out at certain phases of the moon (314) and at this funer-
ary moment. These drums bear a polyrhythmic communicative capacity
recognized by the Native pursuers, who must momentarily cede narrative
authority: Let the drums talk . . . Let the drums tell it (328). When
the search party confronts and questions a group of Afro-Chickasaw, the
blacks seemed to be musing as one upon something remote, inscrutable in
a kind of mind-meld: They were like a single octopus . . . thinking some-
thing . . . [and] knowing something that their enslavers do not want to
think and know (315). As I have pointed out in Blood on the Leaves,
the Chickasaw dramatization of Red Leaves serves as masque for anxi-
eties of Dixies own sacrificial crises in the face of lost causes and systemic
illegitimacy.4
In Faulkner and Love,5 Judith Sensibar helps us see how some of
Faulkners earliest moments of maturing awareness (the bottoms of his
own fluvial imagination) must have stemmed from his realization that his
Africa-descended caretaker Caroline Barr was thinking and knowing some-
thing outside of the known world of white supremacist Mississippi. This
contrapuntal, nigh-polyrhythmic excess of accredited knowledge would
lie at the heart of Faulkners musication. He seems to have heard Mis-
sissippi creek bottom drumming on a regular basis. Jimmy Faulkner, the
authors nephew, asserted in an interview that such drumming continued
in Oxford till around 1970: Wed sit outside on summer nights and listen
to them, and drums would start beating on one side of the Toby Tubby
Creek. Then the drums back here in Tallahatchie Bottom would start
62 Keith Cartwright
answering, and theyd talk all night.6 The drumming along Toby Tubby
Creek (named after a slaveholding Chickasaw leader) informed the funer-
ary rites of Red Leaves and muddied the drawers of Caddy Compson
with certain moon-phase signatures of deep time. Jimmy Faulkner claimed
the rhythms were hypnotic and would draw people to get up, and walk
straight as a plumb line to those drums into the unspeakable voodoo
rites of the white imagination: [I w]ouldnt have gone there for anything
in the world (64). Asked if his uncle had heard them, he responded,
Lord, yes. When the drums got the air vibrating, you could hear them for
miles (65).
Africa and the drum vibrations thrumming the night air of Faulkners
Mississippi signified unavoidable conversions of consciousness, psychic
possessions, a kind of viral contagion exemplified in Yoknapatawphas
blue-gum negroes. When the marooning African of Red Leaves is
slashed by a cottonmouth, he greets the snake familiarly: Ole, Grandfa-
ther (335), in totemic acknowledgement of an ancestor with poisonous
bite. The African, after all, is described as a man with prominent gums . . . a
pale bluish red above his square, broad teeth (327) a likely carrier of the
poisonous, denaturing bite found in the blue-gum folklore of Faulkners
South. For a sense of these contagious creolizing powers, we may look to
a hoodoo tale from The Sound and the Fury (1929) attributed to Dilsey:
Versh said, Your name Benjamin now. You know how your name Benjamin
now. They making a bluegum out of you. Mammy say in old time your granpaw
changed niggers name, and he turn preacher, and when they look at him, he
bluegum too. Didnt use to be bluegum, neither. And when family woman
look him in the eye in the full of the moon, chile born bluegum (44). Strange
moon-phase conversions of name, occupation, and identity take place in
this tale of becoming blue-gum preacher with a vampire-like bite and a
hoodoo gaze. Here, Benjy is the transformed white blue-gum, the one
whose eye-opening (Wolof hippikat) perspective launches the previously
unauthored thinking and knowing of The Sound and the Fury.
The novels blue-gum narrative snippet almost certainly draws from the
authority of Caroline Barr, who as Sensibar informs us came to Missis-
sippi from lowcountry South Carolina after having given birth to children
within that regions nigh-Caribbean slave society. Callie Barr appears
to have been a speaker of Gullah (Sea Island Creole) from one of the
most intensely Africanized sections of North America. Faulkners daughter
Jill recalled that Animals with human traits figured very prominently in
her stories, and his brother John admitted that Mammy Callies sto-
rytelling twined her whole life with ours (quoted in Sensibar 86, 22).
 What was Africa to Faulkner? 63
Through these hippikat Gullah tales, Faulkner was born blue-gum too: his
imagination entwined with some of the same griot and divination reper-
tory that shaped West African writers such as Birago Diop, Amos Tutuola,
and Chinua Achebe. Jill recalled one rhyme Mammy Callie would per-
form for her: My daddy was a lion, my moma was a tigah, / But peo-
ple all say Im an old Guinea niggah (34). She noted variants for the
final modifier: blue-gum niggah or Gullah niggah (34). Through-
out Faulkners childhood, Africa was where the blue-gums come from,
where Gullahs hail from. And whatever Africa signified to him would
come intimately entwined with the multiple significations of a single
contagion-packed word, nigger. Callie Barrs use of the word in acts of
self-identification (and distancing) that hardly coincided with her young
charges immediate social destiny must have played a role in Faulkners
frequent and varied use of it often tied to eye-opening incidents of a fall
from innocence into Southern knowledge/power, and applied to all those
charged with Yoknapatawphas wash (keeping white subjects starched and
clean).
In Sacral Grooves, Limbo Gateways,7 I attend to a Senegambian tale
of an orphan girls initiatory bush-travel to wash a dirty calabash in the
Atlantic, and I trace the reemergence of this narrative throughout the plan-
tation zones of the Americas. These tales of encounter with an initiatory
water-spirit (djinn/genie/genius) foster new kinships and sets of relation,
even in Faulkners Yoknapatawpha, where cross-cultural foster parentage
is crucial. In Go Down, Moses, for example, Molly Beauchamp mothers
the newly born, newly orphaned Roth Edmonds from the moment when
the local creeks flooding makes the plantation a virtual island; and the
Afro-Chickasaw Sam Fathers (he of two fathers himself ) serves as spiri-
tual father to a number of Euro-creole huntsmen in the novels wilderness
river bottoms. Often, however, these waterways appear as a dread limi-
nal vortex: the branch in which Caddy Compson muddies her drawers,
the Charles River of Quentin Compsons drowning, the whelming flood
of the blood of ricklickshun aflow in Dilseys Easter church, the abyssal
waters the African navigates amidst the funeral-drumming of Red Leaves
(SF 22, 295). These are the waters of young Charles Mallisons creekside
fall on Lucas Beauchamps property in the opening of Intruder in the Dust
(1948). And it all drains toward Frenchmans Bend Yoknapatawphas port
of Africanization, the spot in Absalom, Absalom! (1936) where Sutpen lands
his architect and wild niggers from spaces of contact with Gulf and
Caribbean waters where happen is never once but like ripples maybe on
water after the pebble sinks (210).
64 Keith Cartwright
Yoknapatawphas Afro-creole initiatory base (or nyama Mandinka
energy of action) has been most powerfully recognized by Faulkners
African and Afro-creole readers. Tierno Monenembo writes of his first
encounter with Faulkner in an Ivory Coast dorm: To read Faulkner is to be
initiated, to detach ourselves from the world in which we had lived in order
to enter another world more obscure, more vertiginous.8 Monenembo
equates his eye-opening Mississippi immersions with the countercultural
music he was simultaneously discovering: I put Mr Faulkner away next to
the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Otis Redding and James Brown . . . who
spoke to me about the demons and marvels of my era in a language that
was foreign to me (176).

In Poetics of Relation, the Martinican Edouard Glissant relied upon
Faulkner to argue that the entire plantation system constitutes a terri-
tory of creolite.9 For Glissant the oral literature of the plantation shares
such a web of filiations that its vernaculars, musics, and novels cannot
be considered as exotic appendages of a French, Spanish, or English lit-
erary corpus; rather, they entered suddenly, with the force of a tradition
that they built themselves, into the relation of cultures (71). Again in
Faulkner, Mississippi, Glissant returned to Faulkners writing for its new
type of origin emergent from the mosaic tales of hunting camps where
African and Chickasaw and European expressive arts merge in transcul-
tural possessions.10 Faulkner is thus positioned as an initiator of a modern
postplantation literature from within the unstoppable conjunction of
Creolization (30).
The Guyanese writer Wilson Harris turned to Intruder in the Dust and
the icy creek fall of Charles Mallison to launch an early vision of a global
Southern studies in The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination.11
Harris notes young Mallisons debt of hospitality to the Beauchamps in
a Vodou-informed examination of a cross-cultural capacity (xvii) in
Faulkners writing that traverses (and tumbles from) a potential bridge to
twinship or cross-cultural mind over the frozen creeks of apartheid Mis-
sissippi (1113). Taken together, these circum-Atlantic responses explode the
genealogies and legitimacies of canons of English and American literature
and assert a composite origin-ality modeled in creole cultures (and texts)
amidst the bad air of apartheid blockages and stiflings.
Lucas and Molly Beauchamps home may be the creolizing heartland
of Yoknapatawpha: an oblong of earth set forever in the middle of the
two-thousand acre plantation like a postage stamp in the center of an
envelope (ID 8). The swept-earth yard, broomed out each morning in
an intricate series of whorls is both an Africa in Mississippi and a scene
 What was Africa to Faulkner? 65
of composite human experience across deep time, giving way by each
afternoon to the cryptic three-toed prints of chickens like . . . a terrain in
miniature out of the age of the great lizards (89). Another Africanist layer
gets added when the creek-wet, twelve-year-old Charles Mallison enters
the house and is wrapped in Molly Beauchamps patchwork quilt; he is
enclosed completely now in that unmistakable odor of Negroes, Buddy
Boldens old bad air (not of Africa but of Dixie) recognized slowly as an
ideological formation, a condition: an idea: a belief: an acceptance (11) of
a constructed system of power and relations: he could not even imagine an
existence from which the odor would be missing to return no more . . . it
was a part of his inescapable past . . . his heritage as a Southerner (12).
The white boy receives the Beauchamps heritage-hospitality in the utterly
familiar form of collards, fried pork, biscuits, and buttermilk that he calls
nigger food. When he tries to pay for this hospitality, he is rebuffed
by Lucas and forced to feel an indebtedness, a sense of shame (from a
long sweep of denied kinship recognitions) for which there can be no
easy reparation. The white boy is told then to go on and shoot your
rabbit . . . And stay out of that creek (16), which means, here, keeping to
ones own banks in an apartheid system. This is a moment that Faulkner
had explored earlier in Go Down, Moses when Roth Edmonds took his first
meal at the Beauchamp home as a young (suddenly race-fixed) white man:
it was grief and . . . it was shame also (109), [s]o he entered his heritage
(110).
Countee Cullen concluded his Heritage by fashioning an Africanized
Christ placed in the bad air of a white supremacist space. The poem that
gets most incisively to the inevitable fall of the American individual into
grief, shame, and rage of race, however, is Incident, in which Cullens
speaker recalls traveling to Baltimore at age eight and being called nigger
by a white child: Of all the things that happened there / Thats all that
I remember.12 In Faulkners painfully re-membered South the muse and
the gods are almost always nigger. In That Evening Sun the Compson
laundress husband, Jesus, a short black man, with a razor scar down his
face (290), inhabits the other side of the racial ditch. Young Quentin blurts
out that Father told us to not have anything to do with Jesus (290), and
Jason bursts into a repeated chorus: Jesus is a nigger . . . Dilseys a nigger
too . . . I aint a nigger . . . I aint a nigger (2978). After Mr. Compson
tries to reassure the children, insisting that Jesus went away a long time
ago, Quentin asks, Who will do our washing now, Father? (309).
If Cullen reveals something of the burden of bearing African heritage in
America, Faulkner takes up the strange costs of being not nigger and
66 Keith Cartwright
of stepping into a world of laundered whiteness, away from Jesus, away
from ones Africa-descended caregivers and culture-bearers, and as Judith
Sensibar insists away from love.
Finally, if we pursue the question What was Africa to Faulkner? we
arrive at a certain kind of blue-gum creolizing agency: for him the
doom of whiteness in any contact space, a doom tied to the illegitimacy
(and ultimate weakness) of systems of white supremacy everywhere. As the
Canadian Shreve McCannon breathlessly intones in Absalom, Absalom!: In
time the Jim Bonds are going to conquer the western hemisphere . . . and
so in a few thousand years, I who regard you will also have sprung from the
loins of African kings (302). From this perspective (the structural perspec-
tive of English departments to this day), to spring from the loins of African
kings is to have lost claim to a normative subjectivity or an accredited
discipline as Quentin perceives is his own honor-stained situation and
his sisters state as well. The text itself plunges its readers (even at Harvard)
into their creole heritage . . . with its crosscurrents of origin and djinn-fed
genius.
The time-space of Africas meeting with Europe pushes Faulkner beyond
a language and sentence structure that can carry all this laundry: a spot of
earth . . . created . . . for the last despairing fury of all the pariah-interdict
and all the doomed a little island . . . halfway between the dark inscrutable
continent from which the black blood, the black bones and flesh and
thinking and remembering and hopes and desires, was ravished by violence,
and the cold known land to which it was doomed, the civilized land and
people which had expelled some of its own blood and thinking and desires
that had become too crass to be faced and borne longer . . . a soil manured
with black blood from two hundred years of oppression and exploitation
until it sprang with an incredible paradox of peaceful greenery and crimson
flowers and sugar cane . . . as if nature held a balance and kept a book (202).
This sentence on Haiti, which stretches over the better part of two pages
in Absalom, Absalom!, works towards a kind of thinking and knowing
that constantly reiterates and defers both white-supremacist doom and
an enduring creole gnosis of moon-phase drum-time and nonapocalyptic
space. Junot Diaz, from the Dominican side of the island (and from Jersey),
opens The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) in unforgettably playful
yet furious agreement: They say it came first from Africa, carried in
the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos,
uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon
drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open
in the Antilles. Fuku americanus, or more colloquially, fuku generally a
 What was Africa to Faulkner? 67
curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of
the New World.13 Diaz understands that from the perspective of white
supremacist normativity, Africa would always signify a funky-butt fuku
unleashed by the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola, and if weve all
been in the shit ever since (or manured in the blood of each other), Santo
Domingo is fukus Kilometer Zero, its port of entry, but we are all of
us its children, whether we know it or not (2). From Santo Domingo
to New Orleans, and from Frenchmans Bend to the little branch on the
Compsons old Chickasaw land, all of Faulkners readers are hailed as fukus
subjects, or as Octavio Paz would have it, bastard children of La Chingada
Cortes native mistress, The Fucked whether she be a muddy-drawered
Caddy Compson or a fish starting to smell along the Yoknapatawpha
River.14

NOTES
1 Countee Cullen, Heritage, in The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke (1925; New
York: Atheneum, 1969), pp. 2503.
2 Keith Cartwright, Reading Africa into American Literature: Epics, Fables, Gothic
Tales (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2002).
3 Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1977).
4 Keith Cartwright, Blood on the Leaves, Blood at the Root: Ritual Carriers
and Sacrificial Crises of Transition in Yoknapatawpha and Oyo in Global
Faulkner, eds. Annette Trefzer and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University of
Mississippi Press, 2009), pp. 7898.
5 Judith Sensibar, Faulkner in Love: The Women Who Shaped His Art (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
6 Sally Wolff and Floyd C. Watkins (eds.), Talking About William Faulkner:
Interviews with Jimmy Faulkner and Others (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1996), p. 63.
7 Keith Cartwright, Sacral Grooves, Limbo Gateways: Travels in Deep Southern
Time, Circum-Caribbean Space, Afro-creole Authority (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 2013).
8 Tierno Monenembo, Faulkner and Me, in Global Faulkner, eds. Trefzer and
Abadie, p. 177.

9 Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1997), p. 63.

10 Edouard Glissant, Faulkner, Mississippi, trans. Barbara Lewis and Thomas C.
Spear (University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 195.
11 Wilson Harris, The Womb of Space: The Cross-cultural Imagination (Westport,
CN: Greenwood Press, 1983).
68 Keith Cartwright
12 Countee Cullen, Incident, in The Vintage Book of African American Poetry,
eds. Michael S. Harper and Anthony Walton (New York: Vintage, 2000),
p. 161.
13 Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (New York: Riverhead
Books, 2007), p. 1.
14 Octavio Paz, El laberinto de la soledad (Mexico: Fundo de Cultura Economica,
1964), p. 72.
Cities of the modern
 chapter 6

Cosmopolitan culture
New Orleans to Paris
Taylor Hagood

William Faulkner is rightly remembered as a writer of small town and rural

life in Mississippi. However, while he remained a permanent resident of
Oxford and Lafayette County, he also spent significant amounts of time
in cities in the United States and beyond. These exerted various levels of
influence on his art, and he used them as settings in multiple texts. The
two cities most often associated with him are New Orleans and Paris, but
several urban centers figured largely in his life and shaped his aesthetic
principles. Though often overlooked, cosmopolitan culture is an essential
part of Faulkners oeuvre, making it important for readers to be aware of
his relationship with key cities and the ways he depicts them.
The earliest and most enduringly prominent urban area in Faulkners life
was the nearby city of Memphis. As a north Mississippian he was acquainted
with the city from an early age, and it would be the one against which others
would be measured when he first began to make forays away from home
into the larger world. Most of Faulkners earliest trips to Memphis occurred
during childhood whenever his fathers drinking grew so self-destructive it
required his being taken to the Keeley Institute just outside the city limits
for treatment. During these times Faulkner and his brothers would ride
the streetcar into town for the thrill of seeing the big city. By the time
he was a young man, his engagement with the city was less savory, as he
and his friend Phil Stone would go to the gambling dens and brothels on
Beale, Gayoso, and Mulberry Streets. The city was renowned for its vice,
and Faulkner watched and learned of its culture of prostitution, gambling,
and bootlegging. These criminal modes of big income brought with them
a mob presence, and the 1920s saw such characters as One thumb John
Revinsky, who murdered the prominent prostitute Mae Goodwin, and a
gangster named Popeye Pumphrey.1 It was of the latter Faulkner was
thinking when he gave the name Popeye to a dangerous villain and made
Memphis the location of the prostitute Rebas house of business in his fifth
novel Sanctuary (1931). Interestingly, when Faulkner wrote what would be
71
72 Taylor Hagood
the final novel of his life, The Reivers (1962), he looked back with nostalgia
to the excitement the underworld of Memphis brought, returning to Rebas
whorehouse as he fondly told the story of a young boy first encountering
a seedy underworld.
When his childhood sweetheart Estelle Oldham became engaged to
another man because her parents deemed young Faulkner unfit, he left his
home area of north Mississippi in 1918; in so doing he moved through a
number of urban areas that would have a dramatic impact, shaping his
perspective on the world and developing his art. The first of these was
New Haven, Connecticut, where he stayed with Stone, who was a student
at Yale University. In letters to his parents, he describes New Haven as
being comparable to Memphis in terms of size if not culture.2 Here he
encountered university traditions much more picturesque and venerable
than those of the newer University of Mississippi in his hometown. During
the months he lived there from April to June he worked for the Winchester
Repeating Arms Company, but this desk job could not compare to the
glamorous appeal of being a soldier in the Great War. Seeking to enlist in
the Royal Air Force in Canada, Faulkner constructed his first major fiction
an identity as a man of British heritage complete with a faked accent. He
succeeded, and in July he moved to Toronto for training.
Just as he compared New Haven to the metropolis he had known as
a youth, so Faulkner measured Toronto by Memphis. Not only was this
city bigger, but here he found a different flavor even from New Haven,
writing in a letter to his mother, This certainly is an English place
London Bobbies with their capes and high conical hats and no one here
is in a hurry as are cities in the states (Watson, Thinking of Home 50).
The comment is an interesting one for its assertion of his knowledge of
cities: that knowledge was limited, of course, but on his way to Toronto,
Faulkner had passed through Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington, and
New York. Although he was still looking at these major US urban centers
through youthful eyes, he was clearly beginning to form impressions of
what cities were in different places, and as much as his comment carries
a youthful naivete in its attempt to sound world-aware, it also signals his
growing sense of the cosmopolitan.
Even as he was acquiring a new worldview, Faulkner was also learning
how distinct a white Mississippi identity was. He realized there was some-
thing fascinating to people about the way he talked (once safely enlisted
he apparently reverted back to his regular speech), what he thought about,
how the life of Southern white people especially could look so romantic
to outsiders. In other words, this developing cosmopolitan sensibility not
 Cosmopolitan culture: New Orleans to Paris 73
only brought an expanded understanding of the world and its urban cen-
ters, it also reshaped and revised his understanding of his own home and
identity. When Faulkner returned to Oxford in December, the war having
ended without his ever fighting in it, his new cosmopolitan viewpoint had
complicated his attachment to the rural South: he allegedly told Stone he
had had enough of his God forsaken home town to last him the rest of
his life (Blotner, Biography 69). Over the next two years when not at home
enrolled at the University of Mississippi and writing poetry and reviews,
he spent much of his time visiting people in the Delta, moving through
the Memphis underworld, and for the first time visiting New Orleans, the
city that he would come to be most associated with.
Before he became involved in the arts scene in New Orleans, though,
he had his first significant stay in another city that played a key role in
his career. Soured on Mississippi provincialism because of its inhibiting
narrowness, Faulkner accepted the invitation of fellow-Oxfordian writer
and critic Stark Young to come to New York in the fall of 1921. Young
got Faulkner a job for the holiday rush in the Lord and Taylor Depart-
ment store bookshop, which was managed by Youngs friend Elizabeth
Prall. After sleeping on Youngs couch for several days, Faulkner rented a
room in Greenwich Village near Pralls home. The Village was a center of
bohemianism, the culturally rich and radical lifestyle of its many artists
earning it the title Left Bank of America.3 Cheap rents drew these artists
and writers to that part of lower Manhattan, and they brought with them
ideas about free love, experimental writing and art, and daring fashions.
Faulkner was drawn to this model of artistic life, and he was interested
in visual as well as verbal avant-gardes. Although he both wrote and drew
pictures, in his shyness he made few friends and no serious publishing
connections and failed to place any of his work. He was reluctant to leave
fascinated as he was by the excitement of the city but by December he
was back in Oxford.
New York would always appeal to Faulkner, however, and he went back
to the city at the bequest of his friend and agent Ben Wasson in September
1928. The occasion was that Harcourt and Brace had agreed to publish
Faulkners third novel, Flags in the Dust, only with extensive cutting, which
Faulkner at first resisted but finally agreed to help Wasson accomplish.
Perhaps the more important part of this trip was Faulkners finalizing his
first truly great novel, The Sound and the Fury, which he finished in the
room he was renting on 146 MacDougal Street, Greenwich Village. This
second trip saw a Faulkner not only more mature but with more cachet in
the world of writing. He had more friends in the city now, and he would
74 Taylor Hagood
gather with them in speakeasies, drinking and telling stories. When he
returned yet again in the fall of 1931 he had actually emerged into full-
blown celebrity, as publishers clamored for the rights to Sanctuary. On
this trip, Faulkner found himself in the company of famous literary figures
such as Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Helman. Throughout the rest of his
life Faulkner would make trips to New York to tend to publishing matters,
enjoy the dazzling experience and company of the city, and sometimes even
receive health treatment. Oddly enough, though, New York did not play
a large role in Faulkners writing. It appears most memorably in an early
story entitled Pennsylvania Station, in Jason Compsons invective against
Wall Street and the New York Yankees in The Sound and the Fury, and in
Gavin Stevens and V. K. Ratliffs visit to the city in The Mansion (1959),
the final novel of the Snopes trilogy.
But the city that would have the greatest impact both on and in Faulkners
fiction remains New Orleans. After his first lengthy stay in New York,
Faulkner had returned to Oxford to work in the post office and concentrate
on developing his skills as a poet. Sometime in the fall of 1924, Wasson
urged him to go to New Orleans to see his old boss Elizabeth Prall, who
was now married to the writer Sherwood Anderson. Faulkner followed the
advice and made a trip to the city where he met the writer. The trip was
a quick one, but Faulkner returned to New Orleans in January because he
planned to sail from there to Europe where he apparently hoped to make
a name for himself. Anderson was out of town at the time, and Elizabeth
allowed Faulkner to stay in their home. When Faulkner realized it would
take longer to arrange for the trip to Europe he stayed in the city and
became immersed in the bohemian artistic culture of the Vieux Carre.4
The French Quarter was at this point a smaller version of Greenwich
Village, boasting status as a literary hub, with artists and writers filling its
narrow streets and fern-festooned iron-railed galleries. The city was alive
with jazz music, and adding to the already exotic European architecture
and social customs came an influx of immigrants, many of them from Italy.
There was romance and beauty to the place, and Faulkner fell deeply under
its spell.
This time in New Orleans was crucial to Faulkners development. For the
first time, he became part of an artistic community where he could live free
from the ridicule of small-minded Oxford. He listened to the gregarious
Anderson talk of the world of art and literature its rivalries and its joys.
He befriended many bohemians, including artist and Tulane University
architecture teacher William Spratling, with whom he collaborated on a
volume of drawings and text entitled Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous
 Cosmopolitan culture: New Orleans to Paris 75
Creoles.5 Observing Spratlings artistic talent, Faulkner realized he would
never excel in that field as he would at writing, which was an important
epiphany for his development. Equally important to this development was
his growing commitment to writing prose. He had arrived in the city
as a poet, having already had work published in The Double Dealer, a
New Orleans-based journal publishing major Modernist writers. But he
soon started writing prose sketches of city scenes which he sold to both
The Double Dealer and the New Orleans Times Picayune. This nonfiction
quickly led to serious fiction, and it was in New Orleans that Faulkner began
writing his first novel, Soldiers Pay (1926), which Anderson convinced his
publisher Boni and Liveright to accept.
Faulkner wrote about New Orleans more than he did any other city.
His second novel, Mosquitoes (1927), offers up an account of his days in
this community, detailing the excursion a group of artists and their lovers
make out of the city onto Lake Pontchartrain. Exploring the difference
between small-town limitations and big city expansiveness, Faulkner would
pit nineteenth-century New Orleans and its sophisticated representative
Charles Bon against the hickish Henry Sutpen and his north Mississippi
plantation in his later masterpiece Absalom, Absalom! (1936). He set the
action of his novel Pylon (1935) in a New Orleans lightly veiled as New
Valois. This novel is the most urban one he wrote, and significantly it
presents a less romantic and more generic metropolitan space, as Faulkner
conceived of the city in later trips to it. In If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (1939)
Faulkner wrote of the city again, rounding out a decades-long meditation
on this unique and, for him, foundational urban space.
He ended his first stay in New Orleans by going with Spratling on a
trip to Europe, which brought the young writer to the city that was the
hotbed of Modernism Paris. The two sailed to Genoa, Italy, on August 2,
1925. Although Spratling departed for Rome, Faulkner immediately turned
northward, working his way through Italy and Switzerland to Paris. This
city was the one to which New Orleans and even Greenwich Village were
compared, for its Left Bank was the ultimate bohemian community.6 It was
here that the American expatriates of the 1920s gathered, living at extremely
cheap rates, enjoying some of the best food and drink in the world, and
playing out dramatic lives of artistic pursuit. Here Gertrude Stein and
Alice B. Toklas drew both established and young writers and artists. On
the streets on any day or night one might pass Ernest Hemingway, James
Joyce, Ezra Pound, or Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. There was jazz music
and the radical work of artists such as Picasso, not to mention some of the
greatest art in world history in the Louvre. Josephine Baker was dancing
76 Taylor Hagood
her way through an explosion of African culture that had saturated the city
in what was known as Negritude. And, especially to Faulkners liking,
there was the French language and the wonderful architecture and gardens
of this old city.
While Faulkner spent time in Paris during its heyday of American artistic
presence (an important credential for a Modernist), it would not be accurate
to understand him to be part of the expatriate scene. Despite the fact that so
many important figures were practically his neighbors he never met any of
them. He claimed to have spent time at LOdeon Cafe, which James Joyce
frequented, but he apparently sought only to get a glimpse of the great
experimental writer. He visited Shakespeare and Company bookstore, but
he never met its famous owner Sylvia Beach. In fact, if Faulkners goal was
indeed to make a name for himself in Europe and forge connections with
the artists there, he failed miserably. There are a couple of reasons why:
in addition to his great shyness, it seems he wanted to soak up the citys
native atmosphere, to come to it on its own terms. Consequently, he spent
most of his time writing and watching people sail model boats on the lake
of Luxembourg Gardens.
It was this intense personal experience that distinguishes Faulkners
engagement with Paris. He interrupted his time in the city for a brief
trip to London and the English countryside. Englands culture had long
appealed to his aristocratic side, and England and France were the pre-
dominant strains of Mississippis settlement. But Faulkner quickly tired
of London itself while remaining in love with Paris, to which he soon
returned, learning there that his first novel Soldiers Pay, which he had
completed in the city, had been accepted for publication. Paris does not
figure largely in Faulkners writing, although France is an important touch-
stone in his imagination. The most significant appearance of the city comes
at the end of his novel Sanctuary when a traumatized Temple Drake visits
Luxembourg Gardens with her father. Apparently salvaged from his time
there, it is a key moment in the novel, and it reveals much about the mood
of Paris as Faulkner experienced it, as well as his solitary, contemplative
engagement with it. Still, while Paris was never a major setting in his work,
its importance in his life as a writer is great, for it was there that he finally
bloomed into a published novelist committed to a career in fiction.
As important as New Orleans and Paris are, also significant is Los Ange-
les, California, where Faulkner spent many years off and on as a screenwriter
in Hollywood.7 His connection with this glitzy urban area brought him
in contact with major figures such as Lauren Bacall, Clark Gable, and
Howard Hawks, the latter of whom he produced several screenplays for.
 Cosmopolitan culture: New Orleans to Paris 77
The salaries he received from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Warner Brothers,
and other studios tended to bring him a greater and more regular income
than his fiction writing could. It was also in Hollywood that he carried
on the most lengthy and passionate affair of his life with Meta Carpen-
ter. Faulkner wrote of this urban scene most obviously in his short story
Golden Land, and his experiences with movie sets and screenwriting
greatly impacted the imagery of Pylon and to a lesser extent many of his
later works. He would even employ the technique of story-boarding in
composing his novel A Fable (1954), which actually was first conceived as
a screenplay.
It is important not to lose sight of the fact that Faulkner was first and
foremost a product of small-town and rural life, and that his locus of
existence would always be in such a milieu. Nevertheless, he was very
much a person of cosmopolitan presence and awareness. Upon winning
the Nobel Prize for literature in 1949 he traveled to major cities of the
world, including Stockholm, Tokyo, and Rome. More importantly, his
experience of Memphis, New Haven, Toronto, New York, and especially
New Orleans and Paris in his youth played a vital role in his maturing
into a writer of fiction. That poet-turned-fiction writer was an artist of
cosmopolitan experience and sensibility who depicted small-town life with
awareness of the perspective of the city.

NOTES
1 These details on Memphis are gleaned from Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biog-
raphy (New York: Vintage, 1991), pp. 18, 99101, 234.
2 James G. Watson (ed.), Thinking of Home: William Faulkners Letters to his
Mother and Father, 19181925 (New York: Norton, 2000), p. 23.
3 On bohemianism, especially in New York, see Allen Churchill, The Improper
Bohemians: A Re-creation of Greenwich Village in Its Heyday (New York: Dutton,
1959); Albert Parry, Garrets and Pretenders: A History of Bohemianism in Amer-
ica (New York: Dover, 1960); and Virginia Nicholson, Among the Bohemians:
Experiments in Living, 19001939 (New York: William Morrow, 2002).
4 On New Orleans at this time see Scott S. Ellis, Madame Vieux Carre: The French
Quarter in the Twentieth Century (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2010); Louise McKinney, New Orleans: A Cultural History (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2006); John Shelton Reed, Dixie Bohemia: A French Quarter
Circle in the 1920s (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012).
5 William Spratling and William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous
Creoles (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966).
6 Much has been written on Paris in the 1920s. Helpful resources include
Humphrey Carpenter, Geniuses Together: American Writers in Paris in the 1920s
78 Taylor Hagood
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988); Arlen J. Hansen, Expatriate Paris: A Cultural
and Literary Guide to Paris of the 1920s (New York: Arcade, 1990); and Jerrold
Seigel, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of Bourgeois Life,
18301930 (New York: Penguin, 1986).
7 For more on Faulkners connections to Hollywood, see the essays by Sarah
Gleeson-White and James Bloom in this volume.
 chapter 7

The Hollywood challenge

James D. Bloom

I.
Some sixty years ago Van Wyck Brooks argued that for twentieth-century
American writers cultural heterogeneity posed the greatest challenge.
Brooks singled out William Faulkner as exemplary in meeting this
challenge.1 Faulkner enacted this challenge with the response to modernity
of the put-upon Mississippi farmer, Anse Bundren, in his 1930 novel, As
I Lay Dying. After railing against the road thats keeping the folks restless
and wanting to get up and go somewheres else instead of stay[ing] put
(36), Anse sets out on a journey into heterogeneous modernity, which
includes: retail shopping (66, 100, 199), cars (228, 231), dentistry (37, 52,
111), telephones (228), tropical fruit (66, 140, 252), trains (253), Negroes
(229), phonographs (190, 235, 261). Anses engagement with modern
heterogeneity pales, however, next to that of Faulkner himself. Faulkners
most sustained encounter with American heterogeneity took place in Hol-
lywood, where he spent much of the 1930s and 1940s, in California . . . up
to my neck in motion pictures,2 pursuing an off-again, on-again career
as a contract screenwriter at MGM, Universal, Twentieth-Century Fox,
RKO, and Warner Brothers. During two decades of shuttling between
his Mississippi home and that damned West coast place,3 Faulkner
found himself at once beset and beguiled by what Hollywood had come
to represent: a preeminent crucible for the traumatic effects of modernity
and the epicenter for the production of cultural heterogeneity.4 In the
jeremiadic imagination, Hollywood had also come to stand in an all too
interesting age for the rank fecundity of [what] the machine produced:
a desensitizingly image-glutted world and a species of technological
gods and moral devils, scientific superman and esthetic idiots.5 Though
Faulkner too denounced Hollywood as the harbinger of a doomed way
of life (Blotner, FH 286), he also found it as irresistible as and even
more rewarding than Anse Bundren and his brood found the blandish-
ments of town (AILD 140). Joseph Blotner argues that Hollywood

79
80 James D. Bloom
inspired Faulkner by providing a contaminating stimulus (FH 287).
He cites Faulkners 1946 Compson genealogic appendix, prepared for
a new paperback edition of The Sound and the Fury (1929) and for
the now-standard Faulkner anthology, The Portable Faulkner. Updating
the biography of his hearts darling among his fictional characters, the
wayward Compson sister, Caddie, Faulkner reported that in 1920 Caddie
married . . . a minor movie magnate [in] Hollywood, California.6
Faulkner seems to have concluded that no twentieth-century American
life could be considered significant without some Hollywood connection,
even one far more tangential than his own.
If going Hollywood entailed complicity in these alleged depredations
of modernity, Faulkner at least dodged the full immersion chosen by other
novelists lured to Hollywood after Warner Brothers introduced sound to
American movies to leaven narrative with dialogue (Blotner, FH 281).7
Unlike the contemporaries with whom he has been grouped, F. Scott
Fitzgerald and Faulkners California boar-hunting companion Nathanael
West (Dardis, Some Time 92, 11011, 119, 136),8 Faulkner never wrote or
even set out to write an ambitious Hollywood novel like Fitzgeralds
The Love of the Last Tycoon (1941) or Wests The Day of Locust (1939).
The first full-fledged Faulkner in Hollywood narrative arrived over a
generation after his death in Joel and Ethan Coens 1991 noir comedy,
Barton Fink.9 Its dueling caricatures of Clifford Odets (John Turturro) and
Faulkner (John Mahoney) as contract writers at the same studio conflated
the two writers by presenting the Odets characters first studio assignment
as a formula wrestling picture written for Wallace Beery, which was
in fact Faulkners first project (Blotner, FH 265; Matthews, Culture
Industry 57). Reducing Faulkners work as a writer to plagiarism, the Coens
italicized his considerably exaggerated alcoholism (Blotner, FH 275) to
the point of entirely overshadowing the mark Faulkner left on Hollywood:
over twenty credited and uncredited scripts along with the fantastic wit
and frightening powers of observation he exhibited among his studio
colleagues, and his reputation for meeting deadlines (Dardis, Some Time
879, 94, 103, 106, 136). Whatever mark Faulkner made on Hollywood,
however, was eclipsed by the impact of Hollywood on Faulkners writing.
Faulkners Golden Land, a good story out of California in Faulkners
own estimation (SL 84), which appeared in The American Mercury in
1935, is as close as Faulkner ever came to doing Hollywood. Hollywoods
prominence as the worlds superlatively glamorous movie capital resonates
in the storys intermittent headline references to a tabloidal sex scandal
involving an extra actress (CS 705, 713) and in the site of her familys
Beverley Hills home among neighbors whose names and faces and even
 The Hollywood challenge 81
voices were glib and familiar in back corners of the United States and of
America and of the world (702). In these back corners, names such as
Einstein and Rousseau and Esculapius had never sounded (702). Golden
Land promotes the stock view of the modern metropolis as a fallen city, its
fragility and inevitable destruction presaged in the narrators view from his
limousine of a city . . . scattered about the arid earth like so many gay scraps
of paper blown without order, with its curious air of being rootless of
houses bright beautiful and gay, without basements or foundations, lightly
attached to a few inches of light penetrable earth, lighter even than dust and
laid lightly . . . upon the profound and primeval lava, which one good hard
rain would wash forever . . . as a firehouse flushes down a gutter that city
of almost incalculable wealth . . . which may be completely destroyed in
that seconds instant of a careless match . . . (719). Faulkners scripturally
freighted Los Angeles anticipates the fiery Hollywood apocalypse evoked
in Wests 1939 novel, The Day of the Locust (Dardis, Some Time 98), and
confirms Joan Didions reminder that
the city burning is Los Angeless deepest image of itself; Nathanael West
perceived that, in The Day of the Locust . . . what struck the imagination
most indelibly were the fires . . . the city on fire, just as we had always
known it would be in the end. Los Angeles weather is the weather . . . of
apocalypse.10

Following Faulkners advice to view Hollywood anthropologically (Blotner,

FH 286; Bloom, Hollywood 22) and echoing the title of Faulkners story,
Didion titled this LA section of her classic 1968 essay collection, Slouching
Toward Bethlehem, Lifestyles in the Golden Land.
In Golden Land Faulkner exploits a familiar Hollywood genre by
recounting the life of a damned striver, a doomed climber. In these Faustian
tales, ambitious men and women escape obscure, unglamorous origins and
build themselves lives of luxury, status, and libertine indulgence but end up
entangled in their own machinations, betrayed by the ungrateful beneficia-
ries of their coercive largesse. During Faulkners Hollywood years, these self-
victimizers included such iconic Hollywood protagonists as Charles Foster
Kane, Stella Dallas, and Mildred Pierce, the latter of whom inspired a script
Faulkner worked on as an uncredited writer (Dardis, Some Time 142).11
The fallen climber in Golden Land, a Beverley Hills realtor named
Ira Ewing, landed in Los Angeles as a drifter fleeing his familys Nebraska
farm. He eventually gained such a foothold in real estate that, at forty-
eight [ . . . ], owning a business which he had built up unaided and preserved
intact through nineteen-twenty-nine enables him to spend fifty thousand
dollars a year giving his children luxuries . . . which his own father not
82 James D. Bloom
only could have not conceived . . . but would have condemned (703). After
his Filipino chauffeur carries him home and puts him to bed after each
nightly bender, Ewing awakens to a view which might be called the monu-
ment to almost twenty-five years of industry and desire . . . shrewdness and
luck and even fortitude (701) of the opposite canyonflank dotted with the
white villas halfhidden in imported olive groves or friezed by the somber
spaced columns of cypress like the facades of eastern temples (7012).
As a self-made man Ewing recalls one of Hollywoods and Amer-
icas favorite self-aggrandizing narratives. Fortifying this formula, Faulkner
took pains to establish Ewings frontier pedigree, which extends across
America from California to a sodroofed dugout on the Nebraska wheat
frontier (724) where Ewings father, retrospectively growing into the pro-
portions of a giant . . . had engaged barehanded in some titanic struggle
with the . . . earth and endured and . . . conquered (712) and before him
to a Kentucky blockhouse with Indians around it (724). The frontier
narrative moves to the foreground of Golden Land with the shift of
the narrators attention to Ewings widowed mother. Faulkners narrator
repeatedly highlights her role as vestigial upholder of her pioneer her-
itage, showing her wrapped in her knitted shawl and ensconced in her
Nebraska chair (712, 724). This idealization, however, falters, with the
narrators expose of the shawl-clad, rocking-chair bound matriarch as an
unsaintly pioneer opportunis[t] (725). Her opportunism arises from her
need to subvert her sons oppressive benevolence. Having set her up in a
Glendale bungalow with a Japanese gardener, Ewing provides for all her
needs so comprehensively that she needs no cash and has none. In order
to pay for the train fare needed to flee home to Nebraska, she had tried
selling sweets to her grandchildren, only to find herself more than thirteen
dollars short by the time the children outgrew candy and cake (725).
After invoking the older Mrs. Ewing as a vestigial embodiment of frontier
virtue who might have stepped out of Little House on the Prairie (published
the same year as Golden Land), Faulkner ends the story by shifting her
into the company of the delusional death-fearing schemers and dreamers
who would come to populate Wests Day of the Locust.

II.
While in Hollywood Faulkner began work on what arguably became his
magnum opus, Absalom, Absalom! (1936). Another self-made man tale,
Absalom, Absalom! may just as arguably be Faulkners most Hollywood-
inflected work. More than one critic has traced the plot of Absalom,
 The Hollywood challenge 83
Absalom! to Faulkners work for director Howard Hawks on an unfilmed
biopic, Sutters Gold, about the California Gold Rush legend Johannes
Sutter.12 Another unproduced script, Revolt in the Earth, Faulkners own
adaption of Absalom, Absalom!, probably makes the strongest case for
this novels Hollywood provenance (Kawin, Film 1267, 1306). Looking
beyond plot and biography, Joseph Urgo has argued that the distinctive
narrative construction of Absalom, Absalom! by a group of writers and
their appreciation of the precariously fictive and shadowy status of their
medium recalls the conditions Faulkner adapted to while toiling at MGM
(AA 80).13 Urgo singles out three main collaborators Quentin Comp-
son, the Yoknapatawpha scion who appeared in previous Faulkner work;
his Harvard roommate Shreve McCannon; and (according to Quentins
recollections of her) his elderly Mississippi neighbor, Rosa Coldfield. Fol-
lowing customary Hollywood practice and resorting to familiar Holly-
wood hype, Shreve probably the worldliest collaborator in the group
compares the story of Absalom, Absalom! to an earlier Hollywood hit.
Boasting that [i]ts better than Ben Hur (176), Shreve recalls Lew Wal-
laces 1880 novel, which became the best-selling American novel of the
nineteenth-century. Variety, the entertainment industrys influential trade
paper, praised Hollywoods 1924 adaption of Ben Hur for rising above
spectacle thanks to the tremendous heart throbs it provokes.14 Histo-
rian Joel Williamson has stressed the novels significance by pairing it with
another blockbuster novel, which became Hollywoods most durable lit-
erary adaptation. Williamson recounts Faulkners one-sided rivalry with
the Atlanta novelist Margaret Mitchell. Citing its disturbing focus on mis-
cegenation, rape and fratricide, Williamson turns Absalom, Absalom! into
the anti-Gone With the Wind account of life among the Southern planter
aristocracy.15

III.
Faulkners 1935 novel Pylon, written while Faulkner was also working on
Absalom (Kawin, Film 47), indicates, albeit more modestly, the impact of
his first Hollywood sojourn. Pylon opens in a pawn shop in a New Orleans-
like city and shows an airplane mechanic named Jiggs haggling over a pair
of boots, with Jiggs eventually reaching for his money to close the deal:

When Jiggs put his hand into his pocket they could follow it, fingernail
and knuckle, the entire length of the pocket like watching the ostrich in the
movie cartoon swallow the alarm clock. (56)
84 James D. Bloom
The implication of Faulkners elaborate simile, that the ostrich in the
movie cartoon is part of these adult merchants frame of reference, reflects
Faulkners apparent conclusion that Americans everywhere belong to, while
not necessarily belonging in, Hollywood. In an exchange between an editor
and the reporter covering the racing-team Jiggs works for, Faulkner con-
firms this view with the reporters description of the racing-team leaders
wife. His reference to her Harlowcolored hair that they would pay her
money for . . . in Hollywood (36) implicates and allies both Faulkners
characters and readers as Hollywood cognoscenti. Not knowing about
the actress Jean Harlow and her famous platinum blonde look (Bloom,
Hollywood 152) seems in Faulkners view a disqualification for conducting
everyday business in 1930s America. Apparently, by 1935 Hollywood had
become for Faulkner congruent with America itself.
This recognition became especially striking by the end of the decade in
Faulkners The Wild Palms (1939), which became a bestseller despite its two
seemingly disparate narratives: The Wild Palms, the misadventures of a
defiantly adulterous couple, Charlotte Rittenmeyer and Harry Wilbourne,
traversing Depression-era America, and Old Man, the odyssey of a Mis-
sissippi convict unwillingly set free during the catastrophic Mississippi
River flood of 1927 and the Garbo-like flood victim he rescues. Like Pylon,
both Wild Palms stories appeal to Faulkners readers as members of the
mass cognoscenti into which Hollywood had transformed the American
public and both respond to the power of the mass-media and its morons
pap (103) to place [ . . . ] the stamp of verisimilitude and authenticity on
Americas fantasies (20).
Like Pylon, The Wild Palms takes for granted its readers appreciation of
Hollywood rituals and their knowledge of its marquee names. In a Wild
Palms section of the novel, Faulkner singles out one of these marquee
names as a metonym for Hollywoods irresistible takeover of the American
imagination. On a bus ride from Utah to Texas Harry contemplates:
the little lost towns, the neon, the lunch rooms with broad strong Western
girls got up out of Hollywood magazines (Hollywood which is no longer in
Hollywood but is stippled by a billion feet of burning colored gas across the
face of the American earth) to resemble Joan Crawford . . . (176)

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s Crawford stood out among a handful of
Hollywood stars who epitomized ideal American womanhood and taught
Americans that the woman who wants to get along has to go along.16
This idealizing of Crawford is likely to have galled Faulkner more than
the idolizing of the eras other distinctive leading ladies, such as Bette
 The Hollywood challenge 85
Davis or Barbara Stanwyck, would have. One of Faulkners first MGM
assignments entailed adapting his 1931 Saturday Evening Post story Turn
About, about a World War One aviator and a torpedo-boat crew, into
the movie eventually released as Today We Live (1933). Within five days
Faulkner gave director Howard Hawks exactly what he asked for. Faulkners
script also had the blessing of MGMs legendary production chief and
Hollywoods boy wonder, Irving Thalberg.
. . . but everything changed with the sudden availability of Joan Craw-
ford . . . The addition of a heroine entailed a complete rewriting of the script
and the result was a lugubrious love triangle, with Crawford in love with
both Gary Cooper and Robert Young. [Faulkners] action sequences were
the only good thing about the picture; it failed with the critics and had a
very modest financial success. (Dardis, Some Time 94)

Reacting to this muddying of his story, Faulkner quipped, I dont seem

to remember a girl in the story (Blotner, Biography 307; Matthews, Cul-
ture Industry 65, 68). It stands to reason that having begun his Hollywood
career in this way Crawford would come to stand for whatever troubled
Faulkner about Hollywood. As the heroine of the novels Wild Palms sec-
tions, Charlotte Rittenmeyer counterpoints and challenges the infectiously
popular womanly hardworking and virtuous girl ideal that Crawford (at
least early in her career) represented (Basinger, Womans View 110). The
changes that Crawfords addition to the cast of Today We Live thrust upon
Faulkner included a happy ending, a resolved marriage plot. Crawfords
character ends up marrying the American aviator played by Gary Cooper
and this plot turn absolves her of her premarital intimacy with her child-
hood sweetheart, an English naval officer played by Robert Young. In
stark contrast to this Hollywood formula, Charlottes narrative and moral
trajectory her decisive repudiation of marriage and family rests on a
principled, even ideological argument. Hence the previously solitary Harry
marvels at Charlottes conscientious deliberation in establishing their adul-
terous menage:
even the love nest under the rose . . . follow[s] a rule and pattern . . . Its
not the romance of illicit love . . . not the passionate idea of two damned and
doomed . . . against the world and God . . . Its because the idea of illicit love is
a challenge . . . (70)

Instead of stigmatizing sexual waywardness according to the standards of

Hollywood melodrama MGM thrust upon him, Faulkner casts the adulter-
ess as a heroic ideologue, a quixotic one to be sure, by coupling her moral
86 James D. Bloom
defiance with her artistic aspirations. In the love nest passage quoted
above, Faulkners narrator continues by registering Charlottes excitement
at finding A studio. Where I can work and, perhaps echoing Virginia
Woolf s now-canonic 1929 observation, identifies Charlottes studio as her
first room of her own (70).17
In her self-scripted role as Harrys lover and road-movie buddy, Charlotte
competes with Hollywoods on-screen talent. As an artist, however, Char-
lotte competes with the production side of Hollywood, as an image-maker,
a producer of effigies at once popular and subversive, heterogeneous and
canonic. Her collection of little figures deer and wolfhounds and horses
and men and women, lean epicene sophisticated and bizarre . . . fantastic
and perverse (74) sells out immediately when she peddles it at a Michigan
Avenue department store and the stores management turns Charlotte into
even more of a public image-maker, providing her with a screen or stage of
her own, by hiring her to dress its windows with the same sort of histor-
ical figures represented in Hollywood westerns, sword-and-sandal epics,
and biopics (74). This ascent as a popular Chicago entertainer comes to
include puppet-making commissions for magazine covers and advertise-
ments . . . actual figures almost as large as small children . . . Quixote . . . a
Falstaff with the worn face of syphilitic barber, Roxane with . . . a wad
of gum like the sheet-music demonstrator in a ten cent store, Cyrano
with the face of a low-comedy Jew in vaudeville (778). These images
at once deform, deride, and reassuringly replicate and recall the mass-
entertainment formulas that constituted Hollywoods precursors (sheet
music, vaudeville). They also mirror some of the contradictory facets of
Harry and Charlottes relationship: Harry an improbable but successful
suitor like Cyrano: Falstaff, hellbent in pursuit of his own carnal desires;
Roxanne, like Charlotte the object of two mens desire, Harrys and her
husbands; Quixote, whose name has become a byword for damned and
doomed idealism.
Charlottes quixotic principles also associate her with the Hollywood
formula that such Hollywood classics as Casablanca (1942) and Mr. Smith
Goes to Washington (1939) rest on. Moreover, while repudiating Holly-
woods moralizing melodramas, another of Charlottes figures Falstaff
calls to mind quite a different genre: slapstick. Presaged in Falstaff s popu-
lar appeal among Elizabethans, slapstick, Miriam Hansen argues, became
Hollywoods most heterodox genre because like Charlotte as an adulteress
and as an artist it promoted changed gender roles . . . new forms of sex-
ual intimacy . . . a new sensory culture (71). Hence the Chicago sections
of The Wild Palms, which feature Charlottes artistic career, also include
 The Hollywood challenge 87
a voluble, cynical, quasi-Falstaffian drinking buddy named McCord who
even speaks in mock-Shakespearean cadences, Set, ye armourous sons, in
a sea of hemingwaves, and leads the peripatetic pair on a larcenous comic
foray through suburban Chicago (82).
In the next Wild Palms section, Charlotte reprises her artistic career
on behalf of the immigrant employees of the Utah coal mine where
Harry works as a company physician. Faulkner introduces the mine as
a scene like something out of an Eisenstein Dante (157). By citing
the legendary Soviet moviemaker Sergei Eisenstein, Faulkner encapsu-
lates both the complex contradictions of Charlottes artistry and perhaps
of the modernist writers relationship to Hollywood as an unsteady mix-
ture of complicity and ambivalence. While Eisenstein worked briefly in
Hollywood in 1930, his reputation rests on his role in pioneering cine-
matic montage, on his artistic commitment, like Charlottes, to evoking
fluidity, motion and speed (85). Eisensteins reputation also rests on an
identification with historys most powerful and most memorable anti-
capitalist regime. Despite its genocidal treatment of its own populations,
the Soviet regimes legitimacy and its sponsorship of Eisenstein rested
on its view of itself as the global champion of the masses, whom Marx
designated the workers of the world. During the 1930s, the so-called
social muse (Bloom, Hollywood 14) pervaded Hollywood, which also
came to see itself as a champion of the oppressed. At the peak of this
rhetorical convergence, Faulkner shows Charlotte in her last artistic per-
formance acting on behalf a group of oppressed workers. Since none of
the miners understands English, Harry fails to explain to them that their
bosses have abandoned the mine and stolen their wages. Exasperated, he
turns to Charlotte and asks, Now what? (167). In response, Charlotte,
wielding a flying crayon (169), feverishly begins to cover the cabin wall
with kinetic images, unmistakably of the miners themselves, Harry, and
the departed bosses, which anyone would have recognised Necessary?
(169) and which resulted in pandemonium among the betrayed workers
(170).
Charlottes cartoon proves consciousness-raising for its audience, for
at least some workers of the world. But its ultimate effect corresponds
to the words of many contemporary sloganeers, No justice! No peace!, a
condition underscored in the way Faulkner ends the couples quest. After
performing a fatal abortion on Charlotte, Harry spends his life in prison
as a piece of old meat reduced to accepting . . . defeat and choosing grief
over nothing (272), a state of affairs much of Faulkners work ratifies but
that few Hollywood products recognize.
88 James D. Bloom

NOTES
1 Van Wyck Brooks, The Writer in America (New York: Avon/Discus, 1968),
p. 93.
2 Tom Dardis, Some Time in the Sun (New York: Scribners, 1976), p. 112.
3 Joseph Blotner, Faulkner in Hollywood, in Man and the Movies, ed. W.R.
Robinson (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1967), p. 297.
4 Miriam Bratu Hansen, The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema
as Vernacular, Modernism/Modernity 6.2 (1999), 69, 68.
5 Lewis Mumford, Art and Technics (New York: Columbia University Press,
1952), pp. 98, 96, 1367.
6 William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, ed. David Minter, 2nd edition (New
York: Norton, 1994), p. 208.
7 Saverio Giovacchini, Hollywood Modernism: Film and Politics in the Age of the
New Deal (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), p. 17.
8 Tom Cerasulo, Authors Out Here: Fitzgerald, West, Schulberg and Parker in
Hollywood (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010), pp. 6, 9 50.
9 James D. Bloom, Hollywood Intellect (Lanham, MD: Lexington/Rowman
2009), p. 121; John T. Matthews, Faulkner and the Culture Industry, in The
Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner, ed. Philip M. Weinstein (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 54, 57.
10 Joan Didion, Slouching Toward Bethlehem (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2005), pp. 2201.
11 Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1984),
p. 461.
12 Sarah Gleeson-White, Auditory Exposures: Faulkner, Eisenstein, and Film
Sound, PMLA 128.1 (2013), 87100; Bruce Kawin, Faulkner and Film (New
York: Ungar, 1977), p. 88.
13 Joseph Urgo, Absalom, Absalom!: The Movie, American Literature 62.1 (1990),
5672.
14 Variety, N.A., 31 December 1924, http://variety.com/1924/film/reviews/ben-
hur-a-tale-of-the-christ-1200409567/.
15 Joel Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1993), p. 256.
16 Marie DiBattista, Fast-Talking Dames (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2001), p. 146; Janine Basinger, A Womans View: How Hollywood Spoke to
Women, 19301960 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1995).
17 Virginia Woolf, A Room of Ones Own (New York: Harcourt/Harvest, 1989),
pp. 34.
 Times
Rural modernization between the wars
 chapter 8

Topologies of discourse in Faulkner

Charles Hannon

You know, sometimes I think there must be a sort of pollen of ideas

floating in the air, which fertilizes similarly minds here and there
which have not had direct contact.
William Faulkner to Henry Nash Smith1

Electricity (like pollen) was in the air in Oxford, Mississippi in the months
of 1935 and 1936 when Faulkner was writing and revising chapters of
Absalom, Absalom! and mailing them off to his editor, Hal Smith.2 Absaloms
narrator describes Quentin feeling exactly like an electric bulb (143) as
he sits next to Rosa on their way to meet Henry at Sutpens Hundred.
Quentin remembers his father describing youth, the young and supple
and strong who can react as instantaneous and complete and unthinking
as the snapping on and off of electricity (218). Shreve imagines Sutpen
telling Henry that Charles is his brother and Henry calling his father a liar
that quick: no space, no interval, no nothing between like when you press
the button and get light in the room (235). Earlier in the novel, referring
to Sutpens three-year hiatus, the narrator describes him as completely
static, as if he were run by electricity and someone had come along and
removed, dismantled the wiring or the dynamo (312). And lets not forget
Rosas understanding that the cost of electricity was not in the actual time
the light burned but in the retroactive overcoming of primary inertia
when the switch was snapped: that that was what showed on the meter
(70). Taken together, these references are surprisingly anachronistic for a
novel whose primary events take place long before the first municipalities
began lighting their streets. They provide evidence for the argument that
language, especially novelistic language as described by Mikhail Bakhtin, is
shaped by culture, discourse, and technology.3 Faulkner worked in the Ole
Miss power plant in 1929 and perhaps was influenced linguistically by that
experience. But the discourse on electricity in Oxford, Mississippi in 1935
36, during the months that Faulkner was writing and revising Absalom,
91
92 Charles Hannon
Absalom! did much more to shape both the language and the storytelling
structure of this novel.
In the fall of 1935 the city of Oxford faced a decision whether to contract
with the recently formed Tennessee Valley Authority for its electricity
supply. Nearby Tupelo, Mississippi, had famously become the first TVA
City in 1934. But bringing TVA power, and the modern tools and appli-
ances it would make possible, to Oxford, Lafayette County, and other rural
counties in northeast Mississippi was not a simple decision. Histories of the
era cite obstructions of private utility companies in the face of government
involvement in the business of electricity. These companies claimed that
government subsidies and tax support for plant construction and line
installation presented unfair competition and threatened to put them out of
business. But leaving rural electrification to the private sector wasnt work-
ing: the utilities argued that rural customers would not use enough electric-
ity to make the installation of electric lines profitable. In 1935, when TVA
officials began surveying areas in northeastern Mississippi, it was the city
of Oxford, not private industry, that opposed TVA electricity. The city had
been generating its own power since the early 1900s; by 1930, following sev-
eral upgrades to its capacity, it generated enough to enter a $1,500 monthly
agreement to supply power to the University of Mississippi for lighting and
other purposes.4 The city mayor and aldermen were essentially running
the municipal plant like a private company, reaching out to new markets
and experimenting with lower rates in the hope of encouraging increased
usage.5 They even threatened to follow private utilities and enter the retail
appliance business if local merchants did not increase efforts to sell more
electricity-consuming devices.6 As with the private utilities, however, the
citys outreach did not extend to rural customers. And when TVA officials
came to discuss putting Oxford and the local counties on the government
grid a plan predicated upon the city selling its existing facilities to the
TVA city officials reacted like officers of a private company: they slashed
their rates by 40 percent, and launched a campaign to discredit the TVA
offer.
The TVA Fight culminated in a December 1935 vote. Oxfords mayor,
R. X. Williams, led the citys officials in opposing the TVA. In a November
1935 appeal he lamented a vote to give away the valuable local power
plant. He argued that profits from city ownership of the electrical plant
had subsidized city services, and if the TVA were to take over, the local
millage rate would have to be doubled. The citys current rates (after drastic
reductions a few weeks prior) were only 10 percent above those promised by
TVA, so approving TVA would represent a significant increase in costs to
the residents of the city. Finally, he argued that the promise of cheap TVA
 Topologies of discourse in Faulkner 93
service to rural county residents was implausible because energy use in
these households would not meet a TVA-defined threshold for connection
to the grid.7 On the opposite side, the Citizens TVA Committee argued
that comparison cities (Amory and New Albany) had found they did not
have to raise taxes after implementing TVA and if any were necessary in
Oxford, the higher millage rates would be offset by lower rates per kwh
of electricity. They further argued that cheap power from TVA would be
necessary if Oxford and Lafayette County were to benefit from industrial
and manufacturing development in the region. In all of their arguments
the Citizens TVA Committee appealed on behalf of farmers and rural res-
idents who needed TVA electricity to modernize their living conditions.8
But county residents, whom the new power would benefit most, were not
allowed to vote in the election, and the measure was defeated 290237.9
City officials, perhaps belying their true intentions, soon developed plans
to expand their plant and extend lines to a few rural areas according to
plans that had been designed by TVA engineers.10 But county leaders
thwarted these efforts when, with the help of the Mississippi Planning
Commission, they formed a cooperative association, contracted with the
TVA, and began installing TVA-supplied electrical service in the area in
1938.11
Faulkner might well have sympathized with rural residents during this
debate. In 1929 he had purchased a dilapidated but historically significant
house and immediately commenced renovations. Joseph Blotner writes
that the house needed new foundation beams and a new roof, plumbing,
wiring, paper, paint, and screens.12 Indeed, this list of requirements sounds
very like a list of rural Mississippi housing deficiencies identified by a 1934
government survey: out of 22,125 farm homes surveyed, 17,957 were found
to be unpainted, 16,615 needed screening and 7,901 needed additional
windows and doors. In addition, 8,499 were depreciating for lack of a good
roof; 7,373 were needing new foundations; 8,775 houses lacked adequate
bedrooms. The lack of a pure water supply and unsanitary conditions were
stressed in the report.13 This study of rural housing was just one example
of New Deal efforts to identify the most pressing problems and address
them through government programs. From his own experience, and within
the context of recent discussions of ways to reduce the suffering of rural
Mississippians, Faulkner would have absorbed the TVA debate with the
understanding that bringing electricity which also brought light, heat,
and pumped water to nearby counties was a necessary precondition to
modernizing them.
Others have written about how TVA electricity brought modernity
to the rural south.14 The story of the TVA Fight in Oxford reveals
94 Charles Hannon
how modernization was hindered by Oxford city officials before these
same officials were forced to accept TVA electrification. The Fight also
introduces a model of network expansion one that trades local control
for the benefits of a distributed network that can serve as a grid for
understanding Faulkners modernizing of narrative form in Absalom, Absa-
lom!. The novels narrative power derives from the complex network of real
and imagined storytellers that extends beyond the city of Jefferson into
the rural counties and as far north as Quentin and Shreves Harvard dorm
room. Rosa Coldfield tells Quentin her part of Sutpens story because she
wants it told beyond her local network (AA 6, italics removed). Quentin
can take her story to his father, Mr. Compson, link it with his fathers
narrative network itself built upon lines originating from Sutpen, Gen-
eral Compson, and Goodhue Coldfield and then transmit it beyond
the city of Oxford through linkages to his college roommate Shreve. For
his part, Shreve can imagine networks of storytellers that complete addi-
tional circuits of discourse about Sutpen. The rich complexity of the story
that emerges depends upon the official narrators giving up control over
the story and allowing these nodes and linkages to proliferate. Issues of
centrality and control define both the TVA Fight of 1935 and the implicit
tensions in Absalom, Absalom! over how the story of Thomas Sutpen is to be
generated, told and retold. The topological debate over modernization and
development in northeast Mississippi is thus reconfigured in the novel as
a consideration of information exchange within a more or less distributed
network of Sutpen storytellers.
We can explore these ideas by applying principles of network theory to a
comparison between Absalom, Absalom! and Faulkners first novel about the
enduring influence of a storied family patriarch, Flags in the Dust (published
as Sartoris in 1929).15 In Flags, only five characters ever refer to the family
patriarch, Colonel John Sartoris, and only one of them, Old Man Falls,
in any significant number (123 times). Only Falls ever cites others as a
source of information about Sartoris, and these are either Sartoris himself,
or his son Old Bayard. Significantly, Old Bayard (John Sartoriss son) never
directly refers to his father at all, and Young Bayard, John Sartoris great-
grandson, only refers to him twice, in a single exchange with Sartoriss sister
Miss Jenny. Moreover, the stories about Sartoris that are presented in the
novel never extend beyond a very limited and local network of tellers and
listeners. Only five characters ever hear about Sartoris, and these references
occur on only seven occasions. So the network of storytellers in this first
novel of Faulkners never grows beyond a small set of localized, bi-nodal
linkages. The entire network can be diagramed as follows:
 Topologies of discourse in Faulkner 95

{John Sartoris} Character tells Sartoris

story to indicated
character
Indicated character cites
{connected character} for
information about
Isom (1) Sartoris
Old Man Falls [Mother]
{[Old Bayard]} (123) Narrator cites character
for information about
Sartoris
[Character Name]
Character who hears
references to Sartoris
Narrator but does not refer to him
[Dr. Peabody]
(71) {Character Name}
Simon (15) Character cited as
source of information
about Sartoris

Young Bayard (2) Miss Jenny (7)

Figure 1. The John Sartoris storytelling network in Flags in the Dust. Each node is sized
proportionately according to the number of that characters references to Sartoris (listed
parenthetically).

Largely because of the novels conventional structure, we can say that

the narrator of Flags exhibits a high degree of centrality within the novels
storytelling network.16 All the nodes that exist as sources of information
about Sartoris are connected to the narrator through the narrators inclusion
of their references to him, so the in-degree centrality of the narrator is five,
the highest possible. The second highest measure is Old Man Falls (two),
Young Bayards and Miss Jennys measures are both one, and Isoms and
Simons are zero. The Narrator node also has a high betweenness, a
measure of the amount of information flow that must pass through this
node in order to reach other nodes in the network and be heard. Old
Man Falls controls the most information about Sartoris, but he conveys
it only to Old Bayard and he does not have access to information held
by other characters. Young Bayard and Miss Jenny pass a small amount of
information about him to each other. The narrators betweenness measure
is the greatest: if we were to remove the narrator from this graph, the
Sartoris discourse network would all but fall apart.
It is possible to create a similar storytelling network related to the telling
of Thomas Sutpens story in Absalom, Absalom! Figure 2 represents the
four characternarrators in the novel who explicitly refer to Sutpen, to
him or his actions, and the characters whose references to Sutpen form
part of their versions of Sutpens story.17 As in the Flags network, some
conversations about Sutpen are one-way (Rosa tells Quentin her story of
96 Charles Hannon

{Mr. Coldfield "possibly"} {General Compson} {Sutpen} Character tells Sutpen

story to indicated
character
{"reports and rumors"} Indicated character cites
{"it was known"} {connected character} for
{Akers} {"I heard how"} information about
Sutpen, often implausibly
Narrator cites character
{Men at Mr. Compson
for information about
Holston House} (488)
Sutpen
{Judith}

{"someone"}

{Henry} Rosa
Quentin (1061)
(403)

[Character Name]
Shreve Character who hears
{Charles}
(309) references to Sutpen but
does not refer to him
{Character Name}
Narrator {Wash Jones} Character cited as
(385) source of information
about Sutpen
{Lawyer} {Eulalia} {Lee}

Figure 2. The Sutpen storytelling network in Absalom, Absalom!, representing narrators

who refer to Sutpen, and their named sources of information about him (however
implausible).

Sutpen, but Quentin never mentions Sutpen to Rosa), while others are
bi-directional (Mr. Compson-Quentin and Quentin-Shreve). But unlike
in the Flags network, every character who tells Sutpens story draws upon
multiple input sources. In some cases these are unnamed reports and
rumors; in others, they are purely imagined, as when Quentin narrates
Sutpens thoughts directly, or when Shreve narrates any characters discus-
sions about Sutpen that did not come through Quentin (such as the New
Orleans lawyers, Eulalias, or Charles). Occasionally the provenance of the
information is simply unclear: when Mr. Compson conveys information
he knows according to Miss Rosa (37), we dont know if he obtained this
directly from her, or through Quentin. Interestingly, Rosa does not source
much of her information about Sutpen: someone was kind enough to tell
her Sutpen was dead (139), and she imagines Henry telling her that Father
and Charles are walking in the garden (113) when she arrives at Sutpens
Hundred for a visit. Otherwise, her story about Sutpen comes from her
own experience and imagination, or from sources she neglects to cite.
This networks measures of centrality and betweenness mark radical
departures in Faulkners approach to telling the story of a fabled patriarch, as
well as in the experience one has reading these two novels. Like the narrator
 Topologies of discourse in Faulkner 97
of Flags, Absaloms narrator has a high degree of centrality. But in Absalom,
so do all the other characternarrators. Each of the main tellers of Sutpens
story relies upon more or less complex networks of sources of information
about him. However, very few (if any) of these sources are shared between
the characternarrators, which lowers the verifiability of the information:
essentially, a character like Rosa could lie about Sutpen because she cites so
few others as sources of information, and none who are connected to any
other characternarrators there is no one in the network to contradict her.
Moreover, compared to Flags, Absaloms narrators betweenness measure is
much lower. We could remove the narrator entirely from this network and
the remaining discourse chains would still be connected: Sutpens story
would still be distributed. In other words, the narrator is far less central to
the discourse network in Absalom than it is in Flags. In fact, in many places
the narrator appears dependent upon these external linkages. In Chapter 1,
for example, the narrator does not simply tell us about Sutpen; we are
connected to two Quentins telling themselves about Sutpen in the long
silence of notpeople in notlanguage, like this: It seems that this demon
his name was Sutpen (Colonel Sutpen) Colonel Sutpen (5). In Chapter 2,
the narrator connects to the Sutpen-General Compson network ( . . . later
Sutpen told Quentins grandfather); the General Compson-Mr. Compson
network ( . . . as General Compson told his son, Quentins father); and
the Rosa-Quentin network ( . . . as Miss Coldfield told Quentin) (27).
By the end, the narrators stories of Sutpen include linkages to the entire
network of storytellers, with their real and imagined sources of information.
This combination of actual and virtual conversations about Sutpen sets
up a network structure that implies much more than it presents literally.
In social networks, for instance, a powerful force of triadic closure tends
to triangulate three nodes when two edges already exist that is, when
one node is already inked to two other nodes. If General Compson had
not died in 1900, for instance, it is likely that he would have formed a
stronger discourse triad telling Sutpen stories to both Mr. Compson and
Quentin. We can imagine him there nevertheless, in the stories Quentin
hears from his father (solid directional lines) and that Quentin imagines
coming from his grandfather (dotted directional lines). Shreves narration
of Eulalias and the lawyers references to Sutpen sets up a structure for
triadic closure between these two New Orleans figures that we never see
directly represented that is, we never see Eulalia and the lawyer discussing
Sutpen with each other but that we know must have occurred many times.
This tendency in networks also allows us to imagine that Mr. Compson
has discussed Sutpen with Rosa, even though these conversations are never
presented in the novel. Alternatively, the fact that no character narrates
98 Charles Hannon
references to Sutpen made by both Henry and Charles (Rosa includes some
from Henry and Shreve includes some from Charles) underscores the fact
that we never see these brothers in conversation (imagined or otherwise)
where both make direct references to their father. A consideration of triads
can also reveal interesting aspects of information brokerage in such social
networks. In Flags, the lack of triadic closure means that the narrator can
serve as chief broker of the discourse on Sartoris. In contrast, the dense
interactions in Absalom reinforce the idea that the narrator cant control
the Sutpen story because the novels characternarrators have too much
access to information from other sources.
It would be interesting to trace an idea or meme about Thomas Sut-
pen through this storytelling network, to see if other network effects are
observable and can speak to our understanding of the novel. And of course,
network analyses can be performed on other Faulkner texts: measuring, for
instance, how frequently and in what contexts members of the Bundren
family in As I Lay Dying (1931) refer to each other, and how this net-
work representation of the text comports with other analyses we are more
familiar with. But as scholars explore this new domain of literary analysis,
what Franco Moretti calls distant reading, it is important to consider the
historical and discursive contexts of the network effects that emerge. The
decentralized and distributed network of Sutpen storytellers in Absalom!
materialized from a specific moment of debate over the relative benefits
of local versus regional and even national control of energy production in
the United States at a time of economic and moral crisis. Similarly, any
network effects that lie beneath the surface of family dysfunction in As I
Lay Dying should be traceable in part to Faulkners nightly endeavors in the
Ole Miss power plant where he famously wrote that novel. Network anal-
yses of other Faulkner texts will necessarily look beyond the university and
city electrical grids for other contexts within which to understand them.
Faulkner was a great experimenter with form and with the human desire to
convey story and meaning, and as we look further into his inventions for
augmenting his craft, we should always find in it elements of the material
and discursive contexts in which he lived and worked.

NOTES
1 Quoted in Michael Millgate, The Achievement of William Faulkner (1963;
Athens, GA: Brown Thrasher, 1989), p. 14.
2 I would like to thank my colleague Tom Lombardi for helping me consider
ways that network theory might be applied to the texts discussed in this chapter.
 Topologies of discourse in Faulkner 99
3 Bakhtin proposes that novelistic language is unique in its staging of heteroglossia,
a multiplicity of inflected voices of the culture that is internally stratified into
social dialects, characteristic group behavior, professional jargons, generic
languages, languages of generations and age groups, tendentious languages,
languages of the authorities Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed.
and trans. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 262
3. For a full application of Bakhtin to Faulkners work, see Charles Hannon,
Faulkner and the Discourses of Culture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University
Press, 2005).
4 City Officials Close Big Deal With University, Oxford Eagle, 30 October
1930.
5 An attempt is being made to substantially lower the rates and yet to do so in
such a manner that the loss in revenue will be made up by an increased use of
power by the consumers, City Cuts Rates; Raises Salaries, Oxford Eagle, 9
May 1935.
6 To Push Sale of Appliances, Oxford Eagle, 7 May 1936.
7 For Your Consideration, Oxford Eagle, 19 November 1935.
8 Industrial Development Possible Only Through TVA, Committee Says,
Oxford Eagle, 28 November 1935.
9 TVA Loses in Monday Voting, Oxford Eagle, 5 December 1935.
10 City Planning Rural Lines, Oxford Eagle, 9 April 1936; City Will Add to
Power Plant, Oxford Eagle, 6 August 1936.
11 Local Power Loop Gets OK, Oxford Eagle, 10 September 1936.
12 Joseph Blotner, William Faulkner: A Biography (1974; New York: Vintage,
1991), p. 261. John Faulkner remembers his brother doing much of the work
himself: For the wiring and plumbing he had to have men who had the tools
and know-how, but he hired himself to them as apprentice, My Brother Bill
(New York: Trident Press Pocket Cardinal Edition, 1964), pp. 1456.
13 The Farm Housing Survey, Editorial, Oxford Eagle, 22 March 1934.
14 For example, Ronald C. Tobey, Technology as Freedom: The New Deal and
the Electrical Modernization of the American Home (Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1996).
15 This approach is influenced by the work of Franco Moretti, especially Network
Theory, Plot Analysis, New Left Review 88 (2011), 80102.
16 For an excellent introduction to network theory see David Easley and Jon
Kleinberg, Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected
World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
17 Included are references to Sutpen the person but not the patronym (hes
a Sutpen); to him and his but not himself; to Sutpens actions but
not to Sutpens Hundred. The result is inexact but a fair representation of
one characternarrators references to the person Thomas Sutpen relative to
others.
 chapter 9

It and Ole in 1930

The structural economy of Faulkners complex words
Richard Godden

Context lies within a text, often within a single word or phrase, not outside
or prior to the text in the manner of historical backdrop. The Russian
linguist V. N. Volosinov, in the spirit of Marxs observation that language
amounts to practical consciousness made from agitated layers of air,1
argues that linguistic meaning forms from the practice of words as it occurs
in dialogue (the meaning of a word being, therefore, its position between
speakers2 ). Those speakers articulate the particular conditions within which
they came to consciousness, conditions made by prior speakers, and infused
within the voices of yet earlier speakers, as they acted on the world through
language. It follows that any word so heard heard as polyphonic, and
read as a palimpsest may prove immanent with its own sociological
analysis, since in its always shifting, always changing . . . movement from
speakers to speaker, from one context to another, it reaches the ear of
the text, already occupied . . . tenanted by the voices of its previous users,
and unable, to free itself from those concrete contexts into which it has
[earlier] entered.3 For Volosinov, as for Marx, a concrete context remains
in the last instance economic, where an economy should be understood,
not as an abstract force, but as a mask worn by social relations, always and
ever inseparable from the linguistic medium of their making.4
None of which intends to imply that a text exists in transparent relation
to its context, the latter being plainly readable through the former. After all,
many or some of the speech situations sedimented within a word may have
featured speakers at odds with one another, not least because they spoke
from a context whose economic conditions looked necessarily different
when viewed from alternative perspectives on property. For example, the
industrialist and the financier both own capital, but their purposes diverge
to the point of antagonism; the meaning of money, therefore, along with
its varied lexicons and practices, divides as it emerges from their mouths.
Likewise, the landowner who seeks to maximize a cash crop exists at odds
with the tenant who strives to preserve some aspect of his rented land for
100
 It and Ole in 1930 101
production of sustenance rather than profit. Accordingly, land, existing
as an activity and a form of words between its users, takes on contradictory
substance and inflection. To read the context in the word will be to trawl
through semantic opacities, born of conflict, for the generative conditions
of that opacitys making.
Take the word it, as used by the child Vardaman in response to his
mothers death in As I Lay Dying (1930). Vardaman catches and kills a fish,
nigh long as he is, and having done so tot[es] it home to show his
mother (31); before he can do so, she dies. For Vardaman, as we shall see,
the death (it) and the fish (it) are inextricable. In effect, the boy uses
the fish to keep his mother alive, believing, for example, that when the
wagon and the coffin are washed from the ford by the flood, Addie (the
fish) swims free (151). The conjunction of coffin and fish proves crucial to
Vardamans logic. Just as Cash labors over the coffin, so Vardaman labors
over the fish; indeed the extended fraternal tasks intersect for Vardaman
in the coffined fish, both offerings remaining incomplete at the point of
Addies death.
To substitute a dead fish for a dead mother could not resurrect the
mother, but because Vardaman has sweated into that fish, that fish is not
dead; as congealed labor power, it lives and allows Addie to live. The
afterlife of Addie in the labor-life of the fish proves lengthy, undergoing
extraordinary transformations, each of them inseparable from Vardamans
use of the word it:
Then I begin to run. I run toward the back and come to the edge of the
porch and stop. Then I begin to cry. I can feel where the fish was in the
dust. It is cut up into pieces of not-fish now, not blood on my hands and
overalls. Then it wasnt so. It hadnt happened then. And now she is getting
so far ahead I cannot catch her. (53)

The first it in the first paragraph of Vardamans first section (It is cut
up) refers to the fish, gutted and cleaned, allowing the not-fish tacitly
to elide the not-mother. A second it (Then it wasnt so.) effects
a temporal reversal, restoring integrity to the fish, which, in any case,
Vardaman can [still] feel . . . in the dust, but, as it does so, it splits to
refer also to Addies death, recast, care of the persistence of the felt-fish, as
not having happened. This claim is compounded by a third usage (It
hadnt happened then), in which then, prompted by its adjacency to
so (the last word in the previous sentence), slips from temporal adverb
to point of emphasis, as in so, it hadnt happened then. As the subject of
an assertion rather than a question, it, liberated from then understood
102 Richard Godden
temporally, operates to link the undead mother to the uncut fish, both
lodged in the pronoun and released from temporal sequence by the felt
persistence of the fish, a persistence dependent on Vardamans labor.
The progress of Vardamans first two sections amounts centrally to an
iteration of its, as the it draws to itself, through rhythm and alliteration,
linked terms: stick, hit, hitch, gittin, kilt, et. How readily the
it sound, dominant in certain sentences and paragraphs of the initial
sections, and doubled in particular phrases, slips its phonemic exceptions
to produce iteration. Listen to, vomiting it. It makes a lot of noise (54),
or I strike. I can hear the stick striking. I can see it hitting (54), wherein
a doubling and trebling of it in the company of related sounds yields
itting it and it itting, so that Vardamans actions here, vomiting tears,
hitting Peabodys team seem secondary, not to language, but to sound as
a resounding of the coffined fish held living by labor in the it.
It might be objected that I conduct a sound experiment while Vardaman
grieves, except that in the resonance of it Vardaman finds and manages
his grief. During his first two sections, in effect a detailed account of his
immediate response to loss, Vardaman stretches both his own and our ears
towards non-sense because for him and at this time, making sense amounts
to a dead mother. To avoid which, through it, he makes himself a body
that sounds; here, I borrow from Jean-Luc Nancy on listening:
To sound . . . is not only for the sonorous body to emit a sound but it is also
to stretch out, to carry itself to be resolved into vibrations that both return
to itself and place it [the sonorous body] outside itself.5

The manner of the return, in what I am calling Vardamans iteration,

is that of the echo in a rhyme, where rhyme expects the recovery of a
sound, accompanied by an inference of eternity, insofar as the rhyme
opens towards potential endlessness. The resonance of rhyme therefore
implies a particular temporality whereby a sound anticipates the return of
the very thing that it recalls. In the sonority of Vardamans it, so glossed,
Addie may come, and go, and come again, continuing to exist as a fish in
the physical vibrancy of it, as it re-sounds in her sons ear and throat.
Small wonder that Vardaman longs to hear it and finds satisfaction in
vomiting it or in hear[ing] the stick striking . . . hitting as he cries kilt
(54).
The work of it works only if placed within the concrete context of
Bundren sweat (sweat being a considerable issue in As I Lay Dying). Put
reductively, the Bundrens as peasants, or semi-subsistence producers, for
the most part produce use values rather than exchange values: where use
 It and Ole in 1930 103
should not be understood to entail nostalgia for a simpler past somehow
prior to the market, but as a structurally specific form of transparency to
labor, through which land and its products (whether fish, horse, collard
greens or Vardamans it) become sweat, and as such extensions of the
collective body, lodged necessarily in the eyes, ears, and words of its owners.
The ethnographer Michael Taussig usefully notes that peasant proprietors
(like the Bundrens) who own their own land as their primary means of
production, do not treat that land as a commodity; nor do they treat their
bodies, or the goods made by those bodies from the land, primarily as that
which goes to market. Peasant land remains matter made for use by way
of shared work; arguably, therefore, the Bundrens are all more and less
autochthonous, springing from the soil they inhabit, under-mediated by
money and its opacities.6
Yet the semantic force of it, though occupied by the voices of its
users, and bound thereby to the concrete contexts into which it has
entered, remains conflicted. Addie is a fish (84) only by way of archaic
economic insistence. An economy is never one thing: a fact that must have
been palpable on the day after Black Thursday (October 24, 1929) when
Faulkner sat down to write about peasants over a six-week period during
which Wall Street crashed.7 As I Lay Dying makes no mention of the fall of
US finance; nonetheless, Faulkner has a character called Cash (possessed
of scant cash, and that taken from him) fall twenty-eight foot, four and
a half inches, about (90). That he does so with no intent to allude, in a
novel structured as journey to a graveyard in a market town, seems unlikely;
Vardamans bananas, Anses teeth, and Cashs graphophone stand as ample
evidence of market presence. I lack the space to pursue the full function
of that presence, save to say that it casts a shadow of the Crash across
the Bundrens economic subsistence, thereby modifying the inflection of
Vardamans it as a product of that subsistence. Note that the shadow
is cast in the form of an implied pun (C/cash falling), the splitting of
which phrase brings Wall Street to Jeffersons periphery as an inference of
a larger disruption waiting to happen, whereby the generative labor extant
in Vardamans it will be recast as an unlivable archaism. To reinflect
it through the abject future of Vardamans laboring life is to subject the
pronoun to a degree of emergency, care of which the transparency of the
term to the work that went into it tends (to say the least) to open towards
opacity.
Perhaps I make too much of it, by requiring that a pronoun operate
as an extending register of an economic practice (peasant production) in
transition? My defence would be that Faulkner typically does as much and
104 Richard Godden
more, infusing his semantics at key points with whispers of the rise and fall
of regimes of accumulation. Take his use of the phrase, Ol`e, grandfather,
in the short story, Red Leaves (also from 1930), as uttered by a nameless
slave to the Chickasaw, running for his life from the threat of entombment
beside the recently dead body of his master, the Chief Issetibbeha (CS
335). The tribal custom of his pursuers stipulates that the body of a chief
cannot be buried until that chiefs body servant has been put living into
the grave, to serve his master post requiem and in perpetuity. Understand-
ably, the slave, hidden, watches Issetibbehas two-day dying with some
trepidation. On the first day of his vigil, as he concludes, So he is not
dead yet,
[h]e could hear two voices, himself and himself:
Who not dead?
You are dead.
Yao, I am dead, he said quietly . . . It was when death overran him from
behind, still in life. (32930)

The slave divides, hearing two voices address him from his own mouth,
himself and himself, dead and not dead, begging the question in
what sense does the body servant, still in life, die because the master is
dying? Or, why subsequently, when the master ceases to breathe, does the
slave find it strange that he still needed air (330)?
Faulkners curiosity as to the slaves curiosity, over the exact moment
of his own death in relation to Issetibbehas dying, speaks to the accuracy
of Hegels preoccupation with a similar transposition. In his canonical
chapter, Lordship and Bondge, from The Phenomenology of Mind (1807),
Hegel argues that such is the dependency of the bound man on he who
binds (and vice versa) that each potentially contains the other in disguised
form. Masters, as bodies made by slaves, prove liable, for Hegel, to the
recognition that the independence of their mastery depends upon the
labor of the bound man. Or, as Hegel has it:
Just when the master has effectively achieved lordship, he really finds that
something has come about quite different from an independent conscious-
ness. It is not an independent consciousness but rather a dependent con-
sciousness that he has achieved.8

Understandably, that recognition, tantamount to the insight that he and

his are blacks in white face (or, here, in red face), may prove unpalatable,
 It and Ole in 1930 105
not least because it involves a kind of dying the death of the masters
view of himself as an independent consciousness. Few masters choose to
die for such recognition. But what of the slave, within Hegels model, not
least since Faulkners Red Leaves is preoccupied with the viewpoint of
the slave? For Hegel, the bound man, as the recipient of a social death
(as, that is, one whose essence of life is for another), holds in his hands
contradictory and saving evidence (182). In Hegels terms, contemplating
that into which he has placed his labor, the slave may recognize that the
very things made by his hand since the making of them delays the masters
gratification constitute grounds for his own independent existence (and
consequently for the negation of his own prior negation by the lord):
[s]haping and forming the object has . . . the positive significance that
the bondsman becomes thereby the author of himself as factually . . . self-
existent (186). Such a moment is uncomfortable in that it requires that
the bound man experience both the death of his dependent self and the
emergence of an independent self:
Precisely in labor, where there seems to be some outsiders mind and ideas
involved, the bondsman becomes aware, through the rediscovery of himself
by himself, of having and being a mind of his own. (187)
Since Hegels slave in effect learns revolution in and from his own hand,
that hand as the instrument of recognition through labor causes the slave
no end of trouble. Hegel speaks of quaking and complete perturba-
tion as the bound man melts to [his] innermost soul and trembles
throughout [his] every fiber precisely because he recognizes his labor
power for what it is both an extension of his own mind, and the sub-
stance of his masters mastery (185). Here the death of both the slaves
prior death at the hand of the master and the masters subsequent death
at the hand of the slave are coterminous and simultaneous, all within a
tremble.
Since Issetibbehas slave held the [Mans] pot and ate of his food, from
his dish for twenty years, the food, carried first to the slaves mouth and
only then to the mouth of the master, constitutes a congealed form of the
slaves labor power (326). In that he serves as a body servant, Issetibbehas
slave author[s] . . . himself as an independent being even as he looks
upon and recognizes that which his labor has literally authored and pre-
served, the fed and portly body of Issetibbeha (Hegel, Phenomenology 113).
At the risk of glossing my own gloss: the slave lives after the masters death
(and against his own expectation) because he reads the liberatory message
106 Richard Godden
placed by the work of his own hands into the body of his master. But he
lives for only six days an abbreviated freedom during which he runs
around rather than away from his masters body.
How then can I read a revolution into such subservience to his masters
will and body? On the third day of his run, the slave is bitten in the forearm
by a cottonmouth; touching the head of the snake, he watches it

slash him again across his arm, and again, with thick, raking, awkward
blows. Its that I do not wish to die, he said. Then he said it again
Its that I do not wish to die in a quiet tone, of slow and low amaze,
as though it were something that, until the words had said themselves, he
found that he had not known, or had not known the depth and extent of his
desire. (335)

The contradiction is absolute: inviting death by poison, the slave twice

denies the death that he invites, in effect insisting that he will die in order
not to die. The bitten limb shrinks to that of a child (337), and the slave
requests a hatchet so that he may chop the arm off (338). His pursuers
deny his wish but take his point, noting that to send Issetibbeha one who
will be of no service to him would be to turn Issetibbehas postmortem
eternity exactly upside down; as Berry, one of the hunters, says, Issetibbeha
himself [would] have to nurse and care for such a servant (337). Ergo, the
master would be the slave and the slave would be the master, forever.
The slave finds the depth and extent of his revolutionary desire in the
moment of the bite, as, presumably, the poison enters his flesh. The desired
bite elicits amaze[ment], not least because the words [un]known until
the bite, [say] themselves, all but displacing agency from the utterer.
Who then utters; or, better, what within the slave speaks in riddles and
contradictions?
I am left, impossibly, with the poison itself. To explain: by addressing
the snake in Chickasaw and as grandfather, the slave declares a contra-
dictory fealty: to Issetibbehas lineage (he has lived as an extension of his
masters will) and to that which, internal to the line (since Issetibbeha is
nominated as the lines apparent head), threatens the lines extension the
poison he invites into himself, and which speaks through him. Briefly to
unpack the genealogical implications of Ole, grandfather, and so of the
slaves complex utterance: the slaves long service to Issetibbeha places him
in the place of the master, and since Issetibbeha was fathered by Ikkemo-
tubbe (the first Chickasaw slave holder, and one who gained ascendancy
through poison9 ), whose father remains unidentified, Issetibbehas grand
 It and Ole in 1930 107
paternity proves obscure. Both father and son went by the generic name the
Man, a curious contraction deriving from Ikkemottubes familiar name Du
Homme/the Man (pronounced Doom). The shared title implies a ques-
tion: who is the most doomed man? Answer: Adam. Ergo if Ikkemotubbe
stands as the first man, in Adams place, his father (Issetibbehas grandfa-
ther) must be God or Adams maker, where to make is inextricable from
to poison. One might suggest that since Ikkemotubbe was the first of
his tribe to hold slaves, he amounts to the Man the slaves made, and that,
as glimpsed by the slaves complex logic, the slave is of his very substance,
and of the substance of his lineage.
Yet even as I extend the implications of poison and Ole towards
a political potency that recasts the term Red, in Red Leaves, so I
encounter an apparently insurmountable block to a radical reading: if the
slave poisons Issetibbeha through his own body, that body (the body of
the slave) must in some sense contain the body of Issetibbeha, a body that
the slave therefore preserves as much as he assaults.
But why, in 1930, should Faulkner be so interested in the tangled meet-
ing of binder and bound? The existence of the bound in he who binds,
and of the binder in he who is bound announces a co-dependency, pro-
nounced as a dependency of black upon white by the land owning class
in the post- as in the antebellum plantation South. Only the name of the
supposed black dependent changes, from chattel to debt peon. J. R.
Mandle, historian of Southern African American labor, insists that until
the New Deal, Confederate defeat and the Emancipation Proclamation
of 1863 notwithstanding, black labor in the plantation south remained
bound, or more accurately, not slave/ not free,10 care of systemic debt
peonage. As W. E. B. Du Bois put it, writing in 1935, at the close of
the Civil War the slave went free; stood for a brief time in the sun;
then moved back again toward slavery.11 By 1930, with out- migration
from the region slowed by the Crash and incipient depression, Southern
black agricultural workers remained tied to the land by what the historian
Jonathan Wiener calls involuntary servitude.12 Inflected through Hegel,
such ties bind the laboring body to the body of the labor lord, in a rela-
tion whose archaism grew apparent during the early 1930s. Dependency,
an increasingly unproductive form of labor relation, awaited the influx
of federal funding associated with the Agricultural Adjustment Program
(193338) that would finally expel the tenancy from the labor lord and his
land. Structurally unbound, black labor might or might not tremble in
Hegelian fashion, but there is little doubt that it knew in which migratory
108 Richard Godden
direction to turn. Small wonder if Faulkners slave, held in the earliest
phase of plantation production and perceived (circa 1930) prior to the
New Deals externally enforced labor revolution, lacks an equivalent sense
of direction. Rather he runs in circles and enacts a necessarily impaired
revolution.
My purpose has not been primarily to offer readings of Red Leaves or
of elements of As I Lay Dying but to explore how the economic pervades
Faulkners language. Vardamans it and the slaves Ole in no sense
represent the economic moment of 1930. Rather each makes possible
the complexity of the generative contradictions from which that econ-
omy approaches representation, and from which therefore (and in the last
instance) their language likewise derives, doing so by way of the mouths of
the producers who practice that economy.

NOTES
1 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, ed. C. J. Arthur
(London: Lawrence, 2004), p. 51.
2 See V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav
Matejka and I. R. Titunk (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986),
pp. 945, 102.
3 Mikhail Bakhtin, quoted in Titunk, Appendix II: The Formal and Sociological
Method (M. M. Bakhtin, P. N. Medvedev, and V. N. Volosinov) in Russian
Theory and Study of Literature, in Volosinov, p. 199.
4 The Regulation school economist Michel Aglietta insists that without express-
ing the social content of economic relations, we cannot interpret the forces
and conflicts at work in the economic process. He adds that production is
always the production of social relations as well as material objects. Aglietta, A
Theory of Capitalist Regulation, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 1979),
pp. 4, 24.
5 Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2007), p. 8.
6 Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), pp. 9, 11, 99.
7 Faulkner drafted As I Lay Dying between Oct. 25, 1929 and Jan. 12, 1930
(Blotner, pp. 24853).
8 G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie, 2 vols. (New
York: MacMillan, 1910), vol. I, p. 184.
9 For Ikkemotubbes poisonous back-story, see The Old People in Go Down,
Moses.
10 J. R. Mandle, Not Slave, Not Free (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992).
 It and Ole in 1930 109
11 W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 18601880 (New York:
Harcourt and Brace, 1935), p. 30.
12 Jonathan Wiener, Class Structure and Economic Development in the
American South, 18651955, American Historical Review 84.4 (1979),
992.
Figure 1. Illustration by John Held, Jr. for Life magazine (1926). Reproduced by
permission of Illustration House and the Estate of Margaret Held.
 chapter 1 0

Modern sexuality

Kristin Fujie

In September 1926, the year that William Faulkner published his first
novel Soldiers Pay, the cover of Life magazine carried a drawing by the
American illustrator John Held, Jr. (Figure 1). It pictured a young woman
half-reclined across the arm of a sofa, reading. Her hair is cropped and she
wears a thin dress that exposes her legs from garter to ankle. The book in
her hand is titled Psycho-analysis and whatever it says has put a blush on
her cheek; volumes bearing the names of Freud and Havelock Ellis lie
scattered on the floor. The illustrations caption appears at the bottom of
the page, split by the heel of the womans shoe: Sweet Sexteen.
This image provides a useful index to one sexual climate that accom-
panied Faulkners emergence as an American writer in the 1920s. Cultural
historians tell us that the first sexual revolution in the United States hap-
pened in the early decades of the twentieth century, when sex and sexuality
became more visible, openly discussed, and widely acknowledged as inte-
gral features of human life.1 As captured in Helds drawing, the ushering of
sex into mainstream public consciousness owed much to the populariza-
tion of sexology and psychoanalysis, the sciences of human sexuality and,
in the latter case, its relationship to the unconscious (DEmilio and Freed-
man, Intimate Matters 2239; Woloch, Women 3967).2 In the volume by
Ellis, the young woman might have read that [s]ex lies at the root of life,
and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to under-
stand sex.3 From Freud, she would learn that understanding sex meant
looking in places where sexuality had been traditionally disavowed, such
as the bodies of children, or in so-called perversions such as fetishism,
sado-masochism, and sexual inversion or homosexuality. Insofar as these
aberrations were, according to Freud, manifestations of sexual impulses
present in all humans, they had much to teach normal people about their
own desires.4
Most shockingly, perhaps, Helds young reader would have encountered
herself within this literature, where female sexuality was candidly explored
111
112 Kristin Fujie
as an expression of the sexual instincts, rather than strictly in relation to its
reproductive function. This theoretical decoupling of female sexuality from
procreation found practical confirmation in new practices and behaviors
that emerged among middle-class women of the 1920s. The increasingly
widespread use of birth control by married and unmarried couples of the
middle-class, for example, suggested that women were, in fact, seeking
sexual pleasure for its own sake (Woloch, Women 412), as did the creation
of new patterns of sexual play, such as dating and petting by unmarried,
college youth.5 Although marriage remained the goal, young women of this
period experienced a latitude of sexual expression, and a range of sexual
contact, that the previous generation could only have imagined (Fass,
Damned and Beautiful 26270). One of Faulkners young women puts it
neatly when she boasts, I can if [mother] wanted to (SP 120).
The new woman of the 1920s took many forms, but one female type,
the flapper, became a national symbol for the decade and its revolu-
tion in sexual attitudes and behaviors. Identifiable at a glance from her
bobbed hair, flat chest, and short skirts, the flapper was a visual spectacle
popularized and honed on paper by artists like John Held, Jr., and on
the big screen by actresses such as Clara Bow.6 As an image, she was a
study in the contradictions of a sexual culture in flux, at once masculine
and feminine, childlike and provocative, innocently unaffected and archly
contrived. Freed from her mothers corset, the flapper was now known to
bind her breasts, but whatever sexuality she suppressed through this flat-
tening of womanly curves she openly flaunted in her face, heavily painted
in a manner previously associated with prostitution (Fass, Damned and
Beautiful 2804). Most radically provocative, however, was her dancing,
for notwithstanding Helds gentle caricature, the flapper, as her name
suggests, was known not for what she read but for how she shook,
twirled, twisted, quaked, and quivered on the dance floor.7 Stirred by
the spirit of the age and her own sexuality, the flapper was above all a
woman in motion, a body that shimmied its way across boundaries and
gave dynamic form to a period of anxious transition and shifting sexual
mores.
This sexually mobilized body should be of particular interest to readers
of Faulkner, because it marks a crucial point of contact in his work between
what Anne Goodwyn Jones refers to as the national culture of sexuality
and the more specifically Southern sexual culture that surrounded Faulkner
as Mississippian writing in the early twentieth century.8 Jones provides us
with a useful formulation when she suggests that Faulkners writings consti-
tute a site of contestation between these two sexual cultures, for whereas
 Modern sexuality 113
the trend on the national stage was toward the loosening of restraints
upon female sexuality, these adjustments met with greater resistance in the
south, where the flapper rubbed elbows with another female image, that of
southern womanhood. Forged in the antebellum period, this feminine
ideal, epitomized in the figure of the lady and in her descendent, the
Southern belle, abided into the twentieth century where, Jones argues,
she was never displaced or significantly revised by the new woman of the
1920s.9
Considered side by side, the flapper and the Southern lady make for
a striking contrast. Whereas the flapper, flouting convention, maneuvers
between and across boundaries, the Southern lady stands at the core of
a regions self-definition (Jones, Tomorrow 4) and the impacted center
of what Diane Roberts describes as a rigid interlocking system of class,
gender, and race relations.10 Carefully separated from, and elevated above,
blacks and poor whites, the white lady embodies a power and ascendancy
that is in no sense invested in herself; rather, as a symbol of the south, she
reinforces the hegemony of the white men upon whom she is expected to
rely not only for support, but for protection against the alleged bestial lust
of the black men cast as the primary threat to her integrity, and to the
integrity of the social order she embodies (Roberts, Southern Womanhood
13). If sacred womanhoods sexual and racial purity can tolerate no pollution
from without, however, it also cannot tolerate it from within. Depicted
as a vessel or a garden or a statue on a high, narrow pedestal (Roberts
103), a marble statue beautiful and silent, eternally inspiring and eternally
still (Jones, Tomorrow 4), the Southern lady is untouchable, yes, but also
unmoved, outwardly still and serene because she is free from all sexual
desire in short, the antithesis of the flapper who, set in motion by the
new sexuality, rose to prominence in the national consciousness of the
1920s.
Given these tensions, it is no surprise that when the young, modern
woman appears in Faulkners work of this period, she does so under remark-
able pressure. As we shall see, Faulkners version of the flapper does her
share of dancing, but she is less a figure of liberation than of crisis, a body
caught up within and between the conflicting demands of an emergent
sexuality and an established social order. This body arguably finds its most
radical expression in Faulkners sixth novel, Sanctuary (1931), in the char-
acter of Temple Drake, but Temple is really a culminating figure in a series
of young, white, female renegades11 who appear in his earlier novels of
the 1920s, most importantly, Cecily Saunders of Soldiers Pay (1926) and
(Miss) Quentin Compson of The Sound and the Fury (1929).
114 Kristin Fujie
Cecily Saunders provides a key prototype for the modern woman in
Faulkners early novels. Young, modern, and fast, she exhibits a freedom
of movement and a provocative sexuality that make her an object of intense
male speculation, desire, and discomfort. From her first appearance in
Soldiers Pay, Cecily is repeatedly identified by the rhythmic sound of
her nervous, mincing gait, a swift tapping (86), swift staccato (130),
and tap-tapping (202) that puts her notably out of step with the slow,
somnolent atmosphere that pervades much of her small, Southern town.
That Cecily moves to a distinctly modern beat becomes apparent when she
attends a local dance in the spring of 1919. There, sheathed in a revealing
dress, surrounded by [b]oys of both sexes (179), and backed by the
rhythmic troubling obscenities of saxophones (183), her mobile body
appears entirely in its element. A recently discharged soldier, shocked by
the modern dances, the nervous ones (156), insists that the girls dont
like it, that [t]hey havent changed that much, but he seems to be wrong
(187). [C]onscious of physical freedom, of her young, uncorseted body,
flat as a boys and, like a boys, pleasuring in freedom and motion (187),
Faulkners small-town flapper has, in fact, changed, and she seems to like
it very well.
This freedom of motion does not, however, go unchecked in the novel.
One of the key features of Faulkners modern woman is that her sexual
energy stirs up the men around her, who then seek to contain it by physical,
sometimes violent, means. Thus, while Cecily exhibits a high degree of
sexual latitude early in the novel flirting and petting with multiple men,
losing her virginity to someone other than her fiance, and even musing at
one point whether she wants to have a husband and wife too or two
husbands or to get married at all (77) she becomes both imaginatively
and physically hedged in as the story unfolds. Frustrated by his daughters
reluctance to see her fiance, a wounded veteran who returns unexpectedly
from the war as a shell of his former self, Cecilys father resorts to physical
persuasion. Holding her with one arm as she twist[s] her head aside,
straining from him, he forc[es] her face around and declares that if she
wont see her own fiance, hell be damned if [he]ll have [her] running
around with anybody else (122), behavior that later incites Cecily to
insist, cooly, You dont have to man-handle me (132). Over the course
of the novel, however, she is repeatedly handled in this manner by men,
not just her father, but also her current boyfriend, George, and another
suitor named Januarius Jones. Ultimately, Cecily does defy convention by
running off with George, but she returns at the end of the novel, chastened
and married, a dutiful southern belle12 who falls into her fathers arms,
 Modern sexuality 115
weeping, as her new husband stands morose and thunderous behind her
(292).
The Sound and the Fury allows us to probe a bit deeper behind the man-
handling of young, modern women like Cecily in Faulkners work. Like
that predecessor, Quentin Compson is highly mobile, sexually provocative,
and frequently under male surveillance, in this case, largely by her uncle,
Jason, who accuses her of running about the streets with every drummer
that comes to town (230). Quentin ultimately runs clear out of Jefferson,
but not before she is seen climbing out of windows, sneaking and dodging
through alleys, and helling around in cars, all the while again, according
to Jason with her face painted up like a dam clowns and dressed like
shes trying to make every man [she] passe[s] on the street want to reach
out and clap his hand on it (232). Jason does put his hands on his niece,
perhaps partly in lust but also in rage, insisting that though she might think
she can run over [him], hell show her different (183). In a particularly
violent scene, he grabs her by the arm and [holds] her like a wildcat (183)
as he pulls out his belt and threatens, Ill show you whos got hold of you
now (184).
There are few characters in Faulkners fiction more hateful and tyrannical
than Jason, but his brutality is no simple sadism. Although clearly aggres-
sive, his determination to get hold of his niece is at its root defensive,
for as becomes clear when Quentin successfully slips through his fingers,
reducing him to a man sitting quietly [ . . . ] with his invisible life ravelled
out about him like a wornout sock (313), she has the power to undo him at
his foundations. But why is this so? The internal dynamics of the Compson
family provide vital insight, but Quentins ability to collapse her uncles
identity should also be understood in relation to the Southern sexual cul-
ture previously discussed, that interlocking system of gender, race, and
class upon which Southern white masculinity depends, and within which
the white female body still, serene, untouched and unmoved by desire
acts as a kind of cornerstone. That Jasons masculinity is patterned upon
this system is everywhere evinced in the language of his interior rant, which,
to borrow Andre Bleikastens marvelous phrase, is thickly encrusted with
[the] ideological deposits of racism and sexism.13 As succinctly captured
in his warning to Quentin, dont think you can run it over me. Im not an
old woman, nor an old half dead nigger, either (185), Jason defines who
he is by who he is not, or cannot bear to be. He can thus only prop up his
identity by keeping these other groups in their places. By running around
with men, and by running over him, Quentin overturns his identity as a
white Southern male at its most crucial, and most vulnerable, points.
116 Kristin Fujie
Although female sexuality exhibits, throughout Faulkners career, this
power to unsettle masculinity at its core, it does not follow that the young,
modern women who exercise sexual agency in his work feel powerful or
in control. On the contrary, they often seem as much at the mercy of
their own sexuality as they are at the hands of the men who attempt to
route or contain it. In contrast to the image of the flapper, then, in whom
sexual and personal liberation appear ecstatically united, Faulkners young
woman struggles at the confluence of forces that impinge upon her, often
with terrible urgency, both from without and from within.
This confluence produces its most shocking effects in the character
of Temple Drake, the Southern debutante who is made to run, writhe,
and ultimately lie still in Sanctuary. With her scant dress (59), long
legs blonde with running (28), and bold painted mouth (29), Temple
combines and exaggerates all the defining features of the modern woman
in Faulkners earlier works. She is constantly, unnervingly, in motion, and
the novels men react by getting ahold of her in ways that make Jason
Compson look tender by comparison. The infamous corn cob rape is only
the most brutal in a series of physical encounters in which Temple is picked
up, shaken, and otherwise abused by men until, abandoned to Popeyes
vice-like grip, she is reduced to a mere puppet, her torso arching backward,
her soundless mouth open as he grip[s] her at the back of the neck (141).
This manhandling does not stop when she is returned to her own people.
Escorted from the courtroom by her father, a Mississippi judge, she seems
less supported than coerced, her body arching slowly, as it had under
Popeyes grip, her posture one of shrinking and rapt abasement (289).
When her four brothers surround her, her body arche[s] again, and she
appears to cling to the door, resisting them (290).
What ultimately makes Temple such an unsettling figure, however, is
how her body strains under the pressure of not only male authority, but
her own sexual desire. This sexuality fully manifests, significantly, on a
Memphis dance floor, where Temples trembling body is stirred not by
the music, but by the long shuddering waves of physical desire going
over her, draining the color from her mouth, drawing her eyeballs back
into her skull in a shuddering swoon (237). When Red, the man Popeye
has enlisted to have sex with her, seeks her out in a back room, she loses
control altogether, her body once again arching slowly backward, but
this time under the exquisite torture of her own need, which incites her
to hurl[ . . . ] herself upon [Red], her mouth gaped and ugly like that of a
dying fish as she writhe[s] her loins against him (238). Temples arching,
shuddering, moaning body is radical on two fronts. Contorted by lust, it
 Modern sexuality 117
violently ruptures the Southern ideal of a still, hushed, white female body,
empty of all desire, an image evoked ironically, perhaps, in Faulkners
description of how, caught up in her shuddering swoon, Temples eyes
lift[ . . . ] into her skull [ . . . ] with the blank rigidity of a statues eyes
(238). At the same time, Temples writhing form also reworks the popular
image of the sexually liberated woman by transforming the quaking and
quivering body that made the flapper an icon of [womens] greater sexual
autonomy (Bryant, Shaking 182) into an abject figure of subjection,
a body convulsed by sexual impulses that seem to afford her no greater
agency than the men who manipulate her throughout the novel.
That Temples sexual awakening, if we can call it that, assumes such
grotesque and debasing forms might be taken as evidence of the authors
own jaundiced view of female sexuality, or of his pessimism regarding the
possibilities for the modern womans sexual emancipation in the paternal-
istic and patriarchal south. But I want to suggest here, by way of closing,
that the implications of Temples tortured, writhing body go beyond flap-
pers and even women. For what Temple lays bare is the fundamentally
unsettling nature of Faulknerian sexuality, how it materializes for his char-
acters less as an expression of individual desire or need than as a prying
open of the self by what Michael Zeitlin identifies, via Freud, as alienating
internal forces,14 which, though leveraged from within the body, remain
deeply, often terrifyingly, other. This condition finds succinct expression
in Dewey Dells experience of her own sexuality and pregnancy in As I
Lay Dying (1930) as the process of coming unalone, which is terrible
(62), but as Catherine Gunther Kodat suggests, the self shattering force of
desire is a constant theme in Faulkners work,15 one that manifests with
devastating results in male characters such as Quentin Compson, Horace
Benbow, and Joe Christmas. By acting as a nexus for forces that are at once
libidinal and cultural, rooted simultaneously in bodily desire and social
compulsion, Faulkners flappers thus provide him with one of his earliest
vehicles for exploring what it means not just to be a woman, but to be a
modern sexual subject.

NOTES
1 John DEmilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality
in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), p. 234; Nancy Woloch, Women
and the American Experience (New York: Knopf, 1984), pp. 3956.
2 For an excellent introduction to sexology and psychoanalysis, see Joseph
Bristow, Sexuality, The New Critical Idiom (London: Routledge, 1997).
118 Kristin Fujie
3 Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 4 vols. (New York: Random
House, 1942), vol. I, p. xxx.
4 Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. and ed. James
Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2000).
5 Paula Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 262.
6 Patricia Erens, The Flapper: Hollywoods First Liberated Woman, in Dancing
Fools and Weary Blues: The Great Escape of the Twenties, eds. Lawrence R. Broer
and John D. Walther (Bowling Green, OH: Popular, 1990), pp. 1309; Elizabeth
Stevenson, Flappers and Some Who Were Not Flappers, in Dancing Fools,
pp. 1209; Woloch, Women, pp. 4002.
7 Rebecca A. Bryant, Shaking Things Up: Popularizing the Shimmy in Amer-
ica, American Music 20.2 (2002), 170.
8 Anne Goodwyn Jones, Faulkner, Sexual Cultures, and the Romance of Resis-
tance, in Faulkner in Cultural Context: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1995,
eds. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 1996), p. 55.
9 Anne Goodwyn Jones, Tomorrow is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the
South, 18591936 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1981), pp. 8, 16.
10 Diane Roberts, Faulkner and Southern Womanhood (Athens, GA: The Univer-
sity of Georgia Press, 1994), p. 2.
11 John T. Matthews, William Faulkner: Seeing Through the South (Chichester,
UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), p. 37.
12 Jacqueline Scott Lynch, Postwar Play: Gender Performatives in Faulkners
Soldiers Pay, Faulkner Journal 14.1 (1998), 17.
13 Andre Bleikasten, The Ink of Melancholy: Faulkners Novels from The Sound
and the Fury to Light in August (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990),
p. 120.
14 Michael Zeitlin, Masochism in Sanctuary in Sanctuary: Etudes Faulkneriennes
I, ed. Michel Gresset (Rennes, France: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 1996),
p. 97.
15 Catherine Gunther Kodat, Unhistoricizing Faulkner, in Faulkners Sexuali-
ties: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2007, eds. Annette Trefzer and Ann J. Abadie
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), p. 17.
 chapter 1 1

The cage of gender

John T. Matthews

I. Social contexts
The world into which Faulkner was born in the 1890s experienced the
increasing codification and standardization of normal sexual identities.1
As Michel Foucaults work on the history of sexuality first showed, the
late nineteenth century oversaw the emergence of a binary assignment of
sexual preferences, behavior, and acts, to a normative system of identities
defined by the object of sexual desire (as opposed to one recognizing that a
spectrum of sexual activities might be practiced by anyone).2 Appropriate
heterosexual gender identities for men and women became normalized
in medical and psychological discourse, as well as in legal and political
ideology: women were understood to desire men naturally, men to desire
women.3 Those who deviated from such norms were increasingly classified
as possessing distinct (and deviant) identities. Individuals who desired or
practiced sexual relations with others of the same gender were understood
to be homosexuals. At this historical moment of increasing agitation by
women for political, economic, and social equality with men, normative
gender roles for the sexes helped to defend male privilege in masculinist
societies. Correspondingly, the pathologization of same-sex behavior as
an aberrant identity also contributed to the stabilization of a sex-gender
system favoring those already holding power. Each identity required a
binary opposite to make its distinctness intelligible, resulting in polarities of
male and female genders, heterosexual and homosexual selves. As Foucault
observes, making homosexuality into an identity also enabled the invention
of the heterosexual.
It is not a coincidence that a modernizing America in the 1890s was
similarly hardening its binary definition of race. Infamously, in 1896, the
US Supreme Court ruled that those of African descent were not entitled
by constitutional right to unrestricted use of public facilities like trains;
the Plessy v. Ferguson decision upheld a Louisiana state law that required

119
120 John T. Matthews
Negroes to ride in separate railway cars set aside for them. The case
largely established the notion of separate but equal public accommo-
dation in the US South, and led to more than half a century of legal
segregation in states passing such measures. The determination of racial
identity according to an abstract, absolute binary system confronted the
same intractable empirical heterogeneity as did the system of sexual and
gender assignment. Without overstating their similarity, we can see that
both conceptual systems functioned by denying particularity.
The twinning of gender and racial confinements in Faulkners South
descends from special conditions of the plantation world: white womens
sexual behavior had to be regulated by their husbands to ensure the pro-
duction of heirs, whose paternity also had to be unquestionable. Womens
sexuality was enlisted in such a society to the requirements of heterosexual
reproductive ends serving the interests of the patrilineal descent of wealth,
property (including slaves), and land. Black women, by contrast, had long
been used as sexual property by their white owners, who had the power to
exploit them as they pleased. In both respects, hetero-normative sexuality
doubled the exercise of white male supremacy. In the 1890s, intensified
efforts to control the gathering momentum of insistence on equal rights
by free blacks and women of both races provoked reactionary measures
that expressed the dual anxieties of white men. The brutal practices of
lynching, perpetrated almost entirely on black men, were justified by the
white men who committed them as necessary to protect the honor of
defenseless white women. In fact, the fantasies that white women were
helpless and black men predatory betrayed anxieties among certain classes
of white males who, especially in the South, felt their economic potency
slipping away with their slide into landless tenancy and debt, often in
direct competition with successful free blacks, and their sexual command
weakening in the face of womens greater control over their own lives.4
The modern world Faulkner came to maturity in the late teens and
1920s witnessed persistent refusals to Victorian reifications of sexual and
racial identity. George Chauncey has chronicled the emergence of gay cul-
tures in New York City that flouted the absoluteness of heterosexual gender
identity.5 The New Negro Renaissance emphatically queered the binarism
of both race and gender in staging the fluidity of identity, the ability of
individuals to pass across social lines of demarcation, to be multiple at any
moment, to morph over time, to be the creation of performance rather than
natural essence.6 Given the extent to which Faulkners fiction chronicled
the transformations of modern life, it isnt surprising to find him interro-
gating fixed gender roles, often, but not invariably, in the company of an
 The cage of gender 121
assault on fixed racial identity. This exploration of mobile, labile, compos-
ite selves exemplifies Faulkners determination to de-create and re-create
his given world through the power of imaginative transfiguration.

II. Early fictional explorations

One central response in Faulkners modernist fiction to a preceding era in
which sanctioned social identities had rigidified was to explore the variety of
sensibilities and behavior excluded by binary hetero-normative categories.
Scholarship about Faulkners representation of sexuality in his fiction has
illuminated just how extensively his exploration of same-sex desire figures
in his imaginative worlds, both in Yoknapatawpha and beyond. Queer
readings of Faulkner have called attention to the many characters whose
non-heterosexual or homosexual orientations were ignored by earlier gen-
erations of critics, and to the fictions far-ranging curiosity about an array of
queer sexualities: homoerotic intimacy (as in the intense affection between
Quentin Compson and his roommate Shreve McCannon in The Sound and
the Fury [1929] and Absalom, Absalom! [1936]); same-sex desire (as between
Jenny and Patricia in Mosquitoes [1927], or Henry Sutpen and Charles
Bon in Absalom); encoded same-sex couples (such as Judith and Clytie
Sutpen in Absalom); openly gay individuals (like the lesbian Eva Wiseman
in Mosquitoes); or couples with heterogeneous sexual profiles (Buck and
Buddy, the bachelor twins of the McCaslin family; Joe Christmas and Joe
Brown, who are nastily joked about as a married couple by the bigoted town
sheriff in Light in August (1932); or Christmas and his lover Joanna Burden,
each of whom display mixtures of masculine and feminine stereotype).
From this standpoint, queer readings of Faulkner show how his fiction
challenges the oppressive absolutism of hetero- vs. homosexual identity.
D. Matthew Ramsey, for example, argues that one of Faulkners early pub-
lished short stories, Turn About (1932), illustrates Faulkners interest in
the fluidity of eroticism during the modern social crises triggered by the
Great War.7 A combat escapade set in England, it spotlights the high jinx
of two male crews in a sporting military contest, suggesting along the way
how norms of sexual behavior loosen in wartime. Flying combat missions
unites the Americans around fraternal ideals of patriotism, manly brav-
ery, and sacrifice for ones fellows that constitute the glue of masculinist
national states. The English torpedo crew reflects the sexual ambiguity of
such proximities, as the junior member of the team, the girlish Claude,
is unmistakably described in the stereotypes of effeminacy coding homo-
sexuality during the 1920s. Bogard, an American pilot, is strongly drawn
122 John T. Matthews
to Claude, and Faulkner suggests how his homoerotic attraction reinforces
his emergent disillusionment with war. Ramsey concludes that the story
demonstrates Faulkners willingness to challenge numerous related ortho-
doxies: From the storys very first sentence, traditional understandings of
culturally defined gender categories are put into question: Turnabout con-
stantly undermines assumptions about war, masculinity, male camaraderie,
cowardice, desire, nationalism, and homosexuality (and homophobia)
(79).
Faulkner imagines other permutations on the heterosexual dyad in later
novels: the mannish Charlotte Rittenmeyer in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem
(1939) carries off her true love Harry on a romantic, if ultimately tragic adul-
terous affair. The novels counter-narrative involves a pair of convicts who
retreat from fearsome experiences of heterosexual life on the outside to the
domestic tranquility of the all-male penitentiary. (One convict, a hemophil-
iac, takes some joking about his disorder, which sounds like homosexual
to his cellmates.) Yet more adventurously, Pylon (1935) presents the prime
example of what John Duvall has called Faulkners marginal couple, a
domestic-sexual unit that flouts the model of hetero-normative marriage.8
In Pylon Faulkner invents a menage a` trois that functions as a kind of
modernistic social contraption, made up of futuristic humans: a nerveless
female aerial jump artist, her lover-pilot, their mechanic-partner, and an
indeterminately fathered child.
A few years earlier, when as his first Hollywood assignment Faulkner
was asked by Howard Hawks to write the film treatment of his story Turn
About,9 and to add a role for Joan Crawford as he did so, Faulkner had
also come up with something like a menage: this prototype has Crawfords
character as the childhood intimate of her beloved brother Ronnie (shades
of Quentin and Caddie) and their best friend, Claude. Diana has agreed
to marry Claude, and the two become lovers during the war, even though
she realizes too late that she has fallen in love with an American pilot.
Claude is eventually blinded, and later both he and Dianas brother are
killed in a heroic mission. Diana is thus freed to marry the American.
As in Pylon, triangular circuits of sexual desire strain social norms, Diana
serving as both the transgressor of heterosexual propriety and the relay-
point between the homoerotic relations of the brothers in arms. Unlike
Faulkners story, however, which ends with a suicidal gesture against war
itself, Howard Hawkss film insists on a resolution that celebrates the
romance of allied nations (figured in the wedding of the English girl to her
American), in the terms of heterosexual romance (figured in the elimination
 The cage of gender 123
of all representatives of homoerotic rivalry and the proper monogamous
channeling of Dianas desire).
Most of Faulkners explicit representations of same-sex desire focus on
men. Especially early in his career, as Gary Richards has documented,
Faulkner regularly marked artist-figures as implicitly homosexual, and a
number of his prose works from the 1920s suggest a tie between creative
and sexual experimentalism.10 An early abandoned novel, Elmer, focuses
on such a character, as do a series of stories that portray, in Richards words,
homoerotically inflected artist-figures, including Out of Nazareth,
Episode, and Peter. In early versions of Absalom, Absalom!, notably
a short piece called Evangeline, as well as several contemporaneous sto-
ries (Mistral, Snow, and The Big-Shot), another version of the type
appears, named Don, and is often given a creative occupation journal-
ist, architect, etc. According to Richards, Don is a moniker taken from
Faulkners close friend of these years, William Spratling, a painter and pro-
fessor of architecture, who was dubbed Don Guillermo by his Mexican
friends during research trips there in the late 1920s.
As Richards, Ramsey, and Faulkner biographers Frederick Karl, Joel
Williamson, and Jay Parini have increasingly detailed, Faulkner enjoyed
close relations with a sizable set of homosexual artists and writers, partic-
ularly during his 20s and early 30s. Spratling was probably the most sig-
nificant of such friends, the two meeting in New Orleans through mutual
acquaintances associated with the experimental arts magazine The Double-
Dealer, and going on to room together several times in New Orleans, as
well as travel together for six months in Europe in 1925. They lived for
much of that time in Paris, in quarters near the Luxembourg Gardens,
while Faulkner was working on Elmer. Faulkners gay friends included
his townsman Stark Young, a playwright, novelist, and literary critic with
whom Faulkner stayed when he visited New York; his childhood friend
Ben Wasson, who later became his editor at Cape and Smith; and William
Alexander Percy and Lyle Saxon, both of whom would also become promi-
nent writers. The point, as Ramsey, Duvall, and others who offer queer
readings of Faulkner observe, is not to insist that Faulkner was (or was
not) homosexual (or bisexual), but to appreciate how extensively his fic-
tion explores the vagaries of sexual being. The young writer was intimately
familiar with many individuals who were neither confined to the patholog-
ical closeting demanded by Victorian bourgeois definitions of binary sexual
identity, nor cared to out themselves as homosexual persons. Faulkners
imagination not only surveys the confines of the cage of gender, it circulates
124 John T. Matthews
in the spaces between its bars, imagining intimacies that cannot be closed
by/from/to those who prefer to disregard it.
Faulkners short story Divorce in Naples may be his most explicit
meditation on the way the rich ambiguity of sexual behavior exceeds classi-
fications of simple sexual identity. It recounts an episode in the relationship
of an overt same-sex couple in which the young (and virginal) Carl betrays
the affection of his older romantic partner George. Both are merchant
marines, their ship in port in Naples. The kernel of the story proves auto-
biographical, and is based on an evening in which Faulkner and Spratling
were in Genoa on their European excursion in 1925. Spratling ran afoul of
the authorities late one night, was jailed, and returned to tell of a sexual
episode with one of his fellow prisoners. Faulkner once joked that he was
annoyed by this event only because he hadnt been able to participate in
the adventure himself, and he incorporates a number of the elements of
the episode into his story. George is a burly Greek seaman, who jealously
guards the delicate Carls innocence. The two dance romantically on deck
while the other crewmen adopt a variety of attitudes toward them, from
Moncktons outright homophobic mockery to the unnamed narrators sus-
tained curiosity about this exceptional couple. Carl is at one point seduced
by a female Italian prostitute, and returns after several days, ashamed; he
becomes the object of Georges stony disapproval for weeks. But the pair
reconciles, and the closing image of the story has the two of them in a
decorous embrace (CS 892).11
One of the most original aspects of Divorce in Naples is the way
it challenges the very system of classifying heterosexual and homosexual
identities, the epistemology of binary sex and gender. As George puzzles
over what Carls defection to a woman might have meant, he resorts to
distinctions between what people do as opposed to what they are.
His musings correspond to Foucaults account of how a range of same-sex
behaviors get reduced to singular identity. When George returns to a cafe
table hes been sharing with Carl and the prostitute, he finds the two have
left.
They run, he said in a dull tone. They ducked out on me. I never thought
hed a done it. I never thought hed a done me this way. It was her. She was
the one made him done it. She knew what he was, and how I . . . Then he
began to cry, quietly, in that dull, detached way. He must have been sitting
there with his hand in her lap all the time. And I never suspicioned. She
kept on moving her chair closer and closer to his. But I trusted him. I never
suspicioned nothing. I thought he wouldnt a done nothing serious without
asking me first, let alone . . . I trusted him. (8834)
 The cage of gender 125
For George, Carls behavior is a matter of what he done with the prosti-
tute, the word repeated several times before George arrives at an assertion
of Carls nature (what he was). The sentence of Georges that breaks off
and how I . . . can only plausibly be completed by a verb phrase: for
example, and how I love him. Georges sexual behavior never predicates
a sexual identity in the story. The heterogeneity suggested by the uncate-
gorizable variety of sexual acts between people reappears in the storys last
moment, when, having returned to Georges loving arms, Carl surprisingly
asks a favor: having earlier been instructed by George, in a notably dispas-
sionate conversation with Carl about his innocence of women, as to the
importance of pleasing them with gifts, Carl now asks if George might buy
a pink silk teddy, in a size a little bigger than he would wear, presumably to
present to the prostitute he expects some day to see again. Carl here makes
the turn (back) to a (future) connection with his Italian female lover into
the occasion of an imminent commitment from his present Greek male
lover. The story refuses closure, as if determined to evade the settled cate-
gories of homosexual / heterosexual identity, of singular sexual preference,
of any fully charted sexual course.
Divorce in Naples imagines how such sexual fluidity must elude and
may defy the dictates of the state. In the short story, it is George, like
Spratling, who gets arrested. When he realizes that Carl and the prostitute
have abandoned him, the jilted seaman flees to pursue them, inadvertently
treading on some coins he tosses to pay the bill. He is taken to jail as
a political prisoner (885) for defiling the Kings effigy on the currency.
But Georges confinement by the state takes on the significance of sexual
incarceration as well, the prison likened to an aerial view of 42nd Street
(an area of New York City newly associated with public homosexuality12 ).
Earlier, Georges violent defense of his freedom Aint this a free coun-
try? (881) is provoked by his defiant introduction to the crew of their
new mate Carl. Faulkner suggests that theres something of sexual ter-
ritoriality implicit in the nationalities of the homoerotic Greek and the
heterosexual Italian, and points to the complicity of states in warranting
sex-gender systems. Throughout the story George rages like a man bent on
scandalizing all state-sanctioned bodily regulation in streams of eloquent
cursing, by defecating in the jail cells urine barrel, in urinating on the
cafe floor, in skipping out on payment in the madness of passion. George
understands the unclassifiable particularity of his relation with Carl its
sexual forbearance, its forgiving resilience, its brazen eroticism, its cate-
gorical anomalousness as the offense to the state that it is. George is a
political prisoner, his offense, though, more truly the scandal of unlawful
126 John T. Matthews
pleasure. He unabashedly describes the bliss of making love with another
man. Taunted by the homophobic bosun Monckton (suppose you were
one, then? What would you do?), George, characteristically emphasizing
doing over being, replies:

What would I do? . . . What wouldnt I do? . . . Its like the first cigarette
in the morning he said. By noon, when you remember how it tasted, how
you felt when you was waiting for the match to get to the end of it, and
when that first drag . . . . (881)

To measure this form of passion, Faulkner creates a curious but non-

committal narrator, fashioning more a narratorial space for observing and
recording than an embodied participant. The narrator remains unnamed
and non-sexual, often sitting as an unattached extra in scenes of couples.
Twice he watches Carl disrobe in the dark but pretends to be asleep when
his crewmate checks on him, and he seems fascinated by the nightly ritual
of George and Carls dancing. For reasons I will discuss later, Faulkner
seems here, as elsewhere in his fiction, to be resisting the demand that
homosexuality declare itself as such, that it come out into the open, even if
for legitimation. The circumspect narrator offers perhaps the most sympa-
thetic and radical summary of the storys crisis, a formulation that dictates
its title. Grasping the significance of Carls absence from the ship, the nar-
rator observes: This is the most difficult moment in marriage: the day
after your wife has stayed out all night (889). Theres no hint of irony
or derision here, and it prepares for the kind of connubial poise the pair
finally attain.
The couples deck-dancing suggests the elusive particularity of George
and Carls way of being together. The narrator reports how

. . . for thirty-four evenings, after the galley was closed, we watched the two
of them in pants and undershirts, dancing to the victrola on the after well
deck above a hold full of Texas cotton and Georgia resin. They had only one
record for the machine and it had a crack in it, and each time the needle
clucked George would stamp on the deck. I dont think that either one of
them was aware that he did it. (87980)

On the open sea away from the Deep South origins of their cargo, the two
dance to a modern victrola. Unselfconscious partners like these seem par-
ticularly modern perhaps exemplifying Chaunceys gay culture, where
gay would be exactly apt for moonlight dancing on the deck of a ship cross-
ing the Atlantic. They have a single record, with a crack; it plays, but the
 The cage of gender 127
break causes the needle to cluck. George automatically registers the oth-
erwise unnoticed disruption by stamping his foot (I dont think that either
one of them was aware that he did it). The interference in the playback
suggests that the commercial romantic tune theyre doubtless dancing to
requires a slightly adjusted step, which takes in stride and converts a poten-
tial disturbance in heterosexual industrial culture into a rhythm, a point of
emphasis, added to the standard (and standardizing, hetero-normalizing)
product. The radial fracture that runs through the record must be traversed
with every pass across the grooves, a new adjustment fashioned for each
rotation. This bisection of the records indentations materializes the distinc-
tive movement of the couples sexuality, Georges performance stamping a
personal footprint on his consumption of the tune, turning the two from
passive recipients of mass fare into creative consumers. George and Carl
do not experience the recording as circular imprisonment, but as a staticky
cross-fissure they can make something of.13 Georges stamp on the deck
augurs his stomp on the kings stamped face, both acts inadvertent but
nonetheless meaningful ways for a sexual dissident to put his foot down.

III. Plantation Homo-ness

Michael Bibler has written about the way modern Southern writers looked
back at the plantation tradition to imagine affective possibilities it afforded
but often refused to recognize.14 Homo-ness is his term for such rela-
tions, which range from represented same-sex intimacy to reticent forms of
desire not acted upon. In this sense the plantation system itself produced in
its peculiar proximities of bodies, the sites and opportunities for desires it
could not account for, could not contain: possibilities for intimacy between
white men, black and white men, and women of both races. These are the
spaces between the bars in the cage of gender, and Faulkners work dis-
plays a near-continuous interest in circulating through those openings. In
showing how queer relations materialize so prolifically within plantation
literature of the US South, Bibler has proposed that the same-sex bonds
depicted in these texts produce an egalitarian social relation between indi-
viduals that ironically places them at odds with the hierarchical structures
of the plantations they call home (4). In his discussion of Faulkner, Bibler
specifies how homoerotic attractions and homosexual intimacies promise
affective alternatives to the racism, misogyny, and paternalism of the plan-
tation regime, only ultimately to confirm the plantations dominant forms
of white masculinity and male homosociality (64). Bibler focuses on
the relations between (presumed) white men of elevated classes Henry
128 John T. Matthews
Sutpen and Charles Bon, Quentin Compson and Shreve McCannon.
Henrys queer desire for Bon impassions him to set aside the Souths
incest taboo and encourage the marriage of his beloved friend to his sister,
Judith. Quentin and Shreve seek some realization of their manifest erotic
attraction to each other (already evident in The Sound and the Fury, where
the roommates friends take to calling Shreve Quentins husband), their
union culminating in an equivocal marriage of speaking and hearing (AA
253) through which they may tell the tale of their love in displaced form,
in the story of the Sutpen childrens triangle of homosexual and incestuous
desire. Bibler argues that Quentin and Shreves attempt to create in the
postbellum present a new kind of sociality in which their homo-eroticism
would no longer be a problem (73) eventually founders on its confronta-
tion with a form of homoeroticism they find impossible to accept: that
which transgresses the racial divide. Inter-racial homo-ness, posited in the
roommates divination of Charles Bons Afro-Caribbean ancestry, trumps
their own intra-racial homo-ness. Sutpens playing of the race card, when
he allegedly reveals to Henry that Charles is a Negro, demonstrates that the
logic of Southern plantation-derived white supremacy cannot be negated
so readily. Neither white male homosexuality nor incest is actually foreign
to the ideology of the plantation (91), Bibler observes, but in Absalom,
Absalom!, recourse to the plantation past as a precedent for homosocial
egalitarianism fails in its inability to overpass race to love.
Faulkners exploration of homo-ness in his mature fiction about
the South, beyond the early imaginative experiments and later non-
Yoknapatawpha fiction we considered above, suggests the enduring mar-
riage of hetero-normative sexuality and racism. That conjunction organizes
the entanglement of sex and race spectacularly in Light in August, in which
the binaries of gender and racial classification collide with Faulkners deter-
mined efforts to imagine their mixture, exchange, fluidity. Homoeroticism
partially dissolves the toxic, violent enforcement of difference, Joe Christ-
mass racial uncertainty coiling with his sexual ambiguity (in his pairing
up with Lucas Burch/Joe Brown; in the manic exchange of gender roles
in his lovemaking with the mannish Joanna Burden; in Byron Bunchs
proposal to forge an alibi for Joe by connecting him to Rev. Hightower,
whose ostracism owes to confluent racial and sexual abnormalities his
living alone with black domestics coded by turns as miscegenation and
homosexuality).15
Faulkner also explores how same-sex desire between women might chal-
lenge the hetero-normative spaces designed by the Souths plantation-
determined sex-gender system. Jaime Harker has read Absalom, Absalom!
 The cage of gender 129
as a reconstruction of the Southern family reordered around lesbian
sexuality.16 Tracing how the relationship between Clytie and Judith, as
half-siblings fathered by Thomas Sutpen, develops into a longstanding
domestic partnership (which at one point is joined by Rosa Coldfield
during the Civil War), Harker proposes that under their direction, Sut-
pens Hundred becomes a queer contact zone, one both within and out-
side of Southern patriarchal structures (41). Although she sees Rosa as
ultimately disavowing queer desire, for Harker Judith remains the unac-
knowledged originary lesbian mother (45) in Faulkners radical reimagin-
ing of affective and sexual affiliations that elude the law of the heterosex-
ual father.17 The queer contact zone of Absalom, Absalom!s plantation
also anticipates the space occupied by one of Faulkners most gender-
transformative characters, Drusilla Hawks Sartoris in The Unvanquished
(1938).
I have room here only to indicate how transgressive a figure Drusilla
is. She appears in Faulkners cycle of Civil War stories as the cousin of
the child-narrator, Bayard Sartoris, son of the Confederate hero Colonel
John Sartoris. Drusilla unsexes herself to conventional Southern eyes by
marching off to battle like a man. She takes up with the widower Sartoris in
an ambiguous relationship, sharing his tent on the battlefield, working like
a man upon their return to the ruined Sartoris plantation, and living with
the colonel in his cabin (though this cohabitation also includes the young
Bayard), while generally ignoring all communal demands that she present
herself as a marriageable woman. In effect, what Drusilla has done is to
secede not from her womanhood but from the classificatory system that
insists gender be a function of (hetero)sexual identity. At one point, Drusilla
explains that she is grateful the war has allowed her to evade the boring
predictability of life as a Southern plantation mistress. Her masculinized
body and behavior attract homoerotic energy from Southern gentlemen
like Bayard and his father. Such queer sexuality resembles the one between
white men located by Bibler in Absalom, although in The Unvanquished
Faulkner leaves the fate of dissent open. Bayards homoerotic response
to Drusillas sexual familiarity at one point she kisses him, as Bayard
notices her eyes look like his fathers signals his homologous refusal to
perpetuate the plantation Souths violent code of honor; he will not avenge
his fathers death by killing his murderer. Disappointed as Drusilla seems
by this renunciation, at her disappearance from her dead husbands home
she nonetheless leaves behind a sign of her affection for Bayard, a tiny
blossom of verbena, by which she seems to be ratifying his expression of
homo-dissent from a vicious paternalistic regime.
130 John T. Matthews
Go Down, Moses (1942), the last of Faulkners plantation fictions, pursues
the power of homo-ness to fantasize egalitarian alternatives to the exploita-
tive racism and misogyny of the plantation order.18 The performance of
non-hetero-normativity becomes a form of renunciation or relinquish-
ment, a reproach to the plantations sexual violence, with its perversities
of heterosexual miscegenation, incest, and repudiation of kin. Buck and
Buddy live as a bachelor couple while defending themselves against repro-
ductive marriage (they seek protection against Sophonsiba, as they likewise
police the threat that Tomeys Turl will reproduce his lethal racial heritage).
Virtually all the practices of heterosexuality in Go Down, Moses are polluted
by the sins of property and ownership expressed as the chattelization of
women and slaves. The extirpation of women recorded by a genealogy of
distaff anonymity, like the repeated setting aside of women Eunice,
Tomey, Huberts mistress, Roths mistress is a violence that begs for the
renunciation of heterosexuality altogether.
By contrast, the wilderness ethos that stands in would-be opposition to
the plantation domain licenses both open and encoded homoerotic unions.
Theres most spectacularly the lover-like embrace of Lion and Old Ben
in liebestod (love-in-death), figures associated with the casualties of plan-
tation racial slavery. Ben represents the doomed wilderness, doomed from
the moment of human contact, but he also evokes an untouched natural
life-form, some avatar of the Negro before slavery with his kingly status,
his blackness, his jungle habitat. At the same time, Ben is already the
hunted offender, already a version of the Tomey Turl who narratively pre-
cedes him in Go Down, Moses. Ben is often depicted as a trace just ahead of
the chase, like a fugitive slave pursued by dogs, to be brought to bay, finally
killed; hes a ghost of bondage as well, then, a haunt of slaverys hobbled
bodies (Bens foot mutilated once by a trap). The bear dies with Lion, in
name a shade of Africa himself, and one that has endured the awful process
of taming and subjugation to the masters will. Lions subdual by Sam is
a fable of learning to accept the cage without loving it. Such a domes-
tic prison produces a servant only partially subjugated. Lion becomes the
object of Boons tender affection, the half-caste Indians manifest homo-
erotic tenderness part of the hunters longing for antidote to the hetero-
normative perversities of the plantation. At Bens killing by Boon, the entire
assemblage collapses in post-coital exhaustion before the death throes of
that system, and of the wilderness fantasy subtending it: Boon mounted
on Ben from behind, Lion clenched face-to face, the echoes of Bon in
Boon and Ben suggesting the homonymic homo-ness of this anti-hetero-
climax.
 The cage of gender 131
IV. Epistemology of the cage
At one point in The Unvanquished an impromptu ladies vice committee
arrives at the Sartoris plantation to inspect the suspect sleeping arrange-
ments of Drusilla and the Colonel. Drusilla is compelled to allow them
access to the cabin, and pulls aside a curtain that separates her bed from
his. The authorities in effect are attempting an act of un-closeting. They
insist on making public the activities of the bedroom, and to the extent that
they are closer to outing intimate relations between a mannish Drusilla
and her male partner John, that urge to bring out into the open the private
(and here narratively unclassifiable) nature of a relationship corresponds to
what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has called the epistemology of the closet.19
Sedgwick argues that the move from understanding sexual activity as a set
of behaviors to categorizing it as a singular identity serves as the master
emblem of twentieth century epistemology.
What was new from the turn of the century was the world-mapping by
which every given person, just as he or she was necessarily assignable to male
or a female gender, was now considered necessarily assignable as well to a
homo- or hetero-sexuality, a binarized identity that was full of implications,
however confusing, for even the ostensibly least sexual aspects of a personal
existence. It was this new development that left no space in the culture
exempt from the potent incoherences of homo- / heterosexual definition.
(2)

Ill argue that the now chronic modern crisis of homo/heterosexual definition
has affected our culture through its ineffaceable marking particularly of the
categories of secrecy/disclosure, knowledge/ignorance, private/public, mas-
culine/feminine, majority/minority, innocence/initiation, natural/artificial
[and so on]. . . . (11)

Sedgwick adds that the violence of this form of knowing rested on the rela-
tions of the closet, the trope of outing what was unknown, from a position
of privilege inseparable from ignorance (5). It is the power of ignorance that
demands the unknown to reveal itself in terms the ignorant may recognize,
in an act of epistemological privilege. Sedgwick classifies detection of this
sort as paranoid: the acquiring of knowledge as the extracting of con-
cealed or unacknowledged evidence into abstract categories of truth.20 My
last claim in this chapter is that the epistemology of the closet structures
Faulkners dramatizations of bringing the unknown to light, of constituting
knowledge as the outing of secrets.
If we consider the drama of Go Down, Moses as centrally involving Ike
McCaslins quest for the full truth of his tainted legacy, constituted by
132 John T. Matthews
his conviction that his grandfather Carothers McCaslin had committed
miscegenation with his slave consort Eunice, committed incest with the
daughter of that coupling, Tomasina, offered a paltry token to his offspring
by her, Tomeys Turl (the father of Lucas Beauchamp and others by Tennie),
and unspeakably ignored the apparent suicide of his first mistress when
she discovers what he has done to their daughter if Ikes desire is to bring
to light what is hidden in his plantation heritage, then we might see Ikes
discovery as an instance of the epistemology of the closet. It is not simply
that Ike is unearthing the fact of slave masters sexual depravity and its
violence to slave women; Ike is said to know what he will find even before
he reads the ledgers. Instead, or perhaps more subtly, Faulkner is fathoming
how the drive to expose, to bring out of hiding once and for all, is a logic
structured by the ideological fantasy that truth is something hidden to be
revealed; an essence to be grasped in its totality; hidden knowledge that
will declare itself to those who insist they are ignorant of it. Ikes belief that
he has brought the horror of the Southern past to light gives him the relief
that he knows the worst, and can formulate an ethical abstraction on its
basis: relinquishment. From that moment of believing the past has spoken
its truth once and for all, Ike excuses himself from all further responsibility
for and to that past, ascetically insulating himself from working through
his relation to the Souths curse. It is no surprise Ike goes on to act
as if that past retains no meaning for him: have you lived so long and
forgotten so much that you dont remember anything you ever knew or
felt or even heard about love? (GDM 346), asks Roths mistress, who
also happens to be the granddaughter of James Beauchamp (Tennies Jim),
Old Carothers descendant, and who cannot believe Ike is repeating his
grandfathers unfeeling dismissal of a young black kinswoman. For Ike, the
past is an inscription that may be deciphered once and for all; for Faulkner,
the past continues to write itself into the present, where it must be read
and reread.

NOTES
1 I wish to thank Carrie J. Preston and Michael P. Bibler for their generous
readings of a draft of this chapter, and for their invaluable criticism, advice,
and bibliographic guidance.
2 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans.
Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).
3 More recent scholarship has suggested that the codification of heterosexual and
homosexual identities was not generally established legally and socially until
after World War II. See, for instance, Anna Creadick, Perfectly Average: The
 The cage of gender 133
Pursuit of Normality in Postwar America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts
Press, 2010) and Margot Canadays The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship
in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton University Press, 2012).
4 See Joel Williamson, Rage for Order: Black-White Relations in the American
South since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) for an
influential account of the intertwined fates of sexual and racial attitudes during
this period. See Kristin Fujies essay in this collection for a discussion of changes
in modern heterosexual mores and behavior.
5 George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of
the Gay Male World 18901940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
6 Nella Larsens novel Passing (1929) is one of the best-known examples of fiction
that imagined the disregard of racial and sexual dualities. See Mason Stokess
study The Color of Sex: Whiteness, Heterosexuality, and the Fictions of White
Supremacy (Durham: Duke University Press: 2001), and Siobhan Somerville,
Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American
Culture (Durham: Duke University Press: 2000).
7 D. Matthew Ramsey, Turnabout is Fair(y) Play: Faulkners Queer War Story,
Faulkner Journal 15.12 (19992000 FallSpring), 6181. See also John T.
Matthews, Faulkner and the Culture Industry, in The Cambridge Companion
to William Faulkner, ed. Philip Weinstein (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1995), pp. 5174.
8 John Duvall, Faulkners Marginal Couple: Invisible, Outlaw, and Unspeakable
Communities (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).
9 The movie was released in 1933 as Today We Live.
10 Gary Richards, The Artful and Crafty Ones of the French Quarter: Male
Homosexuality and Faulkners Early Prose Writings, in Faulkners Sexual-
ities, eds. Annette Trefzer and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2010), pp. 2137.
11 In Sex and Gender, Feminine and Masculine: Faulkner and the Polymor-
phous Exchange of Cultural Binaries (in Faulkner and Gender, eds. Donald
Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie [Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996],
pp. 7396), Robert Dale Parker reads the story as wanting to affirm homosex-
uality but being unable to because the association of masculine and feminine
with the hetero-/homo-binary was too strong. Parker credits the story with an
emergent recognition of homosexuality, but treats categories of sexual behavior
in terms of established identity and gender.
12 See Chauncey on the transformation of the area into one of the citys most
significant centers of male prostitution in the 1920s (pp. 1915).
13 In Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 2003), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick develops the idea of reparative
reading, intent on identifying the ways literature works to imagine individ-
ual and social possibility, to counter the more dominant habit of paranoid
reading, dedicated to digging out the hidden ideological truths sedimented
in literary texts. This scene invites reparative reading, as Ive tried to suggest
here.
134 John T. Matthews
14 Michael P. Bibler, Cottons Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Lit-
erature of the Southern Plantation, 19361968 (Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press, 2009).
15 See John Duvall, Faulkners Crying Game: Male Homosexual Panic, in
Faulkner and Gender, pp. 4872, and Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, White
Disavowal, Black Enfranchisement, and the Homoerotic in William Faulkners
Light in August, The Faulkner Journal 22.1 (Fall 2006/Spring 2007), 17692.
16 Jaime Harker, And You Too, Sister, Sister?: Lesbian Sexuality, Absalom, Absa-
lom!, and the Reconstruction of the Southern Family, in Faulkners Sexualities,
pp. 3853.
17 See Minrose Gwin on female and male same-sex desire earlier in Faulkners
career: Did Ernest Like Gordon?: Faulkners Mosquitoes and the Bite of
Gender Trouble, in Faulkner and Gender, pp. 12044.
18 In Making Camp: Go Down, Moses (American Literary History 19.4 [Winter
2007], 9971029), Catherine Gunther Kodat argues that the novel entertains
homosexuality as a realm free of the problems of incest and miscegenation that
traumatize Ike McCaslin and lead to the repudiation of his heritage (1007).
Given Faulkners own early explorations of diverse sexual possibilities, and
the sense of loss experienced by some who eventually accept singular sexual
identity, Kodat speculates that the mood of grief in the stories of Go Down,
Moses, many of them touching on deeply felt intimacies between men, may
reflect Faulkners own mood of nostalgia and loss. My discussion here owes
much to Kodats study.
19 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Oakland: University of
California Press, 1990).
20 Sedgwick is careful to distinguish her criticism of such a hermeneutics of
suspicion from its related base in matters of sexual identification. She points
out that there is an oppositional sexual politics founded on the act of coming
out of the closet and avowing homosexual identity. But Sedgwick also wishes
to protect the range of resistance that involves refusing singular sexual identity
in the face of its ideological purposes and effects.
 chapter 1 2

The world of Jim Crow

Leigh Anne Duck

In 1954, as he prepared a series of lectures on Southern US race relations to

be delivered at the University of Virginia, historian C. Vann Woodward
raised in Arkansas, tenured at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore
illustrated his argument through comparison with a society 8000 miles
away. Citing a South African traveler to the US South in 1915, Woodward
explained that, at that time, the two societies shared an absolute separation
of the races in all social matters . . . the same separate schools, the same
disfranchisement, and the same political and economic subordination of
black people.1 Woodwards point, concerning his home region, was hopeful.
While the South African government dominated, as of 1948, by the
Nationalist party was systematically removing what rights that nations
non-white residents had, the US Supreme Court had pronounced school
segregation unconstitutional months before, and white Southerners open
defiance of this verdict had not yet begun. At this moment, accordingly,
Woodward could argue that the two great regions might be traveling in
opposite directions (121). Though the US struggle over civil rights would
soon become more intense and violent than he initially wanted to imagine,2
this transnational approach incorporated into his bestselling The Strange
Career of Jim Crow (1955) aided the historian in depicting race itself as a
dynamic concept, which varies across space and time. Such an awareness
also shaped, albeit more ambivalently, the work of William Faulkner.
For Woodward, ending Jim Crow meant defying the idea that race
constituted fixed demarcations within the human species; accordingly,
he highlighted how the social structures and practices that defined the
category differed not only across time in the US South but also across
global locales. Even as, in the 1910s, some white US Southerners and South
Africans found a distinct commonality in their efforts to dominate another
race, black South Africans and US Southerners were pursuing equal rights
through among other strategies aligning themselves with alternate
spatial frameworks. After the Union of South Africa a self-governing
135
136 Leigh Anne Duck
Dominion in the British Empire passed a law that severely restricted black
ownership of land in 1913, black political leaders, disfranchised in most
regions of their country, took their case to the British Parliament; reporting
on their journey the writer Sol Plaatje warned his British readers that South
Africas Natives Land Act should be abolished because it has lowered the
prestige of the Union Jack in the eyes of the coloured subjects of the King.3
Shortly thereafter, Southern African Americans, as they were drafted into
the US military during World War I, hoped and argued that their efforts
should lead to full citizenship for the race throughout the country.4 (To be
clear, this status was already mandated by the Fourteenth Amendment to
the US Constitution, added in 1868, but the purportedly accompanying
rights were often not acknowledged or protected.) Questions exposing how
concepts of race varied across space circulated throughout the Jim Crow
period, including whether the larger nation would enact similar practices
(in many places and ways, it did), whether the United States would impose
segregationist policies on occupied nations and territories (often), and
whether African Americans should focus on challenging US segregation
or developing autonomous spaces within or beyond the nation (answers
varied).5
Faulkners understanding of race appears to have been deeply informed
by his growing awareness of national and global differences. His first novel
set in Mississippi, Flags in the Dust (published as Sartoris in 1929), acknowl-
edged how black Mississippians responded to the war, but only in a dismis-
sive way. Before the veteran Caspey announces, If us cullud folks is good
enough ter save France fum de Germans, den us is good enough ter have
de same rights de Germans is. French folks thinks so, anyhow, the novels
narrator undercuts him, complaining that Caspey had only trifl[ed] with
continental life . . . rather to his future detriment (58, 57). Where this line
followed the local white supremacist argument, The Sound and the Fury,
also published in 1929, begins to challenge such notions a shift facilitated
by transporting the Mississippian character Quentin Compson to Har-
vard. Quentin suspects that Northerners monitor Southern responses to
niggers, a topic on which he considers himself an expert, but this char-
acters reflections and experiences ultimately suggest that movement into
a new array of racial and ethnic relations can stimulate uncertainty and
discomfort (86).
As Faulkner continued to explore idiosyncratic individual perceptions,
he highlighted numerous such examples of how understandings shaped
in one environment demarcated by race and class, as well as locale
prove insufficient for comprehending a world of incongruous ideas about
 The world of Jim Crow 137
race. In Light in August (1932), for example, conceptions of race are both
paramount in that characters routinely scrutinize strangers and even
themselves to determine racial backgrounds and chaotic, in that the
better-traveled characters have absorbed conflicting definitions, which they
compulsively and confusingly reiterate.6 In Absalom, Absalom! (1936), a
nineteenth-century white Appalachian travels to Haiti to make his fortune,
but because he fails to recognize how that nations racial concepts and
hierarchies differ from those he has learned in Virginia, he inadvertently
thwarts his plan to join the US plantocracy.7 These fictions in which race
itself proves incoherent suggest a writer acutely skeptical of the fixed racial
binary that Jim Crow laws and practices posited and sought to maintain.
Later, during the precarious and explosive diplomatic tension of the
Cold War, Faulkner worried that the larger world would condemn the racial
violence and hierarchies of his region. Embracing the idea that America
the dream and the nation might inspire other countries to resist commu-
nism if the United States ceased to delimit citizenship by race, he warned
that if white Southerners did not accept the inevitable end of Jim Crow
with dignity and goodwill, they would not only wreck and ruin the
region but also, potentially, strangle [America] into extinction (ESPL
151, 146). The 1947 Report of the Presidents Committee on Civil Rights
had already argued that the United States must continue to improve its
record on racial equality in order to facilitate the final [global] triumph
of the democratic ideal,8 and Woodward hinted at a similar warning by
citing Alan Paton, author of the popular South African novel Cry, the
Beloved Country (1948) (Strange Career 1212). In a 1953 essay for a US
magazine, Paton wrote that as the Nationalist government enacted increas-
ingly oppressive racial policies, the world looks at us in astonishment,
wondering what madness has possessed us.9 Faulkner clearly worried that
the United States could share such a fate: after the 1955 murder of Emmett
Till, a fourteen-year-old African American visiting Mississippi, he issued
a statement arguing that white Americans in demonstrating no greater
respect for black lives than Boer South Africa were forfeiting both their
likelihood of and moral claims to a future (ESPL 2223).
Even as Patons argument indicated the necessity of ending Jim Crow,
however, it pointed to another persistent question concerning race in the
United States: whether white supremacy could become engrained in a cul-
ture. Such an argument was crucial to the Supreme Court verdict that
pronounced public segregation constitutional: the majority opinion in
Plessy v. Ferguson pronounced segregation the result of racial instincts
in Louisiana, against which legislation is powerless.10 Woodward sought
138 Leigh Anne Duck
to debunk such arguments by emphasizing races variability over time, as
well as space: though many white Southerners, as he explained in Strange
Careers first edition, had grown up along with Jim Crow and thus
naturally assumed that things have always been that way, in fact this
system dated only to the end of the nineteenth century (xv). A dynamic
history might not produce contemporary flexibility, however. As Paton
noted, Afrikaners also experienced enormous change during the nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries, and yet he argued that, throughout
these challenges, white supremacy had become a unifying commitment,
involving deeply and painfully the whole personality (White
Mans Dilemma 53, 54). The same had influentially been argued of US
Southern white folks in 1928 by historian U. B. Phillips,11 and even Wood-
ward, by his 1966 edition, conceded that many white Southerners seemed
fundamentally attached to Jim Crow. To contextualize the regions recent
resistance to desegregation, which included murder, rioting, unabashed
police brutality, and open defiance of the federal government, Woodward
quoted Faulkners good friend, the historian James W. Silver, who described
Mississippi in particular as a closed society whose pervading doctrine,
for more than a century, had been white supremacy.12
This historiographical question how entrenched were the so-called
traditions of segregation and disfranchisement? had become central
to an acute and often violent public debate. Even the federal government
believed the answer would impact the rate at which these systems could
be changed: in the second part of its Brown v. Board of Education verdict
(1955), the Supreme Court urged all deliberate speed in desegregation
but allowed public and private considerations to determine that pace.13
Meanwhile, African American progress toward voting rights and civil rights
remained arduous. In his influential speeches, Martin Luther King, Jr.,
emphasized that for those who had contested and contended with injus-
tice for decades beyond, of course, the preceding centuries of slavery
claims concerning tradition were irrelevant as well as questionable: the only
temporal framework to consider was the fierce urgency of Now.14
Amid this turmoil, Faulkner took a gradualist position: rather like Paton
in South Africa, Faulkner characterized white supremacy, among its adher-
ents, as an emotional condition of . . . fierce intensity and accordingly
urged civil rights activists to Go slow now.15 These comments quickly
became notorious among African Americans as did, more broadly, an
interview in which Faulkner claimed that he would fight for Mississippi
against the United States even if it meant going out into the street and
shooting Negroes.16 Faulkner quickly disavowed the latter statement and
 The world of Jim Crow 139
contextualized the former in terms of his fear for African American lives (LG
265; ESPL 224). But however well-intentioned his caution and despite
the fact that even his support for gradual desegregation enraged white
supremacists Faulkners concern with how white Southerners would
cope with social change seemed to displace any awareness of how long and
torturous the road to African American rights had already been.
His myopia concerning black perspectives on this timeline demonstrates
how even persons critical of Jim Crow could be influenced by its practices
and cultural productions. For the first decades of the twentieth century,
white Southerners were encouraged not only to believe their social structure
stable but also to disregard evidence to the contrary: when African Amer-
icans protested injustice or simply moved during the Great Migration,
white editors and elites interpreted these events paternalistically, suggest-
ing that black Southerners had been misinformed by agitators or abused
by atypical, anachronistic white supremacists.17 While Faulkners fiction
attests to the impossibility of full spatial segregation especially as many
white Southerners depended on African American labor such relations
compelled certain forms of behavior and limitations on exchange that soci-
ologist Charles S. Johnson, in 1943, labeled racial orthodoxies; though
they may have appeared mere social conventions or age-old . . . tradition,
these rules for conversation and even physical movement were sometimes
violently enforced.18 Though whites political, economic, and vigilante
power directed penalties much more heavily at African Americans, writer
and activist Lillian Smith argued that white Southerners, too, experienced
limitations on what they could do and say, forc[ing] them to deny love
and to humiliate people.19 Such ritual enactments, as historian Grace
Elizabeth Hale has argued, were accompanied by relentless circulation of
white supremacist narrative and visual images: even as a black middle
class was rising, white expressive culture paradoxically celebrated both the
figure of the loving slave mammy and the cruel spectacle of lynching,
images that in combination with Jim Crows spatial, economic, and polit-
ical restrictions conveyed a sense of secure racial hierarchy.20 Because of
these influences, the chief administrator of the Tuskegee Institute posited
an ever widening gulf between the two races during the late 1920s, pre-
cisely as Faulkner was establishing his career in fiction.21 Faulkner himself,
as late as the 1950s, considered it possible . . . that the white race and the
Negro race can never really like and trust each other (ESPL 157).
But even as ideological pressure and social restrictions may have limited
white Southerners ability to learn from interracial interaction, many of
them were increasingly exposed to African American expression in music,
140 Leigh Anne Duck
literature, and other arts. Accordingly, scholars have demonstrated how
Faulkners fiction was influenced by the blues and jazz, the multiracial
artistic community in New Orleans, as well as African American fiction
by authors including Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard
Wright.22 Further, while Faulkners early novels neglect the social transfor-
mations shaping black Southerners lives including the great numbers
moving north from Mississippi the horrors of white supremacist violence
powerfully shape his short stories even early in his career.23
Responding to these diverse, asymmetrical and often deeply opposed
influences, Faulkners fictional Mississippi presents readers not simply with
an overview of a closed society but with an overtly limited perspective
on a complex and shifting ideological and sometimes even literal
battlefield.24 Analyzing Faulkners advice to go slow, James Baldwin
argued that the older writers main priority regarding civil rights was to
allow time in which the [white] southerner [could come] to terms with
himself, his regions history, and the ethical implications of that past;
Baldwin wryly captures the narrowness of such a worldview in wondering
just what Negroes are supposed to do while the South works out what, in
Faulkners rhetoric, becomes something very closely resembling a high and
noble tragedy.25 But in Faulkners novels unlike his public statements
when white Southerners experience emotional and spiritual crisis upon
confronting the regions historical and continuing injustice, the staging of
such scenes facilitates critical distance regarding what Baldwin calls white
Southerners intolerable burden of blood-guiltiness (Baldwin, Faulkner
and Desegregation 151). When young Ike McCaslin, for instance, seeks
to convey bequests to the descendants of his grandfather Carothers and
Carothers slave, who was also his daughter, Ike nonetheless seeks to retain
for white Southerners the chance to endure and outlast . . . the curse they
have brought on the region; here and elsewhere in Go Down, Moses (1942),
Faulkner demonstrates how incompatible any commitment to a distinct
and privileged white racial identity even one that seeks to expiate past
wrongs must be with social justice (266).
Faulkner hardly attempted to represent African American perspectives
on life in Mississippi during Jim Crow; Ralph Ellison argued that his fic-
tion like that of other white Southerners suggests how rigidly . . . the
recognition of Negro humanity has been tabooed.26 For Ellison, this
claim was less a critique than a way of understanding Faulkners contri-
bution: for him, Negro writers . . . have . . . the task of defining Negro
humanity (Twentieth-Century Fiction 43), but Faulkner exposed the
process through which white Southerners either disavowed or began to
 The world of Jim Crow 141
acknowledge African American perspectives and experiences.27 In The
Sound and the Fury, Jason Compson IV paternalistically complains about
having six niggers to feed while readers see him relying on unpaid African
American child labor and abusing his one black elderly employee at a time
when other members of the Gibson family have died or moved away;
two decades later, in Requiem for a Nun (1951), Temple Drake (Stevens)
demeans her African American servant Nancy through egregious stereo-
type (ex-dope-fiend nigger whore), but also acknowledges commonal-
ity, saying Nancy was the only animal in Jefferson that spoke Temple
Drakes language (125). With these and other examples, Faulkner staged
how white Southerners projections of African American lives helped them
blind themselves to their own wrongdoing or manage anxieties about their
own identities; in each case though their capacities for self-reflection differ
utterly these characters reveal how a social structure based on ideological
manipulation and routine exploitation can damage even privileged classes
while unabashedly oppressing others. That theme in his fiction despite
the limitations of his characters and even several of his own statements
evinces the social and cultural dynamism that segregationists sought to deny
and impede. At a time when, as Ellison argued, Southern whites . . . claim
to know the Negro either to deny the Negros humanity or to protect
themselves from their guilt in the Negros condition and from their fear
of retribution Faulkner explored precisely such dynamics.28 Though it
may seem paradoxical that so much of his inspiration in doing so came
from beyond Mississippi, Faulkner recognized as deeply as anyone the
impossibility of isolating any one locale. Despite his love for his home and
fascination with the past, his career reflects a conviction that understanding
the US South perhaps especially its racial relations requires attending
also to a larger and changing world.

NOTES
1 C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 3rd rev. ed. (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 111.
2 James C. Cobb, Therapist of the Public Mind: Woodward and the Most
Burdensome Burden, in The Ongoing Burden of Southern History: Politics
and Identity in the Twenty-First-Century South, eds. Angie Maxwell, Todd
Shields, and Jeannie Whayne, ser. Making the Modern South, ser. ed. David
Goldfield (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012), pp. 1520
(essay pp. 130).
3 Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa (1916; London:
Longman, 1987), p. 167.
142 Leigh Anne Duck
4 Neil R. McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), pp. 3026.
5 See Woodward, Strange Career, pp. 11316; Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire
in the Making of US Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002);
Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for
Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004).
6 See Barbara Ladd, Nationalism and the Color Line in George W. Cable, Mark
Twain, and William Faulkner (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1996), pp. 15771; Leigh Anne Duck, Peripatetic Modernism, or, Joe Christ-
mass Father, Philological Quarterly 90.23 (2011), 26186; John T. Matthews,
This Race Which Is Not One: The More Inextricable Compositeness of
William Faulkners South, Look Away!: The U.S. South in New World Studies,
eds. Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004),
pp. 20126.
7 John T. Matthews, Recalling the West Indies: From Yoknapatawpha to Haiti
and Back, American Literary History 16.2 (2004), 23862.
8 Presidents Committee on Civil Rights, To Secure These Rights: The Report
of the Presidents Committee on Civil Rights (Washington: U.S.G.P.O., 1947),
p. 148.
9 Alan Paton, The White Mans Dilemma, The Saturday Review 36.18 (2 May
1953), 12. The essay was part of the forum South Africa: Can White Supremacy
Endure?
10 Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896).
11 Ulrich B. Phillips, The Central Theme of Southern History, The American
Historical Review 34.1 (1928), 31.
12 James W. Silver, Mississippi: The Closed Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace
and World., 1964), pp. xixiv, 6.
13 Brown v. Board of Education (II), 349 U.S. 294 (1955).
14 Martin Luther King, Jr., I Have a Dream speech, March on Washington,
D.C., for Civil Rights, 28 August 1963, in I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches
that Changed the World, ed. James M. Washington (New York: HarperCollins,
1992), p. 103.
15 William Faulkner, Letter to a Northern Editor (1956), in Essays, pp. 91, 86,
87.
16 Eurie Dahn, If I Were a Negro: Faulkner and the Readers of Ebony Maga-
zine, paper delivered at Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference: Faulkner
and the Black Literatures of the Americas, Oxford, MS, 24 July 2013; Russell
Howe, interview with William Faulkner (1956), in Lion in the Garden, p. 261.
17 Nan Elizabeth Woodruff, American Congo: The African American Freedom
Struggle in the Delta (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 14251.
18 Charles S. Johnson et al., To Stem this Tide: A Survey of Racial Tension Areas
in the United States (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1943), pp. 323; Charles S. John-
son, A Preface to Racial Understanding (New York: Friendship Press, 1936),
p. 178.
19 Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (1949; New York: Norton, 1994), p. 39.
 The world of Jim Crow 143
20 Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the
South, 18901940 (New York: Pantheon, 1998), p. 284.
21 Robert Russa Moton, What the Negro Thinks (Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
Doran & Company, 1929), p. 5.
22 Thadious M. Davis, From Jazz Syncopation to Blues Elegy: Faulkners Devel-
opment of Black Characterization, in Faulkner and Race: Faulkner and Yok-
napatawpha, 1986, eds. Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 1987), pp. 7092; Thadious M. Davis, Lingering in
the Black: Faulkners Illegible Modernist Sound Melding, paper delivered at
Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference: Faulkner and the Black Literatures
of the Americas, Oxford, MS, 22 July 2013; Judith L. Sensibar, Faulkner and
Love: The Women Who Shaped His Art (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2009), pp. 4446; George Hutchinson, Tracking Faulkner in the Paths of
Black Modernism, paper delivered at Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Confer-
ence: Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas, Oxford, MS, 24 July
2013.
23 Cheryl Lester, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem and the Great Migration: History in
Black and White, in Faulkner in Cultural Context: Faulkner and Yoknapataw-
pha, 1995, eds. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 1997), pp. 191227; Cheryl Lester, Faulkner and the
Tropics of Black Migration, paper delivered at Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha
Conference: Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas, Oxford, MS,
22 July 2013.
24 Thadious M. Davis, Games of Property: Law, Race, Gender and Faulkners Go
Down, Moses (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 34, 236, 250.
25 James Baldwin, Faulkner and Desegregation, The Price of the Ticket: Collected
Fiction, 19481985 (New York: St. Martins/Marek, 1985), pp. 152, 148.
26 Ralph Ellison, Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity
(1953), in Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage, 1995), p. 42.
27 Ralph Ellison, The Shadow and the Act (1949), in Shadow and Act,
pp. 273281.
28 Ralph Ellison, Richard Wrights Blues (1945), in Shadow and Act, p. 92.
The United States as world power
 chapter 1 3

South to the world

William Faulkner and the American Century
Harilaos Stecopoulos

Of the major US writers, William Faulkner would not be the first exam-
ple that comes to mind when considering the relationship between the
American Century and literary culture. The era of US global hegemony
seems more a preoccupation of such internationally oriented figures as
Mark Twain, W. E. B. Du Bois, Robert Stone, and Joan Didion, not the
insistently regional Faulkner. Yet as scholars have well demonstrated over
the past twenty odd years, the man celebrated for his local attachments
has a good deal to teach us about US expansion and its relationship to
the literary imagination. While no single Faulkner novel, short story, or
essay focuses exclusively on empire, a great many of his texts take up in
intermittent fashion the brute facts of US power on the hemispheric and
global scales. From the early Rincon stories and their commentary on the
US presence in the Caribbean to Ike McCaslins anguish over the theft and
despoiling of native lands in Go Down, Moses (1942) to the writers own
vexed thoughts on the so-called third world in On Fear: The South in
Labor (1955), Faulkner manifested a deep and sustained engagement with
the problem of US global hegemony. The man famous for writing about a
little postage stamp of native soil attended carefully to the world at large.
Not that this should come as much of a surprise. Contrary to cliched
notions of the region as relentlessly parochial, white Southerners have
for centuries taken seriously their relationship with other parts of the
world. Economic and political exigencies demanded as much. The South
always had pursued foreign markets for its exports, much as it had looked
abroad for its source of labor. Slavery no less than agriculture existed
in an international frame, and the Souths white supremacists paid close
attention to overseas threats (insurgent Haiti) and potential sources of
support (the United Kingdom). The Souths understanding of the world
sometimes clashed with US expansion, most evidently during the late
nineteenth century when influential white Southern politicians such as
South Carolinas Ben Tillman argued that an empire would undermine
147
148 Harilaos Stecopoulos
white America by bringing millions of darker peoples into the body politic,
albeit as second class citizens. Those critiques of US imperialism drew on
and helped stoke existing Southern resentment about a perceived colonial
relationship with the federal government and the industrialized North.
Yet Dixies anti-colonial stance had clearly defined racial limits. As African
American critics and white anti-imperialists were quick to point out during
the US occupation of the Philippines (18981902) and then again during
the US occupation of Haiti (191534), the new American empire took the
Jim Crow regime as its touchstone, thus providing a de facto defense of
the Southern status quo. That was hardly lost on white Southerners who
understood that American imperialism was largely supportive of their way
of life insofar as it endorsed a white supremacist worldview. However much
they might have felt imposed upon from without, most white Southerners
perceived the likely benefits they would derive from their nations ongoing
attempt to exploit foreign markets, peoples, and territories of color.
Faulkner recognized the close affinity of the growing US empire and
the white supremacist South better than most. But as was so often the
case with the novelist, a rich awareness of imperial violence led not to a
committed and progressive political aesthetic, but rather to a contradic-
tory engagement with the hard facts of expansion at home and abroad.
One senses as much in the Caribbean portion of Absalom, Absalom! (1936),
arguably the most famous imperial sequence of any Faulkner text. A tale of
collaborative (and contested) narration Quentins grandfather, Quentin,
and Shreve each contribute their perspectives the West Indian section
of Absalom chronicles Thomas Sutpens experience after he leaves Virginia
to make his fortune in Haiti and finds himself in the middle of a slave
rebellion. Possessed of a savage and indubitable will, Sutpen helps suppress
the insurgency, thus saving the lives and lands of his plantation employers;
yet his subsequent reward of marriage to the planters daughter doesnt so
much launch as derail the grand dynastic design he has only just begun to
imagine. When the plantation familys mixed-race heritage grows palpa-
ble with the birth of his son, Sutpen both recognizes his ambitious plans
likely demise and refuses to relinquish it. The subsequent revenge of the
abandoned Caribbean son on the implacable US father drives forward
the narrative to its doomed conclusion. Rather than serving as the ori-
gin of Thomas Sutpens fantasized success, Haiti turns out to be a place
where the novels anti-hero begins his long and painful immersion in the
linked horrors of plantation slavery and colonial exploitation. The imperial
plot demands for its denouement nothing less than the end of American
innocence.
 South to the world: William Faulkner and the American Century 149
Given the centrality of this sequence to the novel, its extraordinary that,
as John T. Matthews has pointed out, only in the 1990s did Absalom scholars
begin to turn their attention to the question of empire.1 Sutpens Caribbean
episode has been read as an engagement with antebellum Southern fears of
the Haitian Revolution (Godden), as a commentary on the racial politics
of US expansion in the modern era (Ladd), and, most directly, as a critique
of the occupation of Haiti (191534) (Stanchich). Matthews himself has
published a groundbreaking analysis of how the circum-Caribbean geog-
raphy of Absalom extends Faulkners earlier attempts to take up his regions
non-contiguous border with Francophone and Hispanophone countries.2
All of those critics identify the West Indian plot as pivotal to Faulkners
understanding of white identity formation of a range of spatial scales. And,
even as their arguments necessarily diverge, they each find in the West
Indian plot the means by which Faulkner both critiques Western imperi-
alism and slavery consider Quentins description of Haiti as a theatre
for . . . all the satanic lusts of human greed and cruelty (202) and fix-
ates on Sutpens obsessive need to claim the extravagant wages of whiteness,
regardless of the cost to self, family, and community. In Absalom, Faulkners
typically insightful engagement with regional whiteness in crisis speaks to
the nations aggressions south of the border and the manner by which
those far-flung designs redound violently to domestic life in the United
States. Tracing new routes through hemispheric history and geography,
Sutpens creator imbues US racial fiction with expansive political meaning.
For all its now canonical status among Faulknerians, however, the West
Indian subplot of Absalom, Absalom! is atypical of the novelists engage-
ment with empire and its discontents. The substantive connection between
Thomas Sutpens overt attempt at suppressing insurgent Haitian blacks and
his denial of a mixed-race son urges readers to draw a complex association
between the politics of US global power and the central racial plot of this
masterwork. But much of Faulkners engagement with US imperialism
tends to emerge in a more elusive manner, often relegated to a passing
comment or a marginal citation. Consider, for example, how Jason Comp-
son offers a one-line isolationist critique of big stick diplomacy in The
Sound and the Fury (1929). [T]hem up there in Washington spending
fifty thousand dollars a day keeping an army in Nicaragua or some place,
complains Jason, less concerned about the politics of expansion than the
financial costs involved (234). Or, alternately, consider how Calvin Burden,
Sr. adapts to Spanish-Californian Catholicism in Light in August (1932),
only to reassert his natal Protestantism and register as signs of blackness
and damnation the olive skin and diminutive size of his half-Mexican
150 Harilaos Stecopoulos
grandchildren. Such oblique references to US expansion appear scattered
throughout the novelists oeuvre, tantalizing scholars with the hint of an
unusual political theme, but then seemingly abandoning that possibility in
favor of more predictably regional concerns. The place of empire in these
fascinating asides often seems to exist as more of an anomalous gesture
than as a pivotal portion of the narrative. Thus even as a few critics have
attended to the hemispheric theme in Light in August, virtually no one has
analyzed the meaning of Jason Compsons comment on the US presence
in Nicaragua.
To be sure, if the theme of US global power often only emerges as
peculiar marginalia in Faulkners stories and novels, those isolated refer-
ences sometimes accrue greater narrative significance than a decentered
engagement with empire might suggest. Faulkners most notorious novel
Sanctuary (1931) provides a good example of this. Set among a largely white
criminal culture of northern Mississippi and Memphis, Sanctuary seems
at first blush to have little if anything to do with race, let alone empire.
The modernist pulp classic may urge readings of gender, class, and cul-
tural hierarchy, but it doesnt seem to engage with American expansion. Yet
Sanctuary does take up the question of empire, if in a minor key, through its
multiple invocations of Lee Goodwins experience as a US cavalry sergeant
in the US-Philippines War. Early in the novel, Ruby Lamar shares with the
frightened Temple Drake the story of Goodwins conviction for killing a
fellow soldier abroad; and that seemingly anomalous allusion to a bygone
war and a distant nation recurs a chapter later, when Horace Benbow, the
quixotic lawyer, muses on Goodwins service in the US occupation of the
Pacific archipelago. Ruby brings up the military conflict a third and final
time toward the end of the novel as she sits in the jail cell with Horace, the
somnolent Goodwin, and her unnamed child.
While it may seem easy to dismiss those invocations of the US-
Philippines War as little more than topical references, the parallels between
Goodwins homicidal behavior abroad and his unjust conviction for the
death of Tommy and the rape of Temple suggest otherwise. Surely it is
more than coincidental that Lee Goodwin kills a man over a woman in
the Philippines and then stands accused of committing the same crime
in Mississippi. In the former case, Goodwins competition with another
cavalryman over a Filipina results in homicide; in the latter, Goodwins
apparent lust for Temple renders comprehensible his alleged murder of
Tommy, the students erstwhile protector. Faulkner encourages the reader
to link the two murders all the more by establishing parallels in Rubys
responses to each of Lees incarcerations. Whether at the turn of the
 South to the world: William Faulkner and the American Century 151
century or in the 1920s, Ruby waits near a prison, hires an attorney, attempts
to pay the attorney with sex, and, most important, suppresses her anger
and jealousy over the other woman whom Lee desired. Her response to
each of the homicides is no less repetitive than the violence itself.
Indeed, one might claim that much of Sanctuary is structured by an
imperial repetition compulsion that takes its cue from the wartime homi-
cide so pivotal to Ruby and Goodwins doomed relationship. As a vicious
melodrama of two male rivals competing over a woman, the triangulated
Philippines murder adumbrates not only the violence in the bootleggers
camp, but also, in a more mediated fashion, Popeyes fatal shooting of
Red in Memphis. The murder committed by Goodwin, the former soldier,
informs the murders committed by his notorious underworld associate; and
that connection testifies, as we shall see, to Faulkners implicit understand-
ing of how empire ultimately leads to white self-destruction not unlike the
internecine criminal violence that consumes Popeye, Red, and their ilk.
While the violence of both empire and criminality typically disproportion-
ately affects people of color, whether at home or abroad, Sanctuary tends to
understand such bloodletting as the province of criminal whites, whether
in the imperial theater of the Philippines or in a Mississippi lynching.
Whites commit murder and eventually reap the consequences at the hand
of other whites; people of color occupy the shadows of the action, as they
occupy the margins of the novels plot.
Faulkner draws repeated connections between Goodwins military back-
ground a background dominated by imperial service in the Philippines
and the USMexico borderlands and his current profession as bootlegger.
Goodwin now leads a group of criminals instead of a squad of soldiers,
but signs of his earlier work abound. The recalcitrant Van wears a quasi-
military uniform of a khaki shirt and breeches (67); the narrator notes
the presence of a khaki-covered canteen (88) that bore the letters U S
and a blurred number in black stencil (89). If those Army accents tend to
be blurred, that indistinct condition may speak as much to the status of
the military itself as it does to criminal ineptitude. The various attempts
at treating the bootlegging enterprise as a military endeavor dont succeed.
Popeye attempts to fortify the camp by blocking the main road with a
large fallen tree but Gowan and Temple still gain access. Goodwin seeks to
discipline his men but the former soldier can only do so through violence.
As he tells Ruby while slapping her, Thats what I do to them . . . See?
(95). Those failures dont so much undercut as reinforce the sense that
Goodwin in moving from the military to the criminal life has maintained
his intimate relation to violence. The state may deploy the military man
152 Harilaos Stecopoulos
and prosecute the criminal, but in the end the two lethal enterprises seem
more similar than not a point emphasized during the trial scene when
the narrator describes as soldiers the four young thugs surrounding the
corrupt Judge Temple (289).
Vulnerable to the depredations of a patriarchal society, Ruby and Tem-
ple recognize this home truth long before most of the other characters in
the novel. In contrast to Horace Benbow who maintains a weak belief in
the authority of law, justice, civilization (132) until forced to confront the
lynching of his client and his own near-death experience, the two women
learn swiftly a Benjaminian truth about Western culture and its claim
on the world. The long-suffering Ruby is the first to inadvertently register
the affinities of imperial brutality and criminal violence. Having learned the
bitter lessons of personal betrayal, Ruby attempts to warn Temple
that the lead bootlegger hardly resembles a malleable college boy will-
ing to do a debutantes bidding. As the moll exclaims, Let me tell you
whose house youve come into without being asked or wanted; who youre
expecting to drop everything and carry you back where you had no busi-
ness ever leaving (59). That warning segues immediately into a chronicle
of Goodwins vicious record, from killing a fellow soldier in the Philip-
pines to fighting in World War One to degrading Ruby throughout their
relationship. What begins as an attempt to protect her fragile relationship
with Goodwin against the disruptive presence of the attractive coed soon
becomes a lesson about how empire can turn a man into a sort of ani-
mal (277). The terrible shadow of military life in the occupied Pacific
archipelago informs Rubys account of her abusive husband and provides
an imperial context in which to understand Goodwins criminal behavior.
In much of the bootlegger camp sequence, of course, Goodwin seems
to represent a more appealing alternative to the terrifying Popeye as the
two men compete over Temple with the help of their respective allies,
Tommy and Van. Tommy thus seizes Popeye while Lee and Van struggle
as a single shadow, locked and hushed and furious (72). Yet as Rubys
accusation of lust and likely rape suggests Do you think Ill let you?
she screams at Goodwin (95) the head bootlegger often seems more
Popeyes doppelganger than his rival. The fear with which both Gowan
and Temple respond to Popeye at the beginning of the scene transmutes
into the latters anxiety over Popeye and Goodwin or, better, Popeye-as-
Goodwin. Thanks in part to Rubys warning, Temple soon finds the likely
rescuer no less terrifying than the black-clad gangster. As the narrative
makes evident, Popeye and Goodwin share a voyeuristic investment in the
vulnerable girl, watching her together in a binocular fashion: Goodwin
 South to the world: William Faulkner and the American Century 153
looked toward the barn again and Popeye stood at his shoulder, looking
toward the barn (97). When Temple rushes into the house to say someone
was watching her, we arent clear as to the identity of that voyeur, but as
soon as Goodwin enters the doorway, the young coed flees in a disorienting
rush (91). Goodwins connection to Popeye persists to the end of the
scene, with Temple retreating into the apparent safety of the barn upon
finding the bootlegger observing from the house (99), and then imploring
Tommy not to let him in here (100). Goodwin may not kill Tommy
or rape Temple, but his intimate bond with Popeye suggests that the
bootlegger hardly stands apart from the murder and the sexual violence that
follows.
To make this claim is hardly to argue that Goodwin warrants arrest and
conviction for crimes he didnt commit. It is rather to suggest that, in
Sanctuary, one cannot escape the violence of the imperial zone; if Popeye
shadows Goodwin from the barn to the lynching, the earlier murder of
a fellow soldier haunts him in equally significant ways. And with good
reason: the horror of empire in the novel seems to have less to do with
atrocities perpetrated upon native populations than it does with crimes
committed by white men against their own kind. In Sanctuary, the US
occupation of the Philippines leads not to the mass killing of Filipinos or
Moros, as it did in history, but instead to a twenty-odd year record of intra-
white rape and murder that culminates in whites lynching whites. One of
the anonymous members of the lynch mob inadvertently makes that point
as he threatens to include Horace Benbow in a metonymic chain of white-
on-white violence that takes the head bootlegger as its central figure. Do
to the lawyer what we did to him, states the man, linking the mob murder
of Goodwin to the potential murder of the victims attorney, only to then
reach further back in time in the next sentence by connecting the lynching
to Goodwins supposed assault of Temple: What he did to her (296).
The movement from one white crime to an earlier white crime seems to
stop with the false charge of rape; but the reader, unlike the mob, can look
further into the past and recognize that the horrific events traced here take
as their point of origin Goodwins first crime: the murder of a fellow soldier
in the Philippines. The sentence What he did to her inevitably suggests
a corollary: What he did to him. That review of Goodwins connection
to violence speaks as much to the disturbing legacy of the USPhilippines
War as it does to the pervasive violence of the domestic South. In this case,
lynching begins abroad.
Even as Faulkner argues imperialism means the chickens will always
come home to roost, he seems to make this point without ever engaging
154 Harilaos Stecopoulos
directly with those whom white expansion typically destroys. With the
exception of the odd African American at a train station or Minnie, the
African American maid at Miss Renas brothel, Sanctuary is a remarkably
white novel. And yet if we take seriously the structural role of the anony-
mous woman in Goodwins first triangulated homicide, it is clear that the
novels imperial repetition compulsion depends in large part on the pivotal
position of the raced female subject. For all its overt focus on white
folks, Sanctuary limns an imperial cum racial economy that trades in vio-
lated women of color from Manila to Memphis. Ruby highlights that fact
in her vicious reference to Goodwins Pacific paramour as one of those
nigger women, (59) a description that links the unnamed Filipina to the
coffee-colored women in bright dresses who populate Clarence Snopes
favorite Memphis brothel (199). And Temple Drake inadvertently makes
the same point as she takes her place in the global continuum of raced
prostitutes. While Temple is rarely compared to African Americans, as
Ruby is, the putatively white coed often signifies as a figure beyond the
pale, one whose gray face, throat and arms (150) and intimate relation
to a little black thing like a nigger boy (219) highlights the colored space
she occupies between violent white men for much of the novel. Sanctuary
may neglect or sidestep an explicit engagement with the domestic problem
of the color line, but the novel demonstrates that the shadow of empire
tends to manifest itself in a contested woman of color, that the conquest
of Manila always leads to Mexican girls (109).
We may speculate that Faulkner in Sanctuary imagines empire as the
converse of Jim Crow: the female subject at the center not a white woman
raped by a man of color, but a woman of color violated by white males.
That perspective on empire renders the lynching of Goodwin less a pun-
ishment for racial crimes than a return to a colonial scene in which white
men incited by the prospect of territory and power tear at each other for
supremacy. The novels overt engagement with whiteness stands in inverse
proportion to its subtle invocation of the imperial; the two categories serve
to explain one another in this narrative world. Yet any imperial reading of
Sanctuarys overweening whiteness proves less significant than Faulkners
salutary reminder that the white assault on people of color has as much to
do with a particular national drive for global hegemony as it does a global
attempt to assert white supremacy. The US occupation of the Philippines
reflects the national urge to control and exploit minority populations
an urge already visible in the South and West but it also speaks to the
incipient national plan to supplant crumbling European empires and cre-
ate an American Century. That both impulses lead in the end to American
 South to the world: William Faulkner and the American Century 155
self-destruction reminds us of how white subjects excel at nothing so much
as savaging themselves.

NOTES
1 See John T. Matthews, Recalling the West Indies: From Yoknapatawpha to
Haiti and Back 16.2 (Summer 2004), 2389.
2 See Richard Godden, Absalom, Absalom!, Haiti and Labor History: Reading
Unreadable Revolutions, English Literary History 61.3 (Fall 1994), 685720;
Barbara Ladd, `The Direction of the Howling: Nationalism and the Color
Line in Absalom, Absalom!, American Literature 66.3 (September 1994), 525
51; Maritza Stanchich, The Hidden Caribbean Other in William Faulkners
Absalom, Absalom!: An Ideological Ancestry of US Imperialism, Mississippi
Quarterly 49.3 (Summer 1996), 60317; Matthews, Recalling the West Indies,
23862.
 chapter 1 4

Unsteady state
Faulkner and the Cold War
Catherine Gunther Kodat

In Creating Faulkners Reputation, Lawrence H. Schwartz sets out to explain

the early Cold War inflation of William Faulkners literary stock.1 Author
of thirteen novels published between 1926 and 1942, Faulkner had been
dismissed by the bulk of the US literary critical establishment as a tal-
ented but crude purveyor of gothic, needlessly recondite fictions before the
1946 publication of Malcolm Cowleys The Portable Faulkner ushered in an
about-face. For Schwartz, a proper explanation of a change in literary repu-
tation subordinates discussion of formal accomplishment to analysis of the
social and political conditions that made the change possible; this approach
is especially important for understanding how Faulkners remote, com-
plex, iconoclastic novels could have won public acclaim, since they are
so inaccessible as to be virtually unreadable without scholarly assistance
(5). Schwartz credits the anti-Communist postwar cultural readjustment
with conjuring that assistance into being through a critical campaign to
repudiate the socially conscious literary traditions of naturalism/realism
in favor of an elitist aesthetic exemplifying the same values that Western
intellectuals saw in capitalism which made it morally superior to com-
munism (5, 4). Had the aesthetic values of the 1930s persisted or had
anti-Communism not become prevalent, Schwartz concludes, Faulkner
could not have achieved renown . . . [T]he demands of the cold war prop-
agated a new aestheticism. Without that change in aesthetic sensibility it
seems unlikely that such a difficult writer would have achieved the wide
recognition he did (5, 78).
Schwartz implies that, once burnished under the pressure of postwar ide-
ological imperatives, Faulkners reputation shone undimmed thereafter
but in closing with the 1950 awarding of the Nobel Prize Creating Faulkners
Reputation offers a remarkably foreshortened view of the Cold War. Recent
scholarship has contested his claim that the novels exemplify an elitist
aesthetic indifferent to social concern,2 yet Schwartzs characterization
of Faulkners Cold War American reception has gone unexamined. That
156
 Unsteady state: Faulkner and the Cold War 157
characterization merits scrutiny: placing Faulkners Cold War career in a
context that moves beyond 1950 to include his work for the State Depart-
ment and related efforts to turn his literary celebrity into a pinnacle from
which [he] might be listened to produces a more dialectical view of just
what the Cold War did for and to Faulkners reputation (ESPL 119).
Schwartzs study is not without its truth, but that truth needs to be put in
perspective. For in the manner of most large, impersonal forces, what the
Cold War gave to Faulkner, it also took away.
Faulkner almost didnt make the trip to Stockholm to receive the Nobel
Prize. As he told the first reporter who called him for reaction, I am a
farmer down here and I cant get away. Faulkner left on a hunting trip a
week after the announcement, launching into a bender that continued on
his return to Oxford.3 His diffident response to the Nobel was no match
for Foreign Service officer Muna Lee, who would play a major role in
arranging Faulkners later service for the State Department. The details of
Lees campaign to get Faulkner to Stockholm are described in the second
volume of Joseph Blotners biography and do not need much elaboration
here beyond emphasizing that the process of persuasion included lying,
flattery, and emotional blackmail (II 1349). That Faulkner continued to
drink heavily even after agreeing to the trip indicates that his acquiescence
was less than total. But he went, nevertheless, and so launched his career
as one of Americas first Cold War cultural celebrities. Schwartz is right to
see the awarding of the Nobel as an important event, marking not only
the fulfillment of the revaluation of Faulkners writing begun years earlier
but also a new level of play in the rapidly expanding game of Cold War
cultural diplomacy.
Faulkner is usually described as a reluctant cultural diplomat. Yet after
his trip to Stockholm this shy farmer made overseas journeys every single
year for the next five years, to destinations as various as Paris, Cairo, Lima,
Sao Paulo, Tokyo, Manila, Rome, London, and Reykjavik, all but three
of those trips undertaken for the State Department. Certainly government
pressure and his own odd brand of patriotism played roles in bringing
Faulkner to participate in these ventures, but its likely that he also came to
enjoy their pleasures the adulation; the good food and plentiful liquor;
the pretty, attentive women and to pursue them much as he pursued
(even as he claimed to despise) the pleasures of Hollywood. Then, too,
Faulkner may have viewed his work for the State Department as restitution
for the military service he had misrepresented for years. In any case, cultural
diplomacy was an ambivalent undertaking for Faulkner, at once dreaded
and desired.
158 Catherine Gunther Kodat
Deeper tensions within Faulkners diplomatic work can be glimpsed in
his response to State Department official Harold E. Howlands invitation
to participate in the August 1955 seminar on American literature in Nagano.
About rights to any read or spoken material being property of the Dept.,
Faulkner wrote,
I have in progress a book composed of chapters, the subject being What has
happened to the American Dream. I read one chapter at Univ. of Oregon
and published it in Harpers magazine. I have another chapter which I could
read in Japan . . . I would expect to retain rights to these, to include in the
book. Though naturally I should consider the Dept. had rights to use them
in any way it saw fit to further whatever work in int. relations they might
do, once I had used them under Dept. auspices. Can this be done? All other
material coming out of my visit, will be the Dept.s, with me to have the
privilege of using any of it to build further chapters on this theme for the
above purpose, by notifying the Dept. that I wished to do so. That is, I
would like the privilege of clearing with the Dept. in advance any speech
etc. which I saw I could later use, to reserve this right.4

The speech Faulkner delivered in Oregon was titled Freedom American

Style; it appeared in the July 1955 issue of Harpers as On Privacy: The
American Dream: What Happened To It. Its proximate cause was the
fall 1953 publication in Life magazine of a two-part expose on his life and
work that Faulkner strongly resented, both personally and as a sign that the
pursuit of profit could, simply by functioning under a phrase like Freedom
of the Press, render superfluous other, less fungible freedoms (ESPL 70).
Once we consider not only what the essay says but also Faulkners plans
for it, however, On Privacy undergoes an uncanny shift in meaning,
becoming an eerie prediction of Faulkners Cold War fate. Faulkner tells
Howland that On Privacy is part of a projected book, but when he
finished the piece he pitched it to his editor as a lecture that is, a
public performance: It is a section of a kind of symposium, maybe 5 or
6 lectures . . . I have more and more offers to lecture, my price is up to
$1000.00 from colleges now, and I may take it up, use this one for the first
of a series, to be a book later (SL 372). On Privacy, then, constitutes a
deliberate (if also defensive) effort on Faulkners part to profit from his fame
even as its pronouncements on the role of the artist in America condemn
such calculation. America has not yet found any place for the artist,
Faulkner grumbles, except to use his notoriety to sell soap or cigarettes
or fountain pens or to advertise automobiles and cruises and resort hotels
(ESPL 75) or, as Faulkner would learn, to shill for the US itself. Informed
by the agonistic logic of going public in the name of privacy (like the logic
 Unsteady state: Faulkner and the Cold War 159
of waging war to end war, or ensuring peace through Mutually Assured
Destruction), On Privacy forecasts Faulkners feckless handling of his
fame in the years after the Nobel. The perils that await are signaled in the
tortured passage about rights in the letter to Howland: Who has the final
claim on a work embedded in a system it resists? Whose interests does such
work serve?
Until recently, studies of US Cold War cultural diplomacy largely
accepted without question the State Departments two fundamental oper-
ating assumptions: that who pays the piper calls the tune and that the
formal complexity and ensuing interpretive challenges of modernist art
made it the perfect apolitical cultural export.5 It is true that, in certain
nations, admiration for Faulkner during the Cold War had a strategic func-
ad Goncz, the lawyer, writer and, in 1990, the first democratically-
tion. Arp
elected president of the Hungarian republic, taught himself English while
imprisoned for his participation in Hungarys 1956 uprising; his 1970 trans-
lation of The Sound and the Fury carried a certain dissident frisson even
as publication of the novel signaled that Faulkner, a proscribed writer in
the Hungary of the 1940s and 1950s, had finally won government sanc-
tion. Certainly Faulkners continuing popularity in Japan stems from his
1955 visit. But admiration for Faulkners novels hardly guaranteed admira-
tion for the United States. Faulkners profound influence on the writers of
the Latin American boom did not stop them from supporting the Cuban
revolution not the outcome the government had hoped for Faulkners
diplomatic work.6
As it happened, States relationship with Faulkner was short-lived. Signs
that Faulkner would prove a problematic ambassador emerged in Paris
in 1952, when he attended the Congress for Cultural Freedom-sponsored
(and CIA-funded) Oeuvres du XXe Si`ecle. Faulkners appearance officially
was deemed a success (Blotner, Biography II 1412), but the days leading up
to it were harrowing. As W. H. Auden recollected, Faulkner went into a
bout on arrival, shut up in his hotel throwing furniture out of the windows
and bottles at the ladies and saying the most dreadful things about coons.
However we managed to get him sober and onto the platform on the
last day to say that the Americans had behaved badly but that he hoped
they would behave better in the future and sit down.7 In 1954, during
Faulkners first State Department outing, drinking precipitated a collapse
in Brazil that required medical care. For his 1955 visit to Nagano the
launching pad for an 11-week tour to nine cities in six countries Faulkner
started drinking before he left Washington. By his second day in Tokyo,
the US ambassador was ready to send him home; the trip went from a
160 Catherine Gunther Kodat
disaster-in-the-making to runaway success thanks entirely to the work of
Leon Picon, head of the embassys book program (Blotner, Biography II
15411567). A 1957 trip to Athens went fairly smoothly, but by 1960 most
in the State Department had had their fill of Faulkner. Government files
indicate disagreement within the agency over the merits of continuing
the relationship, disagreement sharp enough to lead State to withhold
sponsorship of Faulkners last diplomatic mission, an April 1961 visit to
Caracas. A bluntly-worded internal memo urged frank talk about the
facts of life on this one; States official reply to the embassys request for
sponsorship, while more diplomatic, is firm:
Mr. Faulkner is very well known to us in this office as he has had three pre-
vious American Specialist grants . . We believe . . . that . . . [the] difficulties
outweigh the very considerable advantages that might accrue from [another]
grant. We recommend, therefore, that no further action be taken regarding
this proposal. (CU box 144, file 18)

Faulkner, too, soured on cultural diplomacy, turning down an invitation to

travel to the Soviet Union in 1958. He framed his refusal in anti-communist
terms, but his experience in Eisenhowers People-to-People campaign points
to a more fundamental unease. Faulkner cared little for the Eisenhower
administration, but the president had personally requested his service as
chairman of the writers group of the new program (Blotner, Biography II
1629). Faulkner got the ball rolling in late September 1956 with a letter
to some fifty authors soliciting their involvement. Will you send me in
a sentence, or a paragraph, or a page . . . your private idea of what might
further this project? he wrote. I am enclosing my own ideas as a sam-
ple. 1. Anesthetize, for one year, American vocal chords. 2. Abolish, for
one year, American passports (Blotner, Letters 404). In November those
writers who had responded met at the home of New York Times book
reviewer Harvey Breit to hear Faulkner observe that we have spent all our
lives already doing this very job which President Eisenhower discovered
last year is a critical necessity. So there is not much more we can do
(Blotner, Biography II, 1623). By February 1957, when he and Breit were to
give some accounting of their work at a meeting of the People-to-People
group chairmen, Faulkners disaffection was acute. I dont go along with
that stuff, he proclaimed over whiskies the night before the meeting. The
next day, a shaky, hung-over Faulkner and a nervous Breit arrived late to
the People-to-People gathering, sat in the back of the room, and left early,
making no report at all (II 162931).
 Unsteady state: Faulkner and the Cold War 161
Faulkner was joking when he proposed a year of American silence, but
by 1959, when Muna Lee asked him to address the 7th National Conference
of the US National Commission for UNESCO, he seemed ready to put
the plan into action. Of course I will do whatever I can, he wrote to Lee.
But I am the wrong one to be the official speaker here.
. . . For the reason that I believe that speech is mankinds curse, all evil
and grief of this world stems from the fact that man talks. I mean, in the
sense of one man speaking to a captive audience. Except for that . . . there
would have been no Hitler or Mussolini. I believe that in the case of the
speaker and his captive audience, whatever the reason for the captivity of
the audience, the worst of both is inevitably brought out the worst of the
individual, compounded by the affinity for evil inherent in people compelled
or persuaded to be . . . an audience, which in my opinion is another mob.
(SL 42425)
Faulkners resistance proved weak. Though he went to the conference vow-
ing not to speak, he was cajoled into participating by Foreign Service
officer Abram Minell, almost certainly sent by Lee for just that purpose
(Blotner, Biography II 1744). Over a bottle of Cutty Sark, with Minell at
the typewriter, Faulkner dictated a pages worth of commentary; finagled
into the closing plenary session, he delivered a warmed-over version of
the Nobel Prize speech. By this point in his career Faulkners nostrums
on mans capacity to endure and prevail had taken on the character of
advertising copy catch phrases a predictable (if lamentable) develop-
ment given the nature of cultural diplomacy (the worlds greatest adven-
ture in advertising8 ) and the fulfillment of the bitter prophecy of On
Privacy.
With the publication of Light in August in 1932, Faulkner began the
imaginative interrogation of American racism that would inform his best
work, but he did not see himself as having a mandate to speak publicly
on Southern racial injustice until 1954 the year of the Supreme Courts
Brown decision and his first State Department trip. Faulkners earliest
public statements on desegregation were welcome to supporters of integra-
tion. His March 20, 1955 letter to the editor of the Memphis Commercial
Appeal mocking efforts in Mississippi to maintain segregated schools was
applauded in Masses & Mainstream; later that year his comment on the
Emmett Till murder was similarly praised. Yet the progressive statements
of the mid-1950s were in some ways an aberration informed as much by
Faulkners sensitivity to the powerful influence of racism in the propa-
ganda of the Cold War as by his sense of social justice.9 However much he
162 Catherine Gunther Kodat
intellectually understood the issues at stake, desegregation and civil rights
were fundamentally personal issues for Faulkner. He could not sustain the
emotional detachment that a properly diplomatic approach to the prob-
lem demanded, and the polished Cold War rhetoric soon gave way to
something raw.
Faulkner had been drinking for several days when he sat down to an
interview with London Sunday Times correspondent Russell Warren Howe
in late February 1956. Earlier that month riots had erupted at the University
of Alabama when Autherine Lucy, an African American woman admitted
to the graduate program in library science, arrived on campus. Ostensi-
bly for her own safety, Lucy was suspended from the university on the
third day of the term, and the NAACP, which had won a court order
preventing the university from denying Lucy admission on the basis of
race, charged it with contempt of court. A rattled Faulkner was convinced
that Lucys return to the university would result in her murder, and his
alcohol-fueled distress produced the most infamous public statement on
race of his career. Faulkners confession to Howe of where his allegiances
lay in the Souths racial landscape if it came to fighting Id fight for
Mississippi against the United States even if it meant going out into the
street and shooting Negroes is hardly the only troubling thing about
the interview, in which Faulkner insists the white South be left to work out
integration on its own.10 The attempted damage control of two essays pub-
lished within months of The Reporter interview only made things worse.
In these pieces, Faulkner elaborates a thesis quickly derided as go slowism:
the recommendation that blacks adopt an attitude of saintly forbearance
towards white Southerners that would allow whites to redeem themselves
through voluntary action.11
Reaction was swift and sharp. Faulkners remarks were parodied in
The Nation;12 an outraged Ralph Ellison, star-struck when introduced
to Faulkner four years earlier, pulled no punches in a letter to his friend
Albert Murray:
he forgets that the people hes talking about are Negroes and theyre every-
where in the States and without sectional allegiance when it comes to the
problem . . . He forgets . . . that Mose isnt in the market for his advice,
because hes been knowing how to wait-a-while . . . for over three hundred
years, only hes never been simply waiting, hes been . . . looking for a hole,
and now hes got the hole. Faulkner . . . thinks he can end this great historical
action just as he ends a dramatic action in one of his novels . . . everything just
as it was except for the brooding, slightly overblown rhetoric of Faulkners
irony.13
 Unsteady state: Faulkner and the Cold War 163
In reply, Murray singled out Faulkners work in cultural diplomacy for
special scorn: Saw that Faulkner thing in Life [Letter to a Northern
Editor]. Sad, pitiful, stupid thing . . . Imagine a fatass travelling all around
the world selling humanity for the State Dept and then going back home
pulling that kind of crap at the first sign of real progress (Murray 125).
It was James Baldwin, in an excoriating essay published in the Fall
1956 issue of Partisan Review, who publicly made the connection between
Faulkners literary style and racial politics. Faulkner, Baldwin wrote,
is at his best, and is perfectly sincere, when he declares . . . To live anywhere
in the world today and be against equality because of race or color is like
living in Alaska and being against snow. We have already got snow. And as
with the Alaskan, merely to live in armistice with it is not enough. Like the
Alaskan, we had better use it. And though this seems to be flatly opposed to
his statement . . . that, if it came to a contest between the Federal government
and Mississippi, he would fight for Mississippi, even if it meant going out
into the streets and shooting Negroes, he means that, too. Faulkner means
everything he says, means them all at once, and with very nearly the same
intensity.14
As Faulkner told Malcolm Cowley during the editing of The Portable
Faulkner, Im trying to say it all in one sentence, between one Cap and
one period. Im still trying to put it all, if possible, on one pinhead.15 And
as Baldwin saw, that could be a problem.
Still, we should not conclude that Faulkners writing lost all salience
to Baldwin or later authors (or, to put it another way, that Faulkners
late-1950s civil rights implosion gives the lie to the work of the 1930s). To
the contrary, Cold War readers and writers maintained an active creative
engagement with Faulkner, picking and choosing their way through his
oeuvre, keeping what was useful, setting aside what was not, and frequently
taking issue with both his claims and his techniques habits of critical
reading practiced especially skillfully by African American authors who
came of age during the civil rights movement. Signs of that continued
engagement include Murrays appearance in the Faulkner centenary cele-
brations at the University of Mississippi (He may have misled us a few
times in public utterances, Murray remarked, but that was not his actual
literary work . . . I mean he was right on the verge of being a very pathetic
person. But many great writers are16 ) and Ellisons refusal to disavow
the meaning which [Faulkners] works hold for me,17 pointedly includ-
ing the author in his famous list of literary ancestors.18 While Baldwin
never backed away from his shrewd criticism, his later defense of William
Styrons Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) moved him to acknowledge what
164 Catherine Gunther Kodat
he had found praiseworthy in Faulkners work.19 In 1955 Chloe A. Wof-
ford, a candidate for a Masters degree in English at Cornell University,
filed a thesis comparing Virginia Woolfs and William Faulkners Treat-
ment of the Alienated; thirty years later Wofford by then nationally
known as Toni Morrison described herself as a reader deeply moved by
all [Faulkners] subjects in part because of his ability to infuriate you
in such wonderful ways.20
It was Faulkners post-Nobel, State Department-inflated public profile
that made such intense critical engagement possible, but it was Faulkners
writing that made it an engagement. Recognizing the breadth and depth of
this reaction to, and sustained interrogation of, Faulkners writing during
the Cold War reveals the limitations of claims that his reputation was
uniformly exalted; that his readers (too dull or impatient to comprehend
his remote, complex, iconoclastic prose) unquestioningly accepted the
judgment of a small cadre of scholars; or that dissent was suppressed in
discussions of Faulkners work after 1946 (Schwartz, Creating 5, 202). For
in using his Cold War moment as a pinnacle from which [he] might be
listened to, Faulkner exposed himself and his work to a level of scrutiny
that he likely never would have faced had he stayed down on the farm,
and its that exposure and the habit of critical reading it enabled that
created the reputation Faulkner has to this day.

NOTES
1 Lawrence H. Schwartz, Creating Faulkners Reputation: The Politics of Modern
Literary Criticism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), p. 1.
2 See Richard Godden, A Fable . . . Whispering about the Wars, Faulkner Jour-
nal 17.2 (2002), 2588; John T. Matthews, Many Mansions: Faulkners Cold
War Conflicts, in Global Faulkner: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2006, eds.
Annette Trefzer and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2009), pp. 323; Spencer Morrison, Requiems Ruins: Unmaking and Making
in Cold War Faulkner, American Literature 85.2 (June 2013), 30331.
3 Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography, 2 vols. (New York: Random House,
1974), vol. II, p. 1338.
4 U.S. State Department/United States Information Agency Bureau of Educa-
tional and Cultural Affairs (CU), Special Collections Division, University of
Arkansas, box 144, file 17.
5 See Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract
Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1983); Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold
War: The CIA in the World of Arts and Letters (New York: The New Press,
 Unsteady state: Faulkner and the Cold War 165
2000), originally published in the UK as Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the
Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books, 2000).
6 See Deborah N. Cohn, Faulkner, Latin America, and the Caribbean: Influ-
ence, Politics, and Academic Disciplines, in A Companion to William
Faulkner, ed. Richard C. Moreland (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 499518.
7 Quoted in Richard Davenport-Hines, Auden (New York: Pantheon Books,
1995), p. 280.
8 John W. Henderson, The United States Information Agency (New York: Harper
and Bros., 1950), p. 24.
9 Carol Polsgrove, Divided Minds: Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement
(New York: Norton, 2001), pp. 8, 9.
10 Russell Warren Howe, A Talk with William Faulkner, The Reporter, 22 March
1956, 19.
11 See Letter to a Northern Editor (1956) and A Letter to the Leaders of the
Negro Race (1956) in Essays, Speeches, and Public Letters, pp. 8691, 10712.
12 Roy Bongartz, Give Them Time . . . Reflections on Faulkner, The Nation,
31 March 1956, 239.
13 Albert Murray and John F. Callahan (eds.), Trading Twelves: The Selected
Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray (New York: Vintage, 2001), p. 117.
14 James Baldwin, Faulkner and Desegregation, Partisan Review 23.4 (Fall 1956),
56873.
15 Malcolm Cowley, The Faulkner-Cowley File: Letters and Memories, 19441962
(Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1978), p. 14.
16 Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie (eds.), Faulkner at 100: Retrospect
and Prospect: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1997 (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2000), p. 249.
17 Quoted in Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (New York: Knopf,
2007), p. 234.
18 Ralph Ellison, A Rejoinder, The New Leader, 3 February 1964, 22. This essay
and its precursor appear as The World and the Jug in Shadow and Act (New
York: Vintage, 1972), pp. 10743.
19 Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt (eds.), Conversations with James Baldwin
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989), p. 279.
20 Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie (eds.), Faulkner and Women: Faulkner
and Yoknapatawpha, 1985 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986),
pp. 2967.
 Genres
Fictions of the plantation
 chapter 1 5

Truth so mazed
Faulkner and US plantation fiction
Peter Schmidt

Reading Faulkner in historical context means resisting the temptation

to believe his art is selfprogenitive, a key concept stressed in Go Down,
Moses The Bear. Any consideration of Faulkners literary influences must
include antebellum and early New South plantation fiction. Before the
Civil War, representations of pastoral economies and harmony among the
races played a central role in the Southern counter-attack against Harriet
Beecher Stowes Uncle Toms Cabin (1852), the most influential fictional
indictment of slavery as a threat to the economic and moral fabric of
the United States. After the War, during the era of Jim Crow at home
and US colonialism abroad, influential new narratives set on plantations
by Southern writers appeared to great acclaim in national magazines like
Scribners and Harpers. The Civil Rights era in the mid-twentieth century
eventually transformed our understanding of both Faulkner and plantation
fiction most notably via new interpretive strategies inspired by black
studies, feminist criticism, postcolonial theory, and the global South
turn in US studies. Broadly speaking, the appeal of Southern plantation
fiction was once primarily understood as an expression of nostalgia for a
pre-modern, rural, and regional past in both economic and social relations,
a Southern variant of dialect stories and rural realism that became known
in the late nineteenth century as local color. Since the 1980s, though,
plantation fiction and local color writing have been interpreted as helping
to create literary modernity,1 just as colonial/plantation economies were
essential to the new wealth of cities. Plantation fiction romances were
also powerfully recuperative for post-Civil War audiences. Their plots not
only helped readers manage tragedy and loss associated with the Civil War
via narratives of reconciliation between northern and Southern characters;
they also offered a reassuring model of postslavery race and class relations.
Most recently, the transnational turn in US studies has given us
new hypotheses about how a seemingly backward- and inward-looking
form shaped a future-oriented, global modernism. The South as a
169
170 Peter Schmidt
longstanding exception seemed to threaten the core values of Ameri-
can exceptionalism the view that the United States collectively had a
special, God-given destiny to redeem the sins of human history. By the
late nineteenth century, however, with the nations original sin of slavery
supposedly expunged, many argued that the next phase of US industrial
capitalism would involve expansion beyond continental North America.
Like the South, new US colonies in the Caribbean and the Pacific existed in
a liminal zone, seeming to be a dangerous yet alluring pre-modern region
within the USs expanded national boundaries.2 Plantation fiction after the
1880s modeled ways to shoulder the white mans burden at home and
abroad, and cultural historians now trace the global scope of the local, as
Jennifer Rae Greeson has termed it (speaking of local color literature), in
much New South literature (Our South 259).
Many postwar Southern writers, such as Thomas Nelson Page and
Thomas Dixon, had mixed feelings about global empire, but they agreed
that the postslavery United States needed to reaffirm white racial superi-
ority, not to mention proper gender and class boundaries. We increasingly
recognize, however, that New South fiction by white and black authors
before Faulkner was far more heterogeneous, employing a wide range of
narrative modes expressing ambiguity, dissent, doubt, rage, repression, fear,
irony, and mourning sometimes encoded within the very tales that seemed
most consensus-obsessed when it came to narrating the meanings of race
and history.
The two postwar authors before Faulkner who most relished con-
founding plantation-fiction conventions were Mark Twain and Charles W.
Chesnutt, though George Washington Cable, Joel Chandler Harris, Paul
Laurence Dunbar, Pauline E. Hopkins, Kate Chopin, and Ellen Glasgow
should receive honorable mention. In Puddnhead Wilson (1894), Twains
plot switches a black and a white baby on a Missouri slave plantation
and then gives no easy answer to the question of nature versus nurture
that is, whether raising a child as one race or another will determine its
character. If anything is proven by Puddnheads riddling plot, it is that
whites and blacks are culturally conjoined twins who remain stubbornly
blind to this unsettling truth. Twains satire created a powerful precedent
for the doubles and racial paradoxes at the stormy center of Faulkners
work, especially Light in August (1932) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936).
Chesnutt decisively intervened in plantation fictions culture of consen-
sus via his motifs of passing and haunting. Tales such as Uncle Welling-
tons Wives and The Wife of His Youth are often misread as parables
of light-skinned blacks tempted to pass but then choosing their real
 Truth so mazed: Faulkner and US plantation fiction 171
racial identity. In fact, these stories mourn the passing of the possibility
of mixed-race identity in the Jim Crow era and with it any opportunity
for Americans to acknowledge their own mixed histories. The Passing of
Grandison, set during slavery, appears at first to affirm that blacks like
Grandison are good because they are loyal servants. But the story is an
equal-opportunity satire of both white reformers and white conservatives.
A rebellious son wants to force Grandison to pass into freedom in Canada
but primarily to win his fiancees admiration. The tales concluding twist
reveals that Grandison does indeed aspire to freedom but gained on his
own initiative. Racial issues are also trenchantly rendered in Chesnutts
novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901). Chesnutt began the novel intending
to refute white newspaper accounts of a race riot in 1898, in which whites
overthrew the local elected government and destroyed middle-class black
homes and businesses in Wilmington, North Carolina. But in the process
of writing he expanded his goals to highlight the manifold ironies haunting
the collective amnesia that passes for American memory.
Much has rightly been made in recent criticism of the character who
is probably Chesnutts greatest creation, Julius McAdoo, the freed slave
trickster story-teller featured in The Conjure Woman and Other Conjure
Tales (1899). Uncle Julius indeed gives most eloquent voice to the ghosts
that haunt plantation fictions of the US South, Old or New. Valuable
commodities desired by John, the new northern-born plantation-master
such as scuppernong vines or lumber from an old schoolhouse are said
by Julius to be shadowed by the souls of black folk. John convinces him-
self that Julius tales are simply ways to scam him out of property he
rightly claims is his, and that any debts he may owe to Julius are easily
amortized. Johns point of view frames or circumscribes Julius voice. But
Johns authority cant stop Julius conjure powers from working. Johns
wife Annie hesitates to contradict him directly, but her silence, her quot-
ing Julius ironic and witty remarks, and her own actions open profound
interpretive possibilities. The ending of Po Sandy, for instance, reveals
that Annie has pledged some of her husbands money to support one of
Julius new projects. Chesnutts dramatic ironies in The Conjure Woman
his invocation of the histories that actively haunt, conjure with, and
counteract a white patriarchs control of material resources and narrative
meaning anticipate Faulkners own narrative methods in assuming that
truth is contested terrain.
Plantation fiction presages another quintessentially Faulknerian
moment: the murder of Charles Bon, Thomas Sutpens mixed-race Haitian
son, by his Mississippi-born white offspring, Henry Sutpen in Absalom,
172 Peter Schmidt
Absalom!. One way to think of Absalom is as a fever-dream trying to exhume
the causes that led to Bons murder and its consequences. Two Southern
novels published in 1905 by Doubleday Page in New York Thomas
Dixons The Clansman and Chesnutts The Colonels Dream coinciden-
tally both have plots that turn on death and exhumation.3 In Chesnutt,
the novels hero ignores Jim Crow rules and buries his black servant in his
white familys gravesite, only to find the body of his Uncle Peter dug
up and dumped on his doorstep. This desecration causes Colonel French
to abandon his dreams of economic and social reform. The concluding
compensation Chesnutt gives his protagonist in the very last sentence of
his final published novel (Chesnutt, Colonels Dream 290) pales next to
Chesnutts brutally detailed description of the muddy coffin and opened
grave (2812), which stresses disfiguration, shaming, and silencing, not
restitution and consensus.
Dixons romance of the rise of the Ku Klux Klan also features dese-
crated bodies but this time the corpses include a white woman raped
by a black man, and the son of the novels hero, whose shallow grave on
a Civil War battlefield is violated by the novels villain, Austin Stoneman,
Dixons slanderous fictional portrait of an actual Pennsylvania Representa-
tive, Thaddeus Stevens, one of the key architects of Reconstruction. The
black rapist and Stoneman eventually confess their crimes; Gus is lynched,
but Stoneman, surprisingly, forgiven. The two white elders are united in
a moment Dixon melodramatically highlights: The Southerner slipped
his arm around the old mans shoulders and began a tender and rever-
ent prayer (Dixon, The Clansman 373). Its not only the graves of white
Civil War dead at issue here for Dixon, but also the body of the white
South itself, which had to be redeemed from [the] shame (374) of fed-
eral Reconstruction. For Dixon, only the mystical and military powers of
the Klan may restore Anglo-Saxon honor and achieve true North/South
unity.
The events involving Bons murder in Faulkners Absalom reproduce
neither Chesnutts nor Dixons plots. Bon obviously is not a black ser-
vant, nor is he a white son and heir. His corpse is metaphorically, not
literally, exhumed. Its doubtful Faulkner knew Chesnutts work, and what
Faulkner thought of Dixon is unrecorded, though we know that as a school-
boy Faulkner received a gift copy of The Clansman and saw a theatrical
performance of that best-selling novel in Oxford in 1908, just a month or
so after a lynching there.4 Light in August contravenes and Absalom abjures
Dixons plot resolutions, but Faulkner remains possessed, as were Twain,
Chesnutt, and Dixon, with how the un-buried past haunts the living.
 Truth so mazed: Faulkner and US plantation fiction 173
Faulkners dangerous move in both Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down,
Moses (1942) was to read popular plantation-fiction plots as defense mecha-
nisms. (Sigmund Freuds daughter Anna popularized the term in Ego and
the Mechanisms of Defense [1936].5 ) Narratives of revenge or reconciliation
became tales warped by the forces of repression, transference, and resis-
tance. Self-divided protagonists disastrously impose a singular vision onto
the labyrinth of history the race purity and aristocratic standing signified
by Sutpens 100 acres in Absalom, for instance, or Ike McCaslins attempt
to repudiate the past in The Bear. In each of these cases, the protagonist
becomes embroiled in counter-narratives that cannot be controlled. Absa-
lom undoes repression with eros, an erotic attraction to what is denied or
abused, whereas Isaac McCaslin of Go Down, Moses the least driven by
eros of all of Faulkners major characters tries to track and expunge the
lies of history as if he were stalking a bear in the woods. If Sutpens goal is
to rewrite his own past, Ikes goal is even more ambitious: to free himself
from what (in a different context) James Joyces Stephen Dedalus called
the nightmare of history.
Thomas Sutpens epic scheme to join the white planter class in Mis-
sissippi collapses when his black Haitian-born son Charles Bon shows
up demanding recognition from the father and the right to marry Judith
Sutpen, his unacknowledged half-sister, and then is murdered at the gates
to the plantation by his half-brother Henry. Early in the novel, when Judith
and Henry are young children, their father stages a wrestling match in the
plantation stables to demonstrate to his son his physical as well as mental
racial superiority as a patriarch. Sutpen is victorious, yet his intended initia-
tion of Henry into whiteness what Rosa Coldfield, this sections narrator,
somewhat archly calls a spectacle . . . toward the retention of supremacy,
domination (21) goes drastically wrong in ways that foreshadow the
doom of Sutpens entire project. Henry gets physically sick from the scenes
violence, while his sister Judith who wasnt even supposed to be present
is stimulated by both her fathers and his slaves sweat- and blood-slick bod-
ies in the firelight. The final image of the chapter stresses not just Judiths
attraction to the caged snake (21) of her fathers manhood, but also the
erotic ambiguity of Sutpen racial identity (at least as it is imagined by Rosa):
I was not there to see the two Sutpen faces this time once on Judith
and once on the negro girl beside her looking down (22). Judiths later
sexual attraction to Charles Bon is caused not just by rebellion against her
father or Charles handsome air of worldly sophistication, but also because
of the charge instilled in Judith by this primal scene at the climax of Absa-
loms first chapter. Absalom thus replaces the gendered white-supremacist
174 Peter Schmidt
romance conventions of plantation fiction with a narrative driven by the
eros of racial mixture. But not just that: Rosas sexual obsession with the
story she tells is feverishly denied even as it is being narrated. Rosa sees with
Judiths eyes, but in her retelling of the primal scene she tries mightily to
identify with Sutpens wife Ellens outrage, not Judiths gaze. The psycho-
logical complexities here contain Absalom in microcosm, rewriting plots
meant to reaffirm proper race, class, and gender boundaries as repressed
erotic transgression, transference, and introjection.
The novella The Bear in Go Down, Moses, written in the same decade as
Absalom but published in final form in 1942, challenges plantation fiction
differently, though it too features a patriarchs erotic attraction to both
blackness and violent domination. Originally conceived as an epic story
of a bear hunt in which its boy hero, Ike McCaslin, under the tutelage of
Sam Fathers learns how Nature may redeem fallen human history, The
Bear in its expanded form contains Part 4, a different kind of quest. Ike
investigates the ledgers chronicling his own familys plantation history,
reading between the lines to discover silenced stories about the McCaslins
and their slaves. But if Nature and Sam Fathers inspire Ike to see if times
losses and the sins of history may be repudiated denied and free (269),
those dusty ledgers turn out to be a formidable antagonist. Ike hopes
to cleanse himself of the evil he discovers his grandfather Carothers
McCaslins rape of slaves, including his own daughter, and his fathers and
uncles compounded complicity in many other injustices but Faulkners
narrative shows Ike to be tragically deluded.
The keyword in The Bear signifying times tragic form is mazed:
Faulkners novella, like Absalom, mazes any straightforward truth or lin-
ear heroic narrative. [T]he whole plantation in its mazed and intricate
entirety, the narrator calls it after Ike asserts his inheritance is so cursed
that he must renounce it (284). History itself is so tangled and misunder-
stood that Ikes cousin McCaslin invents a special verb to describe the mess:
Buck and Buddy to fumble-heed that truth so mazed for them (269).
Ike hopes he can buy forgiveness for his grandfathers sins the way one
pays down debts, amortizing them with cash to Carothers remaining
black kin as Ike executes the old mans will. But even as Ike carries out his
plan he realizes its futility. The money wont teach its recipients to use well
their freedom; indeed it commodifies human relations just as slavery did.
As Ike imagines it, Carothers will was flinging almost contemptuously,
as he might a cast-off hat or pair of shoes, the thousand dollars . . . So I
reckon that was cheaper than saying My son to a nigger (258). Like Sutpen,
Carothers refuses to acknowledge his son.
 Truth so mazed: Faulkner and US plantation fiction 175
The yellowed plantation ledgers from slavery time and afterwards in
The Bear emphasize white power in an unusual way: instead of the
tedious recording filling this page of wages day by day and food and cloth-
ing charged against [McCaslin blacks] (257), they selectively record births
and deaths and other life events, as if these too were property transactions.
Faulkner juxtaposes the neat linearity of the ledger entries with a spot on
the flooring next to the desk in the plantation office: the scuffed patch
on the floor where two decades of heavy shoes had stood while the white
man at the desk added and multiplied and subtracted (279). For Ike, these
anonymous inscriptions rubbed into the wood mark the unredeemable,
silent, and continuous expression of black suffering.6 Such marks and the
lives they imperfectly represent can never be fully amortized; they are his-
torys tragic maze in physical form, forever canceling Ikes attempts to be a
Christ-like figure. This scuffed patch also excoriates plantation fictions
lies about slavery and postslavery planter regimes treating blacks as part of
the family, as their white mans burden.
Like Absalom, The Bear embodies mazed truth in both the micro
and macro levels of its storytelling, from the gnarled, spiraling syntax of
its sentences to its overall concatenated structure. Ikes wilderness training
from Sam Fathers convinces him that time is redeemable if the right ritual
can be found. Death may even be undone and time reversed, as in this
magnificent excerpt from Ikes meditation at Sams and Lions grave in
The Bear, Part 5:
. . . quitting the knoll which was no abode of the dead because there was no
death, not Lion and not Sam: not held fast in earth but free in earth and not
in earth but of earth, myriad yet undiffused of every myriad part . . . dark
and dawn and dark and dawn again in their immutable progression and,
being myriad, one (313)

In Ikes invocation here, identities are not separate but part of an eternal
cycle, and the hunt that killed Old Ben the bear replays itself eternally,
reversing times losses, including the bears dismemberment and Lions
disemboweling, while the heroic ritual of the chase continues on in its own
immutable progression, forever a part of Natures rhythms of rebirth.
Even a twist of tobacco, a new bandanna handkerchief, and peppermint
candy Ikes graveside offerings honoring Sam are translated (313) from
store-bought commodities into a sacred gift economy where there is no
death, only transformation.
Fallen human history proves more recalcitrant. The Bear doesnt end
with Ike safely transported into sacred time. After Ikes encounter with a
176 Peter Schmidt
snake, an avatar of Sam Fathers spirit, his equilibrium is invaded by the
sound of Boon hammering on a broken gun so he can slaughter squirrels
trapped in a gum tree. Boons hoarse screams are ironically juxtaposed with
the stealthy silence of legal contracts bequeathing to lumber corporations
the right to divide and log the wilderness Ike so reveres. Dont touch a one
of them! Theyre mine! (315) could be the logging companys credo, not
just Boons. Sams tracking and hunting skills passed down to Ike may have
proven invaluable in the forest and in Ikes quest to decode the hidden
meanings buried in his familys ledgers. Yet in those plantation records
Ike encounters a form of time that can neither be amortized safely paid
down and made past nor cleansed through sacred ritual. Instead, Ike
encounters time fallen and mazed, stubbornly entangling all involved. As
Faulkner wrote in Requiem for a Nun (1951), The past is never dead. Its
not even past (73).
Faulkners prose not only often muddles past, present, and future; it also
frequently represents an action through a kind of demonic gerund verb
always continuing and compounding itself, with no easily identifiable
points where an event can be said to have begun, much less concluded.
(Look at how the movement of Ike quitting the grave knoll is represented
in the previous indented quotation, for instance.) Such constructions desta-
bilize the nouns that would be subjects in a sentence, just as the forces of
history influence human identities in unknowable ways and render them
unstable, divided, opaque. Even a purported master can be displaced
as his sentences sovereign subject by his slaves. Such a grammatical slave
rebellion occurs in what is perhaps the most Faulknerian sentence in The
Bear, which runs in Part 4 from page 250 to many pages thereafter (it
depends how you count). The sentence begins trying to chronicle the
actions of Ikes father and uncle, Buck and Buddy McCaslin, as recreated
in Ikes imagination based on his scrutiny of the ledger data. Soon there is
trouble: the sentences subject noun, the twins (i.e., Buck and Buddy),
is dislodged in the syntax by their property, a long list of McCaslin
slaves, Roscius and Phoebe and Thucydides and Eunice, down to the
anomaly calling itself Percival Brownlee (252). This list of myriad subject
nouns is then itself pushed aside for a three-page-long parenthesis unpacking
the single page (252) of the plantation ledger that is one source, along
with family stories, for the information we are reading. This parenthesis
samples and annotates ledger entries by Buck and Buddy written in the
same italics used for Ikes inner thoughts. It does not conclude until the
middle of page 254, after which we finally get the sentences primary verb
and then another long clause modifying both that verb and the sentences
 Truth so mazed: Faulkner and US plantation fiction 177
subject nouns: . . . took substance and even a sort of shadowy life with
their passions and complexities too as page followed page and year year; all
there, . . . tragedy which . . . could never be amortized (254). The subjects
who take on substance and life here in Ikes imagination are the McCaslin
slaves and their free descendants, wresting agency away from their masters
and, we might even say, breaking the bounds of the parenthesis in which
they were enclosed. Yet even as this lengthy sentence displaces white male
power, it surely also simultaneously entangles whites and blacks in eternal
struggle.
As Ike reads between the lines of the ledger entries, he finds not emerging
free agency for slaves and ex-slaves but a repressed history of rape, suicide,
and incest leading him to the conclusion that his family and the South
itself is cursed and that all he can do is to try to renounce this inheritance.
Ikes impossible hope to extricate himself from white guilt is partly inspired
by Sam Fathers vision of redeeming Nature. But Ike is also motivated by
another, surprising source one of the heirs of Carothers guilt money,
Lucas Beauchamp. Lucas stages his own version of a lexical slave rebellion,
literally appropriating a white masters power to rewrite his own history.
He was originally named Lucius but he altered its spelling while proudly
keeping all of the other family names: his full name is Lucas Quintus
Carothers McCaslin Beauchamp. In Part 4, Ike imagines Lucas in 1874,
after Buck and Buddy have both died, inserting his new name into the
McCaslin ledgers and even (ironically?) using Buck and Buddys writerly
voice. This event is the opposite of the silent patch of scuffed flooring: Lucas
here signifies that he is the sole living direct male heir of the old patriarchs.
In Ikes words, simply taking the name and changing, altering it, making
it no longer the white mans but his own, by himself composed, himself
selfprogenitive and nominate, by himself ancestored, as, for all the old
ledgers recorded to the contrary, old Carothers himself was (269). Lucas
gives Ike the powerful hope that he too can repudiate sin-filled McCaslin
history. Yet Lucas in life hardly provides a model of responsible freedom,
and the project of self-generation that Ike imagines for Lucas repeats rather
than negates some of the failings of Lucas father. Ikes attempts to leap free
from family trauma also fail. The tragedy of The Bear is that financial
transactions cannot free Ike from guilt-debt, nor can he or Lucas uncoil
themselves from Carothers legacy simply by claiming authorship of their
own lives.
The ironies or contradictions attending Ikes and Lucas actions
bedevil Faulkners authorial project as well. The genius of The Bear
exists in highlighting such a paradox, not repressing it. Far from being
178 Peter Schmidt
selfprogenitive, the narrative voice of Faulkners novella finds itself recy-
cling old assumptions and plotlines not just those of Faulkners white
plantation fiction predecessors, but also those of historians like William
Archibald Dunning, who, in the 1890s and after as Jim Crow segregation
was being instituted throughout the South, wrote accounts of the War and
Reconstruction to justify new forms of white rule as a model for the nation
and its new imperial colonies.7 Faulkners distinctive fictional voice is
profoundly intertextual, not autonomous or singular.
The narrator of The Bear, particularly in Part 4, for instance, doesnt
just shift between McCaslin Edmonds and Ikes words as they debate how
to understand history. At particularly tension-filled moments it also subtly
morphs into an unpredictable and ideologically loaded third-person voice.
Mixed with Ikes (and Faulkners) progressive views of the Souths sins
and need for atonement lurk many narrative memes recycled from earlier
writings by whites reinterpreting the War and Reconstruction to demon-
strate the tough benevolence of white rule. Ike paints a picture of heroic
plantation mistresses that could have been lifted directly out of antebellum
defenses of slavery as more humane than northern wage-based capitalism:
wives and daughters at least made soups and jellies for [slaves] when they
were sick and carried the trays through the mud and the winter too into
the stinking cabins and sat in the stinking cabins and kept fires going
until crises came and passed (273). A few pages later, Faulkner bestows
third-person narrative authority onto familiar representations of Recon-
struction as that dark corrupt and bloody time (276). Newly freed blacks
are those upon whom freedom and equality had been dumped overnight
and without warning or preparation or any training in how to employ it
or even just endure it and who misused it not as children would nor yet
because they had been so long in bondage . . . but misused it as human
beings always misuse freedom (277). Black illiteracy making Reconstruc-
tion government a farce a claim common to anti-Reconstruction articles,
cartoons, and fiction, as Eric Foner has shown8 is validated as truth via
this same narrative voice, particularly in the portrait of an ex-slave not so
subtly named Sickymo who became a United States marshal in Jefferson
and signed his official papers with a crude cross (279). Faulkners narrator
even suggests that Ku Klux Klan lynching parties were primarily composed
of descendants of Union Army quartermasters and contractors who stayed
after the War but soon were engaged in a fierce economic competition of
small sloven farms with the black men they were supposed to have freed
(277). True, there are some details in this Faulknerian panorama that would
be at home in pro-Reconstruction literature, such as the novels of Albion
 Truth so mazed: Faulkner and US plantation fiction 179
Tourgee depicting terrorist acts against postwar reforms: men shot dead in
polling booths with the still wet pen in one hand and the unblotted ballot
in the other (2789). But immediately after this particular detail in The
Bear we get the cliched portrait of Sickymo as an emblem of Reconstruc-
tions folly. (Compare the negative representations of Reconstruction in
Faulkners The Unvanquished [1938].) Faulkners various narrators in The
Bear are thus full of ideological and rhetorical detritus from the US past
even while they borrow Biblical rhetoric to give voice to Ike McCaslins
yearning to escape it all.
Sentimental plantation fiction about the South became popular because
it gave a powerful new spin to American exceptionalism, that discourse
whereby trials and suffering were converted into tests to be passed in order
to reaffirm Gods favor and Americas special role in redeeming world
history. Many of Faulkners characters are deeply invested in exceptionalist
rhetoric too, as when Ike in The Bear invokes that whole hopeful
continent dedicated as a refuge and sanctuary of liberty and freedom
from what you [McCaslin] called the old worlds worthless evening (271).
Even while calling the South cursed, Ike assumes that repudiation and
atonement will somehow return fallen American history to sacred time,
just as he believes the truly American self claims the right to rewrite history
and become selfprogenitive, by himself composed. Yet the very texture
of Faulkners sentences and the structure of his fictions obviate such dreams.
Ikes and McCaslins language and Faulkners as well remains weighed
down by the ledgers and discourses of a past that is not past, haunted by
the unspeakable black suffering it yearns to render as either payable debt
or something redeemable by a single heroic white mans gesture.
The somber point here is not just that Faulkners narrative lends its
authority to familiar anti-Reconstruction cliches, but that Faulkners (and
Ikes) fondness for the discourses marketed by American exceptionalism
and plantation fiction are mazed. Instead of simply being reaffirmed, the
facts and narrative frames that pass for such history are placed in a ver-
tiginous space on Faulkners pages where they are subjected to questioning,
interpolation, and revision. The true context of Faulkners plantation
fiction legacy is thus neither outside of Faulkners texts, safely part of his
and our literary past, nor definitively atoned for within his texts present
action. Context and history in Faulkner function like his gerund verbs: they
enact ongoing traumas occurring on continuously contested terrain.
In mazing the past while repeating it with a difference, Faulkner opened
the boundaries of the US South and its history to redefinition and trans-
formation a shift that proved far more subversive than any claim to
180 Peter Schmidt
redeem it. We can thus, as we do today, place Faulkner in conversation
with all those who trace the shadows plantation slaverys history casts onto

our present: Gabriel Garca Marquez and Edouard Glissant,9 for instance,
but see also the other essays in this volume and, for cogent assessments of
an invented South in US memory, scholars such as Lott, Kreyling, Hale,
McPherson, Duck, Greeson, Romine, Ring, and Porter.10 A younger gen-
eration of cultural historians, such as Amy Clukey, locate Faulkner in the
context of the plantation/urban nexus in Ireland, the Caribbean, the United
Kingdom, the United States, and elsewhere, including figures as diverse
as Ellen Glasgow, James Joyce, Elizabeth Bowen, W. Somerset Maugham,
Mulk Raj Anand, Liam OFlaherty, Arna Bontemps, Eric Walrond, Jean
Rhys, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, and Carlos Bulosan.

NOTES
1 See Lucinda H. MacKethan, Plantation Fiction, 18651900, in The His-
tory of Southern Literature, ed. Louis D. Rubin, Jr. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1985), pp. 20918; Jeremy Wells, Romances of the White
Mans Burden: Race, Empire, and the Plantation in American Literature, 1880
1936 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2011); Amy Clukey, Plantation
Modernism: Transatlantic Anglophone Fiction, 18901950 (book manuscript in
progress).
2 Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 2002); Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn (eds.),
Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2004); Peter Schmidt, Sitting in Darkness: New South Fiction, Education,
and the Rise of Jim Crow Colonialism, 18651920 (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2008); Jennifer Rae Greeson, Our South: Geographic Fantasy and
the Rise of National Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010);
Natalie J. Ring, The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State,
18801930 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012); Wells, Romances of the
White Mans Burden.
3 Charles W. Chesnutt, The Colonels Dream (New York: Doubleday Page, 1905);
Thomas Dixon, The Clansman; An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan
(New York: Doubleday Page, 1905).
4 Joseph L. Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography (New York: Random House, 1974),
pp. 20, 33; Philip M. Weinstein, Becoming Faulkner: The Art and Life of William
Faulkner (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 46; Joel Williamson,
Faulkner and Southern History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995),
p. 162.
5 Anna Freud, Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense: The Writings of Anna Freud,
revised edition, 2 vols. (Madison, CN: International Universities Press, 1984),
vol. II.
 Truth so mazed: Faulkner and US plantation fiction 181
6 For more on throwaway bodies and the unnamed abject in southern fiction,
see Patricia Yaeger, Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Womens Writing,
19301990 (University of Chicago Press, 2000).
7 William Archibald Dunning, Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction and
Related Topics (1897; New York: Harper & Row, 1965).
8 Eric Foner, Reconstruction: Americas Unfinished Revolution, 18631877 (New
York: Harper & Row, 1988).
9 Gabriel Garca Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. Gregory Rabassa

(New York: Harper Perennial, 2006); Edouard Glissant, Faulkner, Mississippi
(Paris: Stock, 1996).
10 Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Michael Kreyling, Inventing South-
ern Literature (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998); Grace Elizabeth
Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 18901940
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1998); Tara McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie:
Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2003); Leigh Anne Duck, The Nations Region: Southern Modernism, Seg-
regation, and US Nationalism (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2006);
Greeson, Our South; Scott Romine, The Real South: Southern Narrative in the
Age of Cultural Reproduction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
2008); Ring, The Problem South; Carolyn Porter, Gone With the Wind and
Absalom, Absalom! in A New Literary History of America, eds. Greil Marcus
and Werner Sollors (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 70510.
Modernism
 chapter 1 6

Faulkner and the Modernist novel

Jacques Pothier

Faulkners connection with the Western modernist novel as internationally

exemplified by Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf,
and John Dos Passos, to name only a few, is well-known.1 The purpose of
this short study is to outline how much the construction of a thoroughly
innovative technique that put Faulkner among the most original modernist
writers is grounded in concerns previously addressed in the tradition of the
Western novel.
The first paragraph of Faulkners Father Abraham, the draft of a novel he
started to write simultaneously with Flags in the Dust (published as Sartoris
in 1929), gives an excellent example of this transitional process:
He is a living example of the astonishing byblows of mans utopian dreams
actually functioning; in this case the dream is Democracy. He will become
legendary in time, but he has always been symbolic. Legendary as Roland
and as symbolic of a form of behavior; as symbolic of an age and a region
as his predecessor, a portly man with a white imperial and a shoestring tie
and a two gallon hat, was; as symbolic and as typical of a frame of mind as
Buddha is today. With this difference: Buddha contemplates an abstraction
and derives a secret amusement of it; while he behind the new plate glass
window of his recently remodelled bank, dwells with neither lust nor alarm
on the plump yet disturbing image of his silkclad wife passing the time of
day with Colonel Winword in front of the postoffice. (13)

This introduction may be disturbingly cryptic the character is mysteri-

ously referred to as he and for the moment remains unnamed (the name
Flem Snopes appears a couple of pages further down); the scene is static,
a picture of a couple watched through the frame of a window. The use
of anonymous personal pronouns and such frozen scenes will be recurrent
features in Faulkners fiction. They figure as arrested snapshots embodying
the tensions underlying the novel. But these social tensions are reminis-
cent of the plots in nineteenth century realist novels: the protagonist is
a common man whose status is raised to heroic dimensions because he
185
186 Jacques Pothier
represents a symbolic social situation, reflecting the evolution of a society,
and his ascent from lowly to elevated status implies that he has had to
make compromises to overcome the tensions of his society. In this case it
is suggested that the protagonists rise came at the price of his wifes affair
with a member of the local gentry.
The adulterous wife, the husband, the lover a classic triangle, through
which Flaubert had criticized the mediocrity of the provincial bourgeoisie
in Madame Bovary, Moeurs de province (1856), a novel Faulkner read early.
Philip Cohen has shown what Belle Mitchells affair with Horace Benbow in
Flags in the Dust/Sartoris owed to Flauberts novel.2 This novel, Faulkners
first foray into his fictitious county, is not content with mocking the
provincial middle class: its ambition is also to present the whole com-
plexity of Southern society the declining aristocracy, rural whites, the
rising population of shopkeepers and clerks in the burgeoning towns, and
segregated blacks. Surveying a cross section of the population is closely
reminiscent of the manner of Balzacs La Comedie Humaine.3 In the golden
age of the realist novel, fiction explores society broadly as a function of the
main protagonist of each novel (Julien Sorel in Stendhals Rouge et le Noir
[1830], Jean Valjean in Victor Hugos Les Miserables [1862], Pip in Dickenss
Great Expectations [1860], Maggie Tulliver in George Eliots The Mill on
the Floss [1860], Jude Fawley in Thomas Hardys Jude the Obscure [1895],
and countless other examples).
The nineteenth century continental novel showed the individual con-
fronting a social system that might frustrate him for various reasons, and
as he struggled either he was tragically crushed by the forces that he had
thought he could deal with, or he discovered and mastered the rules of a
society that the author helped the reader understand via the illustration
of episodes in the heros journey through life Dickenss Great Expecta-
tions being the paradigm of this kind of Bildungsroman. Flags in the Dust,
Faulkners first large project set in the fictional South of Yoknapatawpha
County, featuring the rivalry between declining gentry and rising poor
whites the Sartorises and Snopeses, respectively was to be a sociological
fresco of the region and depict its main social groups. Even though this
exact perspective was not replicated in the dozen Yoknapatawpha novels
and many short stories that came out after this one, many critics kept see-
ing Faulkner as the Balzac of the South, whose novels made up a Human
Comedy of sorts, until Malcolm Cowley eventually made the chronologi-
cal exploration of fictional Yoknapatawpha County the organizing principle
of his selection of Faulkners works for the Faulkner Reader he was editing.
Merrill Hortons comprehensive article on Balzacian Evolution and the
 Faulkner and the Modernist novel 187
Origin of the Snopeses shows the extent of Balzacs footprint in the Snopes
material alone. Horton demonstrates how closely Faulkner adapted the
Balzacian design of creating a comprehensive cosmos of his own to rival
Gods creation.
But the seeming triumph of realism in the mid-nineteenth century
should not conceal another undercurrent that was to flourish in the twen-
tieth century: as Western literature claimed an innocent ambition to con-
quer the world, some of its major agents were also acutely aware of the
capacity of literature to expose the limitations of language and of con-
sciousness. As Sartre notes in his extended study of Flaubert, by the mid
nineteenth century, the agenda of literature assigns a strange destiny to the
aspiring authors: they will only confirm their vocation as artists if in their
works literature questions itself and if, through their failure, it reveals its
impossibility.4
The situation of Fabrice Del Dongo, a young soldier at the battle of
Waterloo in Stendhals Charterhouse of Parma (1839), is emblematic, as con-
temporary author Pierre Bergougnioux points out: this scene is described
from the point of view of the protagonist, who does not have any sense of
what is happening around him but Stendhal is not a modernist yet: he
fails to seize the potentialities of this dislocation and retains the authors
posture of omniscience.5 The society is problematic: the industrial revo-
lution, the collapse of the old order, and the political turmoil of the first
half of the century have made the world strange, and the individuals have
to fend for themselves, unprotected by their traditional communities. But
Stendhal will clarify: this is still the realist novel. Through the novel, the
narrator discovers with the hero (the narrator often being the same person
as the hero, looking back on a younger self of whom he can now make
sense) how the world now works. The plot of the novel imitates life, and
through peripeteias builds up to a clarification, a resolution. The exam-
ple of a single individuals destiny has universal scope: it is meant to be
symbolic of an age and a region, as Faulkner puts it.
Faulkners manner draws from nineteenth century literary realism sev-
eral devices: recurrent characters build up the sense that there is a diegetic
world of Yoknapatawpha County that lives on as a background to stories
and novels. Such reappearing characters are an element of verisimilitude
that Faulkner borrowed from Balzac and others; at least in one instance
(Snopes) a story spreads over several novels, following the ramifications of
a family, in the manner of the great sagas of the turn of the century, from
Zolas Rougon-Macquart (187193) to Galsworthys Forsyte Saga (190621)
or Thomas Manns Buddenbrooks (1901). Faulkners recurrent characters
188 Jacques Pothier
inhabit an imaginary locale used as the setting for much of his fiction. The
fictitious postage stamp of native soil that he later said Sherwood Ander-
son encouraged him to explore in his Yoknapatawpha novels might have
been inspired by Thomas Hardys Wessex novels. Both fictitious counties
include actual locations, as well as places with fictionalized names: Wes-
sex includes Bath, Plymouth, and Southampton, but also Christminster
(Oxford) and Casterbridge (Dorchester), just as Yoknapatawpha County,
with Jefferson (Oxford), is set on an axis between Memphis and New
Orleans.
Faulkners Early Prose and Poetry shows that as a young man he was an
ambitious literary critic, eager to absorb the trends in the latest modernist
literature emanating from Britain and the continent. An early reader of
James Joyce, like him becoming the literary standard-bearer of what for
some was but a cultural desert, he would certainly have been interested
in T. S. Eliots famous review of Ulysses (1922) in 1923, Ulysses, Order,
and Myth.6 According to Eliot, Joyces allusions to the ancient myths
provided the modernist focus that was hitherto lacking in the meaningless
twentieth century world of fallen idols: It is simply a way of controlling, of
ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of
futility and anarchy which is contemporary history . . . . Instead of narrative
method, we may now use the mythical method (1778). In The Waste
Land (1922), Eliot registers the lost center of reference in the contemporary
world after the killing fields of World War I, and his poem reflects a post-
apocalyptic chaos. In The Hollow Men (1925) Eliot also exposes the
shallow or uncertain values of his contemporaries, but the poem begins
with a quotation from Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness (1899): Mistah
Kurtz he dead. Faulkner shares Eliots diagnosis (a chapter of Pylon [1935]
borrows its title from Eliots The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock [1915]),
but he takes his stance one step further, suggesting that there may not be
any more axis to the world not even the return to ancient myths. The
disruption of perspective is reflected in the cubist and futurist paintings
of the time in which figure and ground tend to fade into each other, and
which Faulkner tried to emulate in writing.
Faulkner too follows in Conrads footsteps. Conradian impressionism
its insistence on representing the world according to the limited perspective
of individuals inhabiting it rather than the objective stance of an all-seeing
narrator underlines a revolution in Western novelistic procedures, Philip
Weinstein writes.7 It is a revolution that had been brewing for a while: Edgar
Allan Poe was aware that the sense of the uncanny was more effectively
 Faulkner and the Modernist novel 189
produced in fiction by adopting the point of view of an over-sensitive
narrator, and Henry James further explored the frailty of subjective point
of view and the unreliability of the narrator, especially through stories of the
supernatural, the most famous of which is probably The Turn of the Screw
(1898). Conrad, alienated from his native language, stages narrators whose
understandings of the world are uncertain, perhaps illegitimate, certainly
unauthorized. He addresses how they negotiate this uncertainty, without
coming to a vision of a stable, organized world. The colonial worldview is
thus questioned.
Faulkners connection with Conrad is typical of his use of predecessors.
The earliest traces of Conradian influence are anecdotal, when he places
two short pieces, Black Music and Carcassonne, in the Conradian
setting of the Latin American city of Rincon, borrowing from Conrads
Nostromo (1904) (CS 799821, 895900). The protagonists in both stories
tell of the mental wanderings that lead them to this remote American
outpost.8 But it is with Absalom, Absalom! (1936) that Faulkner takes Con-
rads tentative confrontation with an uncertain world a step further. In this
novel Faulkner is not primarily interested in the story of Thomas Sutpen,
the poor white outsider become planter, but in Quentin Compson, the
reluctant recipient of his story. Likewise in Heart of Darkness Marlow as
narrator is an uncertain explorer in what he knew was a heart of darkness
in several respects, and he turns to his listeners to shore up his material.
Faulkner gives the narrative situation a new twist: Quentin has all but
stopped talking by the time he arrives at Harvard, and he is the one oth-
ers talk to. Faulkner writes: Quentin had grown up with that; the mere
names were interchangeable and almost myriad . . . his very body was an
empty hall echoing with sonorous defeated names; he was not a being, an
entity, he was a commonwealth. He was a barracks filled with stubborn
back-looking ghosts still recovering, even forty-three years afterward, from
the fever which had cured the disease (AA 7). He is the passive recipient
for a legacy of stories from the past that has already overwhelmed him,
since the reader knows that he committed suicide back in The Sound and
the Fury (1929).
In Faulkners version of the modernist novel, memory is not a tool to
understand the present, an accumulative resource of experience that helps
man make sense of the world, but a burden that weighs him down. The
darkness of the mind has been described clinically by Sigmund Freud,
who confirms the intuitions of the writers who sensed that, as Hawthorne
puts it in The Birthmark (1843), Truth often finds its way to the mind
190 Jacques Pothier
close muffled in robes of sleep, and then speaks with uncompromising
directness of matters in regard to which we practise [sic] an unconscious
self-deception during our waking moments.9 Except that Freud found
out, and Faulkner was convinced, that truth was forever elusive, in spite
of mans constant urge to connect causes and effects and achieve coherent
discourse.
Marcel Proust is another of Faulkners contemporaries who was sensitive
to the tricks of memory and to the flexibility of time frames, as scientifically
explored by Albert Einstein and philosophically theorized by Henri Berg-
son. Jean-Paul Sartre, a contemporary witness of the rise of the modern
novel, draws the parallel between the two authors:
Prousts fictional technique should have been Faulkners. It was the logical
conclusion of his metaphysics. But Faulkner is a lost man, and it is because
he feels lost that he takes risks and pursues his thought to its uttermost conse-
quences. Proust is a Frenchman and a classicist. The French lose themselves
only a little at a time and always manage to find themselves again.10

One of Prousts most famous scenes, when the taste of the crumbling
madeleine in a cup of tea gives access to the whole forgotten world of
the narrators childhood in Combray, finds a (possibly parodic) echo in a
passage of As I Lay Dying (1930), where a wealth of impressions from the
past well up for Darl from just tasting plain tepid water out of a dipper:
When I was a boy I first learned how much better water tastes when it has
set a while in a cedar bucket (10). As Sartre hinted, Prousts Remembrance of
Things Past (191327), a series of novels, does not break with the nineteenth
century assumption that the exploration of the past and of space should
make the world more intelligible the last novel of the series is entitled The
Past Recaptured, which suggests that the narrators art achieves a coherence,
but with Faulkner the past is not something you can hope to manage.
Faulkners manner, from the earliest texts, is typically to focus on an
arrested scene, like a point of intensity in time and space that serves as a
matrix, a crucible for the intensity of an experience that does not originate
in causes or circumstances. This is the frozen moment at the beginning of
Father Abraham, or the figure of Miss Emily with her father in A Rose
for Emily, drawn from a prose poem by Baudelaire,11 or, perhaps most
famously, the vision of the sisters dirty drawers as she watches the death
scene from a tree that Faulkner explicitly identified as the source for The
Sound and the Fury.
Although The Sound and the Fury was really Faulkners fourth published
novel after Soldiers Pay (1926), Mosquitoes (1927), and Sartoris, it is the
 Faulkner and the Modernist novel 191
novel that really established his status as a modernist author. The fragmen-
tation of point of view in the first three sections of The Sound and the Fury
via the very different mind-styles of the three Compson brothers broke
with the Western tradition of the novel. If, as we have noted above, the
traditional novel as a form tended to focus on one protagonists destiny,
and the way he or she grows to understand and struggle for a place in his
or her world, it makes sense that the novelist privileges the protagonists
point of view, and guides the reader in the revelation of this world. Usual
novelistic plot was a sequence of causes and consequences leading to a
resolution. In a radical shift away from this march to resolution, Faulkner
set side by side narrative points of views that were obviously partial or
flawed, thus depriving the reader of an authoritative subjectivity organiz-
ing the material. Moreover, Faulkner inherited effects of meaning from
techniques innovated for the emerging art of the silent movie, such as
montage and juxtaposition. He shared these attempts to rely on fragmen-
tation and its effects through montage with James Joyce, John Dos Passos,
and Virginia Woolf. Impressionistic effects of meaning could be derived
from the unmediated juxtaposition of scenes that were not connected.
Faulkner pushed this technique to the scale of a novel in The Wild Palms
(1939), wherein two independent plots alternate, both dealing with the
experience of breaking away from the cycle of habits and sterile repetitions,
at the risk of losing oneself. Faulkner himself never arrived at a definitive
narrative practice, but kept experimenting with innovative modes of story
telling.
With The Sound and the Fury he became aware that the experimental
construction of this book launched him into another dimension of literary
achievement at least that is how he described the experience in an
introduction to a new edition of this novel a few years later, after he had
written two more innovative novels, As I Lay Dying and Light in August
(1932):

. . . when I finished The Sound and the Fury . . . I discovered then that I had
gone through all which I had ever read from Henry James through Henty to
newspaper murders without making any distinction or digesting it either, as
a moth or a goat might. After The Sound and the Fury and without needing
to open another book and in a series of delayed repercussions like summer
thunder, I discovered the Flauberts and Dostoeveskys and Conrads, whose
books I had read 10 years ago.12

As a breakthrough, the novel still drew upon the whole span of the Amer-
ican fictional imagination, from highbrow (James) to popular (Henty). But
192 Jacques Pothier
it was more importantly in continuity with the international legacy of the
Western novel, signaled by the reference to European French, Russian,
and Polish/British writers. The early writings of William Faulkner bear
witness to his respect for this tradition. But Faulkner is also at the heart of
an incipient movement of suspicion toward the novels claim to account
adequately for the relationship between the individual and the world.

NOTES
1 See especially Philip Weinsteins informative comparative study, Unknowing:
The Work of Modernist Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).
2 Philip Cohen, Madame Bovary and Flags in the Dust: Flauberts Influence on
Faulkner, Comparative Literature Studies 22 (Fall 1985), 34461, reprinted in
William Faulkner: Six Decades of Criticism, ed. Linda Wagner-Martin (East
Lansing: Michigan University Press, 2002), pp. 37796.
3 Merrill Horton (Balzacian Evolution and the Origin of the Snopeses, The
Southern Literary Journal 33.1 [Fall 2000], 5581) provides a recent discussion
of this issue, previously explored by Philip Cohen (Balzac and Faulkner:
The Influence of La Comedie Humaine on Flags in the Dust and the Snopes
Trilogy, Mississippi Quarterly 37.3 [1984], 32551 and French Peasants and
Southern Snopes: Balzacs Les Paysans and Faulkners The Hamlet, Mississippi
Quarterly 40.4 [Fall 1987], 38392) and myself (The Designs of Faulkners
Yoknapatawpha Saga and Balzacs Human Comedy, Faulkner Journal 13.12
[Fall 1997/Spring 1998], 10930).
4 Jean-Paul Sartre, LIdiot de la famille, 3 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), vol. III,
p. 178 (my translation), quoted in Andre Bleikasten, Modernite de Faulkner
Delta 3 (1976), 170.
5 Pierre Bergougnioux, Jusqu`a Faulkner (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), pp. 313.
6 T. S. Eliot, Ulysses, Order, and Myth, in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank
Kermode (New York: Harcourt, 1975), pp. 1758.
7 Philip Weinstein, Make It New: Faulkner and Modernism, in A Companion
to William Faulkner, ed. Richard C. Moreland (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007),
p. 343.
8 For additional discussion of Faulkners legacy to Conrad, see Jacques Poth-
ier, Faulkner the Cannibal: Digesting Conrad, in Critical Insights: William
Faulkner, ed. Kathryn Stelmach Artuso (Ipswich, MS: Salem Press, 2013),
pp. 12541.
9 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Birthmark, in Tales (New York: Norton, 1987),
p. 121.
10 Jean-Paul Sartre, On The Sound and the Fury: Time in the World of Faulkner,
trans. Annette Michelson, in William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, ed.
David Minter (New York: Norton, 1994), p. 269. Originally published as A
propos de Le bruit et la fureur: la temporalite chez Faulkner, in Situations I
(Paris: Gallimard, 1947), p. 6475.
 Faulkner and the Modernist novel 193
11 In Eating Faulkner Eating Baudelaire: Multiple Rewritings and Cultural Can-
nibalism, Faulkner Journal 25.1 (Fall 2009), 6584, Scott G. Williams demon-
strates how Faulkner transposed one of Baudelaires prose poems, La Chambre
double, in A Rose for Emily.
12 William Faulkner, An Introduction to The Sound and the Fury in The Sound
and the Fury (Norton), p. 226.
 chapter 1 7

Faulkner goes to Hollywood

Sarah Gleeson-White

Nathanael West, in his great Hollywood novel, The Day of the Locust (1939),
famously described the motion picture capital as a dream dump.1 F. Scott
Fitzgerald similarly declared Hollywood a dump in the human sense
of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its
rich; full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.2 The troping
of Hollywood thus as both producer of and magnet for trash has
unfortunately also characterized scholarly attitudes to the screenwriting
careers of West and Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner, too, all of whom
were among those authors who migrated to the west coast on the advent
and development of sound film in the late 1920s through the early 1930s.
Only in the last five years or so have scholars begun in earnest to situate
Faulkners screenplays, so long figured as the detritus of his real work,
within the Faulkner canon. His screenwriting career, sustained over four
accumulative years between 1932 and 1955, was thought to have distracted
him from his real work, or at best, merely subsidized it. That Faulkner
received screen credit for only six of the approximately fifty properties
he worked on and that less than a third of these are in circulation does
little to aid scholarly attempts to salvage his screenwriting career.3 Tellingly,
however, in a handful of letters from the 1930s in which he describes his
work as trash, in every instance, it is the short stories and not the movie
work to which he refers.4
I want to give Faulkner the benefit of the doubt when he claimed in a 1956
Paris Review interview with Jean Stein that he took seriously his screenwrit-
ing. This is consistent with the many testaments to his screenwriting skills,
including those of Twentieth Century-Fox head Darryl Zanuck; MGM
wunderkind Irving Thalberg; Howard Hawks and his script girl, Meta
Carpenter Wilde; and fellow screenwriters Joel Sayre and A. I. Buzz
Bezzerides.5 And, the fact that over a twenty-year period Faulkner con-
tinued to be hired by the major studios even if under pressure from
agents and, most famously, Hawks must count for something. At the
194
 Faulkner goes to Hollywood 195
same time, however, we cannot ignore Faulkners scathing comments about
California in his letters and in the only one of his stories set in Los Ange-
les, Golden Land (1935). And, while Hollywood may not have been a
dump for Faulkner, it was not long before what he initially considered a
small gold mine turned out to be the salt mines (SL 110, 182). However,
whether or not he liked the industry does not in the end matter. For, either
way, he produced several accomplished screenplays for example, Turn
About/Today We Live, The Road to Glory, Sutters Gold, Drums
Along the Mohawk as well as screenplays that became what are generally
considered first-class films: To Have and Have Not (1944), Mildred Pierce
(1945), The Southerner (1945), and The Big Sleep (1946), to name a few.
What is particularly striking about Faulkners example is that he success-
fully managed parallel writing careers and did so over more than twenty
years. During the 1930s, for instance, while working on a vast number of
motion picture properties (roughly twenty-five) for two of Hollywoods
most powerful studios MGM and Twentieth Century-Fox with brief
stints at RKO (assigned to Gunga Din [1939]) and Universal (assigned
to Sutters Gold [1936]), he somehow managed simultaneously to produce
the bulk of what are now hailed as his most critically acclaimed works,
among them Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Unvan-
quished (1938), and Go Down, Moses (1942), in addition to more than
forty short stories. This is indeed, as Joseph Urgo puts it, a phenom-
enal bibliography.6 We have to wonder, I think, just how he managed
to produce the great novels as complex as they are as he simultane-
ously wrote Hollywood screenplays, characterized by a necessary stylistic
concision and transparency of meaning. His Hollywood activities exposed
him more immediately to the world of contract and collaborative labor;
he consequently locked [them] off into another room (Blotner, Selected
Letters 186) as part of that comparable world of publishers addresses and
book lists that likewise threatened to overwhelm the real writing.7 While
he may have been successful to some extent in maintaining the great divide
of high art and industrial practice, there is nonetheless some significant
leaching between the two arenas, something I return to below.
What exactly did Faulkner do in Hollywood? Under contract to the
major studios, he produced what are known as treatments (short prose
outlines of the proposed film, usually broken up into major scenes or
numbered plot developments and sometimes containing dialogue) as well
as screenplays adaptations of others fiction for the most part, although
he did write screen adaptations of roughly ten of his own stories as well
as several original screenplays.8 In these undertakings, he collaborated
196 Sarah Gleeson-White
with some of the most powerful and talented figures of the studio era:
Thalberg and Zanuck; leading American and European directors such
as Hawks, John Ford, and Jean Renoir; and major screenwriters such as
Nunnally Johnson and Bezzerides. It was in Hollywood, too, that Faulkner
encountered the work of Sergei Eisenstein, the great Soviet filmmaker
renowned for his experimentalism, particularly with regard to montage,
which, as well as sound-overlap and sound/image conflict, Bruce Kawin
and others since have identified as structuring so much of Faulkners fiction
(Kawin, Film 145).9
In addition to the collaborations that the motion picture work neces-
sitated, the many adaptations that Faulkner worked on almost always
required that he imaginatively move out of that postage stamp of native
soil, his fictional Yoknapatawpha county, into frequently foreign or at
least unfamiliar temporal and/or geographical settings and plots: the
Revolutionary-era frontier (Drums Along the Mohawk); World War I
Europe (The Road to Glory, Splinter Fleet/Submarine Patrol)10 ; World
War II Martinique (To Have and Have Not); postwar China (The Left
Hand of God); and, in two original film stories, ancient Egypt (Land of
the Pharaohs) and Central America (Mythical Latin-American Kingdom
Story). In order to produce his screenplay adaptations, then, Faulkner
acquainted himself with a range of American and European high and low
cultural texts he may not otherwise have encountered. Faulkner scholars
need now to draw into the discussion of the major work these various
source texts that Faulkner worked closely with as an essential component
of his screenwriting practice.11
It was Hawks who seems to have provided Faulkner with a crash course
in screenwriting on his arrival in Hollywood in May 1932, under contract
to MGM and in desperate need of money for an ever-increasing number
of dependents and subsequent to Sanctuarys disappointing sales. Hawks
brought Faulkner out to California after having read and been impressed
with Soldiers Pay (1926). Convinced Faulkner would make a fine screen-
writer, Hawks assigned him the task of writing a screenplay redaction of
one of his Faulkners own stories, Turn About, which became Today
We Live (1933). According to John T. Matthews, Faulkners screenplay
was so good that Thalberg gave Hawks permission to shoot it as it was
(Culture Industry 60). Hawks and Faulkners collaboration and friend-
ship continued over thirty years, with their last project together, Land of
the Pharaohs in 1955.12
The dramatic form was not new to Faulkner in 1932. He had, as a stu-
dent at the University of Mississippi in 1920, written and illustrated a play,
 Faulkner goes to Hollywood 197
The Marionettes, which already reveals, as Serena Haygood Blount notes,
an interest in the plasticity of form as manifested in the plays calligraphic
writing and his illustrations throughout as well as images that are per-
ceived as acoustic.13 Blounts insights locate in Faulkners very first creative
endeavor qualities we might argue are filmic, something he would struggle
with just how to represent sound and image ideographically? in both
his fiction and screenwriting over the course of his career.
The function or place of film in the work of this reputedly avid moviegoer
and most cinematic of novelists has generally been conceived of in two
not necessarily distinct ways: in terms of analogy and in terms of critique
(Kawin, Film 5).14 Kawins 1977 Faulkner and Film, arguably the fields
founding document, notably identified visual tropes associated with film
in Faulkners narrative strategies, as earlier mentioned. (Doug Baldwins
recent essay in The Faulkner Journal provides a useful overview of the
features of Faulkners fiction that scholars have identified as cinematic).15
Other scholars, such as Jeffrey J. Folks and David Murray, have provided
fascinating but oddly overlooked readings of Faulkners early fiction in
relation to silent film.16 Murray, for instance, finds affinities between the
screen antics of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin and sections of Go
Down, Moses and The Hamlet (1940). Folks, who surveys the films that
Faulkner might have watched in Oxfords Lyric Theatre as a young man,
concludes that in the period preceding his arrival in Hollywood, Faulkner
had already produced novels which . . . appear to reflect the techniques of
cinema and which contain shrewd film criticism such as in Mosquitoes
(1927) (171, 172). Most recently, in a richly suggestive essay designating The
Sound and the Fury (1929) Faulkners coming-to-sound, Jay Watson asks
us to Imagine . . . the artist late in 1927, a thirty-year-old author of three
novels, taking his exquisitely attuned sensibilities to the cinema to sample
the novelty and multisensory sweep of the talkies and the consequences
thereof.17
While Faulkners fiction might share certain strategies with film, it also
at times engages and responds to particular Hollywood plots. Take, for
example, that most compelling narrative of Southern history, The Birth of
a Nation, D. W. Griffiths technically brilliant and ideologically prob-
lematic 1915 adaptation of Thomas Dixons The Clansman (1905), a film
that, according to Peter Lurie, Faulkner almost certainly saw.18 Deborah
Barker has argued that Sanctuary (1931) revises Griffiths film in particular
its Southern rape complex by redirecting the focus of the . . . complex
from the image of the black male rapist to the figure of the decadent
Southern belle and the violent lower class white man.19 Lurie likewise
198 Sarah Gleeson-White
finds affinities between Griffiths film and Light in August and also with
Absalom, Absalom!: Rosa Coldfield offers a specific example of a conscious-
ness in the throes of a fascination with the Old South myth, propagated
by The Birth of a Nation (113). More broadly, for Lurie, Faulkners screen-
writing and movie-going experiences enabled him, in his fiction, to cri-
tique the reified, commodified relationship to history that he saw early film
encourage (105), a claim that echoes Pamela Rhodes and Richard Goddens
comparable reading of The Wild Palms (1939), which they call Faulkners
Hollywood novel.20 Taking a slightly different angle, Urgo argues that
Absalom, Absalom! is about movie-making, and the production of images
and moving pictures under the strange, forced, and often brutal conditions
of an environment foreign to everyone, Hollywood (56). Faulkners fic-
tion, then, can be understood as a critique of Hollywood culture and its
dominant narratives as it would seem to incorporate those strategies typi-
cally associated with cinema as part of a broader literary experimentalism
and ambition.
This unearthing of a cinematic Faulkner has produced groundbreaking
scholarship the repercussions of which extend beyond Faulkner studies
into broader considerations of the encounter of literary culture with media
technologies. At the same time, however, Faulkners actual screenplays
as opposed to the film adaptations of his fiction or the films to which
he contributed have largely (and strangely) been neglected. To be fair,
work on the screenplays has been impeded to some degree by the problem
of accessibility: the vast majority of Faulkners screenplays as with most
screenplays remain unpublished, existing in university and studio archives
in manuscript form only. Nonetheless, enough of the screenplays and
treatments around fifteen at last count have been published to provide
a compelling sense of Faulkners achievement in that form, enabling a
consideration of the place of the screenplays in the Faulkner oeuvre.21
The payoff in turning to the screenplays themselves to repeat, I do
not mean the films that were made of them is tremendous. Scholars
who are beginning to undertake this valuable if at times arduous work
include Kawin on the MGM screenplays; Dallas Hulsey, D. Matthew
Ramsey, and John T. Matthews on Turn About; Robert W. Hamblin and
Robert Brinkmeyer on The De Gaulle Story; Graziella Fantini on War
Birds/A Ghost Story; Stefan Solomon on Who?; Michelle E. Moore
on Dreadful Hollow; Jeff Karem on Slave Ship/The Last Slaver; Ben
Robbins on To Have and Have Not and Mildred Pierce; and my own
work on Drums Along the Mohawk and Sutters Gold.22 To take just
one example, Karem reads Slave Ship/The Last Slaver, which Faulkner
 Faulkner goes to Hollywood 199
wrote in 1936 for Twentieth Century-Fox, alongside Absalom, Absalom! to
show how Faulkners handling of the Caribbean and the Black Atlantic
both recalls and obscures these regions (162). Together, this relatively
recent scholarship on the screenplays produces a slightly skewed Faulkner,
a result of first, taking seriously the screenplays as objects worthy of study,
and second, reading these with care in the context of the entire oeuvre:
short stories, novels, speeches, essays, letters, teleplays the lot.
Hollywood was not the only sector of the culture industry for which
Faulkner wrote. He adapted several of his stories to television in the
1950s: The Brooch and Shall Not Perish for the New York-based Lux
Video Theater (CBS), sponsored by Lux Toilet Soap and briefly hosted
by James Mason, and a treatment of Old Man (from The Wild Palms;
Horton Foote wrote the subsequent teleplay). He also wrote an original
teleplay, The Graduation Dress, for General Electric Theatre (CBS),
which none other than Ronald Reagan hosted. William Furry includes an
intriguing letter to Faulkner from his agent Harold Ober: I am giving
Columbia Broadcasting System permission to telecast your story TWO
SOLDIERS over Television Station WCBW at some time within the next
nine days . . . Incidentally, you might be interested to know that when
CBS called about this story they said it was the first one they had bought
for television. Astonishingly, this letter is dated 1944, which means that
these negotiations over Two Soldiers took place in televisions infancy.
As Furry concludes, Faulkner was indeed a pioneer of sorts in American
television.23
Over the course of his career, Faulkner worked across various print
and broadcast media, and in this light, we would do well to continue
to rethink this so-called high modernist. While he is of course not the
only American author to be situated thus on the interface of literature
and cinema films narrative turn in the mid-1910s created the first in-
migration of eastern authors, and Cormac McCarthy springs to mind as
a high-profile litterateur who dabbles in screenwriting today I would
suggest that Faulkners case is particularly striking because of his very real
and sustained achievements across both modes. While his screenwriting
provided him with the income he apparently so needed in the 1930s and
1940s, it also provided him with the space actual and metaphoric to
experiment further with form. His screenwriting practice also enabled him
to engage, in markedly different form and for a significantly wider audience,
the contemporary political landscape, as indicated by his at times scathing
comments on, for example, big government in such 1930s screenplays as
Mythical Latin-American Kingdom and Drums Along the Mohawk,
200 Sarah Gleeson-White
rehearsals of sorts for those similar sentiments expressed in The Tall Men
(1941) and by Go Down, Moses Ike McCaslin. Close attention to Faulkners
varied engagements with film and the film industry promises ever greater
insights into the way in which literary authors navigated those emerging
and newly-established industrial forms and institutions in the first half of
the twentieth century.

NOTES
1 Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 99.
2 F. Scott Fitzgerald, To Alice Richardson, July 29, 1940, in The Letters of
F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Andrew Turnbull (New York: Scribners, 1963), p. 603.
3 According to Bruce Kawin in Faulkner and Film: An update, in Faulkner
at Fifty: Tutors and Tyros, eds. Marie Lienard-Yeterian and Gerald Preher
(Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, forthcoming 2014),
Faulkners published screenplays and treatments are:
Louis Daniel Brodsky and Robert W. Hamblin (eds.), Country Lawyer and
Other Stories for the Screen (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1987).
Contains Country Lawyer, The Life and Death of a Bomber, and
The Damned Dont Cry.
Louis Daniel Brodsky and Robert W. Hamblin (eds.), Faulkner, A Com-
prehensive Guide to the Brodsky Collection, vol. III: The De Gaulle Story
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984).
Louis Daniel Brodsky and Robert W. Hamblin (eds.), Faulkner, A Com-
prehensive Guide to the Brodsky Collection, vol. IV: Battle Cry (Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 1985).
Louis Daniel Brodsky and Robert W. Hamblin (eds.), Stallion Road: A
Screenplay (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989).
George P. Garrett, O. B. Hardison, Jr., and Jane R. Gelfman (eds.), Film
Scripts One (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1971). Contains The
Big Sleep.
John Gassner and Dudley Nichols (eds.), Best Film Plays 1945 (New York:
Crown, 1946). Contains The Southerner.
Bruce F. Kawin (ed.), Faulkners MGM Screenplays (Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press, 1982). Contains Manservant, The College Widow,
Absolution, Flying the Mail, Turn About/Today We Live, War
Birds, and Mythical Latin-American Kingdom Story.
Bruce F. Kawin (ed.), To Have and Have Not (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1980).
Joel Sayre and William Faulkner, The Road to Glory. Afterword by George
Garrett. (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press,
1981).
4 For example, see To Morton Goldman [Aug. 1934], and To Morton
Goldman [probably June 1936], in Selected Letters, pp. 84, 94.
 Faulkner goes to Hollywood 201
5 See Darryl Zanucks notes on Faulkners March 3, 1936 treatment of Banjo
on my knee, MSS 1680.1, Twentieth Century-Fox Collection, University of
Southern California Cinematic Arts Library; Thalberg in John T. Matthews,
Faulkner and the Culture Industry, in The Cambridge Companion to William
Faulkner, ed. Philip M. Weinstein (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1995); Meta Carpenter Wilde and Howard Hawks in Meta Carpenter Wilde
and Orin Borsten, A Loving Gentleman: The Love Story of William Faulkner
and Meta Carpenter (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), pp. 17, 27; Joel
Sayre, Box 8, Folder 3, Tape 14, 28 December 1973, Joel Sayre Papers, New
York Public Library; Louis Daniel Brodsky, Reflections on William Faulkner:
An interview with Albert I. Bezzerides, The Southern Review 18 (1982),
1758.
6 Joseph Urgo, Absalom, Absalom!: The Movie, American Literature 62.1 (1990),
57.
7 Philip Cohen and Doreen Fowler, William Faulkners introduction to The
Sound and the Fury, American Literature 62.2 (1990), 280.
8 Kawin, Faulkners MGM Screenplays (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,
1982), p. xvi. See the Faulkner filmography that Kawin provides in Faulkner
and Film. In an interesting reversal, Faulkners 1943 treatment, Who?, based
on an idea by Henry Hathaway and William Bacher, became A Fable (1954).
See Kawin, Faulkner and Film (New York: Ungar, 1977), p. 174. See also
Stefan Solomon, Faulkner and the Masses: A Hollywood Fable, in Faulkner
and Film, eds. Peter Lurie and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, forthcoming).
9 For a detailed account of the creative encounter of Faulkner with Eisenstein,
see Sarah Gleeson-White, William Faulkner, Screenwriter: Sutters Gold
and Drums Along the Mohawk, The Mississippi Quarterly 62.3 (2009), 427
42, and Sarah Gleeson-White, Auditory Exposures: Faulkner, Eisenstein and
Film Sound, PMLA 128.1 (2013), 87100. Both Eisenstein and Faulkner wrote
treatments of Blaise Cendrars novel of the Californian Gold Rush, Lor (Sutters
Gold): Eisenstein for Paramount in 1930, and Faulkner, using Eisensteins
treatment, for Universal in 1934.
10 Faulkner had written short stories set in World War One Europe before now,
including Ad Astra (1930) and Turn About (1932) he adapted the latter
for Howard Hawks at MGM in 1932, which became Today We Live. His first
extended narrative of the War is A Fable (1954).
11 Examples of this kind of work undertaken to date include my essay, Auditory
Exposures, which traces the trajectory from Cendrars Lor, to Eisensteins
and then Faulkners respective Sutters Gold treatments through to Absalom,
Absalom!. See Jay Bochner, La fortune de Lor en Amerique, in Cendrars
aujourdhui: Presence dun romancier (Paris: Minard, 1977), pp. 3559 for a
suggestive reading of Cendrars novel and Absalom, Absalom!. D. Matthew
Ramsey has examined the relationship of Les Croix de Bois (Wooden Crosses;
dir. Raymond Bernard, 1932) and The Road to Glory in an unpublished
paper, Carving a Penny Whistle Out of the Wood of Crosses: Faulkners
202 Sarah Gleeson-White
Screenplay for The Road to Glory, Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha Conference,
Oxford, MS, 19 July 2010.
12 On the Faulkner-Hawks collaboration, see Bruce F. Kawin, Faulkners Film
Career: The Years with Hawks, Faulkner, Modernism and Film, eds. Evans
Harrington and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1979),
pp. 16381; Kawin, Faulkner and Film; Kawin, Howard Hawks, Selected
Film Essays and Interviews (New York: Anthem Press, 2013), pp. 89128; and
Marie Lienard-Yeterian, Faulkner et le Cinema (Paris: Michel Houdiard Editeur,
2010).
13 Serena Haygood Blount, Faulkners Figures: Speech, Writing, and The Mar-
ionettes, in Faulkner and Formalism: Returns of the Text, eds. Annette Trefzer
and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012), p. 50.
14 For Faulkners youthful movie-going habits, see Murray C. Falkner, The Falk-
ners of Mississippi: A Memoir (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1967).
15 Doug Baldwin, Putting Images into Words: Elements of the Cinematic in
William Faulkners Prose, The Faulkner Journal 16.1/2 (2000/2001), 3565.
16 Jeffrey J. Folks, William Faulkner and the Silent Film, in The South and Film,
ed. Warren French (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1981), pp. 17182.
D. M. Murray, Faulkner, the Silent Comedies, and the Animated Cartoon,
Southern Humanities Review 9 (1975), 24157.
17 Jay Watson, The Unsynchable William Faulkner: Faulknerian Voice and Early
Sound Film, in Faulkner and the Media Ecology, eds. Julian Murphet and Stefan
Solomon (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, forthcoming).
18 Peter Lurie, Visions Immanence: Faulkner, Film, and the Popular Imagination
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), p. 107. The Birth of a
Nation was rereleased as a sound version in 1930.
19 Deborah E. Barker, Moonshine and Magnolias: The Story of Temple Drake
and The Birth of a Nation, in Faulkner and Whiteness, ed. Jay Watson (Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 2011), p. 110.
20 Pamela Rhodes and Richard Godden, The Wild Palms: Faulkners Hollywood
Novel, Amerikastudien 28.4 (1983), 44966. For a similar argument in the
context of Faulkners mass-magazine fiction, see Matthews, Faulkner and
the Culture Industry. James Blooms essay in this volume also considers the
connections between Hollywood and The Wild Palms.
21 My own volume of Faulkners six Twentieth Century-Fox screenplays is forth-
coming with Oxford University Press (USA).
22 Kawin, Faulkners MGM Screenplays; Dallas Hulsey, I dont seem to remem-
ber a girl in the story: Hollywoods Disruption of Faulkners All-Male Narrative
in Today We Live, Faulkner Journal 16.1/2 (2000/2001), 6577; D. Matthew
Ramsey, Touch me while you look at her: Stars, Fashion, and Authorship in
Today We Live, in Faulkner and Material Culture, eds. Joseph Urgo and Ann J.
Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), pp. 82103; Matthews,
Faulkner and the Culture Industry; Robert W. Hamblin, The Curious Case
of Faulkners The De Gaulle Story, The Faulkner Journal 16.1/2 (2000/2001),
 Faulkner goes to Hollywood 203
7987; Robert Brinkmeyer, The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and Euro-
pean Fascism, 19301950 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009);
Graziella Fantini, Faulkners War Birds/A Ghost Story: A Screenplay and its
Relationship with Faulkners Fiction, RSA Journal: Rivista di Studi Nord-
Americani 12 (2001), 6177; Solomon, Faulkner and the Masses; Michelle E.
Moore, The unsleeping cabal: Faulkners Fevered Vampires and the Other
South, The Faulkner Journal 24.2 (2009), 5576; Jeff Karem, Fear of a Black
Atlantic? African Passages in Absalom, Absalom! and The Last Slaver, in Global
Faulkner, eds. Annette Trefzer and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2009), p. 162; Ben Robbins, The Pragmatic Modernist: William
Faulkners Craft and Hollywoods Networks of Production, Journal of Screen-
writing 5.2 (2014), 23958; Sarah Gleeson-White, William Faulkner and
Auditory Exposures.
23 William Furry, Faulkner in a Haystack: The Search for William Faulkners
Television Adaptations of The Brooch and Shall Not Perish, Faulkner
Journal 16.1/2 (2000/2001), 11925.
Fictions of race
 chapter 1 8

Reading William Faulkner after the civil

rights era
Barbara Ladd

It is increasingly the case that students in my Southern literature classes at

Emory dont always know who is black and who is white in William
Faulkners work. I recall, in particular, a conversation about A Rose for
Emily (1930), in which it became clear to me that the student an
African American student thought the story was about an upper-class,
town-bred, somewhat repressed African American woman. It was not only
her relationship with her male house servant that persuaded him that she
too was African American, but the family relationships, the presence of
the powerful patriarch determined to protect his daughters status, and
especially the predicament of an upper-class African American woman in
the South, meaning the isolation, the repression, and her susceptibility to
the charms of the working man (Homer Barron was also envisioned as
black) with his loud-talking ways. Maybe this student was influenced by
Toni Morrisons portrait of the Dead sisters in Song of Solomon (1977), but
truthfully he could have encountered this depiction of upper-class African
American women from any number of African American texts and, as a
student in a major Southern university in the early 21st century, he was
quite familiar with African American literature as a category, certainly more
familiar with African American literature than with Southern writing or
William Faulkner. Anyway he was surprised to learn that most people have
read Emily Grierson as white. And as we (a white, working class, Southern
woman born in the 1950s and a young upper middle class black man born
in the late 1980s, not himself Southern but with Southern antecedents) sat
looking at each other, I was most aware not of the disconnect of age or
gender or background or race, not so much of a moment of recognition,
but that this moment of recognition, if that is what it was, was surprising
for him. I think that it was surprising because it undercut the idea that black
and white are easily distinguished categories, an idea that still applies in
most schools and universities in our post-identitarian era in spite of recent
work exploring the postracial (an unfortunate name for racial discourses
207
208 Barbara Ladd
after the post civil rights era), the experiences of mixed race populations,
and the impact of globalization on our racial imaginaries. It was probably
even more surprising because this conversation took place on Southern
ground as it were, i.e. on the very terrain within the United States most
associated with blackwhite segregation and racial violence.
Nevertheless, the fact is that black and white are not so easily distin-
guished in Faulkners work for many young readers, who do not necessarily
operate on the assumption that a character whose race is unmentioned is
white. Given the increasingly multiracial, multiethnic population of our
communities, why should they? Rather than to assume that these readers
need only to be corrected and perhaps dosed with some history, we might,
instead, want to accept the idea, at least provisionally, in order to see where
it takes us, because the mistake (if that is what it is) does raise important
questions about the future as well as the past of race in and beyond the
United States and how we read Faulkner.
We first begin to see serious treatment of the African American presence
and of the race issue in Faulkner criticism during the civil rights struggle of
the 1950s and 1960s, and many of the questions posed by scholars and critics
then continue to inform work done today.1 Perhaps the most fundamental
insight of this work is that Faulkners subject is white consciousness, and
perhaps the most persistent question is whether Faulkners work is racist
or not. It is also the case that slavery and its legacies were a compelling
touchstone for the civil rights era and much of this criticism focuses on
the aftermath of slavery in Faulkners South.2 After all, the Civil War era
and the civil rights struggle of the mid-twentieth century are linked in the
American imagination the civil rights movement has often been said to
have undertaken to finish the unfinished business of the Civil War and
Reconstruction, to entitle Americans of African descent to equality on the
same terms that white Americans are entitled to equality.3 It is not that
my students blackening of Faulkners white South is itself idiosyncratic.
Faulkner himself blackens his white South in complex ways. Quentin
Compson, in The Sound and the Fury (1929), learns that he talks like
a colored man (120). He asks his sister, Caddy, why she must . . . do
like the nigger women in the pastures the ditches the dark woods (92,
italics removed). Charles Bon, the quintessential New Orleans aristocrat,
is blackened when Quentin and Shreve take over the project of narrating
the past in Absalom, Absalom! (1936). In the criticism and scholarship, we
have seen corresponding explorations of Faulkners many uses of race. We
learn from this criticism that the Bundrens of As I Lay Dying (1930) are
blackened by poverty.4 The description of Popeye Vitelli of Sanctuary (1931)
 Reading William Faulkner after the civil rights era 209
as a little black man (109) has received a lot of attention.5 In Mosquitoes
(1927), the appearance of the writer, Faulkner, as a funny man, a kind of
little black man (149) has often been glossed.6 In commentary on Light
in August (1932), Joe Christmass blackness is primarily existential. It is
also metaphorical associated with transgression, especially with sexuality,
criminality, poverty, and shame. Elsewhere in Faulkners work as well as in
the criticism, blackness is associated with a convention-defying generosity
of spirit and humane wisdom that are themselves transgressive in the racist
South witness Dilsey Gibson and Molly Beauchamp. Taken together,
these are the qualities that constitute the very definition of blackness
for Faulkners civil rights era readers who are looking for images of and
appropriations of blackness and black characters by whites attempting to
understand themselves.
In other words, the black presence and blackness as signifier of abjection,
transgression, generosity, and creativity enable the critic to say something
about white characters and whiteness. They serve to reveal white character
and to indict white racism. For my student, on the other hand, blackness is
interesting not because it is the means by which white Americans work out
what it means to be white. It is not even a synonym for African American.
For him, Emily Grierson is an African American woman, the victim of
class pretensions, and isolated from her blackness, which for him signals
racial solidarity across class lines a much more political reading than a
metaphorical or symbolic one, and a reading in which the central issue
is African American agency, the power of choice, and the importance of
claiming ones blackness.
His assumption that Emily is African American points to his perception
of a much more complex social world than Faulkner studies has itself
acknowledged a perception grounded in reality, even the reality of the
1930s. In 1932, for example, a reviewer for the New York Times could write
that Light in Augusts Joe Christmas is a poor white with a probable mixture
of Negro blood, a racialization of Christmas, as white, that one would
not likely read in any commentary produced today, given the widespread
belief that the one-drop rule according to which it is held that one drop
of black blood makes one black was more or less universally accepted
in the United States at the time.7 Clearly it was not. And in the twenty-first
century classroom, the conjunction of a reading of A Rose for Emily in
which an unmarked character, typically read as white, is read as African
American alongside a deployment of identity politics around the political
solidarity of blackness illuminates the complex contemporary world in
which I and my student live a world in which racial experience exceeds
210 Barbara Ladd
the capacity of a criticism forged in the civil rights movement of the mid-
twentieth century to explain, but also a world in which that criticism
continues to dominate, at least in the academy. In conversation with my
student, I had to consider what the impact would be of alerting him too
quickly to the register in which blackness is most often explored in Faulkner
scholarship i.e. the exploration of white racist ideology or psychology as
it functions (albeit complexly, ironically, and self-critically) in the work of
a white writer. I decided that it would be the wrong move, because it would
recirculate a too-familiar reading of the work and foreclose any inquiry into
alternative discourses of race or inquiry beyond racial binaries in Faulkner,
something long overdue.8
In a sense what my student might have attempted if he had been a more
experienced reader is not unlike what Brian Norman argues that Suzan-
Lori Parks does in Getting Mothers Body (2003): to appropriate Faulkners
As I Lay Dying to tell, from a contemporary perspective, the story of a black
familys travels to disinter their mothers body and to reclaim the valuables
buried with her before the cemetery in which she is buried is destroyed.
For Norman, As I Lay Dying, as host text for Getting Mothers Body,
pushes against more identity-based traditions (Neo-Segregation 139). In
doing so, it also inscribes a relationship with Faulkner that would have
been impossible before the mid-1990s.
Over the past twenty years, the work of Paul Gilroy, Anthony Appiah,
and Robin D.G. Kelley, among others, has not only questioned the reality
of race as anything other than a social construct, but laid the foundations
for major challenges to the identity politics of the mid-twentieth century.9
Kenneth W. Warrens What Was African American Literature? galvanized the
issue when it appeared in 2011, arguing that the term African American
literature connotes only the writing of Americans of African descent
during a particular historical period (1896 to 1964, or thereabouts) as a
response to Jim Crow. In other words, he situates the origins of a distinct
African American literary tradition in the 1890s, in the black response to
segregation when it became important and expected that writing by black
Americans somehow represent or speak for the race generally.10 With
the dismantling of Jim Crow after 1964, he continues, African-American
literature became history. We can continue to study it, he claims, but can
no longer write it. He explains that the turn to diasporic, transatlantic,
global, and other frames indicates a dim awareness that the boundary
creating this distinctiveness has eroded.11
Warrens position is arguable the response has been extensive and
predominantly critical. He has been accused of literary genocide (Ross),
 Reading William Faulkner after the civil rights era 211
of being too Eurocentric and elitist (Miller), of misplacing the origins of
African American writing in the Jim Crow era when in fact it originates
in the late 18th century (Gates), of ignoring questions of literary form and
influence (Gates, Carpio, Miller), of delineating Jim Crow too narrowly
(Hsu, Jarrett, Zafar).12 And I tend to agree with many of the critics insofar
as their objections point to the past and to the legitimate claims of the past
on current understanding and practice. But Warrens position is less ori-
ented to the past (which he has, after all, periodized and thereby relegated
it to the sidelines) than to the present and the future, to diasporic, transat-
lantic, global, and other frames that problematize race.13 And this is the
conversation I most want to have with my student, who has (in spite of his
own complex positionality vis-`a-vis blackness) internalized a civil rights era
understanding of blackness as racial solidarity. It is not that no solidarity
around blackness can exist, but that those diasporic, transatlantic, global,
and other frames have alerted us to the fact that some people of predom-
inantly African descent are not black (in the sense of solidarity in which
that identity acquires meaning for my student) and some people of Asian
or European or Native American or Latino descent are which brings us
back to the question: Is Emily Grierson Black? No, my student would
respond. Possibly, many critics of race in Faulkner would say, thinking
of her in the contexts of transgression, shame, and criminality. Is Emily
Grierson African American? Yes, my student would say. I thought I
just answered that, many race-in-Faulkner critics would say. Possibly, I
would say.
In the spirit of my students yes and my own possibly, it seems to me
that part of our responsibility in this global, transnational, diasporic era is
to take another look at the complex matter of race in Faulkners work. I
do not mean to claim, here, that the figure of the slave and the continuing
hold of slavery on the imagination are not profoundly significant. What I
am suggesting is that we consider looking at Faulkners work through other
lenses. We can look at it through the lens of African American literature as
Kenneth Warren understands it after all Faulkners years overlap almost
perfectly with Jim Crow and the years of the long civil rights movement.
But we dont have to do so. After all, the past is never dead; its not even
past is only something Gavin Stevens says in Requiem for a Nun (1951) it
is his faith, not necessarily Faulkners (73). What Faulkner said was There
is no such thing as was only is. If was existed there would be no grief or
sorrow (LG 255). He also said, in another interview, that man is never
times slave (LG 70). And I like very much Cleanth Brookss glossing of
that statement when he writes that What Faulkner seems to have meant
212 Barbara Ladd
by times fluidity was that it has no existence except as it is experienced in
the consciousness of individual human beings.14
The foundation for new work, based on the contemporary understand-
ing of time and history in the consciousness of individual human beings,
is out there. For the past generation or so, scholars have been historicizing
the idea of race, exploring the development of the idea and changes over
time, examining sites of race mixing and the identities black, white,
ethnic, and creole identities that have evolved as a result. And this is
an inquiry that promises to be more relevant to readers of Faulkner of my
students generation and beyond, than continued reminders, by scholars
peering through the lens of the civil rights movement, of what blackness
meant to white Southerners in 1920 and 1930.
What this means is that we can look beyond the figure of the slave
and the sharecropper in Faulkner. Because there are other stories as well.
There are, for example, stories of upward (and outward) mobility among
the children and grandchildren of those African American servants to the
Compsons and the McCaslins. Although these and other signs of black
modernity have only rarely been noted in the criticism, we can see black
modernity in glancing references to the movement of the Gibson children
and grandchildren from rural Mississippi to Memphis (as referenced in
The Sound and the Fury); in the travels of the unnamed woman of Delta
Autumn (a descendant of Molly and Lucas Beauchamp), not to mention
her educated speech and the nature of her claim on Roth (she is nothing like
the easily-disposed-of girl who so outrages Sophonsiba earlier in the book);
and in the dress and demeanor of Samuel Worsham (Butch) Beauchamp
of Go Down, Moses, whose story, as told by most readers of Faulkner to
this point, is submerged in the story of Molly Beauchamp and her grief for
him.
At the beginning of Go Down, Moses, Beauchamp himself refuses
that submergence as he lies in jail awaiting execution and answering the
questions of a white functionary in a voice which was anything under the
sun but a Southern voice or even a negro voice (351). His name, he says,
is Samuel Worsham Beauchampand he has no family:

Wait. The census-taker wrote rapidly. Thats not the name you were
sen lived under in Chicago.
. . . No. It was another guy killed the cop.
All right. Occupation
Getting rich too fast.
 Reading William Faulkner after the civil rights era 213
none. The census-taker wrote rapidly. Parents.
Sure. Two. I dont remember them. My grandmother raised me.
Whats her name? Is she still living?
I dont know. Mollie Worsham Beauchamp. If she is, shes on Carothers
Edmonds farm seventeen miles from Jefferson, Mississippi. That all?
. . . If they dont know who you are here, how will they know how do you
expect to get home?
The other snapped the ash from his cigarette, lying on the steel cot in the
fine Hollywood clothes and a pair of shoes better than the census-taker
would ever own. What will that matter to me? he said. (352)

When Beauchamp flees Mississippi, he enters an urban black culture

that redefines him, that gives him another voice and with that another
past, one that inscribes him in modernity in ways that make the return of
his body to Jefferson an irrelevance to him. In part, his modernity may
account for the problematic nature of the ending of the story his story
begins, in which Ike is, for all intents and purposes, out of the picture,
Roth Edmonds has sold Butch Beauchamp in Egypt (353), and only
Gavin Stevens is left, himself an outsider, but one who understands that
put[ting] hit in de paper . . . all of hit is impossible (365).
Achille Mbembe has observed that many arenas of everyday life have
outrun the pedagogies in which [we] were trained.15 Pedagogies, like most
methodologies, are products of time and place. Perhaps we will find, if
we listen carefully and watch closely, previously unseen traces of African
American modernity, African American and Black voices yet unheard,
new ways to read race in Faulkner. Perhaps, too, we will find ways to
read beyond race in Faulkner, to listen for multi-racial intertextualities
and a new problematics of class for a post-segregation United States in a
post-national century.

NOTES
1 Among the earliest book-length studies of Faulkner and race is a 1948 dis-
sertation at Vanderbilt on The Role of the Negro in William Faulkners
Yoknapatawpha Series by Thomasina Blissard. Ralph Ellisons assessment of
Faulkner in Twentieth Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity,
written in 1946, but unpublished until 1953, is among the earliest statements.
There, he writes, the moment criticism approaches Negro-white relation-
ships it is plunged into problems of psychology and symbolic ritual (Shadow
and Act [New York: Random House/Vintage, 1972], p. 27). The interest in
214 Barbara Ladd
psychology and symbolic ritual is characteristic of subsequent work, from
Charles Nilons Faulkner and the Negro (New York: Citadel Press, 1965) to Lee
Jenkinss Faulkner and Black White Relations: A Psychoanalytic Approach (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1981) to Thadious Daviss Faulkners Negro:
Art and the Southern Context (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1983) and on to Philip Weinsteins What Else But Love? The Ordeal of Race in
Faulkner and Morrison (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) to John
N. Duvalls Race and White Identity in Southern Fiction: From Faulkner to Mor-
rison (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). More recently, critics have turned
from blackness to whiteness in their investigations of Faulkner and race,
but the questions are similar what is whiteness in Faulkner and what is its
relationship to blackness as are the methodologies, which still seem to have
derived from questions having to do with the meaning of blackness. Thadious
Daviss Games of Property: Law, Race, Gender and Faulkners Go Down, Moses
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2001) inaugurates a different kind of inquiry,
one that does not rest so firmly in civil rights era concerns about the image of
the Negro. For a good discussion of the submergence of the race issue in matters
of class and economic inequality in the US South during the 1930s and into the
1940s and the transition, in the 1950s, to a criticism of race, see Grace Eliza-
beth Hale and Robert Jackson, Were Trying Hard as Hell to Free Ourselves:
Southern History and Race in the Making of William Faulkners Literary Ter-
rain, in A Companion to William Faulkner, ed. Richard C. Moreland (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2007), pp. 2845. Hale and Jackson also exemplify, in the second
half of the essay, the civil rights era perspective in their conclusion, writing that
Faulkner largely remained in that circumscribed space of Hightowers reverie
in Light in August gazing with ironic but tortured longing at an imagined
communion between Percy Grimm and Joe Christmas without ever moving
beyond that vision (44).
2 There are many examples. Richard Godden, for example, traces questions of
labor in Faulkners work back to slavery in Fictions of Labor: William Faulkner
and the Souths Long Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 1997). See also
Thadious M. Davis, Faulkners Negro: Art and the Southern Context (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983).
3 See David Blights American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011).
4 See Brian Norman, Neo-Segregation Narratives: Jim Crow in Post-Civil Rights
American Literature (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), pp. 1412;
Jessica Baldanzi and Kyle Schlabach, What Remains?: (De)Composing and
(Re)Covering American Identity in As I Lay Dying and the Georgia Crematory
Scandal, The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 36.1 (Spring
2003), 47.
5 See John N. Duvall on his students inclination to read Popeye as black in
Faulkners Black Sexuality, in Faulkners Sexualities, Faulkner and Yoknap-
atawpha 2007, eds. Annette Trefzer and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 2010), p. 138; and James Harding, Sanctuarys Reversible
 Reading William Faulkner after the civil rights era 215
Bodies, in Faulkner and Formalism, Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha 2008, eds.
Annette Trefzer and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2012), p. 81ff.
6 See, for example, John N. Duvalls argument that Faulkners artist is often
envisioned as black, or is shadowed by a black presence in Race and White
Identity in Southern Fiction: From Faulkner to Morrison (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008), p. 19.
7 J. Donald Adams, Mr. Faulkners Astonishing Novel, New York Times,
9 October 1932: BR6.
8 Maybe my response would have been different at another time, in another
course, where this symbolic or metaphorical idea could be explored in the
context of black performances in contemporary popular culture.
9 See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
(London: Verso, 1993); Anthony Appiah, In My Fathers House: Africa in the
Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); and Robin D.
G. Kelley, People in Me: So, What are You? Colorlines 1.3 (Winter 1999), 5.
10 Live Chat: The End of African American Literature? 24 Feb. 2011, http://
chronicle.com/article/Live-Chat-The-End-of/126492/
11 What Was African American Literature? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2011), p. 8.
12 These statements appear in Theories and Methodologies: What Was African
American Literature? PMLA 128.2 (March 2013), 386408. See also Marlon B.
Ross in Callaloo 35.3 (Summer 2012), 60412.
13 It is important to note that Warren cannot be said to have embraced the pos-
tracial: This doesnt mean that racial inequality has disappeared, he writes,
it doesnt mean that Black Americans have stopped writing literature obvi-
ously were in a moment of a great flowering of writing by Black Americans
but what it does mean is that the relation of literary production to social
inequality has changed, and it is that relation, or was that relation, and that
relation only, that constituted African American Literature (What Was African
American Literature? A Podcast with Kenneth W. Warren, Harvard University
Press Blog, 5 Jan. 2011, http://harvardpress.typepad.com/hup publicity/2011/01/
what-was-african-american-literature-podcast-kenneth-warren.html).
14 Cleanth Brooks, William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990), p. 2523.
15 Theorizing the Present: Notes from South Africa, AUETSA/SAACLA/
SAVAL Conference, Stellenbosch, South Africa, 10 July 2006, qtd. in Leigh
Anne Duck, From Colony to Empire: Postmodern Faulkner, in Global
Faulkner: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2006, eds. Annette Trefzer and Ann J.
Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009; Kindle edition), loca-
tion 469.
American gothic
 chapter 1 9

Writing past trauma

Faulkner and the gothic
Lisa Hinrichsen

The past is never dead. Its not even past (RN 73). These lines from
Requiem for a Nun (1951) have come to emblematize a way of thinking
about the US South as a gothic space saturated in loss and haunted by
history. Bound to compulsively repeat the past, the region, so this narrative
goes, exists askew from the progressive temporality of the nation-at-large,
with its distinctiveness resting on a melancholic attachment to past trauma.
While recent work has historicized such representation within the context
of a national ideology wherein Southern backwardness not only coex-
isted with but was a necessary component of the United States emerging
identity as a liberal democracy, the region, in many ways, is still positioned
problematically in the popular cultural imagination as a gothic space filled
with loss that will never [be] dead.1 As Teresa Goddu, Joan Dayan, and
Harry Levin have noted, the gothic, as an elastic concept, plays a special
role in representing the historically oppositional identity of the benighted
South, to use George Tindalls term, framing it as a dark other, a spatial
repository for cultural contradictions that must be disavowed to enable a
national mythology of innocence.2
Early responses to Faulkners work, such as those by Henry Seidel Canby
and Henry Nash Smith, called attention to his gothic obsession with decay
and insanity and drew on its logic as a way to understand southern
culture and to distance it, as Leigh Anne Duck notes, both spatially and
temporally from national culture (Nations Region 147). As she argues,
Depression-era critics, who viewed Faulkners obsession with the regional
past as a gothic anachronism, preferred instead a progressive approach to
the nations problems, while mid-century readers viewed his retrospection
as a virtue, positioning it against a homogenizing mass culture. Critics have
often seen the gothics role in Faulkner work in binary terms, viewing it as
either an anachronistic, sensationalist aesthetic mode to be dismissed (think
of Cleanth Brooks claim that Absalom, Absalom! [1936] is more than a mere
bottle of Gothic sauce) or as a form commensurate with a pathological
219
220 Lisa Hinrichsen
reality, furthering the trope of the backward South, as a reviewer of As I Lay
Dying (1930) did when he wrote that the rural Mississippi of the novel was
productive only of hatred, passion, and frustration.3 While considering
the stereotypes associated with the Southern gothic and noting the way
writers, including Faulkner, have resisted this label, more recent critics
such as Elizabeth Kerr, Max Putzel, Louis Palmer, Susan Donaldson, Eric
Sundquist, and Leigh Anne Duck have reinvigorated critical attention
concerning the nuanced and vital role the gothic plays in Faulkners work.
Emphasizing its role not only as an aesthetic mode but as a means of
social critique, these critics have helped unfold the genres function within
the arc of Faulkners fiction (Kerr), situating it alongside his interest in the
pastoral and the sublime (Donaldson), unpacking its role in the imaginative
construction of region and nation (Duck), and highlighting its relationship
to the representation of race (Palmer, Sundquist).4
While Edgar Allan Poe, William Gilmore Simms, and other writers
certainly figure as important narrative precedents in depicting the South
as an exceptionally haunted space, admitting into American mythology a
sense of the region as a strange and exotic world different from the rest of
the nation long before Ellen Glasgows 1935 proclamation of a Southern
Gothic School, Faulkners modernist engagement with the genre, which
peaks in the period from The Sound and the Fury (1929) to The Hamlet
(1940), offers a more complex formulation of both individual and collective
identity and the modes of remembering on which they depend.5 While
psychoanalytically-derived trauma theory, which developed in its mod-
ern form, via Sigmund Freuds analysis of wartime shell shock in Beyond
the Pleasure Principle (1920), alongside Faulkners emergence, teaches that
the traumatic event remains, at heart, unrepresentable, the gothic often
functions as a literary analogue, dramatizing key issues central to traumatic
memory. As an ideologically contradictory and complex discourse system,
it offers a code which is not a simple one in which past is encoded in the
present or vice versa, but dialectical, [with] past and present intertwined,
each distorting each other.6
Deploying a temporality based on recursiveness, repetition, and dou-
bling, the gothic offers a means of registering effaced experience, reflecting
the memory loss endemic to modernity and its reorganization of social
relations. As Stephen Shapiro has argued, catachrestic narrative devices
and genres such as the gothic appear in conjunction with the recurring
cycles of capitalist accumulation.7 Originating as a genre in part from the
abrupt transition from traditional economies based on land ownership
and patrilinear property rights to bourgeois capitalism, the gothic serves to
 Writing past trauma: Faulkner and the gothic 221
register affective remnants not wholly incorporated into modern commod-
ity relations and to present, through its engagement with the fantastic, the
sensation of the unreality of this transition. Pushing at the limits of psy-
choanalytic epistemologies, it figures the social and psychic deformations
inherent to modernisms jostling of economic and social orders, and reflects
anxieties about the patriarchal, heteronormative order of social relations
allied to capital and yet threatened by it. The years between World War I
and World War II, a key era for Faulkners engagement with the gothic,
were a period of particularly acute material and affective change in the US
South. With the mechanization of agriculture, the growth of metropoli-
tan centers, increased geographic mobility, and concurrent rearrangements
of wealth, power, and social hierarchy, structuring fantasies about South-
ern social coherence were contested. As Fitzhugh Brundage (2005) notes,
the push to modernize the region was accompanied by the systematic
retrofitting of the racial past by elite white Southerners who hoped to con-
struct a version of history that sanctioned their racial privilege and power.8
The illusion that the Old South persisted as a spiritual vanguard, a space of
leisure in contrast to the alienating hyper-capitalism of the North a myth
fed by the rise of plantation romance and heritage tourism proffered a
romantic, nostalgic vision that actively ignored ongoing racial oppression.
Acutely aware of how memorial and commemorative practices forge
identity, justify privilege, and sustain cultural norms, Faulkner drew upon
the gothic in order to confront the cultural and personal amnesia demanded
by the progressive narrative of capitalist modernity. If cultural, social, and
political practices in imagining nationhood demand a singular history, the
gothic troubles these attempts at mastery by exposing the power relations
and the secreted histories underlying all such unifying constructions. By
exposing how dominant cultural currents circumscribe and inform indi-
vidual psychology, and by lending a narrative form to otherwise repressed
or disavowed aspects of social and psychic existence, the gothic provides
a way of writing past trauma that destabilizes the self-protective fictions
that undergird traumatizing ideologies of communal belonging. From the
tight family romance of A Rose for Emily (1935), with its studied appro-
priations of the British gothic, to the growing narrative breadth of The
Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner consistently deploys
the gothics emphasis on affect and defamiliarization to reveal the social
and psychic dynamics that support Southern life, parsing in the process
his own ambivalent attachment to structuring social fantasies ideologies
of race, class, and gender as they were beginning to be destabilized in
modernity. Think of his interest in Soldiers Pay with isolation, failures of
222 Lisa Hinrichsen
communication, self-destructive or sterile attempts to recapture a personal
or cultural past a vision of lost wholeness fundamental to his canon;
Mosquitoes emphasis on parental betrayal, incest, frustration, and the forg-
ing of identity; The Sound and the Furys rendering of the family home as a
haunted stage upon which the tragedy of patriarchal inheritance is drama-
tized in compulsive repetition, fantasy, obsession, and nostalgia; As I Lay
Dyings masterful portrayal of maternal and paternal inadequacy filtered
through a sense of loss, rage, and grief; Sanctuarys sexualized coalescence of
law, paternal order, communal life, and traumatic testimony left unheard
because of socially mandated silences; Light in Augusts presentation of Joe
Christmass occupation of a sphere of loss, separation and abjection; and
his masterwork Absalom, Absalom!, a tale which unravels by increment and
recapitulation, revealing the disavowal and misrecognition that structure
ideologies of family and racial purity and leave Sutpens dynastic design
consumed, like the House of Usher, by its own originary violence.
In presenting trauma in its systematic, everyday forms as endemic to
the structure of the heteropatriarchal family, and to the daily working of
sexism, racism, colonialism, and classism as well as its more spectacular
instances, Faulkner reveals what feminist and trauma theorist Maria Root
terms insidious trauma, a concept which places trauma at the center
of patriarchys unequal power distribution surrounding identity categories
such as race, sexuality, gender and class.9 As Greg Forter has noted, these
everyday, more mundanely catastrophic traumas are so chronic and
cumulative, so woven into the fabric of our societies that they have
been thoroughly naturalized in ways that make it necessary to excavate
and estrange them in order to see them as social traumas.10 With its
aesthetics of estrangement, ambivalence, and affect, the gothic offers a
narrative form able to make visible the darkness of insidious trauma. By
paying attention to the textual dimension of the forms that envelop us
and our bodies as a physical reality in Faulkners work, we can come to
recognize in the atmosphere of his style that what affects us in the act of
reading involves the present of the past in substance not a sign of the
past or its representation.11
Working against a view of trauma as private by instead situating it as
inherently social, Faulkner emphasizes how memory and history are not
merely cognitive undertakings, but dynamic material processes. In writing
of mans conflict [ . . . ] with his time and place, [and] his environment
(FU 19), he repeatedly turns our attention to the role that landscape, mood,
and climate play in human consciousness, parsing the relationship between
matter and its discursive mediation: for Benjy in The Sound and the Fury, for
 Writing past trauma: Faulkner and the gothic 223
example, the environment the smell of rain and trees, the feel of jimson
weed becomes a way of emphasizing a loss that cannot be otherwise
verbalized. With his eyes full of the land, Darl Bundrens mental stability
dissolves as modernity rearranges time and place, ushering roads into rural
spaces: I says to them, he was alright at first, with his eyes full of the
land, because the land laid up-and-down ways then; it wasnt till that ere
road come and switched the land around longways and his eyes still full of
the land, and they began to threaten me out of him, trying to short-hand
me with the law (AILD 367). In Light in August (1932), Reverend Gail
Hightower listens to the distant sound of Protestant music and seems
to hear within it the apotheosis of his own history, his own land, his own
environed blood (367), a phrase that emphasizes, as Eric Gary Anderson
has noted, an intimate fusing of earth and self that bespeaks the violence
of environing and the environing of violence.12 And in Sanctuary (1931)
Faulkner situates Temples violation at the Old Frenchmans Place, a site of
waste set in a ruined lawn, surrounded by abandoned grounds and fallen
outbuildings (41), refracting her rape in landscape that contains a road
rendered like an eroded scar, gutted by winter freshets and choked with
fern (19). Faulkners work thus suggests how modernitys more spectacular
acts of violence World War I, lynching, rape are accompanied by the
insidious trauma of what he terms the normal litter of mans ramshackle
confederation against environment (RN 3).
The gothic form does not offer a pastoral idyll invulnerable to histor-
ical or political changes and undisturbed by moral or spiritual anxieties.
Instead, the landscape it renders is part of the twisted strands of social,
economic, and ethical history. By recognizing how landscape can medi-
ate the Southern imaginary in frightening ways, dramatizing what Scott
Slovic terms the tug of the organic world, Faulkner draws on the gothic
to challenge clinical conceptions of the mind, emphasizing that there is
something external to human subjectivity a world (or an ecology) of enti-
ties, organisms, and processes with which we are in an ethical relation.13
Against constructed, fantasized notions of the South as an abundant
paradise, a pastoral haven of order and simplicity, a feudal, aristo-
cratic anachronism, a place cursed and ruined by its legacy of chattel
slavery images which derive their rhetorical power through particu-
lar versions of the relationship between the South and the natural world,
Faulkner reconfigures nature in a gothic vein in order to emphasize the kind
of psychic fragmentation that parallels ecological dislocation, tracing the
affective formations and fluctuations accompanying environmental degen-
eration, collapse, and commodification, and drawing attention to how
224 Lisa Hinrichsen
politico-economic imaginaries are bound up with ecological realities.14
In Absalom, Absalom! and Requiem for a Nun Faulkner focuses on land
exploitation, as he does in the short stories Red Leaves (1930), A Jus-
tice (1931), Lo! (1934), and A Courtship (1948), and in Light in August
and Go Down, Moses (1942) he explores the devastating impact of lum-
bering operations. Marked by the transition to modern ecological regimes
characterized by the draining of the land by monoculture agriculture,
asset-stripping, the exploitation of bio-capital, heightened privatization,
and shifts from production to consumption, the South of the 1920s and
the 1930s was a precarious ecosystem, a wasteland of widespread environ-
mental abuse and catastrophe. As Faulkner notes in his 1954 essay entitled
Mississippi, the states diminishing wilderness was threatened by capi-
talist speculators bent on destroying that little which . . . remain[ed] and
willing to fell a tree which took two hundred years to grow [just] to extract
from it a bear or a capful of wild honey (ESPL 13).
In contrast to the pastoral order of plantation fiction, which draws
on dominant nineteenth-century cultural abstractions for approaching
nature modes of the sentimental, the sublime, the picturesque, and the
pastoral, which displace the trauma of slavery and Jim Crow with a vision
of lost Arcadia Faulkner envisions nature as a gothic space for staging
ecological resistance to plantation order. Against a view of the wilderness
marked by Romanticism and American Transcendentalism, which lift the
experience of nature out of history and into a timeless sublimity, Faulkner
sees within the American landscape the stress of histories of human habita-
tion, ecological alteration, and native genocide. By violating the American
pastoral and the conceptions of self, memory, and history that stem from
it, the gothic inscribes labor, and its moral and psychological costs, back
onto the land in a haunted manner, revealing the tangled relationship
between nature and racial subjectivity, emphasizing the constitutive link
between intrahuman oppression and ecological violence. Instances of mis-
cegenation and racial cruelty are, to Ike McCaslin in Go Down, Moses,
deeply intertwined with questions of land use and mans relationship to
the natural world: No wonder the ruined woods I used to know dont
cry for retribution! he thought: The people who have destroyed it will
accomplish its revenge (347). According to Ikes confounding logic, the
seeds of human suffering have been preposterously planted by the earth in
the tainted material legacy of the plantation.
Absalom, Absalom!, the text that Leslie Fiedler called the most gothic of
Faulkners books, links environmental exploitation and human enslave-
ment as it illuminates the transhistorical and transnational dimensions of
 Writing past trauma: Faulkner and the gothic 225
American racial trauma, tracing how the history of human commodifica-
tion continues to haunt capitalism.15 Writing to his editor, Harrison (Hal)
Smith in February 1934, Faulkner mentioned that he had begun a novel
to be called Dark House. It would be, he wrote, a tale in which the
theme is a man who outraged the land, and the land then turned and
destroyed the mans family (SL 789). By August, the novel was Absalom,
Absalom!, now the story of a man who wanted a son through pride, and
got too many of them and they destroyed him (SL 834). In addressing the
problems of hereditary and patriarchy, Absalom, Absalom!s gothic design
underscores the relationship between social context and individual psy-
chology, secreting its outrageous story about the environment and human
will.
In tracing Sutpens experiences as an overseer at a Haitian sugar cane
plantation, Absalom, Absalom! projects a parable of enslavement upon a
haunted landscape marked by the yet intact bones and brains in which
the old unsleeping blood that had vanished into the earth they trod still
cried out for vengeance (202). Haiti is a place where fields of sugar rise
from soil manured with black blood from two hundred years of oppression
and exploitation, a little lost island in a latitude which would require ten
thousand years of equatorial heritage to bear its climate (202). Its planta-
tions, drenched in the blood of black people, intertwine human suffering
with the land itself into a tightly wound ecosystem. Faulkner emphasizes
a gothic ecology of exploitation in which whites enslave blacks, who work
a land that ultimately incorporates their bodies and pain, transforming
it into food for white bodies dependent on this ecosystem of oppression.
Sutpen transplants this system to the one hundred square miles of Mis-
sissippi land he acquires from the Chickasaws, using slave labor to build
a dynastic design. Upon the earth, he [t]ore violently a plantation [ . . . ]
tore violently (5, italics removed). Thus aided by slave labor, Sutpen tears
his property out of the wilderness: slaves have dragged house and gardens
out of virgin swamp after having ripped from the soil the lumber and
mud bricks used to construct it (30).
In utilizing the genre of the gothic to mediate the relationship between
psychic mood and environmental atmosphere, Faulkner situates the land-
scape of the South within larger issues of political economy and a globalized
time and space, destabilizing the parochialism and anti-intellectualism that
have been used to set off the South as exceptional from the rest of the United
States. If, as Patricia Yaeger has written, place is never simply place in
Southern writing, but always a site where trauma has been absorbed into
the landscape, the same could be said, as Faulkners work evinces, for
226 Lisa Hinrichsen
the nation as a whole, for the litter of mans ramshackle confederation
against the environment is not a uniquely Southern issue; instead, these
are global problems stemming from the incommensurability of capitalist
expansion and environmental conservation.16 As he reminds us in Requiem
for a Nun, modern progress impacts the American earth, not just the
South: while the time, the land, the nation, the American earth, whirled
faster and faster toward the plunging precipice of its destiny (178). His
novels thus demand we reconsider the relationship between individual and
collective experience, and memory and social context, which he reveals as
inextricably intertwined, precisely because implicated in a common social
history in which regional environments are bound up with the global
biosphere.

NOTES
1 See Leigh Anne Duck, The Nations Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation,
and US Nationalism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006); Jennifer Rae
Greeson, Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).
2 George B. Tindall, The Benighted South: Origins of a Modern Image,
Virginia Quarterly Review 40 (Spring 1964), 281.
3 Cleanth Brooks, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatwpha Country (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1963), p. 295, quoted in M. Thomas Inge (ed.), William
Faulkner: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 49.
4 Elizabeth Kerr, William Faulkners Gothic Domain (New York: Kennikat, 1979);
Susan V. Donaldson, Faulkners Versions of Pastoral, Gothic, and Sublime, in
A Companion to William Faulkner, ed. Richard C. Moreland (Malden: Black-
well, 2007), pp. 35973; Louis Palmer, Bourgeois Blues: Class, Whiteness, and
Southern Gothic in Early Faulkner and Caldwell, The Faulkner Journal 22
(200607), 12039; Eric Sundquist, Faulkner: The House Divided (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983).
5 Ellen Glasgow, Heroes and Monsters, Saturday Review of Literature 12 (4 May
1935), 3, 4.
6 David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fiction from 1765 to
the Present Day, 2nd edition (London: Longman, 1996), p. 198.
7 Stephen Shapiro, Transvaal, Transylvania: Draculas World-system and Gothic
Periodicity, Gothic Studies 10.1 (2008), 2947.
8 Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).
9 Maria Root, Women of Color and Traumatic Stress in Domestic Captiv-
ity: Gender and Race as Disempowering Statuses, in Ethnocultural Aspects
of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Issues, Research, and Clinical Applications,
eds. Anthony J. Marsella, Matthew J. Friedman, Ellen T. Gerrity, and
 Writing past trauma: Faulkner and the gothic 227
Raymond M. Scurfield (Washington, DC: American Psychological Associa-
tion, 1996), pp. 36387.
10 Greg Forter, Freud, Faulkner, Caruth: Trauma and the Politics of Literary
Form, Narrative 15.3 (2007), 260.
11 Hans Gumbrecht, Atmosphere, Mood, Stimmung: On a Hidden Potential of
Literature, trans. Erik Butler (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2012),
pp. 3, 14.
12 Eric Gary Anderson, Environed Blood: Ecology and Violence in The Sound
and the Fury and Sanctuary, in Faulkner and the Ecology of the South, eds.
Joseph R. Urgo and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2005), pp. 301.
13 Scott Slovic, Visceral Faulkner: Fiction and the Tug of the Organic World,
in Faulkner and the Ecology of the South, p. 115.
14 Christopher Rieger, Clear-Cutting Eden: Ecology and the Pastoral in Southern
Literature (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 2009), p. 1.
15 Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Stein and
Days, 1966), p. 334.
16 Patricia Yaeger, Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Womens Writing,
19301990 (University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 13.
The market for fiction
 chapter 20

Faulkner and the paperback trade

David M. Earle

The publication in 1946 of The Portable Faulkner by Viking Press, edited by

Malcolm Cowley, is commonly understood to have transformed Faulkners
career: it supposedly saved Faulkner from obscurity by making evident the
scope of his grand plan. Within a few years Faulkners reputation was such
that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, solidifying
his place in the publics consciousness and the canon of modern literature.
Cowleys promotion of Faulkner is a cornerstone in the edifice of Faulkners
late career, so much so that another seminal event goes unheralded despite
the fact that it is perhaps as important. This was the March 1947 publica-
tion by Penguin Books America of Sanctuary, Faulkners first commercial
paperback.1 Faulkners career in paperbacks provided him with income
between his stints in Hollywood, and they garnered him an entirely new
audience since paperbacks went places hardcovers couldnt: drugstores,
newsstands, and neighborhoods with a high African American and immi-
grant demographic. Yet this aspect of Faulkners publishing career has gone
largely unnoticed.
By 1948, Penguin America broke from its British parent company to
become the New American Library (NAL), Faulkners paperback publisher
under the imprint of Signet Books. The reason for this break had much to
do with Faulkner, or at least the sensational, risque, and immoral fiction that
he was often identified with before Cowleys volume pseudo-Faulkner,
as Leslie Fiedler called it in 1950, derived mostly from the potboiling
Sanctuary.2 Books like Sanctuary, Pylon, and The Wild Palms had made
Faulkner infamous for pushing the boundaries of both style and morals;
what was incest or bestiality in Absalom, Absalom! or The Hamlet but just
another color in Faulkners familiar gothic palette? The last title reprinted
as a Penguin paperback was Faulkners The Wild Palms, a novella dealing
with adultery and a botched abortion.
The publication of Sanctuary by Penguin America sewed tensions
between Victor Weybright, editor of the American division, and Allen
231
232 David M. Earle
Lane, head of Penguin UK. Lane had no use for Faulkner and stated
facetiously that if Penguin were to publish such vulgar authors it should
have a pornographic imprint detached from Penguin perhaps Porno
Books for such material.3 Instead, it was Weybright and partner Kurt
Enoch who detached from Penguin, forming what was arguably the most
influential publisher concerned with a popular audience at mid-century.
Weybright saw the possibilities for paperbacks to bring not only affordable
books to the masses, but good affordable books, modern books.4 Victor
Weybrights plan for Signets NALs success was to balance high culture
with salability, or, as he put it, luster and lucre (Bonn, Heavy Traffic
3). Faulkners borderline position as both sensational and highbrow writer
made him the perfect choice for the Signet line.
Between 1947 and 1950 Signet reprinted five Faulkner titles: Sanctuary,
The Wild Palms, The Old Man, Intruder in the Dust, and Knights Gambit,
with copies totaling almost three million.5 These titles kept Faulkner solvent
at a time when, to quote Cowley, he was effectively out of print.6 By
1958, the number of Signets Faulkner titles would jump to twelve with the
addition of Pylon, Sartoris, a combined Sanctuary and Requiem for a Nun,
Soldiers Pay, The Unvanquished, a combined The Wild Palms and The Old
Man, and The Long Hot Summer (a portion of The Hamlet), for print runs
totaling 5,941,837 copies. The paperback of Sanctuary itself went through
thirteen printings between 1947 and 1953. It is safe to say that more readers
were introduced to Faulkner in paperback than in any other form, however
much the academy has derided and ignored such fare.
The fact that many of the books chosen by Signet are outside the
canonical Faulkner those works on which his academic reputation
was based might suggest that there is a good (modernist, hardback)
Faulkner and a bad (popular, paperback) Faulkner. This idea has been
largely discarded as critics explore the politics of canon making, but there
is little question that many readers still credit such a distinction. Whereas
Weybright obviously sought out novels that he thought would sell, he
was equally concerned with issues of quality and formatting. The NAL
archives show that Signet attempted several times to publish the masterful
Light in August, but Bennett Cerf wouldnt release it to them, preferring not
to dilute the sales of the Modern Library edition. Signet would eventually
publish paperback tie-ins to both The Sound and the Fury and The Hamlet
when film adaptations of each appeared in the late 1950s.
The long list of Faulkner titles in Signet paperbacks illustrates just how
central Faulkner was to Weybrights plan. In his memoir, Weybright con-
tinually cites Faulkner as evidence of Signets success in bringing quality
 Faulkner and the paperback trade 233
literature to the masses. He states that his goal with NAL was to make it
a constructive force in the life of the times by fighting censorship and
preventing a double standard one for the rich, another for the poor, i.e.
one for the $5.00 book in the nations 1,200 book shops, another for the
25-cent book in over 100,000 retail outlets (Weybright, Making 2023). As
sales and distribution lists of Faulkners books show, Weybright succeeded
admirably in bringing quality literature to the general public, and much
more successfully than Cowleys Portable Faulkner, which sold only 20,000
copies by 1951 (Schwartz, Creating 55).The limited exposure of this volume
in contrast to the mass audience of the paperbacks highlights a discrep-
ancy between Faulkners reputation today and how he was read during the
years of mid-century canon formation. We might view Faulkner afresh as
a paperback writer in his time, popular and pulpish, rather than a hardback
author, ignored by and inaccessible to the masses. Moreover, the impor-
tance of the eventual reprinting of Faulkners earlier novels undermines the
traditional division in Faulkner studies between early and late Faulkner.7
Faulkners paperback publishing history divulges a popular Faulkner and,
by implication, a popular modernism.

Faulkner and the paperback revolution

The proliferation of paperback publishers between 1939 and 1948 marked
a revolution in American publishing. This revolution started when Robert
De Graff launched Pocket Books in 1939, bringing quality 25 books to
newsstands. The idea wasnt new. Europe had a long history of mass-
market, paperbound books going back to Aldus Manutius affordable
pocket-sized books for scholars in the sixteenth century. Companies like
Tauchnitz thrived in the late-nineteenth century, Penguin and Albatross
in the twentieth. There were earlier manifestations of paperbacks in
America, but most of them stemmed from the penny weeklies, nickel
papers, and dime novels that eventually gave way to the pulp maga-
zines of the twentieth century. In the mid-1920s Albert and Charles Boni
started a line of quality paperbound books by highbrow authors such as
Huysmans and D. H. Lawrence but, like most other efforts, they failed
because they lacked the distribution infrastructure that De Graff eventually
pioneered.8
The key to the success of Pocket Books and subsequent paperback com-
panies was that they took advantage of the distribution techniques and
audience established by magazines in the early decades of the twentieth cen-
tury. Following earlier magazine entrepreneurs like Frank Munsey, De Graff
234 David M. Earle

Figure 1. Cover of A Rose for Emily: And Other Stories. Copyright 1945, Armed Services
Edition.

marketed his Pocket Books by eschewing book distributors and book stores
entirely, relying instead upon magazine distributors and book displays in
newsstands. Pocket Books were highly portable and inexpensive, appeal-
ing to the magazine buyer; they were perfect for the burgeoning urban
commuter market. The early covers of Pocket Books were inspired by the
dustcover designs of its parent company, Simon and Schuster, and often fea-
tured highbrow abstract and symbolic designs. They were both reminiscent
of quality reading material and distinct from the naturalistically-rendered,
sensational pulp magazine covers that surrounded them. In effect, the hier-
archical distinction between hardback and magazine was bridged by the
paperback.
The success of Pocket sparked a proliferation of other paperback pub-
lishers before and during the war (Avon and Penguin in 1941, Popular and
Dell in 1943, Bantam in 1945), but it was really the war itself that ensured
the huge success of the paperback. Faulkner began to profit from this bur-
geoning new audience with his first paperback, A Rose for Emily and Other
Stories, an Armed Services Edition paperback distributed freely to soldiers
in the hundreds of thousands [fig. 1].
 Faulkner and the paperback trade 235
Between 1943 and 1947 123 million copies of 1,322 titles of ASE books were
distributed to American servicemen overseas.9 The titles included fiction
and non-fiction, aimed both to educate and entertain. This effort by the
publishers, editors, and educators who made up the Council of Books in
Wartime was one of the most successful in American publishing history
not only because of its streamlined methods of production and distribution,
but because of its long-term cultural effects. ASE books introduced millions
of less formally educated Americans to modernist authors such as Faulkner,
Conrad, Hemingway, Woolf, Fitzgerald, and Huxley. A Rose for Emily
and Other Stories, which was created as an ASE original in the spring
of 1945, paved the way for Faulkners success in the post-war paperback
market.
As the war waned, paperback companies went into high gear; publishers
like Weybright figured that they had a ready market in returning servicemen
used to the paperback form. Weybright sought to maintain the goal of
reprinting quality literature through NAL, although unlike the Armed
Services Editions which were supplied free of charge, his books needed to
make money in an increasingly competitive field. He innovated marketing
techniques designed to leave behind Pocket Books and Penguin, both
of which appealed to quality by emulating the aesthetics of hardback
publishing. Weybright instead looked to capitalize on the naturalistic and
narrative aesthetics of pulp-magazine cover design.

Marketing modernism for the masses

Mid-century paperbacks are commonly described as pulp paperbacks, a
deprecation of them as seedy, sensational, low culture.10 Indisputably, many
of these books were sold on the promise of titillation, dangling sex and
violence before readers. The cover of Knights Gambit screamed Tales of
Crime, Guilt, and Love while Sanctuary and Requiem for a Nun advertised
a tale of Sin and Redemption. All of Faulkners covers proclaimed that
they were By the Author of Sanctuary. Signets double aim to publish
works with both luster and lucre, which Weybright also described as heavy
traffic and high culture, may be seen in the tension between the cover and
content of modernist works in paperback.11
In his history of American mid-century paperbacks, Piet Schreuders
characterizes Signet Books [as] paperbacks with covers by James Avati.12
This deliberate overstatement emphasizes the way Avatis style of gritty
realism became synonymous with Signets look through the 1950s, one
especially suited to realists such as Caldwell and Farrell. Avatis cover for
236 David M. Earle

Figure 2. Cover of The Wild Palms. Copyright 1950, Signet Books.

The Wild Palms exemplifies how he typically sought to entice readers by

featuring key narrative situations [fig. 2]. Harry stares despondently at the
negligee-clad Charlotte, who is lying in bed with hands clenched at her
abdomen; the viewer is teased voyeuristically by the scene. Faulkners story
does the same thing in the first chapter, pulling the reader into the Wild
Palms section of If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, which depicts the couples
checking into their sea-side cabin and the Doctors suspicion that there
is something wrong with them that they arent married, at the very
least. The cover for Pylon, not attributed but obviously of the Avati school,
similarly hints at some kind of menage a` trois [fig. 3]. Avatis covers departed
 Faulkner and the paperback trade 237

Figure 3. Cover of Pylon. Copyright 1950, Signet Books.

sharply from their predecessors at Pocket Books, Dell, and Penguin, which
relied on abstract designs meant to be luring, not leering.
Weybright sought out both risque and modernist literature as a means
to sell the public a populist education, hence Signets marketing of qual-
ity literature with sensational covers. Despite appearances, the paperback
form was integral in bringing quality literature to segments of the pop-
ulation that couldnt afford hardbacks or had no access to bookstores.
Faulkners paperbacks were a hyper-commercial form (sensational, inex-
pensive), distributed to sites that were traditionally anathema to high-art
(drugstores, department stores, newsstands) and to people who werent
supposed to understand high-brow literature (working class whites and
238 David M. Earle
African Americans in rural as well as poorer urban locales). And as such,
mass paperbacks trouble both canon formation and the way Faulkners
work was constructed by contemporary critics.

Critical pulp: deconstructing quality and

Faulkners reputation
It should come as no surprise then that Cowley hated paperbacks. He makes
this clear in The Literary Situation (1954) with an account of his perusing
the paperback racks of drugstores in the poorer sections of Chicago. A
depressing assortment of fiction-products competes with kitchenware and
liquor. I looked again at the collection [of titles] as a whole, he writes,
and decided that it was curiously appropriate to the city and the [working
class] neighborhood. It was rich, gaudy, vital, corrupt, and at the same
time innocent; it put culture at the disposal of the plain man, even the
poorest, for less than the price of a bar whiskey; it was impersonal, friendly,
egalitarian, and it proclaimed as dogma its lack of discrimination.13 For
Cowley literary critic; author of Exiles Return (1934), the modernist
memoir that helped canonize Steins term lost generation; and facilita-
tor of the modernist reputations of Hemingway and Faulkner all this
makes the paperback amount to ungoverned consumption, the degener-
ation of American culture, and the death knell for bookstores. He dis-
approvingly recounts how a fellow patron, a broad-beamed house wife,
her head wrapped in a soiled babushka, chooses Spillane over Sartre in
less time than it takes to buy a saucepan (Cowley, Literary 98). The
undertones of classism, racism, sexism, and intellectual elitism are hard to
miss.14
Cowleys scrutiny of the bookracks offers a contextual methodology
for understanding Faulkners paperback success. The Signet books that
surrounded Faulkners on the newsstand were some of the widest ranging
in paperback, offering not only best-selling authors such as the infamous
Mickey Spillane, but quality authors like Christopher Isherwood, James
Joyce, Jack Kerouac, and Aldous Huxley. Signet also offered an extensive
list of African American authors, including Richard Wright, Ann Petry,
Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes, and James Baldwin, as well as high-profile
Southern authors such as Robert Penn Warren, Truman Capote, William
Styron, Flannery OConnor, and Erskine Caldwell. Of all, Caldwell is
arguably the most important to the paperback revolution in that he was
Penguin/Signets first best-selling author and established the paperback
market for naturalistic Southern literature.
 Faulkner and the paperback trade 239
Whereas Cowleys fears that the paperback was corrupting American
culture may have been spurious, the possibility that Faulkners paperback
career might corrupt his serious reputation was more feasible, especially
considering the academic fate of Caldwell, who enthusiastically embraced
the populist potential of the paperback form. Early in his career, Caldwell
was identified as a populist, leftist, and literary author, although it was also
his salacious depiction of Southern degradation that flouted censorship
laws and attracted wide readership. His first book with Penguin, Trouble
in July (1940), did well enough that Weybright quickly published Gods
Little Acre (1946), which became the firms first million-seller, then two
million-seller, then four, distinguishing it as The Worlds Fastest Selling
Book.15
The huge success of Caldwells books for Signet made their marketing
of Faulkner that much easier. Signet seems to have promoted similarities
between Faulkner and Caldwell, even staggering the publications of their
books. On the back of a letter from Random House giving Signet permis-
sion to reprint The Old Man, Victor Weybright scrawled that the book was
to be pub[lished] 1950 [ . . . ], by middle [of] 1949 if no other Caldwell
by then; otherwise by 1950. A 1947 promotional letter to news dealers
marketing Sanctuary listed Signet titles with phenomenal sales, includ-
ing Caldwells Gods Little Acre, and proclaimed Penguin is confident that
it has such another swift seller in SANCTUARY by William Faulkner.
Here is another novel about the South with the hard-hitting impact, the
frank realism, the lusty humor of GODS LITTLE ACRE.16 Yet these
two novelists have very divergent reputations today.
Gods Little Acre was Weybrights biggest coup, but its enormous success
in paperback endangered Caldwells academic reputation. In 1956 Carl
Bode complained that whereas Caldwells sordid representation of the
South would be taken as obviously exaggerated by discriminating readers,
for the multitude of customers in the re-print market . . . it is true enough
for them. And it invites them to feel superior to it.17 Bode also condemned
Gods Little Acre for its portrayal of the plight of the working class and pro-
unionization: The slabs of social significance in the novel (fashionable
in 1933, when it was published) are today merely interruptions to the
narrative. They allow the publisher to murmur something about the social
significance of Caldwells writing, but it is inconceivable that they helped
to sell the book in postwar years. They didnt need to. Sex did the job
(Bode, Caldwell 358). Bode exemplifies the mid-century New Critical
effort to obscure a books populist and political value by tarring it with
popular success.18 Of course, Bodes deprecation of Caldwell is in itself
240 David M. Earle
political. Writing at the height of the Cold War, he construes Gods Little
Acre as anti-American: Caldwell has been unusually popular in foreign
countries. There are doubtless several reasons but again one of them must
surely be the sense of superiority a foreigner can have after a literal reading
of Caldwells tales (358). In other words, Caldwells portrayal of the South
brings the United States down in the worlds eyes. Caldwells leftist leanings,
embodied in both his populist subject matter and paperback popularity,
resulted in his dismissal by critics in the 1950s and exclusion from the
literary canon.
If anything, Faulkners portrayal of the South is bleaker, lustier, more
degenerate, and more fractured than Caldwells. Yet Faulkner, with almost
as much success and almost as many Signet titles, escaped Caldwells fate
because critics sought to extract the real Faulkner from those qualities that
made him a successful paperback author. Explicitly contrasting him with
Caldwell, Bode insisted that as a [m]ythologist of the South and holder
of the Nobel award for literature, Faulkner is a great novelist (359). It was
Cowley who had characterized Faulkner as a mythologist, in his introduc-
tion to A Portable Faulkner and accompanying articles. Cowley credited
Faulkner with creating timeless fiction about universal human themes.
Unlike Caldwells fiction, there were no interruptions in the narrative of a
socially significant nature (358). Casting Faulkner as a mythmaker, Cowley
in effect de-politicized his writing.19 The depreciation of Caldwells strain
of Southern realism and the de-politicization of Faulkner exemplify, in
Chris Vials words, the exaltation of modernist ambiguity by the New
Critics, the heritage of which is the continued neglect in literary stud-
ies of seeing realism as a significant, mid-twentieth century aesthetic.20
Looking at Faulkners paperbacks alongside those of Caldwell underscores
Faulkners own socially political representations of the South as a broken
culture, populated by the working poor, degenerate aristocracy, and blacks
caught in between.
A last example of the way a novels significance may be recontextualized
by its paperback reprinting may be seen in the case of Faulkners Intruder in
the Dust (1948). As paperback historian Kenneth C. Davis points out, NAL
had established itself as the only mass market printer willing to handle
serious work by black writers or about blacks (Davis, Two-Bit Culture 148).
Race novels were some of Signets most popular sellers during the 1950s.
Its list included Richard Wrights Uncle Toms Children, Black Boy and
Native Son, Ann Petrys The Street, Lillian Smiths Strange Fruit, and Ralph
Ellisons Invisible Man. Furthermore, African Americans were an impor-
tant market for Signet. According to Weybright, NAL stimulated
 Faulkner and the paperback trade 241

Figure 4. Cover of Intruder in the Dust. Copyright 1949, Signet Books. First printing 1949.

the distribution of books in predominantly Negro neighborhoods . . .

where . . . [a]spiring young negroes were a substantial and grateful audi-
ence (Bonn, Heavy Traffic 220). In short, Signet forced race relations into
the public consciousness in the years before the Civil Rights movement.
Signets edition of Intruder in the Dust in 1949 illustrates how the market-
ing of these paperbacks pushed Faulkners writing to become more topical
[fig. 4]. The cover, by Avati, depicts Lucas Beauchamp being led into jail;
his back is bowed it is the moment he picks up his hat after it is knocked
off, but potential buyers would just see a man looking humbled or weary.
The foreground shows a group of men gathered, gesturing as if for a lynch-
ing. In 1949 merely placing a black on the cover of a book meant bad sales
in the South, hence the figure of Beauchamp remains at a distance, and he
is not immediately recognizable as a black man (Schreuders, Paperback 90).
By 1956, the paratext had changed: whereas the cover image is the same,
it is now accompanied with the splash line Murder and Violence Rip
242 David M. Earle

Figure 5. Cover of Intruder in the Dust. Copyright 1949, Signet Books. Sixth printing
1956.

a Southern Town [fig. 5]. The back cover is even more explicit: Mob
Fury and a short plot hook. The racial situation in the 1956 edition is
now unmistakable. The reasons are obvious: Brown v. Board of Education,
Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, riots at the University of Alabama. If
the New Critics de-politicized Faulkner by making his work and charac-
ters mythic, this paperback re-politicized Faulkner by making him topical,
and Intruder clearly a race novel. This becomes even more obvious in
the seventh printing, published in 1959, which features an altogether new
cover, more stylized and menacing, with a larger crowd, obviously angry,
and with Beauchamp now full frontal, staring straight ahead, and defiant
[fig. 6]. The back cover now explicitly states: Lynch Him. [ . . . ] Lucas
must pay for this murder. But more than that, he must pay for all the years
he had refused to act like his white neighbors thought he should act.21
William Faulkners career as a public and paperback author a career
that started in 1947 but was ignored for almost a half-century because of
 Faulkner and the paperback trade 243

Figure 6. Cover of Intruder in the Dust. Copyright 1949, Signet books. Seventh printing
1959.

academic prejudice against popular forms invites us to consider our own

politics of aesthetic assumptions and the pluralism of Faulkners work.

NOTES
1 As opposed to non-commercial paperback. The Armed Services Edition of
A Rose for Emily and Other Stories was published in 1945, but this was free to
servicemen. See below for a description of ASE.
2 Quoted in Frederick Hoffman and Olga Vickery (eds.), William Faulkner:
Three Decades of Criticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1960),
p. 1. We can see Faulkners own disparaging remark that he would eternally
be known as the Corncob man as evidence of this. The introduction to
Sanctuary for the Modern Library, in which he points to the book as a cheap
and blatantly economic idea (despite textual evidence to the contrary), can also
be seen as an attempt by Faulkner to control his own reputation.
3 Victor Weybright, The Making of a Publisher (New York: Reynal and Co.,
1966), p. 182.
244 David M. Earle
4 On NAL and Weybrights vision to bring quality fiction to the masses, see
Thomas Bonns Heavy Traffic & High Culture: New American Library as Lit-
erary Gatekeeper in the Paperback Revolution (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1989).
5 Sales information for Faulkners Signet titles can be found at the Fales Library,
New York University, New American Library Collection, Box 38, Folder 628;
on Sanctuary in particular, Folder 633.
6 Quoted in Lawrence H. Schwartz, Creating Faulkners Reputation (Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press, 1990), p. 9. Schwartzs book offers the most
extended study of both Faulkners paperbacks and his mid-century canoniza-
tion. For Faulkners economic reliance upon paperbacks see pp. 3873.
7 On early/late Faulkner and canon formation, see Roland K. Vegso, Faulkner
in the Fifties: The Making of the Faulkner Canon, Arizona Quarterly (Summer
2007) 63.2, 81107.
8 For the history of paperbacks, see in particular Kenneth Davis, Two-Bit Culture:
The Paperbacking of America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984).
9 John Cole (ed.), Books in Action: The Armed Services Editions (Washington,
D.C.: The Center of the Book, Library of Congress, 1984), p. 3.
10 The term pulp is pliable: stemming from the inexpensive all-fiction, wood-
pulp paper magazines of early twentieth century, the term quickly lost this
specific definition to denote a certain low cultural position and aesthetic of
commerciality and sensationalism. More recently though, critics have applied
this term in a deconstructive manner, implementing it to break down precon-
ceptions. For example, the lesbian pulp-paperbacks of Ann Bannon and others
have been shown to identify and give voice to liminal communities of gay read-
ers; see Christopher Nealon, Invert-History: The Ambivalence of Lesbian Pulp
Fiction, New Literary History 31.4 (Autumn 2000), 74564; Martin Meeker,
A Queer and Contested Medium, Journal of Womens History 17.1 (Spring
2005),16588; and Yvone Keller, Was It Right to Love Her Brothers Wife
So Passionately?: Lesbian Pulp Novels and the US Lesbian Identity, Ameri-
can Quarterly 57.2 (June 2005), 385410. David Earles Re-Covering Modernism
(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009) divulges a popular modernism available to
the masses in popular forms, including mid-century paperbacks. We therefore
have three distinct definitions of the term: material, cultural, and critical.
11 For more on Weybrights marketing, see Bonn, Heavy Traffic & High Culture;
on Weybrights terms, p. 3. There were instances of mis-marketing, such as the
movie tie-in for The Long Hot Summer, which reprinted The Long Summer
chapter of The Hamlet with photos of movie-scenes despite the fact that nothing
from that section made it into the film. This resulted in a spate of complaint
letters from readers expecting a straight novelization of the film (Fales, Box 38,
Folder 631).
12 Piet Schreuders, Paperbacks, U.S.A. (San Diego: Blue Dolphin, 1981), p. 88.
13 Malcolm Cowley, The Literary Situation (New York: Viking, 1955), p. 98.
14 See as well Trysh Travis The Man of Letters and the Literary Business: Re-
viewing Malcolm Cowley, Journal of Modern Literature 25.2 (20012002),
 Faulkner and the paperback trade 245
118. Travis looks at strains of anti-mass publishing in two of Cowleys earlier
articles: The Literary Business in 1943, The New Republic, 27 September
1943, 41719, and Books by the Millions, The New Republic, 11 October 1943,
4825.
15 For Caldwell and Signet, see Dan Miller, Caldwell: The Journey from Tobacco
Road (New York: Knopf, 1995), pp. 3306.
16 Fales Library, NYU, NAL Papers, Box 38, Folder 633.
17 Carl Bode, Erskine Caldwell: A Note for the Negative, College English, 17.6
(March 1956), 358.
18 On Faulkners Cold War reputation, see Schwartz, Creating, and Catherine
Kodats essay in this volume; for a global perspective on Faulkners reputation
during the cold war, see Helen Oakley, Faulkner and the Cold War, in Look
Away!: The U.S. South in New World Studies, eds. Jon Smith and Deborah
Cohn (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), pp. 40518.
19 On Cowleys own retreat from leftist politics, see Schwartz, Creating, pp. 99
112.
20 Chris Vials, Realism for the Masses (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2009), p. xviii. On Caldwell, see also pp. 80109.
21 Id like to thank Anna Creadick for pointing out this edition to me, as well as
her much appreciated input on an earlier draft of this chapter.
After Faulkner: A world of readers
 chapter 21

Writing after Faulkner

Faulkner and contemporary US fiction
Jay Watson

They shook their heads in disbelief at everything they saw.

They said, Faulkner was only a reporter.
They said, Faulkner was only the cameras eye.
Lewis Nordan1

For the contemporary US writer, William Faulkner now belongs to Liter-

ature, so authors like Lewis Nordan can engage him directly, much as his
characters engage Tennyson, Shakespeare, or Keats. Yet Faulkners legacy
extends well beyond such literary name-checking. An earlier generation of
critics, influenced by D. H. Lawrences ideas about classic American liter-
ature, linked Faulkners achievement to that of canonical predecessors like
Cooper, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, and Twain.2 And it
would be easy enough to extend these vectors of affinity and influence for-
ward to find the Faulknerian stamp in exposes of frontier imperialism like
Cormac McCarthys bloody romp through the history of the border South-
west in Blood Meridian (1985); in deconstructions of American self-making
like Peter Matthiessens Shadow Country (2008), the chronicle of a ruth-
less arriviste in the Florida Everglades cut from the same cloth as Thomas
Sutpen; or in the spectacular repurposings of American gothic in Randall
Kenans 1989 novel, A Visitation of Spirits, and 1992 collection, Let the Dead
Bury Their Dead. Yet doing justice to Faulkners contemporary significance
may require a different framework than American Studies scholarship, with
its exceptionalist accounts of national and regional literatures, can provide.
One such scheme can be found in the model of minor literature
developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. According to Deleuze
and Guattari, minor literatures are the product of writers who work from
an estranged position within the language of their national literatures.3
The work of such writers has a deterritorializing effect on the host
language, destabilizing its characteristic patterns of usage, verbal tempos,
249
250 Jay Watson
and strategies for organizing meaning. Deleuze and Guattari pronounce
these to be genial conditions for the production of revolutionary writing
that opens up new intensities within the national literary language (19).
To be a sort of stranger within his own language . . . To make use of the
polylingualism of ones own language, to make a minor or intensive use of
it, to oppose the oppressed quality of the language to its oppressive quality,
to find points of nonculture or underdevelopment, linguistic Third World
zones by which a language can escape: this is the program of the minor
author (267).
As an American working in the language of Shakespeare and a Southerner
writing in American English, Faulkner bore a doubly estranged relationship
to his national literary language. In this his situation resembled that of
African American writers and speakers, whose strange and minor uses of
the English language Deleuze and Guattari compare to Franz Kafkas uses
of Prague German (17). Indeed, Faulkners own awareness of the doubly
minoritized linguistic position he shared with US blacks informs the scene
in The Sound and the Fury (1929) when a young New Englander remarks
of Quentin Compsons accent that the Mississippian talks like they do in
minstrel shows (120).
For Deleuze and Guattari, there are two paths open to minor authors
who deterritorialize the national language. One, that of Kafka and Beckett,
stresses sobriety, austerity, a perfect and unformed expression (Kafka
19). The other, that of Joyce and Celine, is to artificially enrich the
dominant tongue, swell[ing] it up through all the resources of symbol-
ism, or oneirism, or esoteric sense (19). Faulkner chose the Joycean path,
embracing the linguistic quiddities of his regional society its working-
class vernaculars, elite traditions of oratory and forensics, love of rhetorical
flourish and affective intensity to expand dramatically the range, depth,
and force of the literary language. Bringing together a verbal gorgeous-
ness that eluded Twain, Dreiser, and Hemingway with a demotic energy
and vulgarity off-limits in Hawthorne or James, Faulkner literally deterri-
torialized American prose, as Whitman had done for the nations poetic
idiom.
As one of the crucial minor figures of modern literary English, Faulkner
shaped the conditions of linguistic possibility not just for writers from other
zones of the global Anglophone periphery Rushdie, Soyinka, Narayan,
Winton but for many of his own countrymen and women as well.
Consider the accretive rhythms, portmanteau words, and colliding lexical
registers in this single sentence from McCarthys early novel, Outer Dark
(1968):
 Writing after Faulkner: Faulkner and contemporary US fiction 251
They entered the lot at a slow jog, the peaceful and ruminative stock coming
erect, watchful, shifting with eyes sidled as they passed, the three of them
paying no heed, seeming blind with purpose, passing through an ether of
smartweed and stale ammonia steaming from the sunbleared chickenrun and
on through the open doors of the barn and almost instantly out the other
side marvelously armed with crude agrarian weapons, spade and brush-hook,
emerging in an explosion of guineafowl and one screaming sow, unaltered
in gait demeanor or speed, parodic figures transposed live and intact and
violent out of a proletarian mural and set mobile upon the empty fields,
advancing against the twilight, the droning bees and windtilted clover.4

Or the colloquial vigor of the communal narrative voice in this passage

from Kenan:
Doctors say it was a bad case of the flu on top of a weak heart wed never
heard tell of. We figured there was more to it than that, something our
imaginations were too timid to draw up, something to do with living and
dying that we, so wound up in harvesting corn, cleaning house, minding
chickenpox, building houses, getting our hair done, getting our cars fixed,
getting good loving, fishing, drinking, sleeping, and minding other peoples
business, really didnt care about or have time or space to know.5

Or the assurance with which Toni Morrison blends plainspoken similes

with mythic accents in Song of Solomon (1977): He had come out of
nowhere, as ignorant as a hammer and broke as a convict, with nothing
but free papers, a Bible, and a pretty black-haired wife, and in one year
hed leased ten acres, the next ten more. Sixteen years later he had one
of the best farms in Montour County. A farm that colored their lives like
a paintbrush and spoke to them like a sermon.6 Such prose is neither
derivative of Faulkner nor conceivable without his example: his cadences,
his audacious stylistic mixtures, his sheer verbal reach. He took a national
literature and a global literary language South to a new place.
He also opened up new social and geographical territory for modern lit-
erature. Critic Pascale Casanova identifies Faulkner and Joyce as the great
literary innovators of the twentieth century, developing new subject matter
for deprived writers working far from the metropolitan centers of pub-
lishing, translation, and criticism that create cultural capital in Casanovas
world republic of letters.7 While Joyces breakthrough was to establish
the sexual, the scatological, and the prosaic aspects of urban life in
peripheral cities like Dublin as viable modern literary terrain, Faulkner
brought credibility to the nonmetropolitan rural spaces of the Global
South, archaic world[s] prey to magical styles of thought and trapped in
the closed life of families and villages (337). In putting an end of the
252 Jay Watson
curse of backwardness that lay over these regions, by offering the novelists
of the poorest countries the possibility of giving acceptable literary form
to the most repugnant realities of the margins of the world, Faulkner has
been a formidable force for peripheral writers, creating new resources that
brought them into contemporaneity with their metropolitan counterparts
(337).
What Casanova dubs the Faulknerian revolution blazed a trail not only
for international writers like Juan Benet, Rachid Boudjedra, Gabriel Garca

Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, and Edouard Glissant, but also for authors from
underrepresented regions of the United States: Appalachia, Indian coun-
try, the border Southwest, small towns decimated by outmigration and
capital flight, and of course, the rural South. Faulkner formalized his
geography of underdevelopment in a fictional territory, Yoknapatawpha
County and its small-town seat of Jefferson, which appears in fourteen
novels and several dozen short stories. He even published maps of his Mis-
sissippi domain, giving its principal sites a visually memorable form.8
Numerous successors have recognized the value of these innovations.
Wendell Berrys upland Kentucky community of Port William; Kenans
village of Tims Creek, T. R. Pearsons town of Neely, and Jan Karons
community of Mitford, all in North Carolina; Nordans Mississippi Delta
hamlet of Arrow Catcher; James Wilcoxs town of Tula Springs, Louisiana,
and Ernest Gainess community of Bayonne from the same state; mystery
writer Joan Hesss Arkansas towns of Maggoty and Farberville; Cathie Pel-
letiers Mattagash and Carolyn Chutes Egypt, both in Maine all feature
in multiple fictional works, carrying on an intertextual dialogue with Jef-
ferson and Yoknapatawpha. So do recent works that provide maps to orient
the reader in their fictional geography: Gloria Naylors Mama Day (1988),
Chris Offutts Kentucky Straight (1992), Josephine Humphreys Nowhere
Else on Earth (2000), Matthiessens Shadow Country (2008), and Karons
Mitford novels.
To explore Casanovas closed life of families, Faulkner perfected a fic-
tional form we could call the genealogical novel, ranging across multiple
generations in the life of an extended family to trace its rise and fall.
The genre informs his sagas of Yoknapatawphas great families the Sar-
torises, Compsons, Sutpens, and Snopeses and reaches a pinnacle in Go
Down, Moses (1942), whose white and black McCaslin lines each span seven
generations, from the antebellum patriarch they share to the mixed-race
infant in whom, a century later, they reconverge. These novels sometimes
double as what critic Valerie Loichot calls orphan narratives, detailing
the absences, uncertainties, and burdens that plague kinship relations in
 Writing after Faulkner: Faulkner and contemporary US fiction 253
postcolonial societies.9 This dynamic between lineage and orphanage resur-
faces in several contemporary novels that engage Faulknerian genealogical
fiction in striking ways. McCarthys epic, brooding Suttree (1979) follows
the scion of an elite Tennessee family who, like Quentin Compson, Isaac
McCaslin, and Henry Sutpen, finds an ancestral legacy of wealth and priv-
ilege to be an oppressive one, retreating to the underworld of Knoxville to
escape its corrupting influence. Lee Smiths Oral History (1983) resituates
the genealogical novel in the hollers of southwestern Virginia, tracing the
lineage of the Cantrell clan across four generations, from its charismatic
founder, Almarine, to a geographically scattered collection of descendants
struggling in various ways to meet the challenges that modernization brings
to Appalachia. Smith even embeds hand-scrawled genealogical entries as
if reproduced from a Cantrell bible or family tree in the five major sec-
tion breaks of her novel.10 Louise Erdrichs Love Medicine (1984) adapts
the genre to portray the entangled lives of two Ojibwe families in a sweep-
ing, braided narrative that spans five generations, fifty years, and a large
swath of the North American mid-continent. Morrisons acclaimed Beloved
(1987) uses a trigenerational household in postbellum Cincinnati to reveal
the trauma to African American bodies, psyches, families, and communi-
ties inflicted by chattel slavery, and to assess a damaged peoples prospects
for healing; Song of Solomon portrays a black lineage encompassing five
generations to document the African American experience in its sorrow,
joy, and wonder from slave times to the 1960s. All four writers join their
great precursor in exploiting genealogy as a critical tool for interrogating
hemispheric legacies of displacement, dispossession, and disavowal that
discredit the exceptionalist premises of US history.
History, though, figures prominently in Faulkners work, nowhere more
than in Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and Go Down, Moses, which depict the
epistemological enterprise of reconstructing past events that weigh trau-
matically on present generations. This mode of historiographic detective
fiction, which Faulkner learned from Conrad, continues to shape con-
temporary novels like Bobbie Ann Masons In Country (1985) and Tim
OBriens In the Lake of the Woods (1994), which trace the quest to unearth
buried histories of the Vietnam War; Ron Rashs The World Made Straight
(2006), which recounts an analogous effort to excavate the story behind a
forgotten Civil War massacre in Appalachia; and David Bradleys stunning
Chaneysville Incident (1981), which chronicles the attempt to uncover lost
histories of slave resistance.
The magical styles of thought that Casanova finds in Faulkners
archaic world align it with the phantasmagoric New World phenomenon
254 Jay Watson
Alejo Carpentier dubbed the marvelous real, and with magical realism as
its corollary narrative technique.11 Faulkners fiction abounds in moments
of dreamlike intensity and incongruity that betoken the marvelous real
spectral figures, totemic animal spirits, clairvoyant characters, graphic vio-
lence encased in silence and stillness but space permits me to focus only
on his brilliant depictions of the hallucinatory illogic of racial lynching.
Dry September (1931) and Intruder in the Dust (1948), along with Light
in August (1932), present lynching as a social script with the power to write
itself into being, drag citizens into its ritual machinery, and gather unstop-
pable momentum as it hurtles toward its savage conclusion. The barest
rumor serves for a cause, lynching parties materialize out of nowhere, and
the collective performance answers to no logic but its own self-fulfilling
one. Dry September captures the surrealism of lynching fever in one of
the greatest lines Faulkner ever wrote. Asked whether an alleged interracial
rape actually took place, the white speaker replies, What the hell differ-
ence does it make? Are you going to let the black sons get away with it
until one really does it? (CS 1712). The rejoinder short-circuits the most
elementary laws of justice (putting punishment before crime) and event
(putting effect before cause), and its sheer irrationality is only compounded
by its ability to pass as unremarkable, a statement of the obvious. Here the
marvelous real infiltrates the very language spoken by the Souths white
citizenry or more precisely, the language that speaks them.
Two extraordinary novels carry this Faulknerian project forward into
the present day, utilizing magical realist effects to engage the oneiric aura
of absurdity, inexorability, and dread that pervades the cultural theater of
lynching. Nordans Wolf Whistle (1993) fictionalizes the details surrounding
the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till, distorting history with an irreverence
some readers will find outrageous: bending events toward slapstick farce,
lyrical extravagance, and baldly inappropriate pathos for the white authors
of the crime. Nordan traces the racial violence of Jim Crow to a gigantic
matrix of white pain and longing: unhappy marriages, unrequited loves,
afflicted children, pinched, provincial lives. He then raises the stakes of his
own game, from the improbable to the marvelous. A lonely schoolteacher
glimpses the image of a drowned child in a drop of rainwater. An ancient
buzzard expresses itself in prayer. And for the death scene of his Till figure,
Bobo, Nordan ups the ante yet again:

From the eye that Solons bullet had knocked from its socket and that hung
now upon the childs moon-dark cheek in the insistent rain, the dead boy
saw the world as if his seeing were accompanied by an eternal music, as
 Writing after Faulkner: Faulkner and contemporary US fiction 255
living boys, still sleeping, unaware, in their safe beds, might hear singing
from unexpected throats one morning when they wake up, the wind in
a willow shade, bream bedding in the shallows of a lake, a cottonmouth
hissing on a limb, the hymning of beehives, of a birds nest, the bray of the
icemans mule, the cry of herons or mermaids in the swamp, and rain across
wide water. (Wolf Whistle 175)
Not long afterward, a speeding arrow alters the laws of time and physics,
reversing the decay of Bobos corpse, as flesh became firm once more, eyes
snapped back into sockets and became bright, bones unbroke themselves,
and Bobos incendiary wolf whistle became mere childs play, a normal
and decent testing of adolescent limits in a hopeful world (2089). Still
later, at the trial of the killers, a majestic parrot ascends to circle the
high-ceilinged courtroom three times before landing, and defecating, on
the head of a soon-to-be-acquitted defendant (24855). In each case, the
fantastic elements offer intimations of hope or justice otherwise absent
from the textual world. Testing the limits of credibility and taste, Nordan
enlists magical realism not only to underscore the myriad disfigurements
wrought by lynching but to salvage some glimmer of possibility from its
human wreckage.
Olympia Vernons A Killing in This Town (2006) is, if anything, stranger,
more haunting and severe. On turning thirteen, each white boy in Bul-
lock, Mississippi, is initiated into the towns klavern of free and automatic
white men by means of a gruesome ritual: dragging a black man through
the woods until, in the incantatory words that invoke the ceremony, his
torso is bloody and his head and body are bloody.12 Worse yet more
hideous and more chillingly precise the corpse must lose an eye. By
depicting the tradition as a local custom so ingrained in the history and
identity of Bullock that even the towns black residents seem reconciled
to its necessity, Vernon both defamiliarizes lynching and allegorizes it,
as an institutionalized force in Mississippi life whose quotidian toxicity
Faulkner would recognize. The endemic violence deranges language, pro-
ducing eerily stilted writing: She seemed a terrifying excursion: Curtis
was a blurring relic in this house, a tornado that had come and spun its
divinity into the shape of a debilitating dream (Killing 29). It also sends
ripples through the natural order, edging events toward the fantastic. The
teenager next in line for initiation passes his hand over the face of a black
stranger, only to discover the minuscule print of a birds beak in his palm
(1245). Another bird nips and pecks at a white Klansman like a tiny fury
(2312). A brown recluse spider dispenses with a second Klansman, which
prompts his widow to eat another spider before a third ascends to weav[e]
256 Jay Watson
a hole in her skull (1401, 130, 224). Other white men cough up blood
from a mysterious environmental illness contracted at the local factory. As
in Nordan, wonders and omens seem to bend the novels moral arc toward
justice, and this time the human community follows suit, as a handful of
characters conspire to turn the violence of the dragging ceremony back
on the Klansmen. What Nordan and Vernon alongside other US exem-
plars of magical realism such as Morrison, Kenan, Naylor, Erdrich, Ellen
Gilchrist, and Sherman Alexie glean from Faulkners precedent is how
centuries of domination and cyclical violence in the Americas have warped
the canons of rationality itself, including its verisimilar narrative strategies.
Critic Margaret Donovan Bauer helpfully reminds us that todays authors
are as likely to revise the Faulkner legacy as reproduce or simply invoke it.13
Because Faulkner focuses primarily on romantic and educated, liberal-
minded southern white m[e]n confronting the sterilizing influence of
their moribund social regime, his fiction stresses the consequences to the
empowered of this sterility: guilt, disillusionment, dysfunction (Legacy 6,
94). Contemporary writers have responded by bringing minoritized figures
into the narrative foreground to underscore the impact of exploitive regimes
upon the disempowered. Gaines, for example, endows the titular heroine
of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) with the full-throated
first-person narrating voice denied The Sound and the Furys Dilsey Gib-
son. As Gaines remarked in an interview, Jane is what Dilsey might have
sounded like speaking from her own kitchen instead of the Compson
kitchen.14 Similarly, Morrisons Song of Solomon reimagines the hunting
tales and wilderness scenarios of Go Down, Moses as all-black affairs rather
than compromised white-led rituals. Smiths Oral History rewrites Quentin
Compson as Richard Burlage, a self-absorbed heir of the seaboard elite
whose romantic notions about Appalachia prove disastrous for a young
mountain woman (Bauer, Legacy 14453). And north Mississippi native
Larry Brown reclaims the actual Lafayette County from Faulkners apoc-
ryphal Yoknapatawpha for the poor and working-class protagonists of his
stories and novels.
At least two writers have attempted Faulkner sequels. Alan Cheuses story
Candace takes up the life of The Sound and the Furys Caddy Compson
after she disappears from the original text. Bret Lotts Rose dispenses
with the anonymous narrator of A Rose for Emily to tell Emily Grier-
sons story from her own perspective. By assigning interiority to characters
Faulkner kept at a narrative remove, these writers subject Faulkner to femi-
nist revision. Others approach his oeuvre in a spirit of postmodern parody.
Kathy Ackers In Memoriam to Identity (1990), runs characters and motifs
 Writing after Faulkner: Faulkner and contemporary US fiction 257
from Sanctuary (1931), The Sound and the Fury, and Wild Palms (1939)
through a literary Cuisinart, with wildly irreverent results.15 Barry Han-
nahs fictions repeatedly puncture the Lost Cause glamour that bewitches
Faulkner romantics like Gail Hightower in Light in August or the Sartoris
family in Flags in the Dust (published as Sartoris in 1929).16 Nordans Sharp-
shooter Blues (1995) lampoons Faulkners reputation for gothic grotesquerie.
Ill read you some Faulkner sometime, a father promises his son. Geeks,
midgets, anything your heart desires. Better than comic books.17 In the
hands of such iconoclastic disciples, Faulkners work proves eminently
available for repurposing and pastiche.
This in turn suggests that another vital aspect of the Faulkner legacy
remains alive and well. Morrison commends the refusal-to-look-away
approach that drove Faulkner toward whatever thwarted or discomfited
him, what resisted containment or easy explanation.18 That killer instinct
the insistence on attacking the most intractable subjects head-on sets a
daunting precedent for the contemporary author, but also an inspiring
one. Here is how one emerging writer, African American poet Jamaal May,
described meeting that challenge: Faulkner went right at it, so Im just
going to go right at it, too.19 For decades now, Faulkners unflinching
gaze has proven a precious gift to his literary successors, even those who
have turned that gaze back upon the author himself.20

NOTES
1 Lewis Nordan, Wolf Whistle (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin, 1993), pp. 21314.
2 See for example Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (Garden
City, NJ: Doubleday Anchor, 1957), pp. 20536; Leslie A. Fiedler, Love and
Death in the American Novel, rev. ed. (New York: Laurel, 1969), pp. 319
24, 41417, 47680; Richard Poirier, A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style
in American Literature (1966; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985),
pp. 7784; R. W. B. Lewis, The Hero in the New World: William Faulkners
The Bear, Kenyon Review 13.4 (Autumn 1951), 64160; and Leo Marx, The
Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964;
New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 10, 16, 246.
3 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975),
trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986),
pp. 1617.
4 Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark (1968; New York: Ecco Press, 1984), p. 35.
5 Randall Kenan, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead (1992; New York: Mariner,
1993), p. 22.
6 Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (1977; New York: Vintage International,
2004), p. 235.
258 Jay Watson
7 Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters (1999), trans. M. B. DeBevoise
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), p. 326.
8 See Absalom, Absalom!, pp. 31415, and Malcolm Cowley (ed.), The Portable
Faulkner, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin Classics, 2003), frontispiece.
9 Valerie Loichot, Orphan Narratives: The Postplantation Literature of Faulkner,
Glissant, Morrison, and Saint-John Perse (Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 2007). See also George Handley, Postslavery Literatures in the Amer-
icas: Family Portraits in Black and White (Charlottesville: University Press of
Virginia, 2000).
10 Besides Smith, several contemporary novelists have taken their cue from Absa-
lom, Absalom! by appending genealogical tables to their works, including John
Edgar Wideman (Damballah), Jill McCorkle (Tending to Virginia), and Louise
Erdrich (The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse). Matthiessen
(Shadow Country), Naylor (Mama Day), and Josephine Humphreys (Nowhere
Else on Earth) provide genealogies and maps as supporting materials, following
Absaloms example even more faithfully.
11 Alejo Carpentier, The Marvelous Real in America (1967), trans. Tanya Hunt-
ington and Lois Parkinson Zamora, in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Com-
munity, eds. Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham: Duke University Press,
1995), pp. 7588.
12 Olympia Vernon, A Killing in This Town (New York: Grove, 2006), pp. 114, 7.
13 Margaret Donovan Bauer, William Faulkners Legacy: what shadow, what
stain, what mark (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2005), p. 2.
14 John Lowe (ed.), Conversations with Ernest Gaines (Jackson: University Press
of Mississippi, 1995), p. 313.
15 See John N. Duvall, Postmodern Yoknapatawpha: William Faulkner as Usable
Past, in Faulkner and Postmodernism: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1999, eds.
Duvall and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002),
pp. 418.
16 See Martyn Bone, Neo-Confederate Narrative and Postsouthern Parody:
Hannah and Faulkner, in Perspectives on Barry Hannah, ed. Bone (Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 2007), pp. 85101.
17 Lewis Nordan, The Sharpshooter Blues (Chapel Hill: Algonquin, 1995), p. 249.
18 Toni Morrison, Faulkner and Women, in Faulkner and Women: Faulkner
and Yoknapatawpha, 1985, eds. Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 1986), p. 297.
19 African American Poetic Responses to Faulkner, Faulkner and Yoknapataw-
pha Conference, University of Mississippi, Oxford, MS, 21 July 2013.
20 See Carol A. Kolmerten, Stephen M. Ross, and Judith Bryant Witten-
berg (eds.), Unflinching Gaze: Morrison and Faulkner Re-Envisioned (Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 1997).
 chapter 22

Reading Faulkner
Empathy, distance, Tehran
Michael Kreyling

Teaching The Great Gatsby in Tehran during the Islamic revolution in

1979, Azar Nafisi admonished her students as she left her classroom for a
demonstration:
A novel is not an allegory . . . It is the sensual experience of another world. If
you dont enter that world, hold your breath with the characters and become
involved in their destiny, you wont be able to empathize, and empathy is
at the heart of the novel. This is how you read a novel: you inhale the
experience. So start breathing.1

Nafisi does not list a novel by William Faulkner among the books she
taught to her students in Tehran. Trained in modern fiction in the United
States, she must have encountered several. Perhaps Faulkner, like James
Joyce and other high modernists, proved only marginally useful in a time
of revolution. The godlike distance, within or behind or beyond or above
his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his
fingernails, seems irrelevant when, like some of Nafisis students, you are
carried off by the Ayatollahs police.2
Faulkners remarks about writing and reading seem to reach us from
the same distance. His memory of ecstatic breakthrough in The Sound
and the Fury, Now I can write. Now I can just write (ESPL 293) was
countered by a valediction to reading thirteen years later (1933 and 1946) in
a second unused introduction to the novel: With The Sound and the Fury I
learned to read and to quit reading, since I have read nothing since (ESPL
297). Among the many things The Sound and the Fury means, it seems to
have meant, to Faulkner, the difference between reading as a reader and
reading as a writer. Reading Faulkner-the-writer might induce the kind
of dis-empathic distance we hear in Stephen Dedalus of James Joyces A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), a would-be writer who imagines
an ideal of authorial impersonality. Does reading Faulkner-as-reader lead
us to the same place? The metaphor for the novel Faulkner used in the
259
260 Michael Kreyling
first shelved preface is as indifferent to readers as it is redolent of Joycean
distance. Before the postage stamp of soil there was autoerotic artifice:
There is a story somewhere about an old Roman who kept at his bedside a
Tyrrhenian vase which he loved and the rim of which he wore slowly away
with kissing it. I had made myself a vase, but I suppose I knew all the time
that I could not live forever inside of it, that perhaps to have it so that I
too could lie in bed and look at it would be better; surely so when that day
should come when not only the ecstasy of writing would be gone, but the
unreluctance and the something worth saying too. Its fine to think that you
will leave something behind you when you die, but its better to have made
something you can die with. Much better the muddy bottom of a little
doomed girl climbing a blooming pear tree in April to look in the window
at the funeral. (2956)

The elision of world and art bears notice: the little doomed girls drawers
have been made, not by a seamstress but by a novelist.
We might benefit by recalling Faulkners edgy dismissal of the reading
public in The Paris Review interview in 1956, well into the years when
the ecstasy of writing [was] gone. Jean Stein asked him: Is he [the
writer] under any obligation to his reader?3 Faulkners persona in the
interview ranges from the writer as Cash Bundren, hands-on craftsman,
to Darl Bundren, modernist savant for whom words are not implements
but impediments. Cash Faulkner declared that the writers obligation is
to get the work done the best he can do it, but Darl adds I have no
time to wonder who is reading me. Being indifferent to even sometimes
annoyed that there had to be readers is a theme in most of Faulkners
public statements about writing, one that high modernist readers have
come to accept.4 Elsewhere Ive argued that much of Faulkners later, or
post-Nobel Prize, writing is deeply marked by fending off, mostly through
self-parody, public attention from the departure of ecstatic joy in writing.5
Still, for increasingly embedded cultural reasons, we persist against long
odds in reading Faulkner, struggling to inhale his world and empathize
with his characters almost to the point of establishing getting Faulkner
as a fetish. Passing the getting Faulkner test has become the ritual of
admission into a select, educated, modernist readership, those weaned from
dependence on character and plot, and initiated into tropes, structures,
and deceptively concealed ideologies (nothing so overt as the Shahs or
Ayatollahs secret police). As Peter Brooks has forcefully argued in Reading
for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (1984): Reading for the
plot, we learned somewhere in the course of our schooling, is a low form of
activity . . . Plot has been disdained as the element of narrative that least sets
 Reading Faulkner: Empathy, distance, Tehran 261
off and defines high art indeed, plot is that which especially characterizes
popular mass-consumption literature: plot is why we read Jaws, but not
Henry James.6 We take this so-called high road at peril, Brooks warns
us, for one must in good logic argue that plot is somehow prior to those
elements most discussed by most critics, since it is the very organizing
line, the thread of design, that makes narrative possible because finite and
comprehensible (4). Generations of college students, for example, have
worked their way up from plot-heavy short stories like A Rose for Emily
to The Sound and the Fury, [t]he quintessential American high modernist
text, where the plot is, ecstatically, jettisoned and many readers re-weave
plot threads to their own designs.7
Both Brookss insistence on plot and Nafisis on empathy have one cen-
tral fixture in common: texts are made to be read, and reading is socially
embedded in our schooling, whether that schooling takes place in a rar-
efied classroom or a turbulent Tehran. Except for early short stories tailored
for popular magazine audiences, reading Faulkner requires nearly all of the
generally adopted protocols of modernist literacy schooling reserved for
the few rather than the many. That might be the reason Faulkners novels
never had much luck in Nafisis syllabi. A reader accomplished in plot
or empathy conventions, then, cannot automatically expect to be literate
in Faulkner too, and the disappointment of finding that out can be an
embarrassing shock.
Knowing how to breathe Faulkners atmosphere, at least since the pub-
lication of The Sound and the Fury in 1929, is the recurrent issue in reading
Faulkner. Noel Polk, in his introduction to New Essays on The Sound and
the Fury, reminds us that the novels first audience was divided between the
mass of readers who were in no way prepared for it and a select few writers
and readers who seemed to have some sense of what Faulkner had done (9).
Evelyn Scott and Clifton P. Fadiman represented the separation between
the select few and the befuddled many. Faulkners publishers sought to
attract select readers to the new novel by promoting it on the reputation of
another of their authors, Scott (18931963), herself a Southern writer, who
at the time carried the modernist flag with The Wave (1929), an experimen-
tal novel about the Civil War. The Sound and the Fury, says the publishers
prefatory copy for Scotts pamphlet On William Faulkners The Sound and
the Fury, should place William Faulkner in company with Evelyn Scott.8
That is to say, readers who had admired Scotts The Wave need not fear a
new novel by little-known William Faulkner. Scott stayed on message in
her review, claiming that reading Faulkner was not for the emotionally
timid, those capable only of reading Faulkners novel as morbid (77).
262 Michael Kreyling
Strong readers, Scott predicted, will recognize and deal with Mr. Joyce
(79) hovering over Quentin on his last day and with the tin-pot Niet-
zscheanism (80) spouted by his brother, Jason. Reading Faulkner, Scott
and the publishers claimed, would validate ones membership in the order
of literary and philosophical modernists, those not shy around James Joyce
or Friedrich Nietzsche, not clinging to plot or dependent on empathy.
Fadiman, responding to both Scott and Faulkner in The Nation, opted
out, finding The Sound and the Fury simply too difficult to read.9 One
has the feeling, Fadiman concludes, that Mr. Faulkners experiment in
the breaking-up of consciousness, in the abolition of chronology and psy-
chological continuity, are both ingenious and sincere, but they are not
absolutely necessary to his story. The fact that his material includes imbe-
cility, incest, paranoia, and sadism does not mean that his tale is therefore
complicated or obscure and in need of oblique and bizarre treatment (75).
The Joycean method (74) is wasted on what, Fadiman determines, is a
rather banal Poe-esque plot (75). Fadimans resistance to the modernist
Faulkner sets the course for subsequent pushback readings of Faulkner. He
returns to what Brooks called the finite and comprehensible. Goodbye,
Joyce; hello, Poe.
Retrofitting Faulkner texts with plot and empathy is a frequent recourse
for those who find him too difficult to read. Maurine Dallas Watkins
(uncredited) and Oliver H. P. Garrett, who took Sanctuary (1931) and
transformed it into The Story of Temple Drake (Paramount, 1933), overcame
many of the challenges of reading avant-garde Faulkner by simply omitting
them. The Horace Benbow Belle Little Belle subplot (saturated, like
the package of shrimp Horace fetches home from the depot, with sexual
innuendo) proved too rank even for pre-Code Hollywood, and so was
excised from the film version. Only a shadow of Horace Benbow remains,
re-purposed as Stephen Benbow, an idealistic bachelor attorney. Miriam
Hopkinss Temple Drake plays not so much a promiscuous Lilith (for
whom anything like empathy was postponed until her reappearance in
Requiem for a Nun [1951]) as a high-spirited, modern, young woman who
turns out all right in the end. The end of the Paramount version takes place,
as in the novel, in a courtroom, but for the film Temple overcomes social
shame and testifies that the gangster Trigger actually did murder Tommy at
the bootleggers hideout, and attacked her there as well.10 The shame of
admitting rape is so traumatic that Temple faints as she leaves the witness
stand and Stephen Benbow carries her limp body toward the camera while
proclaiming to Judge Drake (Temples grandfather in the film version) that
she is, after all, a great girl.11 The credits roll; there is no fiery lynching
 Reading Faulkner: Empathy, distance, Tehran 263
of Lee Goodwin, no ominous coda in the Luxembourg Gardens, the hero
gets the girl.12
The outlines of the Scott-Fadiman skirmish continue in the 21st century,
reconciling plot-oriented reading publics to Faulknerian modernism and
supplying empathy where there is mostly distance. One of the most promi-
nent reparative schools of reading is conducted by Oprah Winfrey . . . the
foremost purveyor of middlebrow culture in contemporary America.13
Winfrey chose three Faulkner novels, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay
Dying (1930), and Light in August (1932), for her Book Clubs reading
project in the summer of 2005. Winfreys attempt to read Faulkner with
plot and empathy was brave and ambitious. Her previous attempt to do
the same with Toni Morrisons fiction established patterns of reading and
resistance that adumbrated the summer of Faulkner.
Timothy Aubry describes the group psychology of reading into elites
in Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class
Americans (2006). In his analysis of the dynamics of Oprah Winfreys
Book Club, Aubrys blow-by-blow analysis of the Clubs problems with
Toni Morrisons Paradise (1997; Oprahs Book Club selection 1998) fore-
shadows their problems assimilating Faulkner seven years later. The anxiety
of Winfreys readers, and the host herself, in overcoming the plot and empa-
thy challenges to reading Paradise dramatizes a dynamic that professional,
academic criticism seldom addresses. Peter Brooks, continuing the argu-
ment of Reading for the Plot in Realist Vision (2005), summarizes the lesson
of much criticism and theory in the last decades of the twentieth century
[as seeming] to suggest that notions of representation and especially rep-
resentation that thinks of itself as an accurate designation of the world,
are nave and deluded.14 Winfreys readers, according to Aubry, experience
desires, anxieties, losses, and hopes not as tropes shaped by psychological,
economic, or cultural forces but as intensely personal lived realities (2).
And the Clubs readers coalesce as intersubjective affective communities
(live audiences for Winfreys shows, participants in Book Club groups) not
based on shared ideologies or critical methods, but with the tacit assump-
tion that what they read in a text was first and primarily still is real trauma
that correlates to the nonfictional scenarios that Winfreys show generally
presents to its viewers: spousal infidelity, family death, drug addiction,
birth defects (46). Winfreys readers expressed varying degrees of anxiety
about not getting Paradise, either on a first reading (47) or after coaching
by Morrison herself, who appeared on the set with Winfrey to discuss her
novel with the audience. Given Morrisons Nobel Laureate prestige and
the hegemony of modernist reading, Winfreys audience tended to locate
264 Michael Kreyling
flaws in themselves rather than in the text, for they were accustomed to
empathizing with other guests stories on first hearing because their pact
with Winfrey was that no buffer separated the audience from the experience
under discussion.15
Winfreys readers, like Nafisis students in Tehran, insert their own trau-
matic life experiences to bring the text to heel. That is, just as Fadiman read
imbecility, incest, paranoia, and sadism as prior to literary configuration
in The Sound and the Fury, Winfreys readers are prone to regard them
as the sufferings of real people. As Aubry puts it, Winfreys alternative to
highbrow reading is the operation of identification, the choosing of one
character as morally approvable and reading through that moral choice
(53). Extended from an individual reader to the community of the Book
Club, [Morrisons] Paradise [or Faulkner, when his turn came] becomes
less exclusionary, in Aubrys words, not because its difficulties disappear,
but because, as an explicit subject of discussion, the purposes that these
difficulties may serve become more evident (69).
The Book Clubs discussion questions for The Sound and the Fury, for
example, extend the strategy of inclusion. They prompt readers to regard
Benjy as mentally challenged, not as a metaphor channeled through
Shakespeares Macbeth. Readers are invited to see Caddy as undergoing
a particularly painful process of sexual maturation, and to view the
changing of Maurys name to Benjy as a clear statement of the Comp-
son family values.16 Still other prompts counsel readers to think of a
Faulkner text as a suspense or mystery story, or as symphonic in struc-
ture, or as entries written in a diary, each of which textual form is less
foreign than the modernist text.17 The danger that this approach to reading
Faulkner might reduce his texts to referential content only is clear: Just
like any family whos shared meals around a dinner table, the characters
[the Compsons] are consumed by the same memories and losses inno-
cence, freedom, life and love.18 Reading the Compsons as just like any
family, the same kind of family of which the reader might be a member,
might seem nave and deluded to veteran modernists. Winfreys readers
might see the muddy bottom of a little doomed girl climbing a blooming
pear tree in April to look in the window at the funeral as merely soiled
underpants in need of a pre-soak and hot-water wash, not the be-all of
human mortality.
Along with The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom! (1936) is one
of the most deliberately unreadable of Faulkners texts. Indeed, it begins
with a pox on reading for the plot: Rosa Coldfield promises Quentin
Compson a story she is sure he will want to write and submit . . . to the
 Reading Faulkner: Empathy, distance, Tehran 265
magazines, an uncomplicated transaction connecting writer and market
that will convert what Rosa sees as an unambiguous tale into a coat or
frock for the writers wife (5). Rosa errs doubly in reading the situation, for
Quentin is as unlikely to see a simple plot in what she tells him of the Sutpen
saga as he is to enter a conventional marriage. Peter Brooks characterizes
Rosas style of reading as demented: What is missing from her account? In
some important sense, everything (Reading for the Plot, 290). But reading
Absalom, Absalom!, according to Brooks, requires coping with and filling
in formal absences, absences in Truth for there are several contesting
voices with divergent investments in the narrative, and absences in plot for
there is no omniscient narrator but rather several, each with his or her own
logic of actions (287). Absalom, Absalom! defeats empathic reading not
by denying the process altogether but by never stopping it, by implying
that the ultimate subject of any narrative is its narrating, that narrative
inevitably reveals itself to be a Moebius strip where we unwittingly end up
on the plane from which we began (305). The published novel was only
part of the Moebius strip; the process of feeling his way into the Sutpen
matter had begun earlier.
The precursor to Absalom, Absalom!, the short story Evangeline (1931)
where the Sutpen story surfaces, juxtaposes Sutpen experience and the
reading of it vastly more simplistically than the novel. Evangelines
narrator, first revealed by his hard-bitten dismissal of the typical plantation
story, is soon identified by a profession: newspaper reporter, one whose
writing is far more perishable than the old Romans vase, and smugly
superior to what he reports. Like the reporter in Pylon (1935), the novel
Faulkner published just a year before Absalom, Absalom!, the reporter in
Evangeline (at first) anticipates with jaded sarcasm Sutpen experiences
he has yet to witness. He writes for a paycheck, not for ecstatic release, until
his hardboiled patter (an affectation he gradually jettisons as Evangeline
progresses) proves inadequate, even offensive, to the reality of events. He
ends with empathy, but an empathy that enables him to write, not read.
The reporter arrives in plantation country by answering a call from
Dan, an acquaintance, an architect by vocation and an amateur painter
by avocation (US 583). Dan is spending his two-week vacation sketching
colonial porticoes and houses and negro cabins and heads in the vicinity
of a plantation once occupied by a family named Sutpen (583). Readers of
Absalom, Absalom! might jump to the novels theme of an over-reachers
grand design gone tragic in maelstroms of race and blood and desire. But
Evangeline concentrates more directly on the theme of superficial, anti-
empathetic reading as a vice that must be purged before the vase can be
266 Michael Kreyling
wrought. A designer of porticoes and houses sketching porticoes and
houses not to mention negro cabins and heads, by the 1930s staples of
modern painting, sculpture, and photography is a figure of ridicule who
underscores the void of empathy. And the friends banter over the color of
the rose they imagine a typical belle fondling as she flirts with her beau on
a vanished verandah foreshadows another facet of Faulkners declarations
about writing in The Paris Review interview. There he had declared: Only
what he [the writer] creates is important, since there is nothing new to be
said (The Art of Fiction). But the architect and reporter seem to think
the nothing new to be said is their writ to bash some stereotypes.
What the architect tells the reporter is that there was a rich planter
named Sutpen who had a son named Henry and a daughter named Judith.
Henry became friends at the University of Mississippi with a student from
New Orleans by the name of Charles Bon. Bon and Judith, Henrys sister,
met, fell in love, were betrothed all according to the romance formula
surviving, at least in skeletal form, in Absalom, Absalom! In the short story
as in the novel, there is a reported summer trip by Henry and Charles
to New Orleans, a revelation to Henry there that dooms his approval of
Bons marriage of his sister, a blow-up between Henry and his father on
the following Christmas Eve (1860) that sends Henry away from the family
home for a brief exile. The Civil War intervenes, as it does in the novel;
in Evangeline, however, Charles and Judith are wed in the spring of
1861 just an hour before the new bridegroom and his brother-in-law ride
off in preparation for the First Battle of Bull Run. They meet at wars end
in an undescribed encounter, the result of which is that Henry brings Bons
corpse back to Mississippi in the bed of a wagon. Dan has this much from
Raby, an elderly black woman who lives in the old house.
The reporter prods more from Raby on his own. Preparing her husbands
body for burial Judith opens a small metal case that had contained, before
the war, a portrait of herself haloed in her blond hair. What she sees in the
case alone in a room with her dead husband causes her to hammer it shut
with a poker, bury her unconsummated love with Bons body, and enter
upon a life of spinsterhood with the black woman who, we are belatedly
told, is her half sister. In contrast to the novel, in which Clytie is revealed as
Sutpen-sired in early pages, Raby delays her declaration that He [Henry]
was my brother until she tells the reporter in the penultimate section of
the short story (606).
The house burns upon the death of Henry, who, as in the novel, has
secretly returned to live out his life in an upstairs room, attended by Raby.
In the steaming cinders (rain falls from clouds of pathetic fallacy at the
 Reading Faulkner: Empathy, distance, Tehran 267
close of Evangeline), the reporter finds the portrait case, pries it open and
beholds, not a blonde Judith but the stereotypical tragic mulatto woman
along with the inscription: A mon mari. Toujours. 12 Aout, 1860 (609). The
date precedes the marriage of Bon and Judith by at least six months, and
the presence of the mulatto womans likeness in a case that had previously
held Judiths suggests that Bon (or someone) expelled the white woman
from Bons desires, and thereby transgressed against the honor of white,
Sutpen racial order. The reporter, if he knows French, knows that Bon was
a bigamist, at least, and of mixed-race too, if he knows that in antebellum
New Orleans Bon, if he were white, would not be addressed by a mulatto
woman as mon mari. Without, paradoxically, Absalom, Absalom! as a gloss
on its minor precursor, could we read all of this in Evangeline? Perhaps
the more important question is this: Did Faulkner himself learn, again, in
working through Evangeline to Absalom, Absalom!, what it meant to read
with empathy and then to discard the empathy so that he could write? Did
he suspect that we, his readers, would unwind the skein back to empathy,
and thereby miss the writing altogether? Is that why there is no Faulkner
in Tehran?

NOTES
1 Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books (New York: Random
House, 2003), p. 111.
2 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, ed. R. B. Kershner (1916;
Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 1993), p. 187.
3 William Faulkner: The Art of Fiction No. 12, The Paris Review
12 (Spring 1956), www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4954/the-art-of-fiction-
no-12-william-faulkner. Jean Stein conducted the interview in New York City
in 1956.
4 See, as one example among many, Donald Kartiganer, Now I Can Write:
Faulkners Novel of Invention, in New Essays on The Sound and the Fury, ed.
Noel Polk (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 7198. Kartiganer asserts
that the principal object [of the Faulkner text] is that it should not be read,
in the sense that it seeks to withstand from beginning to end every critical
strategy (72) except the high-modernist connoisseurs strategy of endlessly
deferring meaning.
5 See Michael Kreyling, Inventing Southern Literature (Jackson: University Press
of Mississippi, 1998), pp. 14866.
6 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 4.
7 Noel Polk, Introduction, New Essays on The Sound and the Fury, p. 1.
8 Evelyn Scott, On William Faulkners The Sound and the Fury (New
York: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, 1929); as reprinted in William
268 Michael Kreyling
Faulkner: The Critical Heritage, ed. John Bassett (London: Routledge, 1975),
p. 76.
9 Clifton P. Fadiman, Hardly Worth While, The Nation, 15 January 1930, 74.
It might be worth noting that Fadiman (190499) went on, after his work
at The Nation, to become a central figure in the instantiation of middlebrow
protocols of reading in the United States. He edited book reviews for The
New Yorker (193343), was master of ceremonies for the National Book Award
presentations in 1938 and 1939, and became a judge for Book-of-the-Month
Club in 1944.
10 The gangster Popeye of Sanctuary is renamed Trigger in The Story of Temple
Drake perhaps because Popeye the Sailor, a seven-minute animated short,
the first based on E. C. Segars comic strip character, was also released (by
Fleischer Studios) in 1933. Roy Rogers mount Trigger was foaled in 1932 and
first appeared on film in 1938; that unfortunate coincidence in naming was
unforeseen.
11 Although The Story of Temple Drake was filmed under pre-Code conditions,
certain words, like rape, were still taboo.
12 A more byzantine example comes with The Long, Hot Summer, prod. Jerry
Wald; dir. Martin Ritt; screenplay Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr.
Orson Welles, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Lee Remick, Anthony
Franciosa (Twentieth-Century Fox, 1958). The same studio, producer, direc-
tor, and screenwriting team brought forth a more puzzling adaptation of a
Faulkner novel the following year: The Sound and the Fury, prod. Jerry Wald;
dir. Martin Ritt; screenplay Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr. Joanne
Woodward as Quentin Compson, Yul Brynner as Jason Compson, Margaret
Leighton as Caddy Compson, Ethel Waters as Dilsey, Jack Warden as Benjy
(Twentieth-Century Fox, 1959). Transformations of novel to screenplay are
too elaborate for summary here; see http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/90927/
The-Sound-and-the-Fury/full-synopsis.html. See also Bosley Crowther,
review of The Sound and the Fury, New York Times, 28 March 1959. Of
Leightons performance, Crowther wrote: . . . a role Margaret Leighton plays
as if she were the Blanche DuBois right out of a stranded road company of Ten-
nessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire. http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/
review?res=940CE6DF1138EF3BBC4051DFB5668382649EDE. For a kinder
and provocative treatment of the film, see Walter Metz, Signifying Noth-
ing: Martin Ritts The Sound and the Fury (1959): A Deconstructive Reading,
Film/Literature Quarterly 27.1 (Winter 1999), 2131.
13 Timothy Richard Aubry, Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does
for Middle-Class America (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006), p. 8.
14 Peter Brooks, Realist Vision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 6.
15 Thus the special sense of violation when James Freys A Million Little Pieces
(New York: Random House, 2003) was revealed to be manipulated semi-fiction.
Freys false memoir was an Oprah Book Club selection in September 2005, just
as the Faulkner summer was ending.
 Reading Faulkner: Empathy, distance, Tehran 269
16 http://www.oprah.com/oprahsbookclub/The-Sound-and-the-Fury-Reading-
Questions/1.
17 Lest we devalue this kind of reading too hastily, see Brookss discussion
of Absalom, Absalom! in Reading for the Plot: The novel becomes a
kind of detective story where the object of investigation the mystery is
the narrative design, or plot, itself (294). For suspense story and symphony, see
http://www.oprah.com/oprahsbookclub/Faulkner-101-How-to-Read-William-
Faulkner/1. For diary, see http://www.oprah.com/book/The-Sound-and-the-
Fury-by-William-Faulkner?cat_id=.
18 http://www.oprah.com/oprahsbookclub/The-Sound-and-the-Fury-About-
the-Novel/2.
 chapter 23

Faulkner and Latin America; Latin

America in Faulkner
Emron Esplin

William Faulkner and his works play a vital role in Latin American literary
history. A substantial body of literary criticism examines his influence
throughout the region, but scholars have not previously considered the
presence of Latin America in Faulkner.1 In this chapter, I provide a concise
overview of Faulkners significance for various Latin American authors,
particularly for the writers of the so-called Latin American Boom; I briefly
compare Faulkners work with two novels by acclaimed Mexican author
Carlos Fuentes, and I analyze how Faulkner approaches one specific Latin
American nation Mexico in Light in August (1932).
Fuentes succinctly described the Booms attraction to Faulkners fiction
by claiming that Defeat is at the core of Faulkners work, and the defeat of
the South was the only defeat suffered by North Americans . . . For that
reason we Latin Americans feel so close to Faulkners work: only Faulkner,
in the closed world of optimism and success, offers a common image to
the United States and Latin America: the image of defeat, of separation,
of doubt, of tragedy.2 Several Latin American writers of Fuentess gener-
ation, including Nobel laureates Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garca
Marquez, have also commented on Faulkners influence on their individ-
ual works and/or on twentieth-century Latin American narrative.3 The rise
of hemispheric or inter-American literary studies over the past quarter of
a century has also witnessed a dramatic increase in the amount of liter-
ary criticism that brings Faulkners work and biography into conversation
with Latin American letters. Faulkners complex narrative style, his pen-
chant for tragedy, and/or his portrayal of the past as ever-present attracted
Latin Americas most well-known writers of the twentieth century to his
work. His literary influence in Latin America is most pronounced on the
writers of the Boom, but scholars have also demonstrated relationships of
influence, affinity, or both between Faulkner and some of the Booms pri-
mary precursors e.g. Juan Rulfo, Alejo Carpentier, Juan Carlos Onetti,
and Jorge Luis Borges and Faulkners fiction continues to influence both
270
 Faulkner and Latin America; Latin America in Faulkner 271
Latin American and US Latino/a writers after the Boom, including Rosario
Ferre, Rolando Hinojosa, and Cristina Garca. Ferres depictions of the fall
of the sugar plantocracy in Puerto Rico often resemble Faulkners portray-
als of the plantation system in the US South, while Hinojosas creation of
Belken County, Texas recalls Faulkners literary founding of Yoknapataw-
pha. Garcas use of the supernatural in her novels demonstrates Faulkners
influence through the conduits of three of his most important readers
Borges, Garca Marquez, and Toni Morrison.
Out of all of the connections between Faulkner and his Latin American
admirers, his literary relationship with Colombian novelist Gabriel Garca
Marquez has received the most attention. This scholarly emphasis exists, in
part, due to the similarities between their fiction, but it is also the outgrowth
of Garca Marquezs own widespread popularity, which is unmatched by
any of his peers.4 The founder of Macondo has long acknowledged his
literary debt to the creator of Yoknapatawpha County, but by the early
1980s, Garca Marquez seemed to tire of the comparisons. In 1981, he
stated that Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my soul,
but Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft, and in
1982, he downplayed Faulkners influence and claimed that the connections
between his work and Faulkners [were] more geographic than literary.5
However, in December of that same year, Garca Marquez accepted the
Nobel Prize in Literature by closing his lecture with a nod to Faulkners
influence and a response to Faulkners own Nobel banquet speech: On a
day like today, my teacher William Faulkner said in this place: I refuse to
accept the end of man.6 It is significant that Garca Marquezs remarks
on this momentous occasion reiterate, rather than evade, his admiration
for Faulkner.
Regardless of the prominence that scholars have assigned to the Faulkner-
Garca Marquez relationship, several of Fuentess novels converse with
Faulkners as much or more than Garca Marquezs do. Fuentess La muerte
de Artemio Cruz [The Death of Artemio Cruz] and Gringo viejo [The Old
Gringo], for example, emphasize Mexicos history of defeat and its obsession
with the past in a fashion similar to Faulkners portrayals of the US South;
contain disjointed, non-linear narrations that recall Faulkners narrative
style; and provide a keen juxtaposition between how Faulkner/Fuentes and
the US South/Mexico approach the concept of racial mixture.
While the US South and Mexico are quite different from one another
on linguistic, religious, and cultural levels, they share a common history of
defeat and occupation by the North.7 Ironically, the particular North
the US military which invaded, captured, and split Mexico during the
272 Emron Esplin
US-Mexican War of 18461848 consisted primarily of US Southerners
who were then defeated by another North, the Union Army, less than
twenty years later.8 The defeat of the US South in the US Civil War
created the sense of an ever-present past that, as Faulkners character Gavin
Stevens famously states, is never dead. Its not even past; and this ethos
of defeat both haunts and drives Faulkners fiction (RN 73). Similarly, both
Artemio Cruz (1962) and Gringo viejo (1985) cast Mexico as a site of internal
defeat by critiquing the failures of the Mexican Revolution, and Gringo
viejo intensifies this feeling of loss by coupling it with the external defeat
Mexico suffered during the US-Mexican War a loss that created the
dividing line between the two nations that Fuentes character, Inocencio
Mansalvo, claims isnt a border. Its a scar.9 Both novels, like Faulkners
fiction, continually bring the past into the present in what Fuentes refers
to as mythical time (Fuentes and Tittler, Interview 50).
The narrative styles Fuentes adopts in these two novels are even more
Faulknerian than their atmospheres of defeat. Artemio Cruz is a deathbed
novel reminiscent of Faulkners As I Lay Dying (1930). Beginning with
the title characters physical and mental torment in his last moments of
life and ending with a retelling of his violent birth and childhood and
a final confirmation of his death, the narrative patterns in Artemio Cruz
also recall Faulkners The Sound and the Fury (1929) and Absalom, Absalom!
(1936).10 The approach in Gingo viejo is less severe, but this work still opens
with its ending as Harriet Winslow remembers her turbulent months in
Mexico during the Revolution as she returns to Washington, DC. Each
of these works focuses on communal and individual memory to reveal,
in jarring fashion, the inherent fragmentation of the past that lives in the
present.
Gringo viejo and Artemio Cruz also create a complex conversation with
Faulkners Abaslom, Absalom!, Light in August, and Go Down, Moses (1942)
concerning the disparate concepts of racial mixture miscegenation in the
United States and mestizaje in Mexico and how these racial constructs
became discourses following each nations violent civil war. In contrast to
the discourse of mestizaje in Mexico which openly accepts so-called racial
mixture between indigenous groups and Europeans as a fact, embraces
Mexicos indigenous past, and ignores the nations indigenous present, the
discourse of miscegenation in the United States denies the reality of mixture
between people of African and European ancestries, labels all individuals
with any African ancestry as black, casts racial mixture as repugnant, and
places all nonwhite groups in the category of blackness. Both discourses,
however, reject the idea that a person can be both black and Mexican:
 Faulkner and Latin America; Latin America in Faulkner 273
the mestizo is defined restrictively as a mixture between indigenous peo-
ples and Europeans (consequently erasing the African presence in Mexicos
past), while definitions of miscegenation in the United States insist on
a black/white dichotomy that either ignores Mexican ancestry altogether
or makes it subordinate to the designation of blackness. Faulkners and
Fuentess novels simultaneously re-create and challenge the discourses on
racial mixture from each authors particular nation, and a comparative anal-
ysis of these works demonstrates the overarching power of each discourse.
Light in August and Artemio Cruz, for example, cast Joe Christmas and
Artemio Cruz in similar racial terms both characters supposedly have
African ancestry although they pass for something else in their disparate
societies but Cruz becomes a powerful business magnate in Mexico while
Christmas suffers through a wandering life of self-loathing that ends in
mutilation and murder.11
While Fuentes, Garca Marquez, and others claim to see Latin America,
the Caribbean, or both within Faulkners descriptions of the US South,
readers are hard-pressed to find actual portrayals of Latin American spaces
within Faulkners works. Faulkner rarely mentions Latin America, and
most of his literary references to the region are brief and inconsequential.12
His 1932 novel Light in August, however, provides the exception to this rule
through its subtle but visible treatment of Mexico and Mexican identity
in Joe Christmas and Joanna Burdens family histories. Faulkner clearly
situates Light in August in the US South, but Mexican identity plays such
a pivotal role in both Christmas and Burdens known and unknown pasts
that the novel acknowledges the actual presence of Mexico within the US
South, above and beyond the similar experiences of lost wars and northern
domination that the two spaces share.
Light in August offers a fictional portrayal of the historical erasure of black
Mexican identity by both propagating and questioning the terms of the
discourse of miscegenation. Literary critics typically read Joe Christmas as
mulatto or black while a few scholars claim that he is white. The characters
in Light in August and most literary critics seem to deny the idea that one
could be both Mexican and black. Indeed, Doc Hines suggests that black
blood cancels the possibility of being Mexican when describing Christmas
father: Telling old Doc Hines, that knowed better, that he was a Mexican.
When old Doc Hines could see in his face the black curse of God Almighty
(374). Hiness violent denial of the racial/national identity Milly Hines
assigns her lover appears to cast black and Mexican as mutually exclusive
alternatives, but his judgment fits into a larger pattern within the novel
of collapsing Mexicanness into blackness. Both Christmas and Joanna
274 Emron Esplin
Burdens genealogies demonstrate how the discourse of miscegenation casts
racial mixture as abnormal and labels any sort of racial other in this case
Mexican as black in order to quarantine whiteness from all other races
and to protect the special interests and advantages enjoyed by the white
community in a dualistic racial hierarchy.
In Light in August, Christmas genealogy is anything but clear, and
no character has any real knowledge of Christmas fathers racial identity.
Arguing that Christmas father claims Mexican identity may take too much
for granted since he has no voice in the novel and since Millys assertion
that he is Mexican could be an attempt to assuage her fathers murderous
temper when he finds her breaking what he considers the ultimate taboo
sexual relations between a white woman and a black man. Yet, reading
Millys assertion of her lovers Mexican identity as a mere invention also
goes too far since the novel neither confirms nor denies that she actually
learned this information from her otherwise silent partner. Millys claim
that the man is Mexican instead of black casts the identities as two distinct
categories. When Milly tells Hines that the man is Mexican, she is really
shouting out to her father that her lover is not black. Her assertion, how-
ever, is not nearly as clear as she might hope. The ambiguity of the claim
the fact that the label Mexican does not clarify Christmas fathers race or
color apparently provides several racial options for Christmas, including
mestizo, mulatto, or white. But the novel disallows all of these racial alter-
natives, not only through Millys use of Mexican to mean not-black,
but more emphatically through the violent words and actions of her
father, Doc Hines, who labels her lover black and silences him with a
bullet.
Hiness declaration that the man is black erases both his national iden-
tity and any possibility of intermediate race. Like Millys claim of the
mans Mexicanness, Hiness assertion segregates black from Mexican. The
assignation of black identity to Christmas would-be Mexican father leaves
only one racial option for Christmas. Since the either/or logic of miscegena-
tion does not maintain an intermediate category that recognizes mixture,
such as mestizo or mulatto, and since Christmas looks white, he becomes
the stereotyped white nigger (344). Even though Christmas does not
know the history of either of his parents, he also is convinced that one
of them was part nigger (254). In other words, he buys into his grand-
fathers assertion even though Hines never makes the claim to Christmas
himself.
Joanna Burdens genealogy, like Christmas, also grafts Mexican, black,
and white into one family tree. The Burden family, however, continually
 Faulkner and Latin America; Latin America in Faulkner 275
collapses the designations of Mexican and black into each other, reproduc-
ing the US Souths logic of racial binarism. According to the family history
that Joanna relates to Christmas, the Burden family has no actual African
lineage. Instead, the eventual blurring of Mexican and black depends on the
gaze of Calvin Burden the family patriarch and Joannas paternal grand-
father who describes the various national/racial strands in his marriage
and in his offspring in terms of blackness.
Calvins wife, his son, and his grandson all have dark complexions that
contrast starkly with his fair features. Joanna paints Christmas a narra-
tive of her grandfather and her father in black and white in terms that
echo the descriptions of the offspring of so-called miscegenational rela-
tionships: the tall, gaunt, Nordic man, and the small, dark, vivid child
who had inherited his mothers build and coloring, like people of two
different races (242). Standing alone, Joannas description of her family
defies any attempt to describe whiteness in terms of racial purity, since
this marriage between two so-called whites reveals one partner as fair, the
other as dark, and their offspring as black. The Burden familys racial status
becomes even more convoluted when Nathaniel the son who looks like
his dark mother marries a Mexican named Juana, who looked enough
like his dead [mother] to have been her sister (246), and sires a son
who is Calvins namesake but whom Calvin calls [a]nother damn black
Burden (247).
Calvin Burdens disgusted description of his grandson begins to reveal his
surprising likeness to Doc Hines. Politically, Burden and Hines could not
be more distinct. Hines preaches violent white supremacy and segregation
while Burden is murdered as he tries to secure black votes in Jefferson,
Mississippi during Reconstruction. But philosophically, Burden appears
to be every bit as racist as Hines. His disparaging descriptions of blacks
mix religion and race in the same bizarre way that Hines does, with the
only difference being where the sin lies for Burden blacks are black
because whites sinned and made them slaves while for Hines blacks are
black because they are cursed by God.
Burden collapses Mexican into black just as Hines erases Mexican with
black, and their disparate but strangely similar views on race reveal how
the logic of miscegenation functions in the United States by grouping any
racial other and all so-called mixed race offspring on the black side of a
black/white binary. Light in August, via Doc Hiness and Calvin Burdens
approaches to race, suggests that racial identifications such as mulatto Mex-
ican or black Mexican are impossibilities. Similarly, the doubt surrounding
Mexicanness in Light in August almost completely nullifies the existence of
276 Emron Esplin
Mexican identity per se, regardless of the prefixes attached. The Mexican
identity of both of the characters who are possibly Mexican either resides
in or contradicts their lovers claims about them. Milly asserts that Christ-
mas father is Mexican in opposition to all other characters claims that he
is black, but Christmas father says nothing for himself. Nathaniel thinks
that Juana is Spanish in contrast with Calvins belief that she is black and
against the details of the narrative that suggest that she is Mexican, but
like Christmas father, Juana never speaks. Throughout the novel, misce-
genations dominant framework the black/white dichotomy silences all
identities that are not black or white by forcing them to one side of the
color divide. Light in August casts Christmas father and Juana, whether
Mexican or not, as other or non-white and automatically places them on
the black side of the US racial dichotomy.
Light in August re-inscribes the discourse of miscegenation when Doc
Hines and Calvin Burden approach Mexican and black identities in oppo-
site ways that both suggest black Mexican identity cannot exist. At the
same time, the novel questions miscegenation as discourse by inserting
Mexican identity into the supposedly black past of Joe Christmas and the
so-called white past of Joanna Burden. The novels distant yet important
relationship with Mexico mirrors the connections between the US Civil
War and Mexico. Mexico is certainly not a primary player in the internal
conflict of the US Civil War, but as I have argued elsewhere, this war
would not have taken place in the same time, space, or circumstances were
it not for the United States previous conflict with Mexico in 184648
(Esplin, Racial Mixture 502). Light in August suggests that the discourse
of miscegenation, like the US Civil War that gave birth to it, relies on a
strange relationship of denial and/or engulfment of the further South
Mexico.

NOTES
1 Even a representative sample of the scholarship on Faulkner and Latin America
is too vast to include in a note. Interested scholars can begin with The Faulkner
Journal 11.12 (199596); Tanya T. Fayen, In Search of the Latin American
Faulkner (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1995); several works by
Deborah Cohn including Combatting Anti-Americanism During the Cold
War: Faulkner, the State Department, and Latin America, Mississippi Quarterly
59.34 (2006), 395413; Faulkner and Spanish America: Then and Now, in
Faulkner in the Twenty-First Century: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2000, eds.
Robert Hamblin and Ann Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi,
2003), pp. 5067; Faulkner, Latin America, and the Caribbean: Influence,
 Faulkner and Latin America; Latin America in Faulkner 277
Politics, and Academic Disciplines, in A Companion to William Faulkner,
ed. Richard Moreland (Malden: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 499518; History and
Memory in the Two Souths: Recent Southern and Spanish American Fiction
(Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999); and the William Faulkner and
Latin America section of Cohns and Jon Smiths co-edited volume Look Away!:
The US South in New World Studies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004),
pp. 303445, which includes essays on Faulkners influence in both Spanish
America and Brazil.
2 Carlos Fuentes, La novela como tragedia: William Faulkner, in Casa con
dos puertas (Mexico: Joaqun Mortiz, 1970), pp. 5278. All translations from
Spanish to English are my own unless otherwise noted.
3 Vargas Llosa and Garca Marquez each mention Faulkner in several works.
For example, see Gabriel Garca Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, La nov-
ela en America Latina: Dialogo, 2nd edition (Lima: Universidad Nacional de
Ingeniera, 1991), pp. 534.
4 Carlos Fuentes and Jonathan Tittler, Interview: Carlos Fuentes, Diacritics
10.3 (1980), 4656. In this piece, Fuentes comments on Garca Marquezs
unparalleled success, claiming that Garca Marquez is the only Boom writer
who can make a living off writing.
5 Gabriel Garca Marquez, Gabriel Garca Marquez Meets Ernest Hemingway,
trans. Randolph Hogan, New York Times Book Review, 26 July 1981, http://
www.nytimes.com/books/99/07/04/specials/hemingway- marquez.html;
Gabriel Garca Marquez and Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, El olor de la guayaba
(Barcelona: Editorial Bruguera, 1982), p. 66.
6 Gabriel Garca Marquez, Nobel Lecture: La soledad de America latina, http://
www.nobelprize.org/nobel prizes/literature/laureates/1982/marquez-lecture.
html.
7 See C. Vann Woodward, The Burden of Southern History, 3rd Edition (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993), pp. 18891 for an early discussion
of how the US South shares a history of defeat with most other parts of the
world.
8 For more on the historical connections between Mexico and the US South,
see Clement Eaton, A History of the Old South (New York: Macmillan, 1949),
pp. 3607; Jose E. Limon, American Encounters: Greater Mexico, the United
States, and the Erotics of Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1998), pp. 716, and the first
chapter of my doctoral dissertation: Emron Esplin, Racial Mixture and Civil
War: The Histories of the US South and Mexico in the Novels of William
Faulkner and Carlos Fuentes, Diss. Michigan State University, 2008 (Ann
Arbor: UMI, 1993. 3331903).
9 Carlos Fuentes, The Old Gringo, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden (New York:
Harper and Row, 1985), p. 185.
10 Carlos Fuentes, La muerte de Artemio Cruz (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura
Economica, 1998).
11 For a detailed comparison between the discourse of miscegenation and the
discourse of mestizaje and for an extended analysis of how Faulkner and
278 Emron Esplin
Fuentes approach racial mixture, see Esplin, Racial Mixture and Civil War,
pp. 84222.
12 My usage of Latin America in this essay refers primarily to Spanish- and
Portuguese-speaking America. French-speaking Haiti, however, plays a major
role in Absalom, Absalom!. For more on Faulkner and Haiti see Richard God-
den, Absalom, Absalom! Haiti, and Labor History: Reading Unreadable Revo-
lutions, ELH 61.3 (1994), 685720. For more on Faulkner and the Caribbean,
see the essay by Valerie Loichot in this volume.
 chapter 24

William Faulkner and Japan

Takako Tanaka

Although the first translation of Faulkners work (A Rose for Emily)

appeared in a high-quality literary magazine in Japan as early as 1932, his
introduction to the general Japanese public had to wait until after World
War II. Faulkners acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950
drew considerable attention, and the translations of Sanctuary and The
Wild Palms that same year started the continuous publication of his novels
in Japan. Even though the number of Japanese who could read Faulkner in
English was limited, the Civil Information and Education (CI & E) Section
(later renamed as American Cultural Centers), established in major cities in
early postwar Japan, offered Japanese intellectuals easy access to American
literature and culture in English.1
In addition, Japanese readers interest in Faulkner was much strength-
ened by the example of French intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre, Andre
Malraux, and Albert Camus, who were quite popular in the 1950s in Japan
as well as in the West. The existentialists emphasis on the responsibility of
the individual for his/her own way of living appealed to the Japanese, who
had been taught to live and die for the nation and for the Emperor. Sartres
important essay review, Time in Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury, trans-
lated into Japanese in 1948, had a strong influence on Japanese writers and
readers.2 Even Andre Gide was called in to provide a complimentary blurb
for The Wild Palms, published in 1950: French writers absolutely praise
the problem novel!! Gide says Faulkner is the most brilliant of the new
constellation.3
Faulkner and some contemporary Japanese writers commonly regarded
France as a symbol of artistic freedom against communal and national
cultures. Faulkners early poems imitated Stephane Mallarme and Paul-
Marie Verlaine, indicating his identification with the French symbolists,
and anticipating his subsequent refusal to narrate the stereotypical romance
of the old South. In 1930s Japan, on the other hand, many artists famil-
iar with Western culture suffered from the increasing pressure of military
279
280 Takako Tanaka
control and the suffocating enforcement of nationalistic, patriarchal cul-
ture. They sought to express their protest in the art-for-arts-sake style of
the French symbolists and the radical expression of the Anglo-American
modernists. Faulkner, with the anti-chronological plots and gothic ele-
ments of his fiction, aroused their interest, which was also sustained by
the favorable attention Faulkner received from the contemporary French
literary magazines.4
Faulkner, however, quickly realized that France had produced imperi-
alists as well as Symbolists. In Red Leaves (1930), first published in the
Saturday Evening Post, a Frenchman, the Chevalier Sur Blonde de Vitry,
becomes acquainted with an ambitious native American named Doom,
and corrupts American Indians along the Mississippi River even before the
Anglo-Americans did. Faulkner deepened his criticism of Southern patri-
archy and the antebellum plantation system in his novels through French
examples in Mississippi and Haiti.
In Red Leaves the Indians at least have the nerve to change French aes-
thetics to their liking: a gorgeous steamboat is turned into an Indian chiefs
residence and French Rococo-style luxury collides with savage wilderness
in a grotesque fashion. Thomas Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom! (1936), how-
ever, must have his mansion built by a French architect to prove him-
self a respectable plantation owner. As this French architect defends his
artistic vision against Sutpens vulgarity in building his mansion, perhaps
he suggests how continental standards measure aesthetic achievement for
Faulkner. But the Frenchman, who was brought from Martinique, also
reminds us of a colonialists double-bind position: authority over the col-
onized and colonial deference to the mother country, which, in his case,
is presumably France. Sutpens experiences as overseer on a plantation in
Haiti and as a newcomer in Jefferson show his closeness to this double colo-
nialist position. Faulkners South also corresponds to both the colonialist
and colonized positions since the Southern white patriarchy rules over
African Americans and yet suffers from defeat and a postwar, subservient
secondary position vis-`a-vis the North.
This middle position approximates that of the Japanese before World
War II: while Japan entertained an imperial desire to expand their power
in East and South-East Asia, it also felt the pressures of containment
from Western nations. Japan during World War II had claimed that her
intention was to liberate South-East Asia from imperial Europe, includ-
ing France. By the end of World War II, however, most Japanese people
understood that the rationale for war against Western imperialism had
been merely a subterfuge for Japans own desire for colonization. Ironically,
 William Faulkner and Japan 281
the Japanese reading public after World War II still looked up to French
cultural authority to mitigate their cultural anxiety over an overwhelming
American influence.
Faulkner visited Japan at the request of the US State Department in 1955,
three years after Japan regained independence from American occupation.5
He was most cordially welcomed, and he successfully completed the ten-day
Nagano Seminar, where he answered questions from Japanese scholars on
English and American literature. The record of these sessions was published
as Faulkner at Nagano, and later incorporated into Lion in the Garden.
Faulkner even left a message To the Youth of Japan in which he mentions
the link between the Souths loss of the Civil War and the rise of Southern
literature: I believe that something very like that will happen here in Japan
within the next few years that out of your disaster and despair will come
a group of Japanese writers whom all the world will want to listen to, who
will speak not a Japanese truth but a universal truth (ESPL 834). Many
Japanese appreciated the encouragement from a Southern writer who could
sympathize with the condition of the defeated. But the author of Absalom,
Absalom! may have expected that serious Japanese writers would question, as
Faulkner did, why they lost the war. They might reexamine Japanese history
and consider the positions they might take in writing about their country.
Naturally, many Japanese writers after World War II engaged in heated
discussions over the writers responsibility for the war, but Japanese readers
tended to think literary appreciation was independent from politics. Sartres
review of Faulkner focused on the metaphysical idea of time, not on the
plantation system, and New Criticism after World War II encouraged
scholars to concentrate on the formal rather than the historical and political
dimensions of texts. Though the tenth anniversary of Japans surrender to
the United States (August 15th) came during Faulkners visit, nobody in
the Nagano Seminar mentioned this or talked about the nuclear power
whose peaceful use by power plants was a controversial subject in Japan
at that time. It is not that the Japanese were unaware of the political
situation. A person at the question-answer session at the Tokyo American
Cultural Center put his general concerns as follows: Do you not think
the present age is darker than earlier times were? (LG 177). But Faulkners
trust in mans strength of survival seems to have satisfied his audience.
Faulkner on his side appeared loyal to both the South and the US State
Department. He maintained that the racial problem in the United States
was an economic one, although he pointed out in the Nagano Seminar the
contradiction of the United States boasting of American freedom despite
the racial inequalities within the country.6 Thus, the intentions of the
282 Takako Tanaka
US government and of Faulkner, and the reception of the Japanese were
subtly different in respect to his visit to Japan. It was most desirable for the
United States during the Cold War era that the Japanese people abandon
the countrys pre-war ultra-nationalism and imperialism and appreciate
American democracy. The Japanese, however, may have learned the lesson
too quickly and were inclined to overlook their colonization of Korea
and Taiwan before World War II. The introduction of Faulkner under
French influence, along with his famous Nobel Prize acceptance speech and
his transpacific visit, may have encouraged Japanese readers to appreciate
Faulkners universal humanity and high modernist art, regardless of their
own (and his) local and historical background.
Nevertheless, some Japanese writers appreciated Faulkners close exam-
ination of patriarchal society and its relationships to the individual and
to the nation through his experimental use of language. Oe Kenzaburo
(1935), who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994, and Nakagami
Kenji (194692), who was regarded as Oes successor, are the major writers
who have acknowledged their literary debt to Faulkner. Oe and Nakagami
in their fiction frequently discuss the patriarchal fatherson relationship,
whether as personal or public interactions, or as social metaphor. Though
Faulkners influence on these writers is not limited to the problems of patri-
archy and language, his Yoknapatawpha narratives have inspired them to
create their own fictional communities and to share and develop Faulkners
approaches to postcolonialist and postmodernist problems.
In Oes The Silent Cry (1967), two brothers, after the conclusion of the
JapanUS Security Treaty of 1960, discuss the uprising of 1860 in their
village against a severe tax system in the region. The JapanUS Security
Treaty confirmed Japans political and economic structural dependence on
the United States, and the 1860 uprising broke out during the critical period
when Japans national seclusion was being shaken by the United States and
other Western countries. The Nedokoro brothers great-grandfather and
great-granduncle were deeply involved in the riot, but they do not know
the exact roles their family members played. Their attempt to discover their
familys history recalls Absalom, Absalom!, in that they have to depend on
letters, rumors, and old chronicles to find out what really happened. In the
midst of their discussion of the old uprising, the younger brother, Takashi
Nedokoro, leads an attack on the village supermarket run by a so-called
Emperor of the Supermarkets.7 The attack, though planned as a protest
against commercial monopolization, is short lived and becomes no more
than a parody of the past uprising. (In the 1860 uprising, a group of young
rebels were killed in the end, while the great-granduncle, the leader of the
 William Faulkner and Japan 283
group, mysteriously disappeared and raised the suspicion that he was a
traitor). The village in the forest grotesquely reflects Japanese society in
the 1960s. The problems of the Emperor system, modern society, Japanese
responsibility for the Korean residents who were brought from Korea before
and during World War II, and Japans postwar relationship to the United
States are the contemporary issues being played out in miniature, along
with the basic questions of just what an individuals responsibility to kinship
and society is.
Along with its extensive examination of Japans modernization, the novel
also severely tests the readers capacity to keep abreast of its hypothetical
and visionary narratives. There is contradictory information about the
great-granduncles life after the riot, and we never learn for sure if Takashis
confession of incest with his sister is true. After Takashis death, however,
his brother comes upon evidence that indicates their great-granduncles
life-long self-confinement following the uprising. With this discovery, the
elder brother, Mitsusaburo Nedokoro, finally accepts the correspondence
between Takashis sense of responsibility and their ancestors, and begins
his first step toward the rebirth of his own family. In The Silent Cry, it
takes not only imaginative interpretation and heated discussion, but also
action, symbolic gestures and the performance of rituals, as well as love
and compassion, for Mitsusaburo to make a final choice among all the
possibilities of what might have been.
In The Sound and the Fury (1929), Mr. Compson sees through Quentins
confession of incest, but his cynical resignation from the role of Father as
a source of law and order only precipitates his sons despair. At the end of
Absalom, Absalom!, on the other hand, the most plausible conclusion of the
Sutpen story narrated by Quentin and Shreve indicts while at the same time
demonstrates the supremacy of the Southern racial code: miscegenation
should never occur in the authentic Southern plantation family and must
be stopped at whatever cost. The two novels exemplify the tyranny and the
failure of patriarchal authority as well as the possibilities and the limits of
narration.
In Oes The Silent Cry, Father is dead from the beginning. But in
this postmodern situation, the author patiently gropes for an accurate
interpretation of the past that will also imply a positive outlook on the
future. Oes belief in writing, exhibited in his consistent examination of its
powers, serves as an indirect response to Quentins despair in The Sound
and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!. To this day, Oe presents layers of subtly
different interpretations in his texts, sometimes visionary and sometimes
quite analytical, exploring the strength of fiction in the face of reality.
284 Takako Tanaka
While Oes village in the forest, based on his hometown, assumes a strong
but curiously abstract sense of marginality, Nakagami Kenjis fictional
community conveys a more concrete sense of place. Though his social
status was different from Faulkners, Nakagami intuitively grasped the
significance of the South, which Faulkner, Latin American writers such
as Gabriel Garca Marquez, and Nakagami shared. Nakagami described it
as the Luxuriating South8 and emphasized Southern writers fascination
with the sense of place, its marginality, and its history. Nakagami created
the so-called Kishu saga, based on the large Kii Peninsula (Kishu is the
ancient name of Kii) far down south from Kyoto, the ancient Imperial
capital. Coming from the Burakumin class, the lowest caste of Japanese
feudal society in the past, Nakagami acknowledges himself as a minority
writer. Discrimination against the Burakumin has generally disappeared
in the 21st century, but Nakagami regards the Emperor system as the
source of Japanese hierarchy. His Roji (the Alley), modeled after his old
hometown in Kishu, represents the abject place alienated from modernized
Japan.
Nakagami, however, feels that the dark, mysterious Kishu in the south
complements the Emperors authenticity in Kyoto, since Kishu is rich
with myths and legends of the origin of Japan. There are famous shrines
and temples in the deep Kumano Mountains, the inland part of the Kii
Peninsula, and Kumano is traditionally called the land of the Dead.
The secret pride in the ancient, primordial land and the sense of revolt
and insurgency against the establishment and the Emperor system co-exist
in Nakagami and form his complex idea of the fatherson relationship.
In Nakagamis texts, the strong sense of being forsaken, and the desire to
recover the lost, original right clash with an opposing sense of revolt against
patriarchal authority and power.9
Accordingly, Nakagami was quite conscious of Faulkners Absalom, Absa-
lom! when he wrote Chi no Hate, Shijo no Toki (The Ends of the Earth,
the Supreme Time, 1983), in which Akiyuki Takehara, an illegitimate son,
challenges his father Ryuzo Hamamura.10 Ryuzo deserted Akiyuki and
his mother in the Alley, the ghetto, and became a rich but notorious
boss of the town with his legitimate family. Akiyuki has killed one of
Ryuzos sons in a quarrel and has served his jail sentence. He has also
defied Ryuzo by committing incest with his half-sister, another illegitimate
child of Ryuzo. But Ryuzo still wants Akiyuki to work in his company
because he is his eldest son and takes after him most. His desire to secure
his eldest son in his group goes beyond incest and fratricide. Ryuzo out-
Sutpens Sutpen, and Akiyuki plays the part of Charles Bon challenging
 William Faulkner and Japan 285
his father, of Henry Sutpen committing fratricide, of Quentin Compson
as narrator, and of all three sons as potentially engaging in incestuous
acts.
Ryuzo, however, finally commits suicide without any convincing reason.
The daredevil nouveau riche in a capitalist society, and yet also a traditional
patriarch who believes in the power of flesh and blood, falls apart. After his
fathers sudden death, Akiyuki sets fire to the big vacant lot in the Alley,
which Ryuzo has bought cheap from the old residents and has cleared for a
shopping center. The arson represents Akiyukis denial of his fathers way of
living, and is a farewell to his primordial, maternal place. After this Akiyuki
leaves the Alley never to return. Compared, however, with the fire set by
Clytie Sutpen to burn down Sutpens Hundred and to expiate the sins of
the family, the fire scene at the vacant lot can be read as an anticlimax:
Ryuzo has kept the lot vacant in spite of the development plan, as if he
were not sure of what he wanted after all.
In The Ends of the Earth, Ryuzo repeatedly refers to the little postage
stamp of land he has acquired, which of course reminds us of Faulkners
own little postage stamp of native soil (Meriwether and Millgate, Lion
255). Since Ryuzos vain attachment to his little postage stamp of land
comes to nothing, and Nakagamis old district actually disappeared under
the new municipal plan enacted in the early 1980s, Nakagami presumably
indicates here his determination to go beyond Faulkners influence and
to end his narratives of the Alley. Still, he apparently continues to learn
from Faulkner, since he writes subsequently about the ex-residents of the
Alley as nomads, much like Joe Christmas, or most of Faulkners non-
Yoknapatawpha heroes. Joe Christmas in Light in August (1932) is still
allowed to entertain the possibility that his stepfather McEachern may not
have died from his violent attack, and, as such, a white patriarchal power
may still exist for him to rebel against. In contrast, Nakagamis Akiyuki, as a
witness to Ryuzos suicide, clearly has seen the disintegration of patriarchal
power. Nakagami does not provide Akiyuki with the consolation of Colonel
Sartoris (Sarty) Snopess pathetic sense of loss for the strong Father at the
end of Barn Burning.
In fact, Ryuzos unexpected suicide suggests to us another interpretation
of Sutpens end in Absalom, Absalom!. Quentin describes Sutpens dramatic
demise at the hands of Wash Jones. With Ryuzos suicide in mind, however,
we might consider the possibility that Sutpen despairs of his life and does
not really resist Joness attack. He has had one of his sons kill another, and
there is no longer any hope of his dynasty in the future. Sutpen may have
seen the dark void as Ryuzo did in the end.
286 Takako Tanaka
Admittedly, Faulkner was satisfied enough with the story of Wash Jones
to include Wash in the Collected Stories. But there is no evidence in
Absalom, Absalom! that Sutpens final dialogue with Jones goes as Quentin
imagines. Sutpens arrogant comment upon the birth of a baby girl is not
convincing enough to bring about Joness final understanding of why the
South lost the war. His comment only testifies to his contempt for women
and his obsession with fathering a dynasty. Joness disillusionment that
Sutpen fails as the advocate of all white Southerners, rich or poor, is quite
devastating. Nevertheless, Quentin, consciously or unconsciously, ignores
the possibility that it is Sutpens own despair at the flawed design of the
South and his failure to father a legitimate heir that leads him to surrender
his life. The story with its final assertion of Charles Bons part-black
identity reconfirms the major southern narrative that observing the racial
code is the supreme commandment of the patriarchal South.
In response to Faulkner, Oe Kenzaburo maintains the importance of the
writers and the readers efforts to establish signification in literature and
asks the reader to examine multiple interpretations of the past in his text.
He is increasingly conscious of a writers responsibility to posterity and tries
to find direction for the future from the potentials of the past. He is aware
of the persistent Japanese desire for the strong Father as absolute authority,
and he invites the reader to join him in his exploration of the role of father
and of writer in the postmodern world.
Nakagami Kenji, on the other hand, has apparently decided to stay an
orphan and to go beyond his maternal place of the Alley as well as beyond
the disintegration of patriarchy. He indicates his gesture of farewell to
the sole owner & proprietor of Yoknapatawpha, and his post-Kishu-saga
heroes assume deliberate and mechanical flatness, exemplifying Nakagamis
determination to reject any grand narrative of the strong Father. While Oe
imagines the brotherhood (or sisterhood) of the writer and the reader
to strengthen the literary imagination through language and to pursue the
ideal role of a father for posterity, Nakagami tries to drive his characters and
readers beyond the imagined community of his own making, demanding
that they survive as nomads beyond narrative, as well as national, bound-
aries. Whether he has succeeded in doing so or not still remains to be
seen.

NOTES
1 On the role of the Civil Information and Education Section, General Head-
quarters, and on the promotion of American culture in Japan during the early
era after World War II, see Takeshi Matsuda, Soft Power and Its Perils: US
 William Faulkner and Japan 287
Cultural Policy in Early Postwar Japan and Permanent Dependency (Washing-
ton, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Stanford University Press, 2007),
pp. 245. Oe Kenzaburo in his novel The Changeling, trans. Deborah Boliver
Boehm (New York: Grove Press, 2010), pp. 176, 2001, refers to one such
library in Matsuyama City in the western part of Japan, where the hero reads
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for the first time in English as a high school
student just after World War II.
2 Jean-Paul Sartre, Time in Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury, trans. Martine
Darmon, in William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism, eds. Frederick J.
Hoffman and Olga W. Vickery (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1960),
pp. 22532. Oe Kenzaburo was one of the Japanese writers who were versed in
French literature and read Sartre.
3 On the slipcover of Yasei no Jonetsu [The Wild Palms], trans. Takako Tanaka,
Sekai Bungaku Sougoumokuroku [Comprehensive Bibliography on World Lit-
erature], vol. IV, p. 316.
4 The Japanese writers familiar with French literature used to acquire new infor-
mation about western literature through French periodicals such as Nouvelle
revue francaise and Commerce. See Yukio Haruyama, William Faulkner (1932),
in Faulkner Studies in Japan, ed. Thomas L. McHaney, compiled by Kenzaburo
Ohashi and Kiyokuni Ono (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985), pp. 177
80. Also see Ohashi, Native Soil and the World Beyond: William Faulkner
and Japanese Novelists, in Faulkner: International Perspectives: Faulkner and
Yoknapatawpha, 1982, eds. Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: Uni-
versity Press of Mississippi, 1984), pp. 25775.
5 For more on this trip, see the chapter by Kodat in this volume.
6 See Lion in the Garden, pp. 8991, 1434,1825. Faulkner was aware of his
social responsibility as a Nobel Prize writer of the United States in the 1950s
and went so far as to head a section of the writers program in Eisenhowers
People-to-People Partnership in 1956, the year after his visit to Japan; see Joseph
Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography, 2 vols. (New York: Random House, 1974),
vol. II, pp. 1610, 161731.
7 Oe Kenzaburo, The Silent Cry, trans. John Bester (Tokyo: Kodansha Interna-
tional, 1994), p. 220.
8 Nakagami Kenji, Faulkner: The Luxuriating South, trans. Michiyo Ishii, in
Faulkner: After the Nobel Prize, eds. Michel Gresset and Kenzaburo Ohashi
(Kyoto: Yamaguchi Publishing, 1987), pp. 32636.
9 See Takako Tanaka, The Global/Local Nexus of Patriarchy: Japanese Writ-
ers Encounter Faulkner, in Global Faulkner: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha,
2006, eds. Annette Trefzer and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2009), pp. 11634.
10 Kenji Nakagami, Chi no Hate, Shijo no Toki, eds. Karatani Kojin, et al.,
Nakagami Kenji Zenshu 6 (Tokyo: Shuei-Sha, 1995).
 chapter 25

Faulkner as/and the postcolonial writer

Hosam Aboul-Ela

In the following senses, William Faulkner was like a postcolonial writer.

He was born into a region that was underdeveloped economically, delim-
ited in its political agency, and sharply divided socially among its various
communities and classes. Its culture, art, and literature underwent scrutiny
from outsiders who controlled and distributed the nations aesthetic pro-
duction. While the issues affecting the US Souths various communities
were diverse, all were pervaded by an acute awareness of dependency on a
more powerful and prosperous neighbor that had no compunction about
controlling local events for its own advantage. Culture could not escape
this sense of dependency.
If Faulkner felt a deep albeit ambivalent and complicated affin-
ity for his native region, he was also one of its most ambitious artists
when it came to importing from the North and Europe innovative strate-
gies as a writer and artist. Over the course of his career, he lived with
striking complexity and innovation the contradiction of embracing to
the point of transcending northern cultures literary avant-gardism, even
while he blatantly deviated from it by taking seriously Southern socio-
historical realities as the subject of his fiction. The paradox that Faulkner
confronted was already in the process of becoming a global pattern for
writers, artists, and thinkers of the postcolonial world when Faulkner was
born. Thus, when his fame rode the wave of both his Nobel Prize and
American post-World War II global hegemony to a new generation of
writers from places where culture was partially shaped by European colo-
nialism, he was almost immediately recognized by many of them as a
fellow traveler, even as many in the United States continued to regard him
as something of an eccentric with obscurantist aesthetics and suspicious
politics.
This connection between Faulkner and the writers of the former Euro-
pean colonies of the Global South, if you will has formed a text in
its own right, starting as it does as a paradox within Faulkner and then
288
 Faulkner as/and the postcolonial writer 289
growing into multiple paradoxes as it travels through Latin American, the
Caribbean, the Middle East and the rest of the postcolonial world.
The first discussions of Faulkners relationship to writers of the Global
South focused on Latin America and date back to the 1950s. That is, they
are almost simultaneous with the re-discovery of Faulkners work by North
American critics and readers. In 1956, James East Irbys study of Faulkners
influence on four Latin American writers established certain propositions
that held sway in the study of Faulkners relationship to cultures of the
unequally developed world for decades to come.1 First, it turned the critics
eye to Latin America as the main source for material illustrating the US
South-Global South cultural nexus that Faulkner embodied. Second, it
authorized the reading of the FaulknerLatin American connection as uni-
directional, starting with the hoary, northern Nobel laureate and moving
southward toward emerging, or minor literatures.
Criticism that studied Faulkners influence on writers of Latin Amer-
ica grew over the following decades, even as the claims that formed the
foundation for this bibliography became increasingly brittle. In the Latin
American/Caribbean region, many of the most important fiction writ-
ers spoke openly of their great admiration for the Mississippian. Gabriel
Garca Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Juan Carlos Onetti,
and others testified with specificity and, at times, great insight about how
and why they incorporated Faulkners techniques and major themes into
their work, adapting them for their own circumstances and concerns. Crit-
ics naturally took up the challenge of explaining the special connection,
hoping to build on what Irby had started. This first generation of critics
tended to focus on formal questions and direct parallels: Vargas Llosa and
Faulkner both use multiple narration, Onetti and Faulkner both build
their own fictive community, Fuentes and Faulkner both complicate tem-
porality, Garca Marquez and Faulkner both redeploy folkloric discourse,
etc. While some of this criticism was executed at a very high scholarly
level, the general direction of this approach to explaining and analyzing
so rich a literary phenomenon proved limited. In the late 1990s and early
2000s, however, as cultural critics discussed processes of globalization with
increased attention and focus, the critical discussion took a series of new
and interesting turns.

At the time Eduoard Glissant published his genre-busting thought piece
Faulkner, Mississippi,2 even Faulkner scholars did not seem to realize how
important the Mississippians writing was for authors from the postcolo-
nial world. Glissant had already established himself by then as one of the
most important Francophone Caribbean literary figures of his generation.
290 Hosam Aboul-Ela
His text mixes memoir, literary criticism, and travelogue, beginning by
juxtaposing the image of Faulkner with that of Saint-John Perse, the best-
known white French colonial author of the Caribbean. In a few short
sentences, Glissant re-orients Faulkner as partially defined by his subject
position as a member of a dominant and oppressive race, but then imme-
diately interposes a series of distinctions that move the reader beyond this
categorization. Within a few pages, he is describing a pilgrimage he takes
with several Caribbean friends, all of them visiting scholars in southern
Louisiana, to see Faulkners former home at Rowan Oak in Oxford, Mis-
sissippi. Although the trip at times reinforces the racial cartography of the
first several pages, it also establishes the deep cultural connection between
the Caribbean and the lower Mississippi region that gives Faulkners sys-
tematic and aesthetically audacious plotting of this region such special
purchase for Glissant and his group.
Glissants readings in the subsequent pages place special emphasis on the
titles within the oeuvres that center the relationship between whites and
blacks The Sound and the Fury (1929), Light in August (1932), Absalom,
Absalom! (1936), and Intruder in the Dust (1948), for example. Many ear-
lier studies had emphasized this significant dimension of the novels, but
Glissants particular approach captured the zeitgeist of an emerging more
globalized perspective on Faulkner. Whereas most criticism had followed
the general trend of analyzing representations of African Americans in
Faulkner through some version of domestic history or domestic civil rights
discourse, Glissant seems particularly sensitive to the globalized dimension
of what Toni Morrison would call the Africanist presence in the novels.
The slave trade, revolution, traces of indigeneity, and traditional religion
are among the sources of this more globalized lens. Also, Glissants pen-
chant for demonstrating through distinction, on display in the opening
Faulkner/Perse analogy, evolves in the text as a reading method that draws
on Francophone criticisms deconstructive impulse, but does so in order
to amplify the immanent presence of globalized histories in Faulkners
ostensibly highly localized milieu.
Although the fascination with Glissants memoir among Faulkner schol-
ars was instantaneous, its impact would have been greatly lessened if not
for the coincidental appearance within a few years of several other more
academic studies that placed some of the books insights into a more refined
and systematic critical language. In Deborah Cohns History and Memory
in the Two Souths: Recent Southern and Spanish American Fiction, for exam-
ple, Faulkner is positioned as a central figure within a bibliography of
novels coming out of the two regions that simultaneously experiment with
 Faulkner as/and the postcolonial writer 291
the form of the genre while engaging with their socio-historical contexts.
Cohns introduction fairly systematically dismantles the Irbyan influence-
based approach to studying Faulkners relationship to Latin America. Draw-
ing on literary criticism, social history, and particularly on the testimony
of several of the key novelists involved in such discussions, Cohn lays
out the clearest case yet for the central role of historical context in the
phenomenon of the Faulknerian author-functions global travels. As she
explains, I rechannel the question of influence away from direct textual
contacts in order to examine convergences, similar features and strategies
that have developed as responses to analogous sociopolitical and histori-
cal circumstances.3 Cohn documents that novelists of the Latin Ameri-
can boom regularly testified to their indebtedness to Faulkners technique
specifically as a literary method for expressing Latin American realities.
What influence studies had not adequately seen in these statements was
their implied connection between literary form and socio-historical reali-
ties. Thus, race relations, the legacy of colonialism, economic underdevel-
opment, yankee/yanqui imperialism, and agricultural economies connect
the two regions in question and viscerally link the form of fiction with
the history that shapes both the subject matter of the work and the con-
sciousness of its authors. Although Cohns focus never veers from Span-
ish America, the argument that she makes for a historical link between
Faulkner and this region tacitly links him to the whole of the postcolo-
nial world in ways that it would take literary critics several more years to
recognize.
In the meantime, more criticism appeared using hemispheric literatures
to re-contextualize Faulkner within discourses of globalization. George
Handleys Postslavery Literatures in the Americas: Family Portraits in Black
and White, for example, looked at the way the legacy of slavery as an insti-
tution and the plantation system as a culture shaped art and letters across
a transnational literary tradition that included Brazil, the Caribbean, and
parts of the US Deep South. Here, the transnational geographies estab-
lished by the institutions of slavery and the plantation tied this discussion
with a trend in comparative literature away from nation-based categories.
Much of this interpretive history reached a kind of culmination with the
appearance in 2004 of a collection of essays co-edited by Cohn and Jon
Smith entitled Look Away!: The US South in New World Studies.4 The
essay collection brought together a group of critics that included younger
scholars who had recently made their mark, prominent senior figures in
Faulkner criticism, and a few senior critics who had been among the
first to argue for reading Faulkner and other US Southern writers more
292 Hosam Aboul-Ela
globally. As such, it marked an emphatic authorization of the new dis-
course in comparative Faulkner criticism. The collection also appeared at a
moment when postcolonial literary criticism had reached a kind of nadir,
a phenomenon leaving a distinctive mark on the way the editors framed
the volume, especially in their emphasis on the instability of Southern
identity. This approach challenged the traditional notion of the US South
as a contained and stable cultural unit, portraying a setting whose influ-
ences and histories were far too complicated to constitute an imagined
community.5
In my own work on the problem of Faulkner in the world, I have
emphasized the way the particular global positioning of Faulkner should
be exploited for interpreting the Faulkner novel. I have argued for this
approach because in pursuing the more traditional tactic of using Faulkner
as a lens through which to understand the literature of the globe, the critic
inevitably falls into the influence-study trap of marking global literature
as derivative in a way that comparative literature scholars have by now
thoroughly discredited. Furthermore, such attention to the global in the
Faulknerian text has yielded remarkable results over the past decade and
a half, raising the question of what kinds of prejudices had managed to
so thoroughly delimit the many published readings of Faulkners work
previously. An example is the mysterious, retrospective, determinative,
and ostensibly anachronistic incident in Absalom, Absalom! when young
Thomas Sutpen travels to the West Indies. Although a careful reading of the
novel makes clear that Sutpens journey to the Caribbean is crucial to his
rise from impoverished, Appalachian white other to patriarch of Sutpens
Hundred, almost no mention of the trip appeared in scholarship on the
novel before the 1990s. Since then, the more globalized understanding of
Faulkner that was really first invoked by writers of the Global South
when Faulkner criticism was concerned with other matters has yielded
an impressive plethora of readings incorporating the trip back into the
interpretive frame of the novel. For Barbara Ladd, the incident shows
the tension undergirding nationalist thought in the globalized world of the
Black Atlantic; for Cohn, the incident raises questions of historiography
that play out in the complicated narrative structure of the novel; Handley
emphasizes the way the legacy of Sutpens excursion twists the family
chronicle at the center of the novel; and John T. Matthews uses the insights
of cultural studies to tease out the representation of the deep structures
of Caribbean history that undergird the incident. And while Absalom,
Absalom! has been a particularly interesting text for critics concerned with
globalization and comparative Southern questions, one might also point
 Faulkner as/and the postcolonial writer 293
to other ways the lens of the Global South has led to reconsiderations: of
Africa as a specter in Intruder in the Dust in Wilson Harriss reading, of
the global dimensions of the Cold War underpinning the milieu of The
Mansion (1959) in an important essay by Matthews, of the determinative
presence of colonized Senegalese soldiers in A Fable (1954) as analyzed by
Gary Rees, of the economics of dependency in The Bear in an older
groundbreaking essay by Susan Willis, or of the parallel between Flem
Snopess combination of social outsider and rapacious capitalist and the
Third Worlds lumpenbourgeoisie in my own analysis of the Snopes
trilogy.
Although an unsympathetic critic might be tempted to see the globalized
dynamics within the Faulkner novel as the product of a trendy turn in the
criticism, my own feeling is that such skepticism would be rooted in an
ignorance of the depth of allegiance that so many postcolonial writers
have felt for Faulkner.6 In my own view, critics have only just begun to
discover the ways Faulkner expressed through both form and content
the social and aesthetic dynamics that circumscribe artists and intellectuals
of the Global South. For example, The Sound and the Fury might more
traditionally be read as a culmination of Faulkners earliest experiments with
modernist form, the novel he wrote answering only to his own aesthetic
principles after his bitter experience with the publication of Sartoris (1929).
This conception of the novel reads it as preliminary to the concerns of
historiography, race, and empire that only emerge in later work. Such a
reading, however, requires the critic to ignore the way an economic and
cultural dependency characteristic of the colonized haunts each of the
brothers in the novel. Benjy, for example, opens the novel by vociferously
proclaiming his exasperation at the edge of the golf course, which not only
reminds him of his lost sister but also symbolizes the Compson familys
reduced fortunes and dependency on northern elite society since it is built
on land sold off of their estate to pay for Quentin to go to Harvard. Jason
also expresses in a blatant and defensive tone his animosity toward, but also
addiction to the Norths capitalist culture through his frustrations with the
stock market and, less directly, his hatred of the New York Yankees baseball
team.
But of all the brothers, Quentin no doubt speaks most directly to the
concerns of the Third World writer in his odyssey northward to achieve
cultural legitimacy through indoctrination within a hegemonic, outside
culture. While the most dominant motif of the Quentin section traces
the psychological fallout of Quentins separation from his sister Caddy,
an almost equally prominent motif is his alienation as a Mississippian in
294 Hosam Aboul-Ela
Massachusetts. At times, Quentin coaches himself on how to behave. Still,
those around him comment on his speech, his carriage, and his behavior.
(He talks like they do in minstrel shows, says one of three young fishermen
that Quentin meets on his walk, setting off a racially inflected argument
among them about whether or not the observation is offensive [120].) The
special attention he receives from Mrs. Bland as a fellow Southerner only
reinforces his alienation, and encounters with African Americans around
Cambridge seem to particularly provoke a sense of guilt and homesickness
for the conflicted camaraderie he perceives his family to share with their
servants, the Gibsons. The dominant refrain in the section is Quentins
accusing question, Did you ever have a sister? hurled most comically
and pointlessly near the end when Quentin throws himself into Quixotic
combat with Gerald, a classmate and proficient boxer. But even Quentins
sister fixation is globalized in an extended passage bringing Quentin into
contact with the working class Italian community of Boston. His goal
in companioning a young, silent, unwashed Italian girl is to help her
find her way home, but the good deed threatens to go awry when Julio,
the girls older brother, arrives in a rage, accusing Quentin of stealing
his sister. While the accusation displaces Quentin from his position of
sister-defending keeper of family honor vis-`a-vis Caddy and Dalton Ames
to sister stealer, it also marks him as immigrant and Southern, with the
latter term globalized by the figure of the deterritorialized proletarian from
economically underdeveloped southern Europe.
A reading of The Sound and the Furys Quentin that emphasizes his
internal alienation as linked to the ways he is externally otherized and
so highlights his connection to Julio as another out-of-place immigrant
would be a reading that illustrates the sorts of textual dynamics that have
repeatedly drawn writers of the Global South to Faulkner. When the Ital-
ian social theorist Antonio Gramsci wrote in the 1920s of Italys Southern
question, he described a connection between a less developed region and
a history of political and socio-economic northern hegemony. Gramscis
essay not only describes the conditions that might have propelled an immi-
grant like Julio to move from southern Europe to Boston; it also formulates
an enduring paradigm of the otherizing of a region through a combina-
tion of politics, economics, and culture. This paradigm caused Edward W.
Said, the most influential to date of the postcolonial literary critics in the
United States, to move away from that strain of postcolonial criticism that
emphasized identity and indeterminacy toward a Gramscian conception
of globalization that brought to the fore structures of power, hegemony,
and historical colonial domination. These dynamics are central to the
 Faulkner as/and the postcolonial writer 295
historical context cited as a reason for the Faulkner novels resonance
among postcolonial writers by comparatist Faulkner scholars mentioned
above.
The Gramscian frame, however, expands the discussion in two ways.
First, it moves the Southern question beyond mere geography and into the
area of cultural and political hegemony. This allows us to see more clearly
the Janus-faced position of the US South as emphasized by Glissant, but
it also suggests that Latin American writers may have no more in common
with Faulkner than do writers from Africa, the Middle East, and those parts
of Asia that have a similar history of colonization and neo-colonialism.
Indeed, Gramscis configuration of souths raises the question as to why
more work has not been done on the relationship between Faulkner and the
many writers who have engaged with him from the postcolonial world that
exists beyond the Americas. Second, Gramscis historical emphasis on the
concept of the intellectual, by which he means the individual as an agent in
the fashioning of cultural representations that reinforce structures of power,
adds another dimension to the FaulknerGlobal South nexus. The writer
of the Global South is now a reader who helps re-imagine the concerns
and the possibilities of the Faulkner text.
I offer Jabra Ibrahim Jabra as a final example that ably illustrates the
possibilities of the Gramscian framing of the global Faulkner question.
The Palestinian writer, critic, translator, artist, and intellectual was born in
Bethlehem in 1919. He received his schooling in Jerusalem during the period
of the British mandate and went on to Cambridge for higher education.
After the 1948 war and the formation of the State of Israel, Jabra found
himself unable to return to his home, and he settled in Baghdad, where
he took up a position as an English teacher. For the first decade after
1948, the issue of the forced displacement of Palestinians was kept alive
only through the cultural work of intellectuals like Jabra, the fiction writer
Ghassan Kanafani, and the poet Fadwa Tuqan.
Jabras Hunters in a Narrow Street, first published in 1960 as his second
novel and the only one written originally in English, depicts in autobio-
graphical fashion a displaced young Palestinian English teacher who comes
to work in Baghdad after being forced out of Jerusalem by Zionist terror
squads.7 Haunted by memories of home and by the cultural consequences
of a decisive loss, Jameel the protagonist shares much with Quentin Comp-
son. The homeland appears in his story only through flashbacks provoked
by his sense of displacement and alienation, which the Iraqis around him
regularly exacerbate, commenting on his strange accent and his foreign
manner, as do the Bostonians who meet Quentin.
296 Hosam Aboul-Ela
Thematically the novel illustrates the authors lifelong concern with
modernity as it manifests itself in transitioning traditional societies. This
thematic emphasis is surely what drew Jabra to the work of Faulkner, result-
ing in his highly influential translation into Arabic of The Sound the Fury
[ ]. After the publication of this translation, Jabra returned to
writing novels in Arabic and began experimenting with Faulknerian strate-
gies at the levels of narration and language. In other words, his engagement
with Faulkner brought out themes already present in his writing and sup-
plemented his own repertoire of aesthetic strategies.
Once he settled in Baghdad, Jabra practiced his craft as an artist working
in multiple media and an encyclopedic intellectual in a manner that drew
in like-minded contemporaries and fellow travelers. His house became a
meeting place and a mini-museum where he collected the artwork of his
friends and the books and music from which he drew inspiration. When
Jabra died in 1994, a relative moved into the house where she herself
died in April 2010 as a result of a car bomb (perhaps intended for the
Egyptian Embassy across the street) that destroyed the house. An account
of the houses destruction8 by the late New York Times journalist Anthony
Shadid emphasizes the anonymity of Jabra among the besieged residents
of Iraq after American occupation, i.e. after another aborted American
reconstruction. Although Faulkner escaped the complete obscurity that
threatened his legacy in the 1940s, a comparison of Faulkner and Jabra
invites a re-examination of how Faulkners legacy escaped that of Jabras
and what global dynamics lurking in the Faulknerian text might have been
lost in the process.

NOTES
1 James East Irby, La influencia de William Faulkner en cuatro narradores
hispano-americanos (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, 1956).

2 Edouard Glissant, Faulkner, Mississippi, trans. Barbara Lewis and Thomas Spear
(1996; University of Chicago Press, 1999).
3 Deborah Cohn, History and Memory in the Two Souths: Recent Southern and
Spanish American Fiction (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999), p. 7.
4 George Handley, Postslavery Literatures in the Americas: Family Portraits in Black
and White (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000); and Jon Smith
and Deborah Cohn, Look Away!: The US South in New World Studies (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2004).
5 The concept of the imagined community is found in Benedict Andersons
studies of the historical emergence of the idea of nationalism.
6 At a recent symposium on globality, indigeneity, and literary culture, I was
surprised to find Albert Wendt, the most important of all Samoan Anglophone
 Faulkner as/and the postcolonial writer 297
fiction writers, citing his debt to Faulkner during his keynote address. When I
took the opportunity to ask him later if he had ever mentioned his affinity to
Faulkner in print, he said he had not, but the incident suggested to me that
the connections being analyzed by comparative scholars of Faulkner may go
well beyond what we find in the academic literature. Also, Pascale Casanovas
widely cited but somewhat controversial attempt to sum up the globalization of
literary culture, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M Debevoise (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2004), cites Faulkner as the beginning of the global
rise of postcolonial writing. Her claims have not yet been interrogated within
Faulkner studies. (See the introduction to this volume and Jay Watsons chapter
for further remarks on Casanovas account of Faulkner.)
7 Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Hunters in a Narrow Street (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1996).
8 Anthony Shadid, In Baghdad Ruins, Remains of a Cultural Bridge, The
New York Times, 21 May 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/22/world/
middleeast/22house.html?pagewanted=all& r=0.
 chapter 26

Translating Faulkner
Can a translator be androgynous?
Ikuko Fujihira

After the publication of my two-volume Japanese version of the 1986 revised

text of Absalom, Absalom! in January of 2012, I was invited to give a lecture
on my translation at a literary conference in Tokyo. I had no idea what
the audience expected from my talk. Were they interested in the challenges
I faced in translating what is considered to be one of the most difficult
novels in American literature? Until then I had not read any instructive
essays or books on how to translate foreign literature into Japanese. Most of
the essays on translation I hurriedly read to prepare for this lecture simply
convinced me that I could never have accomplished the task of translating
Absalom if I had read any of them before embarking on the project of
putting Faulkners words into Japanese several years ago.

I. Benjamins philosophy of pure language

Walter Benjamin, in his The Task of the Translator, frames translation
as a mode whereby the question of the translatability of a work can be
pursued:
The question of whether a work is translatable has a dual meaning. Either:
Will an adequate translator ever be found among the totality of its readers?
Or, more pertinently: Does its nature lend itself to translation and, therefore,
in view of the significance of the mode, call for it?1
While Benjamins second question begins with the original text, the first
question is one that the translator must confront. Who then qualifies as
an adequate translator for any work of literature? Who decides who is
the best or the most adequate? Prior to the publication of my translation
of the revised text, there had already been three different Japanese versions
of the first edition of Absalom published in 1936. These versions, trans-
lated by three different translators, were published in 1965, 1966, and 1974.
Of course I admire the courageous work of these predecessors who under-
took the challenge of translating the complicated text when the resources of
298
 Translating Faulkner: Can a translator be androgynous? 299
detailed textual analyses of current Faulkner studies were unavailable. When
a major publisher showed interest in publishing my translation, Benjamins
question of whether I was an adequate translator of the difficult text did
not occur to me. In addition, I never looked up these previous translations
until the publisher sent me the first galley proofs in the summer of 2011.
Benjamin hypothesizes that to turn the symbolizing into the symbol-
ized, to regain pure language fully formed in the linguistic flux, is the
tremendous and only capacity of translation (80). Translation aims to
reach a sphere in which the original rises into a higher and purer lin-
guistic air (75), where all information, all sense, and all intention finally
encounter a stratum in which they are destined to be extinguished (80).
Benjamins translation theory, published as an introduction to his transla-
tion of Baudelaires Tableaux Parisiens in 1923, underscores the ideal of
translation, one that provides a literary space that has all the transparency
and lightness of air. But his argument can also be applied to the practical
realm of translation. I could very much relate to Benjamins insistence on
the significance of literal translation, in particular, in his concept of pure
language whereby a translated work constitutes a part of a vessel (78) to
be incorporated with the original.

A real translation is transparent; it does not cover the original, does not
block its light, but allows the pure language, as though reinforced by its own
medium, to shine upon the original all the more fully. This may be achieved,
above all, by a literal rendering of the syntax which proves words rather than
sentences to be the primary element of the translator. (79, emphases mine)

Benjamins emphasis on the literal rendering of words rather than sentences

offers an incredibly encouraging perspective for translators working in
Japanese insofar as the Japanese language has an entirely different syntax
from Western languages. In actuality, in terms of technique, it was difficult
to be wholly faithful to Faulkners punctuation marks; we do not have
colons or semi-colons, nor italics in traditional Japanese written form. I
did, however, remain faithful to the original number of periods in Faulkners
prolonged sentences, and managed to follow the order of words as much as
possible to recreate the original texts style by using more commas than the
original text does. I used sans-serif fonts for italics in the original, though
the former translations of Absalom used smaller fonts or diagonal fonts for
italics. In the end, in spite of their apparent complexity in structure, I was
able to transform Faulkners sentences into readable Japanese by following
the text word by word, which allowed me to comprehend the concrete
300 Ikuko Fujihira
reality of the anger and desire of Rosa, Judith, Clytie, Thomas Sutpen,
Henry, Charles Bon, and Wash Jones.

II. Can gender count in translation?

In my recent endeavor to research various ideas on translation, I also came
across very discouraging views, in particular, those expressed by Vladimir
Nabokov in his letters written in 1942, when he decided to have his Russian
novel, The Gift, translated into English.
What I would like you to supply me with . . . is a good translator . . . I need
a man who knows English better than Russian and a man, not a woman.
I am frankly homosexual on the subject of translators.2
Why did Nabokov want a male translator? Would Faulkner also have
wanted his translator to be a man, not a woman? If so, I most definitely
was not an adequate translator of Absalom. I had never expected an author
would make such a request concerning translation, but when I thought
about it, I realized most of the Japanese translators of major fiction and
poetry by male authors have been male, although in my opinion that simply
reflects the climate of academia and the publishing world. In another letter,
Nabokov insists his translator be endowed with style and a rich vocabulary
(Nabokov and Bruccoli, Selected Letters 42). He goes on to say: Without
a good deal of linguistic and poetical imagination it is useless tackling
my stuff (42). I entirely agree with his views that the translator must
have both linguistic proficiency and literary imagination. Nonetheless, I
couldnt help but be puzzled by his request that his translator must be a
man, not a woman. Did he believe that only male translators were capable
of understanding the psychology of his male protagonists?
I had never thought that gender should matter with regard to the authors
choice of a translator. I happened to be the first female Japanese translator
of Faulkners major novels, although in 1995 I was invited to join a team of
translators for Essays, Speeches, and Public Letters for the Japanese collection
of Works of William Faulkner; I translated Faulkners essays, including
Mississippi. That was when I became convinced that, whether essay or
novel, Faulkners work requires a prodigious vocabulary and rich literary
imagination on the part of the translator, regardless of his or her gender.
While Nabokov may have expressed his preference for a male translator, I
had to take on an entirely different gender issue in the process of translating
Absalom. The issue was a matter of technique, but it occurred with every
sentence in the original. Gender became an issue to a certain degree when
 Translating Faulkner: Can a translator be androgynous? 301
I had to convert the words of male or female characters into the Japanese
language, which is well known for its variety of expressions based on
class, gender, and age. In addition, we have what are called specific polite
expressions to be used in a particular situation. In Japan, gender-based
language is an extremely complicated matter that challenges and at times
even frustrates every translator. For example, in written or spoken Japanese,
if we were to include local dialects, there are more than ten distinct ways of
expressing the first person pronoun I in English; according to the speakers
gender various kanji characters can be employed for I in the written
form. The same applies to the use of the Japanese syllabary, hiragana,
in the first person. The choice of the appropriate Japanese first person
pronoun depends on the social status of each character, male or female, old
or young, as well as on the social context of these characters conversations.
Therefore, in order to find the most appropriate expression from a plethora
of similar words, it is essential that the translator capture each characters
psychological situation in each scene. As a result, I ended up spending a lot
of time interpreting the emotional registers of love, hatred, grief, anger, fear,
misery, guilt, envy, regret, pride, or despair experienced by each character
at each given moment in the novel.
My interpretation of Absalom revolves around understanding the mys-
teries of Sutpens story through the key character Rosa, who not only
appears as the first narrator of the novel, but ends up being a vital presence
throughout as she inhabits the consciousnesses of Mr. Compson, Quentin,
and Shreve right up to the very end; only by grasping Rosas desire and
frustration can the translator manage to depict the intricacies of Thomas
Sutpens Camelots and Carcassonnes (AA 129), and represent Quentins
commonwealth and barracks filled with stubborn backlooking ghosts
(7) of the South.
As a translator as well as Faulkner scholar, I would never claim that female
scholars have a better grasp of women characters than male scholars do, or
vice versa. We scholars or translators rely on our sensitivity to languages,
critical approaches, and literary imagination. As my work progressed, I
came to realize that Rosas fury and outrage come from her recognition
of the sins of the fathers in the South, symbolized by the evil acts of
Thomas Sutpen, who was not at all a gentleman (9) in her opinion. So
while I decided to have Rosa speak basically in a traditional Japanese ladys
language, I also made sure the sensitivity of a bitter but romantic young
girl would come across by translating her fierce outrage directed against a
male dominated world, which coincides with her frustrated longings for
marriage and love. This task of understanding and translating Rosa was a
302 Ikuko Fujihira
crucial step toward imagining the later scenes in which Thomas Sutpen
shares his stories with General Compson. It allowed me in turn to render
his language into a more precise male language in Japanese.
These efforts also made me very careful in my translation choices for
Clyties words. Translating the dialect of black people and poor whites
into Japanese has always been an extremely difficult problem. A common
solution for many translators of American novels has been the use of rural
Japanese dialects. However, I hesitated to translate Clyties words into an
underclass provincial dialect of Japan. Fathered by Thomas Sutpen, but
with a black mother from a Caribbean island, Clytie is born at Sutpens
Hundred and basically lives at Sutpens house, where she often plays with
her half-sister Judith and half-brother Henry. We hear Clyties voice in
Rosas recollection of her conversations with Clytie at Sutpens house in
Chapter 5, and in Quentins memory of his conversations with her
in Chapters 6 and 9.
When Rosa rushes to Sutpens house with Wash Jones immediately after
Henry shoots Bon at the gate posts of Sutpens Hundred at the conclusion
of the Civil War, Clytie stops Rosa from going upstairs. Rosa describes
Clyties face as one without sex or age because it had never possessed either
(109). I put these first words that Clytie speaks to Rosa in the novel, in a
slightly countrified accent, with a friendly tone, which is used in a desperate
situation by both Japanese men and women: Wait, and Dont you go up
there, Rosa (111).
On the other hand, Quentin Compson remembers Clyties voice as that
of a polite woman when, as a boy, he had dared to enter the dilapidated
haunted mansion with four other boys (172). Quentin encounters Clytie
and a saddle-colored boy (173) called Jim Bond, whom he will know later
as [t]he scion, the heir (296) of Thomas Sutpen. Quentins memory
recalls Clyties voice almost like a white womans saying, What do you
want? (174). The scene is absolutely crucial here when Quentin observes
that Clyties voice sounded like a white womans. Given this situation
whereby a white boy from the nearby town meets Sutpens black daughter,
I chose to have Clytie speak with the polite expressions ordinary women
use in Japan.
I also avoided using rural dialects in translating the conversation that
occurs between Quentin and Clytie in September 1909, when Quentin
accompanies Rosa to Sutpens house to uncover the mystery there. Again
Clytie tries to prevent Rosa from going upstairs to the second floor, but
this time Rosa struck Clytie to the floor . . . and went on up the stairs
(295). Then, as if well aware that her relationship with the young man is
 Translating Faulkner: Can a translator be androgynous? 303
analogous to that of a servant/slave and plantation master, Clytie turns to
Quentin and says, Dont let her go up there, young marster (295). The
exchange that follows reveals the social dynamic between these characters:
. . . Who are you? she said.
Im Quentin Compson, he answered.
Yes. I remember your grandpaw. You go up there and make her come
down. Make her go away from here. Whatever he done, me and Judith and
him have paid it out. You go and get her. Take her away from here. (296)

Clytie takes on the tone of seeking mercy from the grandson of a prominent
figure in the town, General Compson, who knew Sutpen well and fought
with him in the Civil War. Meanwhile Clytie speaks to Rosa in a familiar
manner: Dont you go up there, Rosie (295). The exchange shows how
these two women, one black and the other white, have become closer
since their first confrontation when Clytie managed to prevent Rosa from
intruding on Judith as she grieves over the body of her fiance who has been
shot to death by her own brother Henry. In both of these conversations,
Clytie does not deprecate herself as a black woman but asserts her identity
as Sutpens daughter with pride.
Another example of how I had to pay special attention to Faulkners
socially charged words involved finding the appropriate expressions in
Japanese for woman/women. Thomas Sutpen coldly expels his wife from
a mans world by putting Ellen into the inferior category of woman:
I dont expect you to understand it . . . Because you are a woman (21).
There are two words to render the English word woman into Japanese;
one is used generically, while the other has disparaging connotations. For
Sutpens declaration mentioned above, a Japanese translator would not
hesitate to choose the latter form in order to cast Sutpens comment as
a sexist remark. The same choice would be applied to Mr. Compsons
conservative views of the Southern women: the other sex is separated
into three sharp divisions . . . ladies, women, females (87) or They lead
beautiful lives women (156). However, when translating Rosas words, I
relied on the more generic form of woman/women, in particular when she
describes how Judith, Clytie, and herself survived at the ruined plantation
during the Civil War: not as two white women and a negress, not as three
negroes or three whites, not even as three women, but merely as three creatures
(125).
Gender, of course, is only one of many issues involved in this task.
In translating Faulkners words into another language, his translator must
confront the whole network of cultural and social implications regarding
304 Ikuko Fujihira
race, class, and religion. Let us return to Benjamins inspiring suggestion
that [i]f translation is a mode, translatability must be an essential fea-
ture of certain works (Task 71). I absolutely agree with his idea that
good works are translatable into any language, for I believe that a great
novel overflows with the authors imagination so much so that it can be
rendered into another language as long as the translator has sufficient lin-
guistic proficiency and poetic imagination. Furthermore, I would say that
great writers, male or female, are basically androgynous; they can open
up the narrow preconceptions of a male readers mind as well as probe
the secrets deep within womens hearts. In Rosas account of her love in
Chapter 5, she believes that she became all polymath loves androgynous
advocate (AA 117). Just as Rosa becomes androgynous as a narrator and
interpreter of Sutpens story, a good translator may wish to be androgynous
in order to delve into and transmit the profound mysteries that both male
and female characters conceal in the enigmatic words writers employ to
depict them.

III. Inspired by Kenzaburo Oe

Interestingly enough, translation has been regarded as an essential activity
in modern Japanese literature, not only for literary critics, but for writers as
well. Kenzaburo Oe, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1994,
often depicts scenes in which his protagonists translate foreign works into
Japanese. As a French major at the University of Tokyo, Oe wrote his thesis
on Jean-Paul Sartre, and is well-versed in foreign literature. An abbreviated
list of poets and novelists quoted in his novels includes William Blake,
W. B. Yeats, W. H. Auden, Dante Alighieri, Edgar Allan Poe, Faulkner,
and Flannery OConnor. He frankly admits in a public lecture: At the
age of twenty, I felt like I was struck by lightning when I first read the
English original of T. S. Eliots Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock alongside
the accompanying Japanese translation on the opposite page. It was at that
moment that I wanted to write my own story. I was inspired to express
myself the way this translation did.3 Since his remarkable debut in 1958 as
one of Japans most promising novelists, Oe has been well known for his
unique literary style, one often described as having the feel of translated
literature.4 One of his protagonists in a recent work sounds like Oe himself
in his recollection of the methods employed to form his style through
translating English poetry. The protagonist always attempted a literal
translation of the lines by Eliot or Auden.5 In the process, he hears a new
voice with new echoes between the two different languages. And thus his
 Translating Faulkner: Can a translator be androgynous? 305
literary style was reshaped (Oe, Annabel Lee 149). By sheer coincidence,
Oe reproduces Benjamins point that translation aims at the single spot
where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of the
work in the alien one (Task 76).
Oe created a mysterious androgynous character in the three-volume
novel, The Burning Green Tree (199395). Oes magnum opus follows the
metaphysical inquiries of a writer who explores how our souls can be saved
or healed without any specific religious faith. The narrator, once a beautiful
brilliant boy, now lives as a woman described as androgynous rather than
hermaphrodite.6 Oe presents the narrators interpretation of a local legend
in southern Japan; the first-person narrator endowed with both male and
female perspectives fulfills the role of transcribing all the details of the
tragedy the so-called Savior suffers.
Nicoletta Spadavecchia, who translated Oes novel Teach Us to Outgrow
Our Madness (1969) into Italian, writes an interesting essay about her
translation.

We [translators] have to learn how to find good expressions for the original
in Italian language, based on precise interpretations of the original text. As
long as we abide by this process with diligence, we will be able to find the
perfect Italian equivalents to the original expressions; vocabulary, syntax,
style, figures of speech and metaphors in the original text can be beautifully
translated into Italian with the same vividness and persuasive power in the
original. But then one begins to wonder: perhaps the author, in the process
of writing in his mother tongue, has already deliberately chosen specific
words which can be easily adapted into the structure of a foreign language.7

Spadavecchias suggestion is validated by Oes claim that he used Sans-

serif fonts for the spoken words of the mentally handicapped boy, which
should be in italics when the novel is translated into Western languages.8
Thus Oe seems to enjoy freely moving back and forth between languages
while writing in Japanese. I myself encountered an experience similar to
the one described by Spadavecchia as I searched for the perfect Japanese
equivalents to the original expressions in Faulkners Absalom.
Hideyo Sengoku, an acclaimed literary critic in Japanese literature as
well as prominent professor of American literature, writes that translating
a novel is undoubtedly the task of a literary scholar who has the inventive-
ness of rendering the subtleties of the human heart into Japanese. In this
sense, translation can be creative work, inspired by new discoveries and
developed through profound insights.9 Sengoku published a new trans-
lation of Melvilles Moby-Dick in 2000. As a translator of this American
306 Ikuko Fujihira
masterpiece, he is fairly modest in assessing the translators role, but at the
same time his insistence that translations play a crucial role in literature is
reminiscent of Benjamins theory of pure language. When he summarizes
Benjamins philosophy of translation, Sengoku contends that translation
is a finite work insofar as its longevity is limited, while the original work of
art aims to last forever. Sometimes, however, the original work rises into the
sphere of a higher order of language only by being translated into another
language (287).
Instead of providing a detailed analysis, I have traced my experience of
taking on the arduous task of translating Absalom over a period of three
years before its publication in 2012. I was fortunate not to be hindered by
the remarks, comments, and theories on translation mentioned throughout
this chapter. My only enemy was time. Now my only wish is that readers
will find in this rendition of Absalom a sphere of pure language, no matter
how small it may be.

NOTES
1 Walter Benjamin, The Task of the Translator, in Illuminations, trans. Harry
Zohn (New York: Shocken Books, 1969), p. 70.
2 Dmitri Nabokov and Matthew J. Bruccoli (eds.), Vladimir Nabokov: Selected
Letters: 19401977 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989), p. 41, emphases
mine.
3 Kenzaburo Oe, Lectures on Reading, in Japanese (Tokyo: Shueisha, 2007), p. 31.
4 Yukio Mishima, one of the most famous Japanese novelists in the postwar
era, comments that Oes style may sound just like Sartres language translated
into Japanese, but Oes novels, with their feel of translated literature, are
already accepted as congenial to the minds of contemporary readers (Mishima,
A Writing Style, in Japanese [Tokyo: Chuko-bunko, 1973], p. 39).
5 Oe, Annabel Lee, the Beautiful, in Japanese (Tokyo: Shincho-Bunko, 2010),
p. 149.
6 Oe, The Burning Green Tree, 3 vols, in Japanese (Tokyo: Shinchosha, 199395),
vol. I, p. 56.
7 Nicoletta Spadavecchia, Translating Oe, Gunzo Literary Journal, Special Issue:
Kenzaburo Oe, in Japanese (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1995), pp. 956.
8 Oe, Essays on Writing, in Japanese (Tokyo: Shinchosha, 1998), p. 113.
9 Hideyo Sengoku, 9.11/ Nightmares of a Dreaming Country: On War, America,
and Translation, in Japanese (Tokyo: Sairyusha, 2008), p. 194.
 Index

abd al Rahman, Ibrahima, 60 Balzac, Honore de, 186, 187

Absalom, Absalom!, 11, 19, 30, 36, 39, 40, 63, 66, Bankhead, Tallulah, 16
75, 137, 170, 189, 195, 198, 208, 224, 231, 253, Bannon, Ann, 244
258, 272, 280, 281, 283, 284, 285, 286, 290 Barker, Deborah, 197
as plantation fiction, 1724 Barnett, Ross, 12
ecological themes in, 27 Barr, Caroline, 16, 59, 61, 623
global South in, 35, 46, 478, 292 Baudelaire, Charles, 190, 299
gothic elements of, 219, 221, 222, 225 Bauer, Margaret Donovan, 256
Hollywood influence in, 823 Beach, Sylvia, 76
imperialism in, 1489 Beckett, Samuel, 250
Japanese translation of, 3056 Ben Hur, 83
network theory in, 912, 958 Benjamin, Walter, 2989
New Orleans in, 48 Bergougnioux, Pierre, 187
queerness in, 121, 123, 1278 Bergson, Henri, 190
readability of, 2647, 269 Berry, Wendell, 252
Achebe, Chinua, 63 Bezzerides, A. I., 194, 196
Acker, Kathy, 256 Bibler, Michael, 1278, 129
Africa, 67, 76, 130, 1356, 137, 290, 293, 295 The Big Shot, 39
Aglietta, Michel, 108 Big Woods, 23, 26
Alabama, University of, 162, 242 Bilbo, Theodore, 12
Alexie, Sherman, 256 The Birth of a Nation, 198
Allen, Henry Watkins, 37 Black Music, 189
American Century, 14755 Bleikasten, Andre, 20, 115
American exceptionalism, 36, 41, 170, 179 Blotner, Joseph, 20, 79, 93, 157
Ames, Adelbert, 12 Blount, Serena Haygood, 197
Anderson, Eric Gary, 223 Bode, Carl, 23940
Anderson, Sherwood, 74, 188 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 26
Appalachia, 137, 252, 253, 256, 292 Boni & Liveright, 75, 233
As I Lay Dying, 15, 16, 25, 53, 79, 98, 117, 190, 191, Borges, Jorge Luis, 52, 270
208, 210, 220, 222, 263, 272 Bow, Clara, 112
economic conditions in, 1013 Bowe, John, 43
Aubry, Timothy, 2634 Bradley, David, 253
Auden, W. H., 159, 304 Breit, Harvey, 160
Avati, James, 2357 Brooks, Cleanth, 211, 219
Brooks, Peter, 2601, 265
Baghdad, 295, 296 Brooks, Van Wyck, 79
Baker, Houston A., Jr., 29 Brown v. Board of Education, 18, 28, 138, 242
Baker, Josephine, 75 Brown, Larry, 29, 256
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 91, 99 Brundage, Fitzhugh, 221
Baldwin, Doug, 197 Butler, Charles (William Faulkners
Baldwin, James, 17, 140, 163, 238 grandfather), 13

307
308 Index
Butler, Leila (William Faulkners grandmother), Cruz, Denise, 36
13 Cuba, 37, 43, 44, 159
Cullen, Countee, 59, 656
Caldwell, Erskine, 235, 23840
Cambridge, University of, 295 Daniel, Pete, 41
Camus, Albert, 279 Danticat, Edwidge, 53
capitalism, 26, 1023, 156, 170, 178, 220, 221, 225 Davis, Kenneth C., 240
See also economic conditions Davis, Thadious, 214
Carcassonne, 189 De Graff, Robert, 2335
Caribbean, 4654, 62, 63, 128, 147, 1489, 170, de Soto, Hernando, 25
199, 273, 28990, 291, 292 Deleuze, Gilles, 24950
Carpenter, Meta. See Wilde, Meta Carpenter desegregation, 13541, 1614, 21011
Carpentier, Alejo, 52, 254, 270 desire, 11117, 1312
Casablanca, 86 Daz, Junot, 66, 67
Casanova, Pascale, 2512, 253, 297 Dickens, Charles, 186
Celine, Louis-Ferdinand, 250 Didion, Joan, 81, 147
Cendrars, Blaise, 201 Diop, Birago, 63
Cerf, Bennett, 16, 232 Divorce in Naples, 1247
Cesaire, Aime, 53 Dixon, Thomas, 170, 172, 197
Chamoiseau, Patrick, 49, 53 Django Unchained, 29
Chaplin, Charlie, 197 Donaldson, Susan V., 220
Chauncey, George, 133 Dos Passos, John, 185, 191
Chesnutt, Charles W., 1702 Doyle, Don, 12
Cheuse, Alan, 256 Dry September, 254
Chicago, 86, 87, 212, 238 Du Bois, W. E. B., 107, 147
Chute, Carolyn, 252 Duck, Leigh Anne, 180, 219, 220
civil rights, 214 Dunning, William Archibald, 178
Civil Rights Act, 30 Duvall, John N., 122, 123, 214, 215
civil rights movement, 17, 28, 29, 30, 135, 137,
1389, 1612, 169, 20713, 241 economic conditions, 11, 25, 268, 3544, 49,
Civil War, 11, 13, 16, 25, 26, 36, 379, 41, 107, 129, 1008, 119, 135, 139, 147, 154, 169, 175,
169, 172, 208, 253, 261, 266, 272, 276, 281, 2201, 2234, 281, 282, 288, 2935
302, 303 Einstein, Albert, 190
Clewiston, FL, 401, 42, 43, 44 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 160, 287
Cliff, Michelle, 52 Eisenstein, Sergei, 87, 196
Clukey, Amy, 180 electrification, rural, 98
Coen, Joel and Ethan, 80 Eliot, George, 186
Cohen, Philip, 186 Eliot, T. S., 188, 304
Cohn, David L., 24 Ellis, Havelock, 111
Cohn, Deborah, 52, 2902 Ellison, Ralph, 140, 141, 162, 163, 238, 240
Cold War, 15664, 240, 282, 293 Elly, 39
colonialism, 35, 14755, 169, 222, 280, 28896 environment, 26, 42, 2226, 256
See also imperialism epistemology of the closet, 1312
communism, 137, 1567 Erdrich, Louise, 253, 256, 258
Conde, Maryse, 53 Evangeline, 123, 2657
Conrad, Joseph, 1889, 191, 235, 253 Evers, Medgar, 28
Cooper, Gary, 85
Cornell University, 164 A Fable, 77, 201, 293
A Courtship, 224 Fadiman, Clifford P., 2612, 268
Cowley, Malcolm, 156, 163, 186, 231, 238, 239, Falkner, Dean (William Faulkners brother), 16
240 Falkner, J. W. T. (William Faulkners
Crawford, Joan, 84, 85, 122 grandfather), 13
creolization, 4654, 62, 645 Falkner, Maud Butler (William Faulkners
Crevasse, 59 mother), 13
Crowther, Bosley, 268 Falkner, Murry (William Faulkners father), 13
 Index 309
Falkner, W. C. (William Faulkners great- Glasgow, Ellen, 170, 180, 220
grandfather), 13, 14
Glissant, Edouard, 46, 4854, 64, 180, 252,
Fanon, Frantz, 53 28990, 295
Father Abraham, 1856, 190 Go Down, Moses, 30, 147, 169, 195, 197, 200, 224,
Faulkner, Jill (William Faulkners daughter), 59, 253, 256, 272
62, 63 African influence in, 59, 63, 65
Faulkner, Jimmy (William Faulkners nephew), as plantation fiction, 173, 1749
61, 62 ecological themes in, 256, 224
Faulkner, John (William Faulkners brother), 99, family relations in, 14, 140, 2523
238 queerness in, 12730, 132, 134
Faulkner, William race in, 140, 21213, 2523
alcoholism of, 16 slavery in, 41
Canadian RAF service of, 15, 72 Godden, Richard, 149, 198, 214
childhood of, 1213, 14, 63 Golden Land, 77, 195
Cold War reputation of, 15664 Hollywood influence in, 802
cosmopolitanism of, 717 ad, 159
Goncz, Arp
family relations of, 1314, 1516 Gothic, 156, 21926, 231, 249, 257, 280
film and TV work of, 7987, 194200 Gramsci, Antonio, 2945
Japan visit of, 15960, 2812 Grant, Ulysses S., 11, 12
modernism of, 18592 Great Depression, 27
Nobel Prize of, 1567, 279, 287 Great Flood (1927), 27, 84
publishing career of, 23143 Great Migration, 1078, 139
racial views of, 1618, 13641, 1614 Green, Ely, 60
State Department service of, 15761, Greeson, Jennifer Rae, 170, 180
2812 Griffith, D. W., 197, 198
works, See individual titles Guattari, Felix, 24950
Ferre, Rosario, 271
Fiedler, Leslie, 224 Hahn, Stephen, 41
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 75, 80, 194, 235 Haiti, 267, 35, 38, 42, 43, 468, 49, 51, 53, 66,
Flags in the Dust, 15, 73, 136, 185, 186, 190, 232, 137, 147, 1489, 171, 173, 225, 278, 280
257, 293 Hale, Grace Elizabeth, 18, 139, 180, 214
network theory in, 945 Hamer, Fannie Lou, 28
flapper, 11217 The Hamlet, 197, 220, 231, 232
Flaubert, Gustave, 186, 187, 191 Hammett, Dashiell, 74
Florida, 40, 43, 249 Handley, George, 48, 53, 291, 292
Folks, Jeffrey J., 197 Hannah, Barry, 29, 257
Forrest, Nathan Bedford, 12 Harcourt and Brace, 73
Forter, Greg, 222 Hardy, Thomas, 186, 188
Foucault, Michel, 119, 124 Harker, Jaime, 128, 129
Franklin, Cornell, 15 Harlem Renaissance, 120
Freud, Anna, 173 Harlow, Jean, 84
Freud, Sigmund, 111, 117, 173, 189, 220 Harris, Joel Chandler, 170
Frey, James, 268 Harris, Wilson, 46, 512, 53, 64, 293
Fuentes, Carlos, 2713, 277, 289 Havana, 36, 37, 38
Furry, William, 199 Hawks, Howard, 76, 83, 85, 122, 194, 196
Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 189, 249, 250
Gaines, Ernest J., 252, 256 Hegel, G. W. F., 1048
Galsworthy, John, 187 Held, John, Jr., 111, 112
Garcia, Cristina, 271 Helman, Lillian, 74
Garrett, Oliver H. P., 262 Hemingway, Ernest, 75, 235, 238, 250, 271
genealogical novel, 2523, 258 Henty, G. A., 191
Gide, Andre, 279 Hess, Joan, 252
Gilchrist, Ellen, 29, 256 Hinojosa, Rolando, 271
Gilroy, Paul, 36, 210 Hollywood, 29, 76, 77, 7987, 122, 157, 194200,
Girard, Rene, 61 213, 231, 262
310 Index
Horton, Merrill, 186 labor, 11, 26, 27, 3544, 1018, 195, 224, 225
Howe, Russell Warren, 162 Ladd, Barbara, 292
Humphreys, Josephine, 252, 258 Lafayette County, MS, 1119, 23, 71, 256
Hungary, 159 The Land of the Pharaohs, 196
Hurston, Zora Neale, 140, 180 Lane, Allen, 232
Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 233 language, 91, 1008, 115, 179, 187, 189, 24950,
254, 255, 282, 296, 3056
If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, 25, 75, 122, 191, 199, Larsen, Nella, 133
231, 232, 236, 257, 279 Lasch, Christopher, 44
Hollywood influence in, 847, 198 Latin America, 48, 52, 189, 284
imperialism, 35, 14755, 178, 249, 2802, 28896 Faulkners depiction of, 2736
incest, 14, 128, 130, 132, 134, 177, 222, 231, 262, Faulkners influence on, 159, 2703, 28892
264, 283, 284 Lawrence, D. H., 233, 249
Indians. See Native Americans Lee, Muna, 157, 161
Intruder in the Dust, 30, 51, 63, 232, 254, 290, Light in August, 16, 17, 30, 39, 48, 121, 128, 137,
293 149, 150, 161, 170, 172, 191, 195, 198, 209,
creolization in, 645 222, 223, 224, 232, 254, 257, 263, 285, 290
paperback version of, 2402 Mexican identity in, 2736
Irby, James East, 289, 291 Lincoln, Abraham, 41, 44
Irwin, John T., 19 Lind, Michael, 40, 41, 43, 44
Italy, 74, 75, 294 Llosa, Mario Vargas, 270, 289
Ivory Coast, 64 Loichot, Valerie, 252
The Long Hot Summer (paperback), 232
Jabra, Jabra Ibrahim, 296 The Long, Hot Summer (film), 244, 268
Jackson, MI, 28 Lost Cause, 13, 38, 257
Jackson, Robert, 214 Louisiana, 26, 37, 43, 49, 119, 137, 252, 290
James, Henry, 189, 191, 261 Lucy, Autherine, 162
Japan, 158, 27986, 298, 3056 Lurie, Peter, 1978
jazz, 28, 74, 75, 140 lynching, 28, 120, 139, 151, 152, 153, 172, 178, 223,
Jim Crow, 42, 43, 13541, 154, 169, 171, 172, 178, 241, 242, 2546, 262
21011, 224, 254 Lytle, Andrew, 60
Johnson, Charles S., 139
Jones, Anne Goodwyn, 11213 magical realism, 2536
Joyce, James, 75, 76, 173, 180, 185, 188, 191, 238, Mallarme, Stephan, 279
250, 251, 25960, 2612 Malraux, Andre, 279
A Justice, 224 Mandle, J. R., 107
Mann, Thomas, 187
Kafka, Franz, 185, 250 The Mansion, 74, 293
Kanafani, Ghassan, 295 Marionettes, 197
Karem, Jeff, 54, 198 Marquez, Gabriel Garca, 180, 270, 271, 273,
Karon, Jan, 252 277, 284, 289
Kartiganer, Donald, 267 Martinique, 467, 196, 280
Kawin, Bruce, 196, 197, 198, 200 Marx, Karl, 87, 100
Keaton, Buster, 197 Mason, Bobbie Ann, 253
Kenan, Randall, 249, 251, 252, 256 Mason, James, 199
Kenji, Nakagami, 282, 2846 Matthews, John T., 39, 149, 196, 198, 202, 292,
Kennedy, John F., 28 293
Kenzaburo, Oe, 284, 286, 3045 Matthiessen, Peter, 249, 252
Kerr, Elizabeth, 220 May, Jamaal, 257
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 138, 242 Mbembe, Achille, 213
Knights Gambit, 232, 235 McCarthy, Cormac, 199, 249, 2501, 253
Knopf, Alfred, 16 Melville, Herman, 52, 249, 305
Kodat, Catherine Gunther, 134 memory, 171, 18990, 220, 222, 224, 226, 272
Korea, 282, 283 Memphis, 12, 245, 712, 73, 116, 150, 151, 154,
Ku Klux Klan, 28, 50, 172, 178 161, 188, 212
 Index 311
Meredith, James, 12 Once Aboard the Lugger, 39
Mexico, 37, 151, 2716 Onetti, Juan Carlos, 270, 289
Middle East, 289, 295 Oxford, MS, 1119, 24, 30, 61, 71, 73, 74, 924,
minor literature, 24950 157, 172, 188, 197, 290
miscegenation, 17, 49, 83, 128, 130, 132, 224,
2726, 283 Page, Thomas Nelson, 170
Mishima, Yukio, 306 Palestine, 2956
Mississippi, 35, 46, 4950, 53, 59, 60, 71, 161, 252, Palmer, Louis, 220
255, 256 Parini, Jay, 20, 123
culture of, 11, 1618, 2730, 613, 72, 136, 138, Paris, 71, 756, 77, 123, 159
140, 290 Parker, Robert Dale, 133
geography of, 236, 224 Parks, Rosa, 242
modernization of, 92 Parks, Suzan-Lori, 210
University of, 11, 12, 72, 163, 196 Paton, Alan, 1378
Mississippi (film), 29 Paz, Octavio, 67
Mississippi Burning, 29 Pearson, T. R., 252
The Mississippi Gambler, 29 Pelletier, Cathie, 252
Mitchell, Margaret, 83 Penguin (publishing house), 23143
modernism, 756, 169, 18592, 221, 233, 2358, Percy, William Alexander, 25, 123
25963 Perse, Saint-John, 489, 53, 290
modernization, 23, 918, 253, 283 Petry, Ann, 238, 240
Monenembo, Tierno, 64 Philippines, 148, 1505
Morrison, Toni, 48, 50, 164, 207, 251, 253, 256, Phillips, U. B., 138
257, 2634, 271, 290 Plaatje, Sol, 136
Mosquitoes, 14, 75, 121, 190, 197, 209, 222 plantation, 27, 36, 39, 414, 4654, 60, 635,
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 86 1078, 120, 148, 16980, 221, 224, 225, 265,
Murray, Albert, 162, 163 271, 280, 281, 291
Murray, David, 197 Plessy v. Ferguson, 119, 137
Pocket Books. See De Graff, Robert
Nabokov, Vladimir, 300 Poe, Edgar Allan, 188, 220, 249, 262, 304
Nafisi, Azar, 259, 261 Polk, Noel, 29, 261
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 102 The Portable Faulkner, 80, 156, 163, 231
Naples, 124 postcolonialism, 253, 28896
narrative network, 938 Prall, Elizabeth, 73, 74
National Association for the Advancement of Proust, Marcel, 185, 190
Colored Peoples, 28, 162 Pylon, 75, 77, 122, 188, 231, 232, 236, 265
Native Americans, 25, 26, 211, 280 Hollywood influence in, 834
Chickasaw, 11, 26, 612, 63, 64, 67, 1038, 225
Choctaw, 26 race, 12, 1618, 278, 2930, 39, 48, 59, 65, 113,
Naylor, Gloria, 252, 256 115, 11921, 128, 13541, 14754, 1614,
Nelson, Dana D., 29 16975, 20713, 220, 221, 222, 2403,
New Critics, 239, 240, 242, 281 2546, 267, 2726, 290, 291, 293
New Haven, 15, 72 Ramsey, D. Matthew, 1212, 123, 198
New Orleans, 14, 17, 24, 28, 37, 39, 46, 48, 60, 73, Random House, 16, 239
745, 83, 96, 97, 123, 140, 188, 208, 266, 267 Rash, Ron, 253
New York City, 734, 120, 123, 125, 199 Reagan, Ronald, 199
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 262 realism, 156, 169, 1868, 235, 239, 240
Nordan, Lewis, 29, 249, 252, 2545, 256, 257 Reconstruction, 12, 172, 1779, 208, 275
Norman, Brian, 210 Red Leaves, 224, 280
African influence in, 601, 62, 63
OBrien, Tim, 253 labor relations in, 1038
Ober, Harold, 199 Rees, Gary, 293
Offutt, Chris, 252 Requiem for a Nun, 141, 176, 211, 219, 224, 226,
The Old Man, 232, 239 232, 235, 262
Oldham, Estelle (William Faulkners wife), 15, 72 Rhodes, Pamela, 198
312 Index
Richards, Gary, 123 South
Roberts, Diane, 113 United States, 11, 12, 23, 59, 60, 73, 93, 1078,
Romanticism, 224 11213, 11920, 12730, 13541, 1614,
Root, Maria, 222 16980, 186, 1978, 2078, 209, 21922,
A Rose for Emily, 190, 221, 234, 235, 243 2234, 2256, 23940, 241, 252, 2712, 275,
racial identity in, 20711 280, 286
Rulfo, Juan, 270 global, 3544, 4654, 59, 60, 14755, 169,
2256, 251, 275, 276, 2802, 284,
Said, Edward W., 294 28896
Sanctuary, 16, 71, 74, 76, 196, 197, 208, 222, 223, South Africa, 1356, 137
257, 279 South Carolina, 11, 62, 147
film adaptation of, 2623 Soyinka, Wole, 52, 61, 250
imperialism in, 1505 Spadavecchia, Nicoletta, 305
modern womanhood in, 113, 11617 Spratling, William, 74, 75, 123, 124, 125
paperback publication of, 2312, 235, 239 Stanchich, Maritza, 54, 149
Santo Domingo, 67 Stein, Gertrude, 75, 238
Sartoris. See Flags in the Dust Stein, Jean, 20, 194, 260, 267
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 187, 190, 279, 281, 304 Stendhal, 186, 187
Saxon, Lyle, 123 Stevens, Thaddeus, 172
Sayre, Joel, 194 Stone, Phil, 71, 72, 73
Schreuders, Piet, 235 The Story of Temple Drake, 2623, 268
Schwartz, Lawrence H., 1567, 244 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 169
Scott, Evelyn, 2613 stream-of-consciousness, 15, 1889, 1901
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 131, 133 Styron, William, 163, 238
segregation, 12, 1618, 28, 50, 120, 13541, 1614, Sugar Kings, 40, 42
178, 208, 21011, 275 Sundquist, Eric, 220
Sengoku, Hideyo, 3056 Sunset, 601
Sensibar, Judith, 19, 20, 61, 62, 66 Sutters Gold, 83, 195, 198
sexuality, 11117, 11932, 209, 222
Shadid, Anthony, 296 Taiwan, 282
Shakespeare, William, 264 Tehran, 259, 267
Shapiro, Stephen, 220 Tennessee Valley Authority, 924
Sherman, William Tecumseh, 11 Thalberg, Irving, 85, 194, 196
Signet. See Penguin That Evening Sun, 61, 65
Silver, James W., 138 Till, Emmett, 18, 137, 161, 2545
Simms, William Gilmore, 220 Tillman, Ben, 147
Simon and Schuster, 234 Tindall, George, 219
Simone, Nina, 30 Today We Live, 85, 195, 196, 201
slavery, 1112, 267, 3544, 489, 1038, 1302, Toklas, Alice B., 75
138, 149, 16980, 208, 214, 2245, 253, Tokyo, 159, 281
2901 University of, 304
Smith, Andrew Jackson Whiskey, 12 Toomer, Jean, 140
Smith, Hal, 91, 225 Toronto, 15, 72
Smith, Lee, 253, 256 Tourgee, Albion, 179
Smith, Lillian, 139, 240 Transcendentalism, American, 224
Soldiers Pay, 14, 75, 76, 111, 190, 196, 221, 232 trauma, 177, 179, 21926, 253, 263
modern womanhood in, 11315 Tulane University, 74
The Sound and the Fury, 15, 16, 17, 19, 25, 30, 73, Tuqan, Fadwa, 295
74, 80, 121, 128, 136, 141, 149, 159, 189, 222, Turn About, 85, 1213, 195, 196, 201
232, 250, 256, 257, 272, 279, 283, 290 Tutuola, Amos, 63
creolization in, 62 Twain, Mark, 27, 147, 170, 172, 249,
global South in, 2935 250
modern womanhood in, 11516
modernism of, 1902 Union, 38
readability of, 25962, 2634, 268 army of, 12, 37, 178, 272
 Index 313
United Kingdom, 147 Wiener, Jonathan, 107
The Unvanquished, 179, 195, 232 Wilcox, James, 252
queerness in, 129, 131 The Wild Palms. See If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem
Urgo, Joseph, 83, 195, 198 Wilde, Meta Carpenter, 77, 194
Wilkinson, Alec, 40, 41
Vardaman, James, 12 Williams, R. X., 92
Verlaine, Paul-Marie, 279 Williamson, Joel, 83, 123
Vernon, Olympia, 2556 Willis, Susan, 293
Vicksburg, 11, 24 Winfrey, Oprah
Vieux-Chauvet, Marie, 53 Book Club of, 2634, 268
Viking Press, 231 Woodward, C. Vann, 135, 137, 138, 277
Volosinov, V. N., 100 Woolf, Virginia, 86, 164, 185, 191, 235
World War I, 14, 15, 72, 121, 201
Wallace, Lew, 83 World War II, 132, 2802, 283, 287
Warren, Kenneth W., 21011, 215 Wright, Richard, 29, 140, 238, 240
Washington, DC, 12, 72, 272
Wasson, Ben, 73, 74, 123 Yaeger, Patricia, 225
Watkins, Maurine Dallas, 262 Yale University, 72
Watson, Jay, 197 Yoknapatawpha, 11, 17, 23, 25, 27, 41, 46, 47,
Weinstein, Philip, 188 4850, 52, 54, 59, 61, 62, 634, 67, 121,
Wendt, Albert, 296 1868, 196, 252, 256, 271, 282, 286
West, Nathanael, 80, 81, 82, 194 See also Mississippi; Lafayette County, MS
West Indies, 35, 39, 43, 44, 478, 149, 292 Young, Robert, 85
See also Haiti; Caribbean Young, Stark, 73, 123
Weybright, Victor, 2313, 2358, 23941
white supremacy, 11, 12, 1617, 18, 278, 2930, Zanuck, Darryl, 194, 196
367, 61, 11921, 128, 13541, 1545, 1614, Zeitlin, Michael, 117
1709, 21011, 2413, 2546, 2736
Zola, Emile, 187