Faulkner

The guide for contributors to this volume asks us to “write for intelligent readers, though not necessarily knowing ones” and to “use language of general accessibility rather than of theoretical coteries.” Had the great majority of contributors to Faulkner studies in 2006 heeded either piece of advice, it would have been a better year of reading criticism. More important for the purposes of scholarship itself, however, an even greater number of erstwhile Faulkner critics should have written with at least some regard for the “knowing” readers—other scholars versed in the criticism produced on this writer. A shocking number of those who offered work on Faulkner simply did not do their homework (exceptions noted below, with pleasure).

i Biography

This category saw no publications in 2006.

ii Bibliography, Editions, Manuscripts

This category saw no publications in 2006.

iii General Criticism

Two monographs center on Faulkner this year, and he appears as a major subject of five others. Easily the most distinguished of all these is Ted Atkinson’s Faulkner and the Great Depression: Aesthetics, Ideology, and Cultural Politics (Georgia), which duly notes the way Faulkner critics tend to “struggle to rehabilitate Faulkner for the prevailing climate of literary studies.” Instead of trying to “reconcile the irreconcilable” tensions between the political and aesthetic claims on Faulkner’s attention, Atkinson “approache[s] the political Faulkner by accepting, rather than trying to resolve, the dialectical forces of contradiction, thus reading his texts in context as sites of intense ideological negotiation and political struggle.” His effort occasionally detours too far into theorists only tangentially relevant to his project, but his focus on the various and tremendous cultural pressures at work in the Great Depression of the 1930s affords fascinating insights into undervalued Faulkner texts like Mosquitoes and The Unvanquished as well as (perhaps overly) familiar ones like The Sound and the Fury. Atkinson’s work betters Lawrence Schwartz’s overvalued Creating Faulkner’s Reputation by emphasizing Faulkner’s fiction rather than his alleged appropriation by a Cold War machine: “With dialectical force,” he concludes, “Faulkner’s form of individualism—and, indeed, his individualism of form—resisted at virtually every turn the kind of bold, monolithic, and often reductive representations coming from the Right and the Left in the throes of cultural politics.” At the other end of the ideological spectrum, Nancy Grisham Anderson compiles a set of lectures given ten years ago at Harvard by Richard Marius and titles the resulting volume Reading Faulkner: Introductions to the First Thirteen Novels (Tennessee). The book is a fine tribute to a teacher but not a significant contribution to Faulkner studies.

In a related but more ambitious effort, Arnold Weinstein undertakes to explain why he loves to read and teach the fiction of Proust, Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Faulkner, and Toni Morrison. Recovering Your Story (Random House) is “a personal tour of these rich and varied fictional worlds, and meant to open them up, to make you realize how intimate and hospitable and mirrorlike they are—rather than how daunting or inaccessible they may appear.” Although he has read some of the major scholarship on these writers, he makes no claim to scholarly innovation. Instead, he has written “a novel, my novel, my story” in which Faulkner serves as “the dark star, the death star, of this book because his magnificent depictions of consciousness, of that fabled inside story that each of us contains, are stories of undoing, of coming apart, of being dismantled and dissolved from both within and without.” Mark Royden Winchell also offers years’ worth of his thinking, about Southern literature in particular, as Reinventing the South: Versions of a Literary Region (Missouri). His chapter on the “Faulkner wars” in criticism indicates that he quit reading that criticism in 1984, with the publication of Joseph Blotner’s one-volume biography of the writer; consequently, he offers outdated readings of both the criticism and Go Down, Moses. Also out to “reinvent” Faulkner is Mary Weaks-Baxter, Reclaiming the American Farmer, who offers solid readings of the treatment of the farmer figure in works by Ellen Glasgow, the Southern Agrarians, Jean Toomer, and others. Strangely enough, her...