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  • Faulknerscapes
  • Ted Atkinson
Charles S. Aiken . William Faulkner and the Southern Landscape. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009. 288 pp. $34.95 cloth.
Annette Trefzer and Ann J. Abadie, eds. Global Faulkner: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2006. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. 224 pp. $55 cloth.
Philip Weinstein . Becoming Faulkner: The Art and Life of William Faulkner. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. 250 pp. $29.95 cloth.

Taken together, Philip Weinstein's Becoming Faulkner: The Art and Life of William Faulkner, Charles S. Aiken's William Faulkner and the Southern Landscape, and Global Faulkner, the latest installment in the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference series, call to mind the often repeated claim that heightened concern with space relative to time is a feature of the postmodern moment. These significant contributions to Faulkner studies cover substantial literal and figurative territory, extending from the ground-level perspective on the vagaries of Faulkner's life and work that Weinstein delivers to the intertwined geographical histories of Faulkner's native and fictional grounds that Aiken painstakingly documents to the borders that contributors to Global Faulkner redraw, transgress, or remove altogether when considering Faulkner's place in the world and the world's place in Faulkner. Though they occupy at least some common ground, these studies take divergent critical paths through one of the most traversed locales in literary studies. In so doing, they demonstrate that Faulkner continues to inspire diverse scholarly explorations [End Page 471] that yield new insights into the author's achievements as an artist and his seemingly inexhaustible capacity to remain relevant.

In Becoming Faulkner, Weinstein forthrightly addresses one of the many challenges that emerge when writing a life: "The life itself loses its messy authenticity when it enters the monumentalizing mangle of biography: it emerges straightened out, time-ordered, false" (4). In other words, the life on the page seems far removed from the actual one. And yet Weinstein and others have pressed on, each writing a life and in aggregate producing the many written lives of William Faulkner. For Weinstein, the purpose of adding another book to an already crowded shelf of Faulkner biographies, ranging from Joseph Blotner's monumental work to more recent offerings by Jay Parini, André Bleikasten, and Judith Sensibar, is to provide an account that weaves together the life and the fiction rather than giving them the standard treatment as "parallel tracks that do not meet" (4). This endeavor starts with reference to a passage from Absalom, Absalom! describing the human condition as a struggle within a complex cultural fabric that makes the process of becoming Faulkner or anyone else seem like an exercise in mystification and futility that ultimately "cant matter" [sic] (1). The phrase "cant matter" is Weinstein's biographical Muse, inspiring ruminations on its profound implications for his subject. Enhancing the effort to convey a sense of life's "messy authenticity," Weinstein foregoes the strict use of linear chronological sequencing in favor of a thematic structure framing chronological clusters in which he reads the events of Faulkner's life and the material of his novels as exerting mutually constitutive influences.

Becoming Faulkner contains five chapters in all. The first two chapters focus on Faulkner's early literary production, the roots of his troubled relationship with his wife, Estelle Oldham Faulkner, and his aimless years in young adulthood prior to the string of masterpieces that emerged between 1929 and 1932. In my view, the next chapter is the most compelling, exploring with great nuance and depth how Faulkner's life and writing function as complex means of experiencing and expressing vexed race relations in the South. Weinstein delves into Faulkner's ambivalent racial attitudes and the complexity of his fictional representations of race with an unflinching critical eye. The fourth chapter posits the combined pursuits of drinking and love affairs as Faulkner's preferred means of seeking escape from intractable dilemmas in his life. Weinstein reads If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem and The Hamlet as erotically charged texts expressive of his passion for Meta Carpenter, a young lover whom he met while working in Hollywood. The final chapter, which is rather slight by comparison to its predecessors, chronicles the notoriety and frustration of...

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