William Faulkner: An Economy of Complex Words (review)

Studies in American Fiction251 Melville scholars like Milder and incisive non-specialists like Pardes are still finding much to enjoy—and to discover—in texts that we keep assuming that we know. Lafayette CollegeChristopher N. Phillips Godden, Richard. William Faulkner:An EconomyofComplex Words. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2007. ? + 251 pp. Cloth: $39.50. Opening on the observation that most ofthose who study the relationships between literature and the economy conceptualize those relationships in terms of analogy (i.e. "words have their economies . . . because language and economy are both arbitrary systems of exchange" [I]), Richard Godden undertakes to "establish a causal rather than arbitrary connection between the work of Faulkner's words and the work of the economy" in the United States South in the 1940s and 1950s. More particularly he is interested in changes in agriculture and land ownership following the New Deal, the disappearance of the sharecropper, the increase in migration out of the region by displaced tenants, and the infusion of northern capital which "shifted" the landed class's "pattern ofdependency from black labor to northern capital" (2). Exploring the mourning of the landed class over the loss ofAfrican American labor, and hence part of itself, in Faulkner's fiction of these decades, William Faulkner: An Economy of Complex Words is a continuation of the work begun in Fictions ofLabor. Where the earlierstudy examined the impact ofslavery, a "pre-modernlabortrauma," on Faulkner'sfiction ofthe thirties, this newbook"arguesthat Faulknerspends the next two decades resolving the impact ofthat founding trauma's loss" (4). Godden focuses on three novels: The Hamlet(19A0), Go Down, Moses (1942), and A Fable (1954), returning in his analyses ofeach to the scene of southern white loss, mourning, and desire through the elucidation ofsubtle sexual and excretory associations that reveal a network of queer longings precipitated by the displacement of black labor by capital. In The Hamlet, Ratliffs longing for a "blackened" Flem, or at least what that Flem represents , a residual populism (in part), is a manifestation of Ratliffs own removal from the land and the tenant class to which he, like the Snopes clan, traditionally belonged. Roth Edmunds's search for "his own face" in the face of Lucas attests to the momentary suggestion of an emancipatory pull in Go Down, Moses that could produce, if anyone wanted it, "an independent African American voice," but, Godden asserts, no one (i.e. neither Lucas nor Roth) wants it (86). What he terms the "floating phalloi" of Go Down, Moses " are . . . fetishes: open to disavowal, they stand in the place ofa lost thing," i.e. African 252Reviews Americanlaboring bodies (155). Godden's discussion of"Pantaloon in Black" is excellent in its emphasis on Rider as "rogue labor" in a transitional southern economy. Reading the chapters on Go Down, Moses, I was reminded of Thadious B. Davis's GamesofProperty:Law, Race, Gender, andFaulkner's Go Down, Moses(2003), which is alsovery invested in questions ofwhite guilt and shame and African American departures, and, read together, these two books make an invaluable contribution to the understanding ofrace in this period of Faulkner's career. In two chapters on the little-studied A Fable, Godden returns to the transitional moment in the southern economy by way ofa compelling exploration ofthe hiddenJew as "an alienwho defines the power elite" (178), subsequentlylinking the figure ofthe hidden Jew to the AfricanAmerican presence which has become an absence. Throughout this study ofloss, Godden resists the loss ofthe referent that characterizes Saussurean readings, tracing, instead, its displacement (Flem's black bowtie against the white expanse ofshirtfront recalls Ab Snopes's club foot as it smears mud on an expensive rug in a landholder's home, then recalls male sexuality, then race, then the loss ofblacklabor). As a result, his approach is appropriately temporal and historical. In his treatment of "Pantaloon in Black," Godden notes thathe has been "fabricating a scene from the recurrent parts ofother scenes" (98). In fact, this is his practice elsewhere in the book as well. Moreover, his "fabricated" (one might say, instead, "excavated" or "excreted ") scenes are themselves part ofthe construction ofa larger queer narrative detailing the unspoken intimacies ofmale labor relations. Dense in its close readings, in its...