Morrison and Faulkner

MORRISON AND FAULKNER 731 These volumes are a great resource, not only to Sterne scholars, but to all those interested in the workings of the Church of England in the eighteenth century - its doctrines, practices, strengths, and limitations. The copious notes provide sufficient resources for innumerable studies in homiletics and church history and attitudes towards other denominations and religions (dissenters, Roman Catholics,Jews) as well as challenging the view of Sterne himself as a latitudinarian preacher with a secular humanist bias. While others may wish to add to its commentary, especially with regard to Sterne's use of the prayer book, the Florida edition will no doubt remain the standard text for many years to come. Morrison and Faulkner MICHAEL E. NOWLIN Philip M. Weinstein. What Else But Love?: Tlte Ordeal of Race in Faulkner and Morrison New York: Columbia University Press 1996. xxx, 238. US $42.00 cloth, us $15.50 paper Carol A. Kolmerton, Stephen M. Ross, and Judith Bryant Wittenburg, editors. Unflinching Gaze: Morrison and Faulkner Re-Envisioned. Jackson: UniverSity Press of Mississippi 1997. xiv, 248. us $45.00 cloth, us $18.00 paper Toni Morrison once wrote part of her master's thesis on William Faulkner, but as an esteemed novelist in her own right, she has never seemed flattered by the comparisons made between her writing and his. On the contrary, critical evocations of white literary masters like Faulkner have tended to irritate her. Her recent critical writings on American literature, however, have given new impetus to such comparative readjngs, and to the assumption that her texts yield their largest meanings when set within the matrix of classic American literature. Perhaps one of the more fTU itfuIironies issuing from the recogni tion of African-American Iiterature as a legitimate field of study may be the growing consensus that American writers black and white so profoundly share a stake in the legacy of race - especially in the twin tropes of 'whiteness' and 'blackness' - that one can no longer pretend that 'African-American' and 'American' signify separate cultural domains. Ralph Ellison recognized some time ago, in Going to tile Territory, that 'what some of [his] "teachers " were calling "white literature" was not really white at all.' For how could that literature remain unaffected by what Morrison, in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, calls 'the four-hundred year old presence of, first, Africans and then African-Americans in the United States'? Recent scholarship on the biracial aspects of American literature hCls confirmed Ellison's insight, itself an elaboration of W.E.B. DuBois's, that 'part of the music of the language, part of the folklore which informed our conscious American literature came through the interaction of the slave and the white man, and particularly so in the South.' 732 M1CHAEL E. NOWLIN Ellison went on in the same piece to say that 'Mr. Faulkner ..,had no doubt about that, and some of our most meaningful insights into the experience of the South have come through his understanding of that complex relationship. And because he did [understandL he has been responsible for some of the real glories of our literature.' Many of today's critics -like Morrison herself, less buoyed by Ellison's brand of liberal humanism - are less confident about how thoroughly Faulkner understood. One of the aims of two recent books, Philip M. Weinstein's What Else But Love?: The Ordeal of Race in Faulkner and Morrison and a collection of fifteen essays called Unflinching Gaze: Morrison and Faulkner Re-Envisioned, is to reveal the parameters of that understanding through readings that place Faulkner's work 'intertextually' beside Morrison's. As John Duvall puts it in the opening essay of Unflinching Gaze, the notion of intertextuality 'means that one can validly read not only Faulkner's influence on Morrison, but also Morrison's influence on Faulkner - how her fiction and literary criticism may cause one to rethink Faulkner in a fundamental way.' Philip Weinstein comes across precisely as an established Faulknerian whose thinking about Faulkner has changed in a fundamental way as a result of his reading of Morrison. But he gracefully steps back from wanting to diminish the power and authority...