Faulkner on the Color Line: The Later Novels, and: Natural Aristocracy: History, Ideology, and the Production of William Faulkner, and: The Fugitive Legacy: A Critical History (review)

Watching the South is a social and academic sport that seems to reinvent itself every other day. At the moment, Southern studies conferences and collections have refigured the South in a transnational, global context. With notions of a bichromatic South largely scrapped, new colonial, postcolonial, and regional studies have found rich new lodes of ignored aspects of Southern culture. As fresh critiques try to situate new writers on the scene, one promising trend reads new texts alongside or against established classics of the old Southern canon—especially those of the Southern Renaissance—that continue to influence writers of a new South. Three recent books—two on Faulkner and a third that maps anew the influence of the Fugitive writers—exemplify current revisionary scholarship on the old canon of Southern writing.

In her compact and lucid Faulkner on the Color Line, Teresa Towner extends the work of James Carothers and Noel Polk in shoring up the stature of Faulkner's late work. Noting that the common critical dismissal of these works is "more frequently asserted than analyzed," Towner argues that the late novels in fact reveal Faulkner's deepening analysis of the construction of racial identity. She provides an elegant yet concise survey of how race figures in Faulkner's "major phase" (from The Sound and the Fury to Go Down, Moses), which serves as a platform for her extended reading of his later novels. Rebutting critics who see disjuncture in Faulkner's work after he won the Nobel Prize, Towner proves that the developments of the later works were in process already and convincingly traces a more continuous trajectory for Faulkner's production.

Drawing on recent writing on the construction of whiteness and on major African American writers and critics (DuBois, Ellison, Morrison, and Gates), Towner delineates the central role race plays in Faulkner's later novels, even in A Fable. While she fails to persuade me that we should elevate these works to major status, she does convince me that Faulkner racheted his treatment of race into new gears in these works, which justifies their reexamination. Her approach also helps mediate between ideological critics who gloss over Faulkner's complexity by reductively pointing out racism or sexism in his work and old school apologists who try to extricate Faulkner from his deplorable personal pronouncements about race. Towner's argument would be much stronger if she hedged her claims for the late novels by more extensively comparing them with the earlier ones—and admitting their difference. I also wish she had made a stronger case for The Hamlet. Its experimentalism, its dazzling mix of comic exuberance and irreverent sexuality, and its often elegiac critique of materialism and loss of folk culture surely make it one of Faulkner's finest achievements.

Taking a different but sometimes parallel track, Kevin Railey poses "a Marxist question": "How does Faulkner exist in ideology and history? How did material reality shape, produce William Faulkner?" In Natural Aristocracy, Railey goes in search of Faulkner's authorial ideology, suggesting that rather than Faulkner's having produced a new literature, his culture produced it through him. Although properly respectful of Faulkner's breathtaking technical innovations and anguished, often heroic, attempts to squarely face and interrogate the South's racial tragedy, Railey ultimately finds Faulkner guilty of allegiance to a patriarchal code of "natural aristocracy," a set of moral positions that led him into his most powerful and searching works but also, in the late novels (especially The Reivers) gave rise to an endorsement...