Faulkner and Film ed. by Peter Lurie and Ann J. Abadie (review)

The influence of Hollywood on William Faulkner remains a vital source of scholarship after reading the essays contained in this collection. The main assumption for all of the writers in this volume is that the work Faulkner did for the film industry had an effect on the modernisms he uses in his literary output. However, some of the prose style seems to cloud the definitions of those same modernisms that arose in the twentieth century.

The introduction by Peter Lurie (one of the editors) usefully engages the previous commentary on the influence of film on Faulkner, suggesting that much anticipates the philosophical underpinnings of modernism (particularly Henri Bergson), though the use of the film criticism of Gilles Deleuze with Faulkner’s texts can be a challenge. It’s reasonable criticism to use Deleuze as a fulcrum in order to understand cinematic technique (as Deborah Barker does in this volume), but Lurie seems to suggest that Faulkner appropriates some of concepts about time (a variation on Bergson) from the film world in order to create Light in August and Absalom, Absalom. This may need a bit more argument than is provided.

Aaron Nyerges depends a good deal on this perceived relationship between Faulkner and Deleuze; his essay elaborates on the potential correlation between the images of the film and the narrative structures of Faulkner’s novels, but the essay needs to show that Faulkner himself was aware of the concepts that Deleuze later formulated for a different arena, that of film criticism. Nyerges untangles the potential film that Light in August may well be, but it’s a leap of faith to accept D.W. Griffith’s Western films as a kind of parallel universe to a modernist interpretation of time and memory in Faulkner’s work. The essay discusses the stasis and motion that exists in the characterization of Joe Christmas and in film in general, but the words sometimes betray an artful expression that does not seem genuine in insight: “so characterization, and in particular the spatial manipulation of character locomotion, presents a powerful literary automatism with which Faulkner confronts the mechanical reproduction of the moving image and acknowledges its relationship to the fixity of its photogrammatic substrate. Ingeniously, Faulkner allows his same novelistic technology to absorb the burden of literary influence.” Nyerges moves to a discussion of Nathaniel Hawthorne: “the deterministic orthodoxy of a Puritan intellectual culture that predicated and automated the history of the American novel. Thus he stands a memorializer of memory’s automatization.” The prose here needs to be clearer; some of this writing seems elliptical.

Robert Hamblin’s history of Faulkner’s involvement with Hollywood as a scriptwriter is astute and detailed. The film techniques that Faulkner grew to know, Hamblin shows, were incorporated into some of his fiction. The forty or so film projects that Faulkner worked on, suggest that Faulkner’s screen plays suggest that his fiction appropriated new ways of looking at modernisms of the time, “as a different mode of writing fiction—a shift, by the way, that is altogether consistent with an author who puts a premium on experimentation and uniqueness.” For example, Hamblin discusses A Fable in terms of how the narrative structure resembles a scriptwriter’s approach to scene and setting, and shows how “Faulkner strategically places individual characters within the larger context of the sweeping movements of both the anonymous crowd and this historical and military forces that threaten to overwhelm them.” Hamblin’s essay provides a solid foundation for the sense of the importance and history of Faulkner’s work in the film world.

Robert Jackson’s contribution is on target for the substantive discussion of the collaborative nature between the film and the fiction of Faulkner. The analogy of Meta Carpenter’s (Faulkner’s mistress in Hollywood) role as script girl to Faulkner’s place in film writing is apt and appropriate. Jackson’s...