Faulkner and History ed. by Jay Watson et al. (review)

In his introduction to Faulkner and History, Jay Watson reminds readers that "William Faulkner was, and remains, a historian's writer" (p. ix). Noting that such famous practitioners of the craft as Leon F. Litwack and Joel Williamson assigned Faulkner in their southern history courses and that the era's preeminent southern historian, C. Vann Woodward, kept a portrait of Faulkner in his Yale University study, Watson alerts us to the fact that Faulkner's relationship to the discipline was and remains shifting and multivalent. Embraced by some as a "fellow historian" and by others as more of "a dramatist of the fraught epistemological enterprise of doing history," Faulkner was also a "historical figure himself," who, especially in the years after winning the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, emerged "as a sometimes reluctant, sometimes not-reluctant-enough public intellectual" (p. ix). The fifteen essays in this volume, delivered in 2014 at the forty-first annual "Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha" conference, present this historian's writer in rich complexity, deepening our appreciation of how a novelist whose works rarely seek to give an accurate picture of the past has contributed so much to our understanding of history, particularly how the past is always in the making and is never truly the past.

Each essay in this collection illuminates the reciprocal relationship between Faulkner and history and is attuned to how his work simultaneously remakes and is being remade by our understanding of history. In the opening essay, Wai Chee Dimock remaps Faulkner via "a new set of geographical coordinates" that allow him to be "an intensely local author with a sustained global outreach" (pp. 3, 6). The result is a provocative essay that improvises some new connections for Faulkner scholars. Alert to "low-bar networks" that affiliate groups in "weak" but "not to be dismissed" ways, Dimock suggests that an "affective network" of loss and humiliation gives Faulkner's work a "trans-Pacific regionalism" that produces "fault lines as well as lines of filiation" between the post–Civil War South and post–World War II Japan, as well as between Faulkner's fiction and contemporary Native American literature (all three groups "fought for something and fought in vain") (pp. 6, 8, 3). Weak networks may offer only "a connectivity of sorts," but this connectivity is rich because it identifies not only a "new set of historical references" for Faulkner's work but also a "transregional arc [that] might turn out to be one of the most enduring aspects of Faulkner's thinking about history" (pp. 15, 3).

The collection's best essays, not all of which can be discussed here, find equally inventive ways of networking Faulkner to intriguing historical questions. For instance, Colin Dayan explores how Faulkner's The Hamlet (1940), in both form and content, repeatedly blurs the line between the human and the animal and "dissolves distinctions so that all kinds of things, living and dead, persons and property, are put into relation," compelling "us to risk losing ourselves in what is beyond our ken" (p. 25). This loss prompts "an attentiveness that is crucial to his ethics, and to the kind of historical response that it demands": compassion for the "neglected or abhorred" who exist "beyond the reach of customary written history" (pp. 22, 33, 32). In a timely essay, Andrew B. Leiter revisits the presence of Nathan Bedford Forrest and Civil War memory in three of Faulkner's stories. Approaching these works as "Lost Cause literary monuments that establish southern history as the domain of patriarchal white memory," Leiter argues that Forrest's uneasy presence in these tales "highlight[s] Faulkner's alternately romantic and condemnatory treatments of southern history" (p. 86). Although he acknowledges Faulkner's "imaginative ties to the romantic tradition," Leiter also uncovers "occasional rents" in these fictional monuments to the Lost Cause and "odd, incongruous moments and subtexts" that reveal Faulkner's...