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Unhistoricizing Faulkner
- University Press of Mississippi
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3 Unhistoricizing Faulkner Catherine Gunther Kodat . . . all human beings are capable of making a homosexual object-choice and have in fact made one in their unconscious. —Sigmund Freud1 For more than twenty-five years, historical modes of analysis have dominated literary study in the United States, and Faulkner studies have been no exception. Indeed, one could say that Faulkner scholars have been in the vanguard of the historicist movement, which is generally seen as having replaced excessively formalist New Criticism, hastily universalizing mythical readings, and rigidly allegorical “psychoanalytic” approaches with long-overdue attention to the economic, social, and political conditions under which authors and their texts come into being. Fredric Jameson ’s 1981 command to “always historicize!” was followed just two years later by Eric J. Sundquist’s influential Faulkner: The House Divided, in which reconstructing “a context for Faulkner’s fiction out of historical experience, contemporary literature, or political and sociological documents ” is postulated as “the only way in which Faulkner’s power and significance can be made to emerge.”2 As Sundquist’s title hints, Faulkner scholarship since the early-to-mid-1980s has granted privileged interpretive status to U.S. Southern history and its legacies of slavery, military conquest, and de jure racial segregation. Yet historicist modes of reading, like the allegorical ones they sometimes still resemble, are virtually limitless ; and while the road to Yoknapatawpha has for good reason proceeded mostly through this landscape of racialized sectionalism, it has not been the only historical route through the novels. The nativist Faulkner, the New Deal Faulkner, the Cold War Faulkner, the postcolonial Faulkner, and, yes, the queer Faulkner—all are historically derived interpretive constructs in one way or another. Before going further I should make one thing clear. I am not at all opposed to historical literary and cultural analysis; I do it myself a lot of the time; one might say that there’s nothing else I, or any one of us, can ever do, given our own historical boundedness. But acknowledging one’s 4 c at h e r i n e g u n t h e r k o d at own historically derived epistemological limitation as a reader is rather a different thing from delimiting an artwork’s historically determined zone of meaning. Certainly both gestures are foundational to any ethical or politically aware cultural analysis; but while the first is the cornerstone of humility, the second risks hubris, even cynicism. The emergence of the last of those contextual frames that I just listed—the sexual frame, which gives us the queer Faulkner, historically inflected as that emergence is— has highlighted the difference between these two ways of reading history in literary study, raising fundamental questions about the analytic categories informing most historicist modes of inquiry (for example, identity, teleology, and consciousness). We should not ignore these questions, if only because we would wish to be certain that, in our own interpretive work, we do not (to anticipate my discussion of a recent essay by Tim Dean) practice our politics at the expense of our ethics.3 It would be foolish , of course, to claim that reading Faulkner’s sexualities through queer theory puts to rest a generation’s worth of historically informed readings, many of them brilliant and illuminating both ethically and politically. Still, if a discussion of Faulkner’s sexualities is to be more than an occasion for one-liners (I am thinking here of Frederic Koeppel’s question, “Who knew that the Nobel Prize winner was ambidextrous?”4 ), then we should acknowledge the questions queer theory poses for historicism. Toward that aim, here is what I plan to do in this essay: first, I will describe some fairly recent developments in queer theory, a volatile field of inquiry that has productively reopened questions long treated as closed. It will be clear how these developments press against many of the assumptions governing historicist literary analysis, but I will hone in on some of those pressure points so as to make plain the issues they raise. Since my research began with my own confusion over how to proceed through the dozen or so ways it seems to me one could approach Faulkner’s sexualities , I will close with a discussion of the short story “The Leg”—an early work useful for considering how one angle on Faulkner’s sexualities can lead to what we might call, following Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon, a more “unhistoricist”5 approach enabling “antihistoricist ways of...