Faulkner in the Twenty-First Century (review)

The ten essays in this book were presented as papers at the 27th annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, July 23-28, 2000. Each essay includes some reflection about the ways in which Faulkner will be read and written about in the century that lies before us. No essay addresses the more fundamental questions: will Faulkner be read at all? And, if so, where and by whom? The answers implied by the book are: 1) of course he will be read; and 2) he will be read in colleges and universities, by professors and their students. No one even entertains the possibility that the most influential readings of Faulkner might be extra-curricular, by people who encounter his work as a discovery, not as an assignment.

So the future is conceived professionally and professorially. What matters is the re-configuration of the deck-chairs on the luxury liner, and not what unknown possibilities may lurk in fog-banks through which she travels. We certainly cannot blame these Faulknerians for having failed to foresee 9/11. But did intelligent people in the year 2000 really believe that the future of literature, and of their own profession, would simply continue, with small variations, its recent past? Apparently so.

Thus Teresa Towner believes that our reading of Faulkner in the next century will increasingly attend to characters and novels heretofore regarded as minor; her essay "The Roster, the Chronicle, and the Critic" provides a model of what is to come. Annette Trefzer, having found that "Lo!" and "Red Leaves" "cancel [Faulkner's] critique of colonialism by reinscribing it with a hegemonic discourse" (72), looks forward to a time "when we will not only study Faulkner's Indians but the Indians' Faulkner" (85). Leigh Ann Duck believes that twenty-first century readings of Faulkner will "increase our awareness of the relationship between the scenes of violence and dehumanization represented in Yoknapatawpha and those that have occurred in regional, national, and transnational history" (102). Robert Hamblin, having suggested the influence of Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis on Go Down, Moses, anticipates that the twenty-first century will place Faulkner "more centrally in the American [as opposed to the regional and modernist] literary tradition" (170).

Karl Zender prefaces his essay on "The Fire and the Hearth" by noting that "the recent emphasis on politicized commentary" has irreversibly altered Faulkner criticism by "identifying the avoidances and silences that mark the limits of his artistic vision" (119). Such criticism "implies that desirable political alternatives—particularly for maginalized individuals and social groups—can only be discerned by reading beyond, rather than within, the manifest content of Faulkner's fiction" (120). Zender elects to read within rather than beyond, but he does not seem to question the notion that it is the job of the novelist to imagine, and the critic to make explicit, "desirable political alternatives."

Zender's generalizations fit most of the essays in this book, which is not to say that the essays are all of equal value, or that there is not some variety in their approaches. But the essays seem to me to raise serious questions about the future of Faulkner, as these critics envision it. Why—apart from professorial self-interest—should anyone go on reading a writer whose silences and avoidances implicate him in undesirable, hegemonic political alternatives? Why not just read the critics instead, and let them outline the desirable, pluralistic alternatives without having to struggle through Faulkner? Or, to put it another way: are there reasons for reading that do not pertain to the amelioration of Mississippian or American or transnational culture and society? Perhaps there are, but these essays do not mention them.

I thought the best essays in the book were by Barbara Ladd and Walter Benn Michaels. In "Absalom, Absalom! The Difference between White Men and White Men," Michaels deftly interweaves Stark Young's So...