William Faulkner's Legacy: "What Shadow, What Stain, What Mark" (review)

Margaret Donovan Bauer claims to stake new ground in Faulkner studies: "Examining echoes of Faulkner in works by his contemporaries and by ours draws readers' attention to themes and characterizations in Faulkner's works that had been previously neglected by critics" (4). Specifically, she proposes to examine selected fictions by Zora Neale Hurston, Ellen Glasgow, Donald Barthelme, Larry McMurtry, Pat Conroy, Ernest Gaines, Toni Morrison, Lee Smith, Elizabeth Dewbury, and Tim Gautreaux to see how these authors have navigated the legacy of this "giant of southern, American, and modern literature" (2). She does not explain why she chooses these writers as opposed to others or which "themes and characterizations" previous Faulkner critics have overlooked. Because she writes about African-American, female, and class-conscious writers, she would seem to mean issues of race, class, and gender. Even to imply that Faulkner studies have "neglected" these mountains on the critical landscape is to reveal an almost willful ignorance of the preponderance of that criticism for over twenty years. My first criticism of Bauer's book, then, is that she has not done her homework in Faulkner criticism. Where she seems to have done so, she has not made much effort to respect the integrity or evolution of the arguments she plucks.

Two examples should suffice to illustrate. First, she quotes Noel Polk in a 1986 essay trying to correct a general view that Faulkner represented black characters primarily as victims and symbols. Rather than agree with or dispute the point, Bauer slides into analogy: "One might make a similar argument about the criticism on Faulkner's female characters at least until the late twentieth century" (3). Leave aside the fact that Faulkner criticism came into full flower in the late twentieth century: many critics did argue that Faulkner's women were just symbols and victims, and so does Bauer. She claims that her book "exposes the Faulknerian perspective that, intentionally or not, marginalizes and/or objectifies African Americans and women, thereby explaining why critics may have difficulty perceiving these characters as subjects in and of themselves rather than as objects of another's perspective" (3). This just reiterates the very sort of criticism that Polk was attempting to mediate. Nor does Bauer cite Polk's revision of that essay into his book on gender roles in Faulkner—in effect ignoring work directly relevant to her project here. I draw the second example from her chapter on Faulkner and Toni Morrison. She cites John Duvall's nuanced explanation of why, in pairing Song of Solomon for discussion with Go Down, Moses, he takes pains not to imply that Faulkner's was the better book. "Nor am I," Bauer snaps, "in pairing various works with works by one of the leading figures in the 'established' canon of American literature, doing so for the purpose of showing whether and, if so, how well these writers' works stand up next to this long-time critically established writer's canon" (113). Well, nobody said she was. Her citation of Duvall's essay serves no end other than to restate her thesis.

If Bauer's project is to discover the "dialogic relationships" between Faulkner's texts and those by others (113), it is incumbent upon her to do more than repeatedly assert the limitations of "Faulkner's perspective," as though that were a consistent and quantifiable thing. She says she treats the fictions of women writers here because they do not write of life from "the perspective of the sensitive white male aristocrat out of place in and trying to change the social system that would support such oppression" (9). The notion that Faulkner has the same view of the world as, say, Quentin Compson or Gavin Stevens has been thoroughly debunked, but Bauer insists that "Faulkner's primary focus is upon the reactions of the romantic and educated, liberal-minded southern white man to the Old and New South" (6). Given that...