Faulkner at 100: Retrospect and Prospect (review)

Faulkner at 100: Retrospect and Prospect. Edited by Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie. University Press of Mississippi, 2000. 299 pp. Paper $24.00

Reading Faulkner at 100, the collection of talks given at the 1997 Yoknapatawpha conference at Ole Miss, is like attending a good funeral. It serves the living more than the dead. It gives the family a chance to gather and remember and testify to their love for the departed, a chance to remind themselves exactly how and how much they honor the grand figure who has passed, a chance to define again what matters about Faulkner and his monumental fiction. The Right Reverend Duncan M. Gray Jr., D.D. even provides a eulogy and a description of the kind of funeral Bill wanted.

One of dozens of celebrations of Faulkner's one-hundredth birthday all over the world, Faulkner at 100 has all the right stuff—smart people saying smart things about this great southern writer. Joseph Blotner, Faulkner's first biographer and maybe the only person with credentials that permit him to wax sentimental, looks sentimentally out over the years of Faulkner scholarship and admires the parade that has passed before him. Noel Polk, the staunch editor of Faulkner's texts, reminds us commonsensically that whoever we think Faulkner was he remains "the man who wrote the books." He nicely reminds us too that much of what we say about Faulkner we are really saying about ourselves. Michael Millgate offers a fine reassessment of the "defining moment" in Faulkner's career when Malcolm Cowley put together The Portable Faulkner and, as Millgate persuasively argues, burdened Faulkner more than necessary with the yoke of regionalism.

The commemorators succeed in honoring the Faulknerian legacy because they stay focused, for the most part, on fundamentally important issues. For example, we learn again and in interesting ways how much race matters in Faulkner. John Matthews eruditely demonstrates that Faulkner never forgot the significance to American identity of portrayed "blackness," as in minstrelsy and dialect. Concomitantly, Thadious Davis challenges us to share the perspective of Tomey's Turl in Go Down, Moses to see how Faulkner constructs "whiteness" as a constricting racial identity.

To accommodate the large number of speakers, the conference (and thus the volume) was divided into panels of three short talks interspersed with longer plenary presentations. This arrangement produces a few nice juxtapositions and unexpected gems. In the panel "Untapped Faulkner," for example, Judith Sensibar describes the likely collaboration between Bill and Estelle on each other's fiction, and Thomas McHaney discusses Faulkner's reading of avant-garde journals while he worked at the university post office—a kind of reading often assumed as part of Faulkner's intellectual development but seldom concretely documented. Some panel clusters are a bit odd, to be sure—why John T. Irwin's piece on Faulkner's "lost loves" is part of the panel on "Faulkner and America" would take some explaining—but for the most part the organization provides useful shape to the volume.

Some of the most compelling talks are so because the speakers recognize the ineffability of Faulkner's confrontation with his life and heritage through his writing. Philip Weinstein says it most eloquently in answering his panel's question "Why Faulkner?": "In his great tragic work [Faulkner] writes . . . of encounters that repercuss rather than resolve. He is our supreme writer of the culturally unworkable." André Bleikasten, in a forceful if somewhat disgruntled overview of recent Faulkner scholarship, takes American critics to task for treating Faulkner's fiction as test pattern for preconceived theories about race, gender, and class. For Bleikasten what matters is Faulkner's "singularity"; we as critics must pay heed to the "grain of the text," to the "intensities," "pulses," and "rhythms" of Faulkner's writing. Brilliantly provocative though Bleikasten is, the most intriguing comment on Faulkner's writing was uttered by Albert Murray in answering a question about the beneficial effect Hollywood had on Faulkner: "It helped...