Subverting Mythologies: Refiguring Faulkner and Welty

In today’s academy it is widely acknowledged that university presses have little interest in essay collections. The Festschrift has almost disappeared; most presses will not even consider them. Happily, however, scholarship on the giants of our literature continues to be shared through collections. Organized around a theme, such collections can seem greater than the sum of their parts.

Such is the case with Faulkner and Material Culture, a gathering of eight essays from the 2004 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference. The essays lead to a heightened appreciation for Faulkner’s rendering of the concrete and a heightened sense of the complexity of his realism. The essays reconfigure familiar texts—notably Absalom, Absalom!, Light in August, Flags in the Dust, and “Barn Burning.” Additionally, readers are invited to reflect on Faulkner the individual—preservationist, performer in his attention to his wardrobe, the man who lamented the passing of the era of mules and horses on the southern landscape but was also “one of the first Americans to learn to fly and to own his own airplane” (14). In the concluding essay, T. J. Jackson Lears observes that “as an anthropologist of American material life, Faulkner rivaled Henry James and Edith Wharton” (144). Readers of Faulkner and Material Culture will likely agree as they salute the growth of material culture studies.

The title of the 2005 Yoknapatawpha Conference is more abstract, inheritance opening a wide avenue. Connected to death and dying, the term can have very precise meanings: land, money, material culture. In the afterword to Faulkner’s Inheritance, Jay Parini considers the term in its broadest sense. The word derives from the Latin word meaning “to grasp”: “the master of the land comes to grasp the importance of his possession” (160), the emphasis of much of Faulkner’s writing. Fortunately, the essayists realized the freedom that the general idea of the conference gave them. Not surprisingly, many could fit very comfortably under other rubrics. It would, for example, be easy to slip Jon Smith’s essay on metropolitan fashion into a collection emphasizing material culture. The practiced hands of Faulkner’s Inheritance reward us with more variety and force than “influence study” might suggest.

The focus is sharp in Faulkner and Welty and the Southern Literary Tradition, twelve essays by Noel Polk. Although each essay was written for a specific audience (often in other countries) for a specific occasion, the essays are shaped by Polk’s awareness of the limitations of traditional views of the South and its literature. The totality provides a strong sense of the character of the essayist. We come close to the man who wrote the memoir Outside the Southern Myth (1997), who, like Faulkner and Welty, was shaped by Mississippi history and culture. Like them, he puzzled his heritage. Studying their work, he was aided in defining himself.

Polk, the editor of the Library of America’s editions of Faulkner’s novels, is given to pondering meaning in the minutest details of plot, language, and punctuation. His readings benefit especially from lessons learned from feminist criticism. The Faulkner that Polk gives us is not the Faulkner we discovered with Cleanth Brooks; his Welty is not the Welty we explored with Ruth Vande Kieft. Polk requires that we rethink the place of family and community in the fiction of his subjects.

In the lead essay, Polk unsettles the traditional view that judges the two writers as “empowered and limited by their ‘place’ in Mississippi” (7): critics too easily dismiss the work wherein the writers abandon or neglect southern soil...