Faulkner

Holistic studies on Faulkner continue to increase, with single-text readings in decline again this year. The exception is a major study of Go Down, Moses. An expansive sense of Faulkner is presented by those who incorporate the later work, particularly A Fable, into their thinking. Together these two factors indicate continued attention to Faulkner as an intellectual presence whose contribution to 20th-century intellectual history is not limited to a handful of phenomenal books written in his 20s and 30s. Also on the rise is Faulkner's participation in Americanist interest in Creole studies and in placing the South in hemispheric and global contexts.

i Biography

Thomas Argiro's "'As Though We Were Kin': Faulkner's Black Italian Chiasmus" (MELUS 28, iii: 111–32) takes as its point of departure the provocative juxtaposition of Faulkner's statements about racial politics in the mid-1950s with a letter written to Italian publisher Livio Garzanti in 1956 claiming kinship to Italians "as though we were kin, not just in spirit but in blood too." Examining works such as The Sound and the Fury and The Wild Palms in which "the identities of blacks and Italian Americans are assimilated and reversed in a signifying arrangement involving both displacement and substitution," Argiro argues that Faulkner wrote his anxiety over the existence of his own African American family (the "shadow family" in and around Oxford) into his Italian American characters. Drawing on Joel Williamson for biographical material and extending the work of Doreen Fowler for Lacanian methodology, Argiro finds, for example, that in The Sound and the Fury "the Italian girl, positioned in a chiasmatic crossing as black, can become Quentin/Faulkner's 'sister,' just as the Italians, whose American brethren are conflated with blacks in Faulkner's fictions, are nevertheless related 'in blood too.'" The essay is a strikingly concise case study of racial, biographical, and psychological underpinnings of the creative process.

Examining Faulkner's 1947 objection to a proposal to demolish the county courthouse on Oxford's town square, Brian Carpenter in "The Freestanding Poetry of Yoknapatawpha" (SoR 39: 617–24) explores "Faulkner's consideration of what was worth preserving and why." Drawing on Intruder in the Dust and Requiem for a Nun, Carpenter finds that "what was worth preserving wasn't necessarily picturesque, nor was it always anything you could clearly see in any conventional sense." Rather, Faulkner sought preservation of architectural aids to experience, similar to what John Ruskin called a "sense of voicefulness" in public structures. Faulkner's most evocative dramatization of such an experience comes at the end of "The Jail" essay in Requiem for a Nun, where a stranger visits the county jail and is able to envision events that transpired there in the past, "connecting one generation to another." Today the jail is gone but the courthouse survives, with a plaque from Requiem for a Nun on its south facade, a monument not so much to the past as to Faulkner's works and the tourism that followed.

Cather critics may find surprising the claim that Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway are the three major American literary figures of the 20th century, and Hemingway critics may wonder how it is that both Faulkner and Fitzgerald "have surpassed Hemingway as masters of American fiction," but a penchant for box-score criticism rarely does more than bristle. M. Thomas Inge's "Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Little Lord Fauntleroy" (JACC 26: 432–38), despite its cryptic title, is a cursory examination of Faulkner and Fitzgerald's awareness and comment on one another, a relationship for which there is precious little material evidence. One notable and intriguing exception is in a 1932 letter where Fitzgerald claimed to be reading Sanctuary and Frances Hodgson Burnett's Little Lord Fauntleroy in profitable juxtaposition and was "overwhelmed by the resemblance." Inge finds no parallel "in plot, structure, characterization, or style," and concludes that Fitzgerald "was speaking figuratively"; what must have overwhelmed him was how different the novels were in their vision and rendering of reality. The topic may be worth another look, especially in light of Inge's claim that Fitzgerald read Sanctuary superficially, [End Page 172...