Faulkner in the Twenty-First Century (review)

The essays collected in Faulkner in the Twenty-First Century reinvigorate Faulkner studies. This volume entices Faulkner enthusiasts to re-open their favorite works and re-evaluate the texts through modern perceptions, positing fresh insights into both old and new theories.

Theresa M. Towner's opening essay, "The Roster, the Chronicle, and the Critic," addresses the importance of Faulkner's much overlooked minor characters. As Towner states, "All of the minor characters running around in his pages cast any number of shadows, and as we read him in the twenty-first century, I think we should look carefully at those shades and their concerns, no less present and real for being small" (3). Towner, finding these minor characters in the "margins of life" (10), adeptly illustrates how they impact our understanding of the major characters.

In what is perhaps one of the newest realms of Faulkner study, Deborah N. Cohn explores the relationship between Faulkner's South and Spanish America's South. "Faulkner and Spanish America: Then and Now" looks at the characteristics that tie the two literatures together. According to Cohn, one factor is the "commonalities of historical trauma and social structure which situate Faulkner's—and the South's—experiences within a hemispheric context" (51). Cohn also explores Faulkner's own impact on Spanish American authors such as Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortázar. "His fiction offered themes, images, and paradigms that resonated with the Spanish American authors, and that they deployed time and again in their own works" (54). Cohn provides an excellent overview of an often-overlooked connection between the two Souths.

Class distinctions among whites and blacks are re-examined in Walter Benn Michaels' "Difference between White Men and White Men." Michaels sees the civil war as a class war, thus it "can be understood as a battle between interests rather than beliefs, and the moral and/or political principles each side invoked on its behalf can be understood as, strictly speaking, ideological—desires in disguise, expressions of what is wanted masquerading as judgments about what is right" (141). Michaels astutely analyzes the effect slavery's end had on breaking down class distinctions between whites and blacks, resulting in the deep horror with which the post-civil war South viewed miscegenation. Michaels also explores the class connections between Faulkner's Thomas Sutpen and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby, as well as Gatsby's connection to Charles Etienne Saint Valery Bon, finding on the one hand that self-driven, self-made man and on the other the desire to be a part of and accepted in a familial dynasty.

In such a highly saturated field of study, Faulkner in the Twenty-First Century clears new and exciting avenues for Faulkner studies. This newest compilation from the long-running Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference is an asset to any Faulkner scholar. Furthermore, the varied subject matter—everything from a postcolonial reading of Faulkner to an analysis of class distinctions—draws an even wider audience.