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  • 9 Faulkner
  • Joseph R. Urgo

This year's Faulkner scholarship is marked by two volumes from the centenary year celebrations, by special issues on modernism and masculinity, and by holistic critical assessments. The Faulkner Journal, publishing at the forefront of Faulkner criticism, has emerged as essential reading for Faulknerians. Interest in sexuality and masquerade continue to run strong, while the second major phase of Faulkner's career is receiving increased critical attention.

i Biography

Mostly biographical, James G. Watson's William Faulkner: Self-Presentation and Performance (Texas), is indebted to and echoes Judith Wittenberg's Faulkner: The Transfiguration of Biography (1979) for its method—seeking parallels between the biographic and the thematic. Watson employs "performance" terminology, updating and expanding the way the idea is understood, and imports theoretical elements from Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag for photographic analysis. He stresses Faulknerian "self-presentation," "a narrative strategy that capitalizes upon the experience of the man and artist, including of course the performative experience." His strongest point is that Faulkner worked hard at creative self-representation, crafting his life as he crafted his art and crafting his identity through his art: "Literally, he was reading and writing himself into being." One example is in the letters Faulkner wrote home from New Haven and New York in his 20s, an experience transfigured into Quentin's experience at Harvard in The Sound and the Fury: "Like so many inversions of Faulkner's life in his art, Quentin's performance as creator of his father both reveals and conceals William Faulkner." While composing the Compson story, Faulkner reread his [End Page 163] letters home, revealing, according to Watson, "his sense of all writing of all kinds as imaginative, often self-imagining, performance." In his study of "the negotiations between life and art, art and life" Watson suggests, for example, that "Sanctuary [was] nothing less than the public revelation of his inmost emotional life," both "self-expressive and purgative"; that "Pylon is no thinly veiled family biography . . . but is based like several preceding books in ironic self-presentations and still more outrageous performances"; and that in Absalom, Absalom! "The heightened declaration in the foreword is a public performance in itself." What Watson's Faulkner wrote "transformed and consumed him; he came to speak in his fiction, like Shegog in his sermon, in a voice that was likewise transformed and transforming."

ii General Criticism

The year's most notable book-length study of Faulkner is Theresa M. Towner, Faulkner and the Color Line: The Later Novels (Mississippi). "No single novel either contains the essence of Faulkner's later vision," Towner argues, "or epitomizes his achievement." Nonetheless, the second major phase continues to challenge us, if for no other reason than that there is little in the first major phase that prepares readers for the revised complexity of Faulkner's work after the Nobel Prize. Fifty years after the beginning of the second major phase of Faulkner's career Towner suggests that "it behooves anyone who wants to understand the shape of his entire career to look closely at the later novels." Faulkner was interested in racial issues throughout his professional writing life. The later fiction, according to her, reveals "his interest in the ways we humans try to invent, and reinvent, ourselves and our neighbors according to willful and carefully tended conceptions of what is 'natural' to us." The novels are "deliberately constructed aesthetic equivalents of this process of naturalizing the artificial." Much more than the early fiction the later novels explore "the relationships between 'race' and 'art,' between an individual's story and the master cultural narrative that often threatens it." To clarify Faulkner's structural purpose, Towner invokes Walter Ong on orality and storytelling, and concludes that the novels of the second major phase "look at how we tell ourselves stories" in order to construct identity and community—particularly regarding matters of racial self-and communal-representation.

Towner focuses on the Snopes trilogy. Her analysis is aesthetically [End Page 164] sophisticated, avoiding the critical pitfall of misreading it as sociology or migrant history. For example, she finds in The Hamlet a "pattern of expanding narratives" which "parallels Flem's increasing power over Ratliff's imagination...

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