Telling Truths in Faulkner's Fiction

In the recent historical contexts of a new American president looking to the first Great Depression for ways to head off a second, and the 2008 MLA meeting rife with angst over the teaching of literature and the humanities amidst the worst academic job outlook since the troughs of the mid- 1990s, two new books of Faulkner criticism seem especially timely. William Faulkner: An Economy of Complex Words extends Richard Godden's earlier work on subjectivity in Faulkner (Fictions of Capital, Cambridge UP, 1990) to show us more ways that economic relations can define both our own identities and how we perceive those of others. David Evans' William Faulkner, William James, and the American Pragmatic Tradition reminds us of the rich literary and philosophical heritage that runs through Faulkner's work and keeps us reading and teaching his texts for lessons in who we are and what we might become.

Godden's book reveals the complex dynamic by which Faulkner's characters tell (and believe) stories about themselves and their pasts that encrypt competing, possibly truer accounts that might damage their preferred narratives. Why they do this is as elusive as the preferred identities to which they cling, but each case is reducible to a fundamental contradiction (economic, historical, psychological, sexual, or racial) that once served dialectically to construct the preferred identity, but which is no longer available. Through this lens, Godden questions our own received assumptions about many of Faulkner's canonical texts.

Central to his argument is the Great Migration of black labor from Mississippi and the larger South in the aftermath of New Deal policies of the Agricultural Adjustment Agency. These policies paid white land-owners not to plant cotton and other crops, so as to raise prices and stabilize agricultural markets. Instead of paying their tenants a share of these subsidies, however, landowners evicted black agricultural workers and kept the subsidies for themselves. This led to the migration of black labor away from southern farms, a mass movement that intensified with the advent of World War Two and the inevitable growth of agribusiness. In this transformation, land became identified with capital rather than labor. But more to the point, whites lost a fundamental element of their own identities. Self-defined for generations as not-black, whites no longer could rely on this age-old dialectic (in some ways as old as the land itself) to define themselves and their relations to others.

Godden observes Faulkner's characters' struggles with residual and emergent economic identities from frontier days through the early 1900s, while at the same time accounting for Faulkner's own position in an economy undergoing transformation in the 1930s and 1940s. As a result, we have some radical reinterpretations to consider. Flem Snopes of The Hamlet represents not the emergence of "capital" in Frenchman's Bend but rather the site of conflicting residual and emergent impulses both for Ratliff, who buries his own allegiance to capitalist practices within his narrative inscriptions of Flem, and for Faulkner, who from the perspective of the late 1930s is participating in the occlusion of the premodern South that has been the foundation of his work. Isaac McCaslin of Go Down, Moses is a determined misreader of the commissary ledgers, where the "real" story of his father, Buck, and his uncle Buddy's incestuous homosexual desires is secreted within Ike's preferred narrative about his grandfather's racial sins. (Willful or not, this misreading stabilizes Ike's identity as a repudiator of the past and deflects any unsettling consideration of his own sexuality.) The Corporal of A Fable, a novel replete with "hidden" Jews (albeit devoid of real ones), is but the central support of a melancholic allegory of the Communist scares of the Cold War and of the absent black body that provided the founding mythology of Faulkner's earlier work. These...