Faulkner and "Faulkner"

Faulkner on the Color Line: The Later Novels By Theresa M. Towner University Press of Mississippi, 2000

William Faulkner: Self-Presentation and Performance By James G. Watson University of Texas Press,2000

At the May 2001 annual meeting of the American Literature Association, Sacvan Bercovitch hosted a panel titled "Literary History and Ethnicity," featuring three of his contributors to the multivolume Cambridge History of American Literature. Werner Sollors's presentation was entitled "Ethnic Modernism," and it offered a synoptic view of the many texts and trends that could be gathered together under such a rubric. At about the midpoint of his talk, Sollors came to the example of William Faulkner, whom he straightforwardly and unapologetically identified as "the most significant American novelist of the century." He paused, giving the phrase time to resonate in the hot, tiny, and overcrowded Cambridge hotel conference room. Then, looking up at his audience, he added with a smile, "it's wonderful finally to be able to say this."

It was an arresting moment, so much so that by now, I confess, it is pretty much all I remember of the talk itself. For as striking as the comment was, the audience reaction was perhaps even more intriguing. There were a few appreciative chuckles, a scattering of silent smiles, but by far most of those in the room were clearly nonplussed, and some seemed distinctly alarmed. Many, no doubt, were wondering just how we were meant to take such an uncompromising verdict in an intellectual climate that, for many years now, has viewed such categorical judgments with suspicion, and never more so than when they are offered as self-evident truths. One would normally expect this kind of claim to come bracketed in a carefully calibrated framework of qualification, or at least a few minutes' explanation of the exact meaning of the assertion's operative terms ("most significant," certainly, and perhaps also "American," "novelist," and "century"). Sollors, on the contrary, offered no explanation; or, rather, the explanation he offered—which struck me far more forcefully than the assertion of Faulkner's greatness—was the notion that this was something he only recently felt "able to say."

There is of course an obvious and mundane explanation for Sollors's comment: it was simply not a claim that he could have made before the twentieth century was over. Given the reaction in the room, however, I see his remark addressing a larger intellectual context in which scholars trying to say something about Faulkner have felt, for some time now, likely to be cut off, if not ignored. We could start describing such a context with a revision of my claim that all judgments of significance are generally viewed with suspicion. In fact, this is only partly true: one can easily imagine a claim for the significance of another author that, while unlikely to enjoy unquestioned acceptance, would not automatically receive quite such a prickly reception. No, it is not the claim of significance that gives pause; it is the claim of Faulkner's significance that is the problem, and the way in which such a claim can almost immediately be read (indeed, has been read) as simultaneously enshrining salient aspects of Faulkner's identity—his race, gender, region, and (so far as they seem coherent and knowable) his politics—as likewise significant. It is, in other words, to read man, work, and scholar as linked in an unbroken chain of positive identification that many would find, as the saying goes, deeply problematic.

In a single academic generation, Faulkner moved from being the Great White Hope of Cold War America to the Dead White Male of the so-called culture wars. Faulkner's race and gender, and the political and social positions that presumably inexorably flowed from them in Jim Crow Mississippi, are today seen by many in the academy as perhaps not the most significant. The widely held view that Faulkner is thus a problem to be gotten around (rather than, to be deliberately naive...