Following Faulkner: The Critical Response to Yoknapatawpha's Architect by Taylor Hagood (review)

"the best game of all, the best of all breathing and forever the best of all listening, the voices quiet and weighty and deliberate for retrospection and recollection and exactitude"

—Go Down, Moses

Taylor Hagood has done us a big favor. His 2017 book Following Faulkner: The Critical Response to Yoknapatawpha's Architect takes on a challenge that has not been essayed in Faulkner studies, but one that in many ways is long overdue—namely, a critical guide to the extant scholarship that has formed the backbone of the field and an account of what every major monograph on Faulkner's corpus pursues interpretively.

This is not a modest challenge. Yet one aspect of Hagood's approach to the rather extensive body of work he views is indeed its humility. While Hagood is more than capable of offering a sharper critique of certain materials that he surveys, he maintains an equable, measured tone throughout his discussion. He walks seemingly effortlessly through the major contours of Faulkner scholarship from the writer's earliest partisans. And Hagood is an affable guide. The book's tone is conversational, and it strikes a balance between informed and casual that allows any reader to feel that Hagood is genuinely interested in speaking with him or her. There is neither patronizing nor pandering here. There are also notable moments of genuine pathos, even intimacy with Faulkner's many admirers. For example, in a brief portion devoted to the main biographies, Hagood displays his book's real gift to readers: an awareness of what distinguished particular Faulkner studies, in this case Joseph Blotner's 1974, still-definitive Faulkner: A Biography. Quoting from the end of the book, Hagood brings us, with Blotner, to Faulkner's funeral and his opus's final page, watching with Blotner as "the cars moved away from the raw clay slope, where in time the rains would anneal it and the sward would cover it" (21; Blotner 1984 718). In prose that recalls Faulkner's own (such as the "annealing" tears that course down Dilsey's face during the Shegog sermon), Blotner shows what Hagood rightly characterizes as "a loving personal quality to this biography" (21). Such affection toward Blotner's accomplishment, as toward that of so many others, animates Hagood's own assessment of the earlier Faulkner readers to whom we are all indebted.

The book is organized in four main chapters, starting with "Genius in the Hinterland," which orients the book's discussion and describes Faulkner's earliest champions. This first section carefully traces the earliest endeavors to present Faulkner as the serious, indeed major US writer he would soon become. Highlighting the seminal work of Malcolm Cowley, Irving Howe, and contemporary articles and reviews by the likes of Donald Davidson, Ted Robinson, Edmund Wilson, and John McClure, Hagood shows how these readers framed the debate around Yoknapatawpha as a grand design or, rather, a piecemeal series of narratives that emerged across Faulkner's career. Hagood includes figures such as Michael Millgate and Edmond Volpe and their work as a group of helpful "guidebooks" to the novels.

The second chapter traces the criticism from the 1960s and 70s, when studies of Faulkner gained traction by way of what Hagood sees as the period's two main scholarly tenets: the New Criticism and structuralism. Clearly, the New Critics were central to the first waves of Faulkner studies—as was his work to these same critics' careers. Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren's ability to fashion a methodology which, they purported, followed completely from a work's internal, "organic" logic found a ready exemplar in Faulkner's rich, densely wrought prose. In describing the work and influence of these luminaries, Hagood does not hesitate to identify the conservative politics at play in their embrace of Faulkner, referring often to them as "patriarchally minded individuals, often of wealthy backgrounds, educated in the classic tradition" (27)—in addition to being white southern...