Faulkner Novels of Our OWN: Oprah’s Middlebrow Book Club Meets the Classics

CECILIA KONCHAR FARR St. Catherine University Faulkner Novels of Our OWN: Oprah’s Middlebrow Book Club Meets the Classics THIS ESSAY ON OPRAH’S SUMMER OF FAULKNER WILL TAKE UP THE FRONT half of the peculiar literary pairing that calls these articles together in Mississippi Quarterly. Fifteen years ago, I unintentionally became an Oprah expert when my women’s college students challenged me to watch her TV Book Club. A feminist theorist and scholar of American literature, I was fascinated by what I saw, and I have been watching and studying Oprah’s Book Club since. My role, then, is to cast some bright daytime TV light on what happened when Oprah’s Book Club encountered Faulkner in the summer of 2005. I argue here that, as impressive as it was (and it was impressive), the Summer of Faulkner did not represent the best of Oprah’s Book Club. By the time Winfrey recommended Faulkner, her Book Club was nearly ten years old and faltering.1 Three years earlier she had cancelled it altogether. When she revamped the format and returned after a year’s hiatus in 2003, some of the best elements of her original Book Club were gone, and, though the Book Club continues today after several more format shifts, it still has never returned to what it did best. The many iterations of Oprah’s Book Club, including the classics version that featured Faulkner, have been markedly less consistent, noticeably less populist, and surprisingly less substantial than the Book Club in its first six years, as I will demonstrate here. My contention is that Oprah’s Book Club worked better when it paid attention to viewers than when it responded to its critics, and it functioned more effectively when it let everyday readers talk than when it invited them to listen to professors. TheSummerofFaulkner,asothershavenoted,involvedaremarkable collection of online literary resources. As Malin Pereira points out in her essay “Oprah’s Book Club and the American Dream,” the Classics Book 1 This essay follows the practice among Oprah scholars of using “Winfrey” when referring to the person, “Oprah” when referring to the production or television persona, and “Oprah!” when referencing the talk show. 424 Cecilia Konchar Farr Club was “pointedly and actively educational, with academics obviously involved in the production of the Web site background information, study questions, and e-mail reading assistance” (201). On Oprah.com during the Summer of Faulkner, visitors were directed to “Oprah’s Classroom” to watch video lectures, ponder reading questions, and take quizzes. They could print out a bookmark with reading deadlines, as on a college syllabus, and there were guides for each novel, with reading tips and scholarly (though accessible) essays—about Faulkner’s links to Toni Morrison, his background and biography, his use of myth, and strategies for reading his modernist narrative (like a mystery, like a jury trial, like a symphony). In the Summer of Faulkner, readers all over the country got to know Thadious M. Davis, Robert W. Hamblin, Phillip and Arnold Weinstein, Jay Parini, Donald Kartiganer, and other Faulkner scholars. By all of our academic standards, this was quality material. Taking advantage of the best resources available, Oprah turned her Book Club into an online classroom that summer. It was the culmination of Oprah’s engagement with literary classics—and the furthest she separated her books from her original talk show format. No matter how successful we now perceive it to have been, Winfrey and her producers apparently considered it a step too far. Only a month after the Summer of Faulkner ended, the Book Club backpedaled from classics when Oprah selected James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces. and announced her return to a more diverse book list, including more memoirs. Most of you probably know how that turned out, with accusations of dishonesty leveled against Frey, a recall of his book, and a dramatic TV smack-down where Winfrey wielded her considerable authority more overtly and imperiously than ever before (details, including videos, are still available on the website, Oprah.com). In hindsight, it should have been easy to see the decamping from classics coming. When I last revisited the Faulkner resources on the...