Introduction: Faulkner's Continuities: Textuality, Materiality, History

In her opening remarks to the conference in Amiens, France that took place in September 2019 titled, "Le père du texte": Continuités et ruptures du patrimoine faulknérien dans les littératures contemporaines" ("The father of the text": Continuities and Ruptures of Faulkner's Legacy in Contemporary Literatures"), the event's organizer, Frédérique Spill, referred to the novelist Pierre Michon. She cited his 1997 essay in which Michon described his discovery of Faulkner: "I was past thirty. I hadn't written a single line yet. By mere chance I read Absalom, Absalom!, which had just been republished in paperback; there, no sooner had I read the first pages then I found a father and a brother, something like the father of the text" (Michon 78-79, quoted in Bleikasten 215). With this passage Spill identified the conference's theme, one that, as its title indicated, was indeed on questions of artistic influence and lineage, particularly in a contemporary context. Yet as the essays in this special issue suggest, the conference participants also presented work that varied importantly from this approach. Claiming that "What Michon found in Faulkner was not only a model with whom he felt an improbable kinship," Spill went on to say, "Faulkner also ignited in him the urge to write. Michon associates Faulkner's text with a generative inheritance likely to stimulate not only his own upcoming texts, but the text of limitless literature … [The] very vivacity of literature—its perpetually ongoing text—certainly makes it inexhaustible."¹

Such a text as Spill describes, we can fairly say, is a particularly French notion. Few literary cultures value the literary per se in the manner and the extent to which we find among France's scholars and its reading public. The act of writing and the love of language has long defined the French commitment to the ongoing, conjoined idea as well as fact of writing—as creative act, as material substance, as the converting of silent thought and feeling to what Spill went on to call the "haunting power of black and white markings."

The model of kinship on which Michon finds his link to Faulkner thus has little to do with the latter's presence as influence or "patrimony." As the papers here demonstrate, Faulkner's prose sounds a note that resonates with an imperative that precedes his own writing effort as well as extends beyond it. There is no "father of the text," quite, whose prior presence initiates or authorizes a later writer's art. There is rather an ongoing continuum of writing on which others find Faulkner and on which he found himself and, as he described, antecedents to him such as Conrad, Balzac, Turgenev, or Flaubert, who themselves contributed to the "text of limitless literature."

Spill identified another aim of the conference in her welcoming talk, one that the articles in this issue help to realize. Citing Proust's Contre Sainte-Beuve and Barthes's "La mort de l'auteur," Spill declared, "The purpose of this conference is not […] to celebrate a particularly generous father figure nor to make sure that Faulkner still stands firmly on his pedestal." Contra Faulkner's lack of generosity as an actual father, Spill means this in the spirit of largesse that many writers who followed him found, including Michon and, as her article reminds us, André Malraux, Claude Simon, Pierre Bergounioux, and others. The papers in Amiens and those we furnish here move away from Faulkner as the Southern, white, male, cisgender, privileged individual who produced the writing by which we remain fascinated. As well they offer a dialectical take on the troubled notion of literary "paternity." As Michon puts it in terms that suggest this dynamic,

[Faulkner] is the father of all I have written. Not that I have undergone his influence, as the saying goes: I have never been blamed or praised for writing like Faulkner, for having appropriated his mannerisms, his themes or his narrative tricks—for the [offspring] dwarfed by their fathers do their best not to resemble him, not to be his epigones. They feed...