Toni Morrison and William Faulkner's Verbose Ghosts

Toni Morrison, who published her first novel eight years after Faulkner's death in 1962, recognized the problematic legacy of Faulkner in her own work. In 1985, Morrison was invited to Oxford, Mississippi, as the keynote speaker for the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, centered that year around the polemical subject of "Faulkner and Women." The first words of Morrison's speech are telling: "I'm ambivalent about what I'm about to do" (Fowler and Abadie 295). Ambivalence is certainly the most appropriate term to define Morrison's literary relationship with Faulkner. At the end of her speech at the Yoknapatawpha Conference, Morrison addressed her complicated relation to Faulkner: "There was for me not only an academic interest in Faulkner, but in a very, very personal way, in a very personal way as a reader, William Faulkner had an enormous effect on me, an enormous effect" (Conversations 25). However, in the course of the Q&A that followed her speech and reading, she appeared to quickly backpedal by stating that "I'm not sure that he had any effect on my work" (Conversations 25), completely divorcing herself from Faulkner as a writer all the while acknowledging him still as a reader and a scholar. This stance can easily be understood: for a black writer with such an active stance against the insidious workings of racism, there is something inherently dangerous in being immediately categorized as being indebted to a white writer whose treatment of race has often been considered ambiguous. From a feminist perspective, Morrison was undoubtedly aware of the weight of being seen as merely emulating a white male writer, and especially "the patriarch of Southern literature," to quote Mary Ellen Snodgrass' Encyclopedia of Southern Literature's entry on Faulkner: "If Southern literature were to declare a patriarch, the title would go to William Faulkner" (Snodgrass 93). More generally, it could be said that Morrison suffered from the same burden as any "post-Faulknerian" novelist, as Flannery O'Connor famously phrased it: "The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down" (O'Connor 45). Throughout her literary career, Morrison has simultaneously worked against and with the current created by the Dixie Limited, recognizing while resisting the Faulknerian heritage on her work. Yet, it remains clear that their works actively resonate with each other. Perhaps signaling the influence of Faulkner on her work, it is at this 1985 Yoknapatawpha Conference that Morrison read the first pages of her then unfinished novel, Beloved.

The intertextual relationship between Faulkner and Morrison has rapidly caught the attention of critics. The collection Unflinching Gaze: Morrison and Faulkner Re-Envisioned, edited by Carol A. Kolmerten, Stephen M. Ross, and Judith Bryant Wittenberg in 1997, proposes an in-depth analysis of Morrison and Faulkner's complex literary relationship. The title of Alessandra Vendrame's article raises the controversial question: "Toni Morrison: A Faulknerian Novelist?" (1997). Schreiber's Subversive Voices: Eroticizing the Other in William Faulkner and Toni Morrison (2001) examines identity and race through the prism of Jacques Lacan's theories. Similarly, a whole section dedicated to Faulkner is featured in Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu's Toni Morrison Encyclopedia (2003). Parallels between As I Lay Dying and Beloved have been drawn, especially by Karla F. C. Holloway's chapter in Unflinching Gaze, "Narrative Time/Spiritual Text: Beloved and As I Lay Dying," in which she argues that As I Lay Dying and Beloved are both narratives, which "privilege dissonance and violence in the telling of their stories" (Unflinching Gaze 92), by focusing on the shared spiritual and narrative space of the two novels. In the brilliant book Dead Women Talking, Brian Norman analyzes the omnipresence of dead women in American literature, and dedicates two separate chapters to Addie and Beloved. Although the peculiar resonance between As I Lay Dying and Beloved has been previously noticed and commented upon, I would like to contribute to the conversation on these two novels by adding...