Faulkner's Questioning Narratives: Fiction of His Major Phase, 1929-42, and: Subversive Voices: Eroticizing the Other in William Faulkner and Toni Morrison (review)

Differing in theme, organization, and theoretical approach, these two texts share an interest in voices. Their differences are complementary, however, as they seem to fill each other's silences. David Minter is concerned with the role of Faulkner's proliferating voices in his narrative strategy; Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber considers the acquisition or repression of voice as part of a discussion on subjectivity.

Faulkner's Questioning Narratives is the culmination of decades of thinking and writing about Faulkner. In addition to new material, revised versions of several of Minter's previously published essays appear in this volume, allowing readers access to the new insights and carefully considered conclusions of a veteran Faulkner scholar. Some overlap occurs, so that discussions of some books or themes appear in similar form in different chapters. In his effort to account for the "distinctive qualities of Faulkner's achievement," Minter discusses many of the central issues in Faulkner's work, including love, death, family, region, violence, and history. The true energy that propels this study, however, is Minter's analysis of Faulkner's narrative technique. Interested in uncertainty, Minter argues that Faulkner perpetually defers closure by refusing to authorize any one of his many voices. Minter might have productively pursued this line of thought, exploring the implications of such radical undercutting of authority in novels preoccupied with power structures like patriarchy and slavery. Instead, Minter demonstrates how technique draws the reader into the narrative as both cocreator and interpreter. In discussing Sanctuary, for example, Minter describes how the gaps in Faulkner's narrative lead readers to supply the missing information, thus implicating them in the horrific acts of the mob.

Although Minter claims that it is the combination of narrative technique and social critique that makes Faulkner's novels powerful, his own text proves somewhat unsymmetrical in its emphasis on narrative technique. Minter tantalizes the reader with intimations of an imminent discussion about identity categories, and while there is some discussion of region, class, and gender, questions of race remain persistently minimized. When Minter does broach the issue of race, he ultimately dismisses its significance. In his discussion of Light in August, for example, he extensively quotes the passage in which Gavin Stevens recounts Joe Christmas's final hours, alternately ascribing Joe's motives to either his "white blood" or his "black blood." Minter argues that Stevens is "misstating [Joe's motives] in racial terms," claiming instead that they arise from "a desire for and love of life and a fear of it that becomes a hatred of it" (90). This unfortunate avoidance of race in Light in August forestalls any exploration of the question of how and what we know about Joe Christmas's racial background, which would otherwise seem to be exactly the sort of inquiry that most interests Minter.

In contrast, the emphasis in Schreiber's Subversive Voices is almost entirely on the social world created within the novels she examines. Building upon cultural studies theory, Schreiber uses Lacan to explain the reciprocal relationship between emerging marginal voices and the dominant culture, as well as the role of individual psychology in social change. In Faulkner's novels, Schreiber argues, white characters engage with the racial or gendered other in an entanglement of pursuit and avoidance, desiring an objectified other to fulfill their needs but retreating into nostalgia when the other asserts agency. In some cases, however, the potentially threatening encounter with the other results in a reconstituted subjectivity, opening up a space for a more potentially inclusive emergent culture. Chick Mallison's reluctant assistance of Lucas Beauchamp in Intruder in the Dust is an example of this variation...