News from Faulkner Country

The world of Faulkner criticism is becoming increasingly selective and increasingly helpful. There were some periods, fifteen or twenty years back, when several dozen books on Faulkner were published in a year. The twenty-first century has so far been spared that kind of production. The books that see print today are in their respective ways useful and, at their best, ground-breaking.

Faulkner and War, edited by Noel Polk and Ann J. Abadie, comes close to falling into the latter category. Drawn substantially from the annual Faulkner conference in 2001, the essays here are both substantial in every scholarly sense of the term and provocative. As Polk points out in the introduction, Faulkner's fiction has dealt more often than earlier criticism recognized with the Civil War, World War I, and even World War II: for assessments of the role his cognizance of war played in all his fiction (perhaps in his stories more often than the novels) essays by such critics as John Liman, Lothar Honnighausen, James G. Watson and John Lowe are seminal. (I would bracket these with Donald M. Kartiganer's 1998 Modern Fiction Studies essay.) Prompted, too, by critics of the war writing of women writers of the twentieth century, this turn to the positioning of Faulkner in that wide context is inordinately helpful.

John Liman's essay on Addie Bundren from As I Lay Dying might seem the most peripheral of the group, but in "Addie in No-Man's Land" he traces a number of the narrative's elements to writing about World War I in this novel that he terms "a book with alternative locks for competitive keys." Besides the figures of the dead and yet-to-be buried, the mud, the consciousness dependent on liminal states and other elements, Liman foregrounds the fluidity of Faulkner's style, the complexity of Addie's monologue, and the novel as an ur-type of the Great War novel in a reading rich with asides about Faulkner's short stories.

Lothar Honnighausen's study of A Fable is also related to Faulkner's stories—as well as to film treatments of the war. His strengths are in making readers see the often troublesome book as a novel of ideas, as does—to some extent—Noel Polk in his imaginatively conceived essay "Scar." As John Lowe treats these fictions in relation to what he calls "the myths of masculinity" and James G. Watson adds attention to the performative in Faulkner, the reader is drawn into much wider explorations of the ways Faulkner wrote about war. Whereas Don H. Doyle provides a classically historical study of elements of war, David Madden's essay, "Quentin, Listen!" connects much of the great early Faulkner fiction with the omnipresence of the Civil War, especially as it is distilled in the character of Quentin Compson. The collection as a whole convinces the reader that Faulkner knew the many dimensions of military conflict and searched throughout his career for ways to historicize and image it.

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With each new biography of Faulkner, readers are affected. Since Joseph Blotner's 1974 two-volume work—followed in 1980 by his one-volume version—each decade has seen the publication of several new biographies. Jay Parini's 2004 One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner, is the most recent to appear from a commercial publisher.

Published as it is a decade after Richard Gray's biography and nearly twenty-five years after David Minter's, Parini's study gives but slight attention to even these remarkable books. He seems content to tell his version of the Faulkner story with the quick pace the reader might anticipate from the commercial worlds of a "good read." There are two...