This collection of essays explores key dimensions of Faulk- ner’s widespread cultural import. Drawing on a wide range of cultural theory, ten major Faulkner scholars examine closely the enduring whole of Faulkner's oeuvre in clearly written and intellectually provocative essays. Bringing into focus the broader cultural contexts that give his work its resonance, the collection will be particularly useful for the student seeking a critieal introduction te Fanllener, while serving also the dedicated scholar interested in discerning recent trends in Faulkner criticism. ‘Together, these essays map Faulkner's present-day mean ing by exploring his relations to modernism and postmod. etnism, to twentieth-century mass culture, to European and Latin American fiction, to issues of gender difference, and, above all, to the conflicted scene of U.S. race relations. Nei ther assuming in advance his literary “greatness” nor insist- ing that his canonical status be revoked, the essays ask in- stead, What is at stake, today, in reading Faulkner? What company does he keep? In what ways does his work inter sect with current debates on race and gender? How does his practice respond to today’s questions about the individual subject's insertion within broader cultural activities? Why, in short, should we read him now?THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO WILLIAM FAULKNERCAMBRIDGE COMPANIONS TO LITERATURE ‘The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature edited by Malcolm Godden and Michael Lapidge ‘The Camridge Companion to Dante ‘edited by Rachel Jacoff ‘The Cambridge Chaucer Companion edited by Piero Boitant and [ill Mann, ‘The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Theatre edited by Richard Beadle The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies ‘edited by Stanley Wells The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama edited by A. R, Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway ‘The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry, Donne to Marvell edited by Thomas N. Coms The Cambridge Companion to Milton edited by Dennis Danielson The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism edited by Stuart Curran ‘The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce edited by Derek Attridge ‘The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen lited by James McFarlane The edie The Cambridge Companion to Beckett ‘edited by Jobn Pilling The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot edited by A. David Moody ‘ambridge Companion to Brecht yy Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks The Cambridge Companion to WILLIAM FAULKNER Edited by Philip M. Weinstein Swarthmore College 4 CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS178 238 Published by the Press Syndicate ofthe University of Cambridge The Pite Building, Trumpingvon Street, Cambridge CB2 1RP 440 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia ‘ambridge University Press 1995 Fisse published 19% Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ‘The Cambridge companion co William Faulkner / edited by Philip M, Weinstein pcm Includes index. ISBN 0-521-42063-6 jhardback]. ~ ISBN 0:521-42167-5 (pbk| 1. Faulkner, William, 1897-196) ~ Criicism and interpretation. 1 Weinstein, Philip M. S351 1 AB6Z745 "1998 813'52 ~ de20 98-7335 cP {A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0-521-42063-6 hardback ISBN 0.521-42167-5 paperback CONTENTS Preface List of Contributors Chronology of William Faulkner's Life and Works Abbreviations for Texts Cited Introduction PHILIP M. WEINSTEIN Part I. The Texts in the World Faulkner and Modernism RICHARD C, MORELAND Faulkner and Postmodernism PATRICK O'DONNELL Faulkner and the Culture Industry JOHN MATTHEWS Faulkner from a European Perspective ANDRE BLEIKASTEN Looking for a Master Plan: Faulkner, Paredes, and the Colonial and Postcolonial Subject v age vii 7 31 51 96,Part I. The World in the Texts Racial Awareness and Arrested Development: The Sound and the Fury and the Great Migration (1915-1928) CHERYL LESTER Race in Light in August: Wordsymbols and Obverse Reflections JUDITH BRYANT WITTENBERG Absalom, Absalom!: (Un)Making the Father CAROLYN PORTER Conclusion: The Stakes of Reading Faulkner ~ Discerning Reading WARWICK WADLINGTON Works Cited Index 103 46 168 197 221 231 PREFACE Not just “another book on Faulkner”: when I accepted Cam- bridge University Press's invitation to edit this Companion to William Faulkner, | insisted on that distinction. Free to gather together many of the best Faulknerians writing in the 1990s, I sought to convert the potential defects of an anthology into its virtues. The absence of a single guiding argument could be- come the presence of several provocative introductions. In place of a sustained, unified intelligence (engaged peripherally with other points of view], this book could foreground en- counter itself — difference. It could emphasize what most lit- erary studies pay lip service to but actually work to conceal: that the entity we call “Faulkner” exists, publicly, only in the plural, differentially construed according to the operative crit- ical approach. The Cambridge Companion to William Faulk ner is dedicated to introducing, to a broadly literate audience, several of the most compelling “Faulkners” of our time. These various Faulkners are by no means the arbitrary con- structions of willful critics. Rather, my nine fellow contribu- tors come to Faulkner through critical procedures with their own cultural history, and I have urged these contributors to attend self-consciously to the orientations enabling theit thought. All of them have ~ while revising their own work — read one or more of the neighboring essays, and at certain points specific convergences of ideas and claims take place. ‘Taken together, this range of orientations gestures toward the viiviii Preface broader discursive field within which current commentary on Faulkner is being generated. The Companion makes no pre- tense of mapping that field exhaustively, but it does acknowl- edge that the field is necessarily prior to the writer being discussed within it. Ideally, the Companion sheds light simul- taneously on the present-day significance of Faulkner's work and on many of the partienlar questions cultural critics of the 1990s have counted as significant. In the Introduction I discuss in detail the kind of argument — its assumptions and implications — each contributor is making, But the point to emphasize here is that the volume as a whole is committed to producing an accessible Faulkner. This is no simple task, since making him accessible cannot mean making him “easy” (that would be a betrayal of his work's deliberate transgressions}, nor can it mean reducing the terms of critical approach to a single vocabulary of assump: tions and goals (that would be a betrayal of the tonic range of questions his work engages in the critical practice of the 1990s}. Rather, “accessible” must mean the presentation of a Faulkner whom first-time readers can recognize, a Faulkner not trammeled up in a thick weave of previous commentaries and scholarly footnotes. And it must mean a Faulkner not uniquely pursuing his esoteric dreams but, instead, a Faulkner immersed in his broader culture's compelling debates. Read- ers already interested in such debates will recognize them here, and they will find in the Companion’s various Faulkners both a “citizen” (however reluctant} of his time and place and a respondent (however reluctant} to our time and place. Getting ten Faulknerians to collaborate on one volume has not lacked its frustrations, but this joint enterprise has been mainly an occasion of intellectual enrichment. Poring over one another's work, each of us ensconced hundreds {or thou- sands) of miles distant from each other, we persevered in our own parodic version of Absalom’s Jefferson/ Cambridge proj- ect of multiple authorship. I am grateful to each cuntributor for this provocative and unpredictable interchange. Likewise, Preface ix Iam grateful to Julic Greenblatt and T. Susan Chang (both at Cambridge University Press} for seeking out this volume and for then adroitly seeing it through. Finally, without the ex- traordinary achievement of William Faulkner there would have been no common focus for our energies, no body of texts through which we severally rehearse what it means to be sub- jects in culture, no “companion” to make possible this Com- anion.CONTRIBUTORS ANDRE BLEIKASTEN is Professor of American Literature at the Université de Strasbourg. His major work on Faulkner began with book-length studies in the 1970s of As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury, followed by many essays in scholarly journals and collections, culminating in The Ink of Melancholy: Faulkner's Nov. els from The Sound and the Fury to Light in August (Indiana, 1990}, His essay in this volume appeared in an earlier form in Faulkner, His Contemporaries, and His Posterity, ed. Waldeman Zacharasiewicz (Tabingen: Francke, 1993). Curvy LesTER is Associate Professor at the University of Kansas, where she teaches cultural studies, modern literature, and African- American literature and culture. She has written several essays on Faulkner and is currently completing a manuscript entitled Faulk. ner and the Great Migration, to be published by Cambridge Univer- sity Press, JOHN MATTHEWS is Professor of English at Boston University. His contributions to Faulkner studies include the editorship of the Faulkner Journal and his major study The Play of Faulkner's Lan- guage (Cornell, 1982}. He has published widely in the scholarly jour nals on Faulkner and others, has written The Sound and the Fury: Faulkner and the Lost Cause (Twayne, 1991), and is now completing a study of framing devices in American literature. Rican C. Moneranp, Associate Professor of English at Louisi ana State University, is the author of Faulkner and Modernism: xixii Contributors Rereading and Rewriting (Wisconsin, 1990), He has also written scholarly essays on Faulkner, Morrison, and the teaching of cross- cultural encounters in the new canon. He is currently at work on a project entitled “Domination and Democracy in Twain, Eliot, Ellison, and Morrison,” Pataick O'DONNELL is Editor of Modern Fiction Studies and Pro- fessor of English at Purdue University. His work centers on moder- ism and postmodernism, and he has edited a number of anthologies focused on twenticth-century culture. His book-length studies in- clude Passionate Doubts: Designs of Interpretation in Contempo: rary American Fiction (Iowa, 1986) and Echo Chambers: Figuring Voice in Modern Narrative (lowa, 1992) CAROLYN Porter is Professor of English at the University of Cali- fornia, Berkeley. She has taught and published on a wide range of ‘American writers and issues. Her work on Faulkner began with See: ing and Being: The Plight of the Participant Observer in Emerson, James, Adams, and Faulkner (Wesleyan, 1981), and it has continued in the form of scholarly essays for conferences and in journals, RAMON SALDivAR is Professor of English and Comparative Liter. ature at Stanford University. He is the author of Figural Language in the Novel: The Flowers of Speech from Cervantes to Joyce and Chicano Narrative: The Dialectics of Difference. His teaching and research focus on literary criticism, nineteenth- and twentieth- century comparative literary studies, Chicano narrative, and cultur- al studies. Warwick WADLINGTON is Joan Negley Kelleher Centennial Pro- fessor of English at the University of Texas. His publications include ‘The Confidence Game in American Literature (Princeton, 1975} Reading Faulknerian Tragedy (Cornell, 1988), and As I Lay Dying: Stories out of Stories (Twayne, 1992), as well as many scholarly essays on American fiction and culture. Puiriip M. WEINSTEIN is Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor of English at Swarthmore College. He teaches and publishes on American, British, and comparative fiction. His books include Hen: ry James and the Requirements of the Imagination \Harvard, 1971), The Semantics of Desire: Changing Models of Identity from Dick- Contributors xiii ens to Joyce (Princeton, 1984}, and Faulkner's Subject: A Cosmos No One Owns |Cambridge, 1992} JupirH Bryant Wirrenserc is Professor of English and Acting Dean of the College at Simmons College. She teaches widely in American literature and culture, Her central work on Faulkner be- gan with Faulkner: The Transfiguration of Biography (Nebraska, 1979], has continued in the form of many essays in scholarly jour nals, and is currently embodied in her serving as President of the Faulkner Society.1897 1902 1914 CHRONOLOGY OF WILLIAM FAULKNER'S LIFE AND WORKS 1916-17 1918 xv William Cuthbert Falkner, first of four sons of Murry C. Falkner and Maud Butler Falkner, is born on September 25 in New Albany, Mississippi. Murry Falkner is an administrator for the railroad built by his legendary grandfather, William C, Falkner — a man known as the “Old Colonel” and widely remembered for his achieve ments as soldier, landowner, lawyer, businessman, pol; itician, and writer. (The family name was spelled “Falk- ner” until WF added the “u” in 1919.) The Falkner family moves to Oxford, Mississippi After an indifferent secondary education (ceasing after the tenth gradel, WF accepts a mentor relationship with Phil Stone (four years older}, reading widely in classics and contemporary literature. Stone will serve for many years as a sometimes unwanted adviser, help- ing WF get his early works published. WF begins to write verse and to submit graphic and literary work for the University of Mississippi year. book. WF and Estelle Oldham, childhood sweethearts, do not manage to elope. She marries Cornell Franklin. WF at- tempts to enlist in the U.S, Air Corps to fight in World War I, is rejected because of insufficient height, goes to ‘Toronto and {masquerading as an Englishman] joins the Royal Air Force training program. He returns to Oxtord after the war, feigning war wounds and military ex-xvi Chronology 1919-20 1921-23 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 ploits (his flight training was actually completed only in December, a month after the armistice. WE enrolls as a special student at the University of Mississippi, studies French, writes a play entitled Mar- ionettes, completes his first volume of verse ~ The Marble Faun — which (with Phil Stone’s help) will eventually be accepted for publication. WF works in a New York bookstore managed by Eliz: abeth Prall, Sherwood Anderson’s future wife. He re- tums to Oxford to serve as university postmaster, a job he notoriously mishandles; in 1923 he is fired from it ‘The Marble Faun is published in December. WF travels to New Orleans and is introduced (through Elizabeth Prall] to Sherwood Anderson and his literary circle, a group associated with the avant-garde literary magazine The Double Dealer. WF spends six months ‘with this group, developing a serious interest in writing, fiction, not poetry, and completing his first novel, Sol- diers’ Pay, a “lost generation” story centering on the betrayals of a warwounded aviator. Anderson’s pub- lisher, Horace Liveright, accepts it for publication. WF spends the second half of 1925 traveling in Europe, liv- ing in Paris, reading contemporary literature, and writ: ing reviews, he returns to Oxford by Christmas. Soldiers' Pay is published in February. WE's second novel, Mosquitoes, set in New Orleans and attentive to the avant-garde arts scene, is published in April by Liveright. Liveright refuses WF's third (and most ambitious to date) novel, Flags in the Dust. This novel inaugurates WP's fictional history of his own region and is accepted. eventually by Harcourt, Brace, on condition that it be shortened. Throughout the 1920s, WF continues to see Estelle Oldham Franklin and her two sons during her visits to Oxford. He begins writing The Sound and the Pury in the spring and finishes it by early fall Shortened and renamed, Flags in the Dust is published as Sartoris in January. WE begins writing Sanctuary. 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934-35 Chronology xvii The Sound and the Fury, his first indisputable modern: ist masterpiece, is rejected by Harcourt, Brace but ac- cepted by Cape and Smith. Estelle Oldham Franklin’s divorce is finalized in April; WF marries her in June. The Sound and the Fury is published in October. Dur. ing this fall, WF works nights at a power plant, com: pleting a first draft of As J Lay Dying (his next modern- ist masterpiece] in under seven weeks. As I Lay Dying is published in October by Cape and Smith, giving WF’ fictional county its name of Yok, napatawpha. WF buys Rowan Oak, an elegant Oxford estate. In need of funds (a need that will continue for the next twenty years}, WF begins aggressively to mar ket his short stories along with his novels, the former often paying better, Sanctuary, begun before publication of the two previ ously completed masterpieces and first conceived a5 a potboiler, is heavily revised before being published in February. Its sexual violence attracts the attention of Hollywood, and WE soon begins an off-and-on twenty- year history as a scriptwriter for MGM and Warner Bros. (The film versions of Hemingway's To Have and Have Not and Chandler's Big Sleep both contain much Faulknerian dialogue.) These Thirteen, a collection of WF's stories, is published in September. Light in August, WE’ first major treatment of racial turmoil, is published in February by Smith and Haas. WP's second volume of poems, A Green Bough, is pub- lished in April. Jill Faulkner is born in June, The Story of Temple Drake, a film version of Sanctuary, is re- leased. Doctor Martino and Other Stories, a collection of de- tective stories, is published in April. WE works on Ab; salom, Absalom!, his most ambitious novel about the South so far, as well as his most deliberately modernist work, both in Hollywood and in Oxford. He interrupts Absalom to complete Pylon, a brief, feverish novel about daredevil stunt pilots, in a few months, then re-xviii 1936 1938 1939 1940 1942. 1946 1948 1949 1950 1951 Chronology turns to Absalom after the death of his youngest broth- cx, Dean, in an air crash. (WE, himself an amateur avia tor, had encouraged Dean to learn to fly.) Pylon is published in March 1935. ‘Absalom, Absalom!, is published in October by Ran- dom House, thereafter WF's permanent publisher. The Unvanquished, a collection ot Civil War stories, is published in February. WE writes The Wild Palms, a hybrid novel composed of two intertwined stories. He buys a farm outside of Oxford. The Wild Palms is published in January. WF is elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Despite previous attention from French critics such as Malraux and Sartre, WF only now begins to receive searching commentary from American critics. The Hamlet, the first novel of the Snopes trilogy, is published in April. Go Down, Moses and Other Stories, WP's broadest and most sustained scrutiny of black-white relations, is published in May. Malcolm Cowley’s edition of The Portable Faulkner is published in May by the Viking Press. Except for Sane: tuary, WP's novels are out of print; Cowley’s ably intro duced volume makes WE's work inexpensively avail- able to a large reading public. Intruder in the Dust, a sequel to the Lucas Beauchamp, materials of Go Down, Moses, is published in Septem- ber. The novel's overt interest in Southern racial tur moil secures large sales and signals WF's willingness to speak out on social issues. WF is elected to the Ameri- can Academy of Arts and Letters. Knight's Gambit, a collection of detective stories, is, published in November. Collected Stories is published in August. WF wins the Nobel Prize for Literature, travels with his daughter fill, to Stockholm, and delivers his famous Nobel Prize ac- ceptance speech. Collected Stories is awarded the National Book Award. 1954 1955 1957 1963 Chronology xix Requiem for a Nun, a reprise of the Temple Drake ma- terials in Sanctuary, written in a form both novelistic and theatrical, is published in September. France awards him the Legion of Honor. From this point on, WE's work receives critical (indeed “canonical” atten- tion and brings him financial security. Increasingly, he writes and speaks out on political (especially racial) issues, his position costing him support from many fellow Southerners because of his attack on racism, while disappointing liberals because of his gradualist approach to desegregation. WF travels extensively dur ing the 1950s as a sort of cultural ambassador for the State Department. A Fable, WF’s most premeditated novel, a story of World War I in terms of the Christ fable, is published in ‘August. It wins the Pulitzer prize. Big Woods, a collection of stories, is published, The Town, the second novel of the Snopes trilogy, is published in May. WE teaches as writerin-residence at the University of Virginia. He will alternate residence between Charlottesville and Oxford until his death. The Mansion, the final volume of the Snopes trilogy, is published in November. meses The Reivers, Faulkner's last and deliberately light- hearted novel, is published in June. A month later, on July 6, WF dies unexpectedly (probably of a heart at tack) in a clinic at Byhalia, Mississippi, where he had been recurrently hospitalized for alcoholism and more recently for treatment following the last of many horseback-riding accidents, His funeral takes place the next day in Oxford. The Reivers wins the Pulitzer prize.AA cs ESPL FAB FMS FU GDM LG SF SL TH ABBREVIATIONS FOR TEXTS CITED Absalom, Absalom!: The Corrected Text. 1936. New York: Vintage International, 1990. Collected Stories of William Faulkner. New York: Random House, 1950, Essays, Speeches and Public Letters, ed. James B. Mer- iwether. New York: Random House, 1966. A Fable. New York: Random House, 1954. Faulkner’s MGM Screenplays, ed. Bruce F. Kawin. Knox: ville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982. Faulkner in the University, ed. Frederick L. Gwynn and Jo- seph L. Blotner. New York: Random House, 1959. Go Down, Moses. 1942. New York: Vintage International, 1990. Light in August: The Corrected Text. 1932. New York: Vin- tage International, 1990, Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, 1926~1962, ed. James B. Meriwether and Michael Millgate. New York: Random House, 1968. The Sound and the Fury: The Corrected Text. 1929. New York: Vintage International, 1990. Selected Letters of William Faulkner, ed. Joseph L. Blotner. New York: Random House, 1977. Thinking of Home: William Faulkner's Letters to His Moth- er and Father, 1918-1925, ed. James G. Watson. New York Norton, 1992. xx us we Abbreviations xxi Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner, ed. Joseph L. Blotner. New York: Random House, 1979, The Wild Palms. 1939. New York: Vintage, 1966.THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO WILLIAM FAULKNERPHILIP M, WEINSTEIN Introduction What do we do and why when we think Faulkner? This is the personal (but never just personal] question I asked all of the contributors to ponder as they thought about their essays for this Companion. In responding to it, they have aligned their work, roughly, within one of two groups: “‘the texts in the world” or “the world in the texts.” The five essays that make up Part I explicitly press beyond the art of Faulkner's texts in order to comment on the larger “world” those texts inhabit, envisaged here as contextual social activities and processes within which Faulkner’s practice may reveal its broader cul- tural dimensions. These essays sketch out a range of contexts = modernism, postmodernism, the “culture industry,” a can- on of twentieth-century European novelists, the noncanonical practice of Latin American fiction of the same period — that permit us to consider Faulkner's comparative identity. To put the matter differently, these first essays identify several of the current “theaters” in which Faulkner's texts are most inter estingly performed. The three essays that constitute Part II operate otherwise, probing more deeply into the textual behavior of three of Faulkner's canonical masterpieces — The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom! These essays attend in detail to a discrete text’s formal moves, but they go beyond New Critical procedures in their insistent focus on “the world in the texts,” especially the larger social problematies of race, 12 Purtir WEINSTEIN gender, and subject formation. A fourth Faulknerian text — Go Down, Moses = receives sustained attention as well, in the essays of Patrick O'Donnell and Warwick Wadlington. Finally, this introduction and Wadlington’s conclusion, conceived more as “metacommentaries” on the practice of Faulknerian commentary, move outside the alignment of either group. Taken together, all ten essays aspire to be a composite (though necessarily incomplete) “profession” of Faulkner studies to- day, by circulating around the following concerns: 1, What is at stake in reading Faulkner? How does the appar. ently private act of reading function in the broader dynamic of cultural reproduction and revision? 2. What (from the perspective of the 1990s} does it mean to call Faulkner a modernist? What (largely European) alignment of forms and concerns is thus asserted? How is this alignment reaccented when we contrast Faulknerian practice with other fictional practices of the same period? 3. What would constitute a postmodernist interpretive lens, and how would such a lens map Faulkner's work in ways that differ crucially from the New Critical celebration of Faulkner that was founded on modernist premises and remained canon- ical in U.S. criticism from the 1950s well into the 1980s? 4, How would a postmodernist axis of priorities remap the relation of Faulkner's high-culture achievement to the bur geoning forms of popular culture ~ movies, magazine stories, best-selling novels ~ within which it made its way and negoti- ated its accommodations? 5. How does Faulkner’s work explore the construction of human subjectivity (that personal space of thinking, feeling, and doing that - with whatever qualifications ~ we insist on as the domain of our private identity and that fiction has long taken as its special province}? How do Faulkner's texts pro- duce the “traffic” between this interior resource and the larger culture’s incessant demands on the individual? 6. In what ways does Faulkner's fiction — the passionate work of a white American male of the early twentieth century Introduction 3 — participate in, and shed light on, his own culture's differen- tial structures of race and gender? Going beyond the facile critical alternatives of blindness to, or rebuke of, these differ- ential structures, how might we read the fissures within his work determined by the pressures of race and gender so as to deepen our understanding of his culture's normative proce- dures and of his complex insertion within them? 7. Within what larger, nonliterary cultural narratives is Faulkner's practice tacitly embedded? How might his work look when understood within racial/historical perspectives not his own? Richard Moreland’s opening essay identifies at the outset some of the issues that circulate more indirectly through all the subsequent ones. Moreland candidly inquires into the re~ lations among the three central activities he himself performs when he is thinking Faulkner: reading, writing, and teaching He then seeks, speculatively rather than insistently, to recon- ceive these activities as dimensions of texts themselves: the “readerly” text of realism (a text that passes on to us the world substantially constituted as we already seem to know it), the ‘“writerly” text of modernism (a text that seems radically to refuse the commonly perceived world of the status quo}, and the “participatory” text of postmodernism (a text that recog- nizes our complicity in the cultural arrangements — however ironic our stance ~ that we both identify within and import into the texts to which we attend). Moreland tellingly an- alyzes the ways in which Faulkner's work generally — and Light in August specifically — activates with fluid unpre: dictability all three novelistic stances. “The world of [Faulk- ner’s| work,” he writes, “does not feel natural, comfortable, or recognizable in the cultural way that realist work feels to many readers. It does not effectively contain its society's self criticisms and discontents, or reduce those conflicts to terms an individual character, narrator, or reader can resolve.” In other words, although both the “real” and its critique are4 Puriip WEINSTEIN compellingly produced in Faulkner's practice — we read of a cultural landscape both easily recognizable and disturbingly charged with social ills — his texts at the same time under- mine any simple commitment to reform. They thus leave in their reader a sense of malaise ~ “a critical dissatisfaction with what the culture in general or any of us as individuals alone already knows how to say.” This pervasive resistance on the part of Faulkner's texts to effective diagnosis and cure ‘Moreland happily terms a “critique of critique.” Patrick O'Donnell also probes the sense of unresolvable im- passe that characterizes Faulkner's modernist major phase: his experimental texts between The Sound and the Fury (1929} and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). O'Donnell draws on two conflicting dimensions of European modernism in gener- al: the writer's urge to escape the contaminating practices of the world he has inherited, by way of a monumental and for mally stunning (antitealistic) replacement of that world (Joy: ce’s Dublin, Proust's Combray, among others); this urge fol- lowed by his concomitant ironic awareness that the refused historical world always returns, however repressed, to haunt its brilliant replacement. O'Donnell sees this tension writ large in Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner's tragic modernist masterpiece. He then explores Go Down, Moses (1942) as an implicitly postmodem, transitional text in Faulkner's career, in which this double bind of modernism (the transcendent urge, its subsequent betrayal) yields to a more contingent and resilient vision of ongoing histories, black and white, female and male, that quietly elude the either/or dynamic of Faulk- ner's tragic modernism. As O'Donnell puts it, “To return to Quentin's metaphor of the interconnected pools, these ‘post- modern’ moments frequently appear in the form of a ripple effect — a movement along the surface of the text far removed from the nascent occurrence that initiated the series, yet one that profoundly puts into question the fatality of events and their aftermath often seen as characteristic of Faulkner's fic- tion.” Introduction 5 Finally, in this opening triad of contextual essays, John Mat- thews subtly analyzes the impact of larger market pressures on Faulkner’s artistic practice. Drawing on Adorno and Horkheimer to theorize the emergence of the “culture indus- ty” (the unparalleled development in the United States of mass-produced and mass-consumed art forms during the mid- twentieth century), Matthews examines closely some of the vicissitudes of Faulkner's Hollywood writings during the 1930s. His argument resembles Moreland’s and O’Donnell’s in its refusal of a simple binary opposition that would pit the Olympian detachment of the high-modernist masterpiece, on the one hand, against the ideologically contaminated prac- tices of mass culture, on the other. (This stereotypical opposi- tion organizes our most widely shared narrative of the “great writer” ~ such as Fitzgerald or Faulkner ~ ensnared by "Holly- wood commercialism.”} Attending to the transformative his- tory of “Turnabout,” one of Faulkner's rate stories actually to be made into a film, Matthews shows that Faulkner's much revised script neither slavishly submitted to commercial pres- sures nor sublimely transcended them. Rather, it managed, by reflecting wittily on its own manner of rehearsing social co- ordinates, to distinguish its uncoerced behavior from the “culture industry” norms it necessarily encoded. Matthews pursues this argument as part of a larger project of recon- ceiving the ways in which the aesthetic practice of high mod- emism encounters mass-market cultural forms spawned by twentieth-century modemization. We have wanted too often to polarize this encounter. We are just learning — thanks to essays like this one ~ to chart a more complex dynamic of submission and resistance. The next two essays seck to assess Faulkner's work, first, within 2 twentieth-century European novelistic perspective and, second, as culturally illuminated by the related practice of a Chicano writer {Américo Paredes} exactly contemporary with Faulkner. In the first of these two pieces, André Bleikasten shrewdly interrogates the current critical convic-6 Puritp WeINSTEIN tion that the significance of a writer's work is determined in the last instance by his cultural insertion. Noting that Faulk- ner’s novels have for more than a half century reached and moved a huge European readership whose knowledge of the ‘American South is restricted to what they leam from his pages, Bleikasten speculates that Faulkner’s work possesses an aesthetic power that survives translation and crosses cul- tural borders with impunity. He then gathers together the rare European novelists — a dozen in all ~ whose work has achieved, in his view, an equivalent mastery and reach. Mod- emists all, these writers nevertheless lack the unifying com- mitment to realism that permits us to join ninetcenth- century writers as divergent as Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, and James. With fine discrimination Bleikasten shows how Faulk- nerian practice maintains a creative tension between a poet- ic/experimental impulse and a mimetic/representational im- pulse. Faulkner thus produces novels that draw powerfully on fiction’s primitive resource — storytelling itself ~ while all along calling into question the authority of the stories they do not cease to unfold. Bleikasten concludes with a modernist pairing as compelling as it is unexpected: Kafka and Faulkner, both “children” of Dostoevsky, compassionate masters of the uncanny, of mesmerizing tales that are simultaneously trans- parent and opaque. Ramon Saldivar's comparative frame is equally modernist, but his project could hardly differ more from Bleikasten’s. Rather than attend to the dimensions of Faulkner's artistic mastery, Saldivar is intent on the unmanageable inflection of class, race, and ethnicity on subject formation within Faulk- ner’s protagonists. The representation of the subject-in- culture is Saldivar's focus, and he turns to Sutpen in Absalom, ‘Absalom! as Faulkner's paradigm case. Saldivar brings to the Haiti portion of Sutpen’s career a cluster of concerns that reveal as never before the specifically cultural components of subject formation. Using colonial and postcolonial theory, he charts the fatal differences — for Sutpen — between (1) a coloni- Introduction 7 al culture (Haiti) whose identity terms exceed (and thus es- cape] the binary opposition of black and white and (2) a master-slave culture (the antebellum American South} whose identity terms are suffocatingly inscribed on a black-white opposition. Eulalia Bon “is” one kind of person in the former culture, another kind in the latter, and Saldivar adroitly discusses Absalom, Absalom! as a text that discloses subjec- tivity to be multiply constructed even as it tells the story of a man (Sutpen) incapable of this awareness. Finally, Saldivar juxtaposes this Faulkner commentary against a continuously pertinent reading of conflicted identity formation in Paredes's Chicano novel George Washington Gémez, concluding that the antirealistic forms of modernism allow both texts ~ through the suggestively different but equally failed life histo- His they narrate — to debunk any totalizing myth of origin or en The three essays in Part II — “The World in the Texts” — focus, respectively, on The Sound and the Fury, Light in Au- gust, and Absalom, Absalom! ~ canonical masterpieces ac- cording to virtually any account of Faulkner’s work. But Cher- yl Lester’s scrutiny of The Sound and the Fury proceeds outside the terms of canonical reverence. Not that Lester is urging us to revoke The Sound and the Fury's canonical sta- tus. Rather, she wants to bring into visibility an ongoing his- torical event that Faulkner's novel simultaneously registers and represses: the Great Migration of blacks from the South that began around 1915 and continued into the 1960s {ie., throughout Faulkner's career, Lester focuses on The Sound and the Fury’s self-conflicted engagement with a historical phenomenon its author could neither ignore nor understand. The white South’s emotional and economic “purchase” on Southern blacks was irreparably self-conflicted, white subject formation depended intricately on black silhouettes and re- ciprocities. Systemic violence against blacks lived side by side with intimate transferential projections on them. Lester ar- gues that Faulkner ~ like some of his memorable protagonists8 — Purtip WEINSTEIN (e.g., Horace, Quentin} ~ could not compass, emotionally and intellectually, the phenomenon staring him in the face. He could narrate this steady exodus of blacks from their home- land only by inverting both its direction and its racial focus. On this reading, Quentin Compson (alert throughout his deathday to every nuance of black behavior in Cambridge) experiences an exile displaced detail by detail from its black origin. Lester goes on to collect the various other “absences” in the text around the overdetermined figure of Caddy — sister, mistress, mother, mammy — concluding that The Sound and the Fury (like its writer) could encounter this historical event only in the form of loss and dispossession. A text usually celebrated for its achieved psychological intensity is here seen as shaped decisively by its racial positioning, and the histori- cal testimony it offers becomes eloquent in its very evasions. Race equally determines Judith Bryant Wittenberg's tho- rough discussion of Light in August, but not in the form of a historical event that white Southerners were determined not to see. Rather, Wittenberg demonstrates race to be invisible in another sense. That is, and this is searingly true of Light in ‘August, race may function as a wholly constructed, concep- tual phenomenon; melanin may have nothing to do with it. In this most race-obsessed of Faulkner's novels there are vir- tually no “black” blacks, only whites tormented by the thought that they may be, or be involved with, blacks un- aware. Pursuing her analysis through a Lacanian understand- ing of the symbolic order (the word world we pass our lives within) as prior to the “things themselves” to which words ostensibly refer, Wittenberg reveals the gossamer but inde- structible fabric of lies, rumors, beliefs, and sayings ~ of words - that cushion every character's thought and action in this novel. “Wordsymbols” do irreparable damage in Light in ‘August, and Wittenberg argues that the novel is intricately complicit with the verbally generated acts of misprision and violence that it simultaneously analyzes ~ and in analyzing indicts. In making this latter argument she joins those other Introduction 9 critics in the Companion who propose a Faulkner inescapably invested in, even though critical of, his culture's most disturb- ing racial and gendered practices. Carolyn Porter’s commentary on Absalom, Absalom! joins Ramén Saldivar's in providing some of the most provocative analysis of subject formation this much discussed text has yet received. Porter notes that Faulkner's early work is maternity- obsessed {especially The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying], whereas Light in August is the transitional text about the fathers (McEachern, Hines, Burden) that heralds the medi- tation on the institution of patriarchy itself in Absalom, Ab- salom!. Pressing hard on those pages that narrate the child Sutpen’s passage from being turned away at the planter’s door to his accession to a “design,” Porter identifies an intricate structure of speech and silence, of self-interrogation and inter- cession of the Other. The damaged child, potentially revolu- tionary, makes his way past his psychic wound and eventually “hears” the voice he requires ~ objective, impersonal, final — to sanetion his design. Drawing on Lacan's model of subject formation, Porter argues that the negotiation of the Oedipal crisis supports not only patriarchy but Western theories of kingship and Christian theology as well. That is, the rebel- ious subject/son, seeking acknowledgment and hearing only the divine father’s silence, finds his way into the mediated law (spoken by others) on the other side of that paternal si- lence. He joins the father rather than slaying him, ensuring that, even though actual sons and fathers succeed each other and die off in time, the structure of the father — what Lacan calls the ‘Symbolic Father” ~ retains its privileged authority. Itis this authority, in the form of an alienated discourse, that modulates the son’s accession into the symbolic order of the father. Absalom, Absalom! attests powerfully to the racial and gender-caused carnage that accompanies this accession. Indeed, the title of Porter's essay — “(Un|Making the Father” points to the diagnostic energy Faulkner mounted in decon- structing, detail by detail, the “becoming” of patriarchy.10 PHitip WEINSTEIN ‘Warwick Wadlington’s concluding essay recapitulates many of the dominant concems already discussed. Like Morcland’s opening essay, this last one is unusually informal and candid in its manner of engaging its reader. Wadlington sees Faulkner addressing (both as achieved diagnosis and as unwitting com- plicity) one of the cardinal ills of our century: the unshakable desire to think of the private sphere as radically different from the public sphere. He interrogates this desire on several levels, beginning with a reader's conviction that one’s own private reading of Faulkner has little in common with the “institu- tion” of Faulkner (the range of transactions ~ this Companion being a good example — that attend to Faulkner in public ways), Wadlington shows that the private act of reading is inevitably inflected by the stance of others: none of us is born knowing how to read, each of us enacts a scene of sustained cultural training when we unselfconsciously attend to or dis- regard certain aspects of a text as we go about the moment-by- moment business of reading. Likewise, the domain of the pri- vate marks our experience of the public, We do not encounter “some monolithic phantom abstraction like The Public, The Economic System, or The Culture.” Rather, we absorb these realities through the agencies of particular people, filtered by their particular subjectivities. Wadlington draws on this fu- sion of the private and the public not only to launch a theory of “discerning reading” but also to claim that Faulkner's texts enact the same dynamic in their encounter with difference, their temptation to demonize difference [racial difference, gender difference) as inalterably Other. He then reads Go Down, Moses as about Ike McCaslin’s doomed attempt to transcend private ownership without incurring indebtedness to others. For the most important projects we conceive are unrealizable without the troublemaking yet empowering par ticipation of others. I might well close this portion of the Introduction by reminding you, the reader, that only by de- pending on my fellow contributors have I been able to access my own thought here, just as you may find your way into your Introduction i richest Faulknerian thoughts and feelings through the media- tion of these gathered and offered essays. How might a reader most profit from this Companion to Wil- liam Faulkner! If the volume is successful, its uses will ex- ceed my predictions. Nevertheless, a certain number of Faulk- nerian inquiries are here explicitly enabled, and these may be identified at the outset. Foremost, this is a volume that interrogates Faulkner's modernist practice as a phenomenon simultaneously socio- logical and aesthetic. Bleikasten masterfully sketches in the contours of European modernism, drawing on Italo Calvino’s memorable claim that “what takes shape in the great novels of the 20th century is the idea of an open encyclopedia. ‘Nowadays it has become impossible to conceive a totality that is not potential, conjectural, and plural” (184). An open ency- clopedia: the phrase finely captures the two dimensions — experimentation and monumentality — so characteristic of European modernism, and Faulkner's contribution to this en- terprise is indisputable. Yet a number of the Companion’s essays probe either mod- emism’s discontents or Faulkner's discontent with modern- ism. He is surely the supreme American novelist to write himself out of modernism in the 1940s as decisively as he had written himself into it in the 1920s, Moreland and O'Donnell both pursue the limitations implicit in a modernist aesthetic, as well as aspects of Faulkner’s work that seem to escape modernist tenets. We tend (with unavoidable imprecision} to call postmodern those writers who are creatively suspicious of modernism, and several contributors open up the possi- bilities of a postmodernist practice. In this regard Matthew's congenial analysis of Barton Fink (a 1990s film that playfully and frighteningly rehearses the plight of a Faulknerlike writer caught up in Hollywood insistences) interrogates explicitly the relation of modernist high culture to popular culture. “Both [modemist art and mass culture] bear the scars of cap-12 Pureip WEINSTEIN italism,” Adorno has tersely written, “both contain elements of change. Both are tom halves of freedom to which, however, they do not add up” (Huyssen 58}. Matthews works to recon- nect these “torn halves,” to bring — as Wadlington wants to bring — the high individualist art of modernism back into relation to the broader culture and economy of twentieth- century modernization trom which it sprang and in terms of which it has its deepest resonance. In a related vein, several essays in the Companion press Faulkner's work against phenomena it is not normally made to confront. Saldivar shows Absalom, Absalom! to have a dif- ferent face when juxtaposed against Paredes's George Wash- ington Gémez, and he uses this juxtaposition to launch a broader exploration of American possibilities of subject for- mation. Lester and Porter likewise insert Faulkner within larger social dynamics than the writer himself is likely to have contemplated: racial/historical processes (the Great Mi- gration) and political arrangements (the dynamics of patri- archy} that his work does not so much choose to represent as, itis, so to speak, chosen by them. For a writer's choices coex- ist exquisitely with his involuntary enactments: the ratio be~ tween these discloses both his individual autonomy and his cultural situatedness. It is difficult not to oppose these terms — autonomy and situatedness — yet many essays in this volume suggest that subjectivity itself is but a reaccenting of culturally proffered {or imposed) models of being. “Identity is the primal form of ideology,” claims Adorno (Negative Dialectics 143), and so many arguments in the Companion bear down on the dynam- ics of interior subject formation precisely because the authors are intent on an exterior mapping of the larger culture's ideo- logical resources — both as limitation and as possibility. Finally, race emerges in these essays as an unpacifiable marker of difference in Faulkner's practice and in our com- mentary on that practice. Whether the focus on race be a comparative study of U.S. and Haitian identity models, or the Introduction. 13 indirect impact of the Great Migration on his texts, or a ps chological probing of the conceptual core of white racism, or a structural inquiry into the role of race within a patriarchal dynamic, or a meditation on the broadly cultural need to think of difference and sameness as continuously interrelated ~ in all of these discussions the phenomenon of race is at the heart of Faulkuer’s present-day significance. More than his white male peers, he seems to have been wounded by race, and he risked his work more than they did on the representation of racial turmoil. It was a wager he knew to be unwinnable, one whose parameters exceeded his self-knowledge and whose pursuit would necessarily deprive him of mastery. Perhaps it is his acceptance of his own nonmastery — his inextricable situatedness in what Wadlington calls his culture's “tragic turbulence” — that best accounts for his ongoing and far from innocent vitality, even now, more than thirty years after his death, near the end of a century he never ceased to view with amazement.I The Texts in the WorldRICHARD C, MORELAND 1 Faulkner and Modernism When I think Faulkner, I'm usually reading, writing, or teach- ing (and learning) about his work, or performing some combi- nation of these three activities, and perhaps it is these activ. ities that suggest the three things I think of Faulkner's work as doing and enabling others to do, the things I think litera- ture and other cultural work can do at its best. First, his work reflects or represents certain realities (as in much reading, especially of “readerly” texts], It never does so directly, but it often does urge readers’ attentions on past a relatively trans- parent medium toward the apparently solid message, past questions of how we are seeing toward questions of what we are seeing, in ways that tend to reinforce or articulate (or rearticulate) what seems natural, what seems like common sense. However, Faulkner's work, at other places and times in it, or in the reading, writing about, or teaching of it, also pointedly criticizes those same realities it represents, calling readers’ attention back from what they see to how they see it, to the “nature” of reality and to “common sense” as construc- tions and questions for discussion (as in much writing, espe- cially of “writerly” texts). And in still other ways, Faulkner's work participates in the ongoing social construction of those realities insofar as readers, writers, teachers, and students more or less consciously respond to such questions of nature and common sense as important cultural works in progress, 718 RicHarp MORELAND an ongoing process of social negotiation and change {as in much teaching and learning, for example]. What does all this have to do with modernism? The three functions I have suggested for literature assume different rela- tions to one another in different social and historical contexts and in different kinds of texts. The American literature of the later nineteenth century that is often called realist literature seems to emphasize most the task of representing reality, al- though certainly it does also criticize and take part in those realities it represents (not least by rearticulating — as it re- states — common sense|. I think modernist literature tends to adopt a more emphatically and self-consciously critical role. ‘And much of the literature called postmodernist, contempo- rary, postwar, multicultural, or postcolonial tends to place more stress on the ongoing, problematic relationship between the work and the social contexts of its production, reception, and circulation. Faulkner's work is usually considered mod- emist and correspondingly critical in its relationship to the social contexts in which and about which Faulkner wrote. But the social criticism elaborated in his work becomes more in- teresting if we consider how this critical function and mod- emist periodization remain closely related to a more repre- sentational function and realist discourse, and also to a more participatory function of transference, negotiation, and change, in a more obviously multicultural, multitemporal (or nonsynchronous) social context, Faulkner's work does suggest trenchant criticisms of power- ful cultural and psychological currents in his society, by artic- ulating and especially by accenting disturbing motivations and effects that those discourses more often obscure, mini- mize, or ignore, For example, Joe Christmas's efforts in Light in August to become a man on the model of his adopted fami- ly’s and his society's assumptions about masculinity repro- duce those rites of manhood in several of their least flattering, most defensive and violent forms. At fourteen and fifteen, Joe and neighboring boys his age can “plow and milk and chop Faulkner and Modernism 19 wood like grown men”; however, to avoid “the paramount sin” of being “publicly convicted of virginity,” one boy ar- ranges for five of them to take turns in a deserted shed with an. unnamed young black woman (LA 156). Instead of simply emerging from the shed confirmed as a (white) man, however, Joe enters the dark shed and feels his own confusion and fear as “a terrible haste. . . . something in him trying to get out,”" something he is more accustomed to associate with the situa- tion of the young woman here as part of her more general social situation as feminine and black, “smelling the woman, smelling the negro all at once,” sensing only vaguely “some- thing, prone, abject” (156). His reaction is unexpected and desperate, but it recalls and focuses the larger social dynamic: “He kicked her hard, kicking into and through a choked wail of surprise and fear” (156—7}, Joe’s and the other boys’ attempt to overcome their own confusion and fear have violently as- signed that confusion and fear to her, to be overcome by domi- nating her. Their white manhood depends on that domina- tion. Joe reacts in much the same way to his adopted mother’s Kindness to him, a kindness tempting enough that he wants to lower his guard and cry, but for that very reason hated and considered distinctly feminine: “It was the woman: that soft Kindness which he believed himself doomed to be forever vic- tim of and which he hated worse than he did the hard and ruthless justice of men. ‘She is trying to make me cry’” (168— 9}, And at his first news of “the temporary and abject helpless- ness” suggested to him by menstruation, the idea that “the smooth and superior shape in which volition dwelled” could be “doomed to be at stated and inescapable intervals victims of periodical filth,” Christmas only “got over it, recovered” by going out and shooting a sheep: “he knelt, his hands in the yet warm blood of the dying beast, trembling, drymouthed, back- glaring,” as if to reassure himself, “illogical and desperately calm All right. It is so, then. But not to me. Not in my life and my love” (185-6).