Critical Insights
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
CRITICAL INSIGHTS William Faulkner CRITICAL INSIGHTS William Faulkner Editor Kathryn Stelmach Artuso Westmont College SALEM PRESS A Division of EBSCO Publishing Ipswich, Massachusetts GREY HOUSE PUBLISHING Cover Photo: William Faulkner © /ANSA/Corbis Editor’s text © 2013 by Kathryn Stelmach Artuso Copyright © 2013, by Salem Press, A Division of EBSCO Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be used or reproduced in any man- ner whatsoever or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or me- chanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner. For permissions requests, contact [email protected]. Critical Insights: William Faulkner, 2013, published by Grey House Publishing, Inc., Amenia, NY, under exclusive license from EBSCO Publishing, Inc. ∞ The paper used in these volumes conforms to the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48-1992 (R1997). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data William Faulkner / editor, Kathryn Stelmach Artuso, Westmont College. pages cm. -- (Critical Insights) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4298-3828-3 (hardcover) 1. Faulkner, William, 1897-1962--Criticism and interpretation. I. Artuso, Kathryn Stelmach, editor of compilation. PS3511.A86Z9856857 2013 813’.52--dc23 2013008597 ebook ISBN: 978-1-4298-3844-3 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Contents About this Volume, Kathryn Stelmach Artuso vii Career, Life, and Influence On William Faulkner, Kathryn Stelmach Artuso 3 Biography of William Faulkner, Lorie Watkins Fulton 19 Critical Contexts “The Past Is Never Dead”: Faulkner’s Relationship to Southern Culture and History, Karen M. Andrews 29 William Faulkner’s Critical Reception, Taylor Hagood 51 Reading Faulkner through Morrison, Doreen Fowler 68 Misreading “the Other” as a Strategy of Narrative Empathy in Go Down, Moses, Patrick E. Horn 84 Critical Readings Faulkner the Cannibal: Digesting Conrad, Jacques Pothier 105 A Furious Echo: Hearing Dublin’s Joyce in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha, Kieran Quinlan 125 As I Lay Dying, The Time of Man, and the Modern Folk Novel, Mark Lucas 142 “Shall Not the Judge of All the Earth Do Right?” William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, and Jurisprudence, Bryan Giemza 161 “Far from Home across the Sea”: William Faulkner, Randall Kenan, and Taboo Sexualities, Mary Alice Kirkpatrick 179 Faulkner and the Bible: A Haunted Voice, Norman W. Jones 202 “A Summer of Wistaria”: Old Tales and Talking, Story, and History in Absalom, Absalom!, Hans H. Skei 222 Faulkner and Film: The 1950s Melodramas, D. Matthew Ramsey 240 Hurling Yourself against the Beautiful: Faulkner and Creativity, Amy Weldon 262 v Resources Chronology of William Faulkner’s Life 279 Works by William Faulkner 283 Bibliography 285 About the Editor 289 Contributors 291 Index 295 vi Critical Insights About this Volume Kathryn Stelmach Artuso Faced with a staggering mountain of commentary dedicated to the fic- tion of William Faulkner, critics may well wonder whether anything new is left to be said. Yet this volume proves that close textual analysis and theoretical applications still yield fresh insights that can be com- municated to Faulkner’s readership. Fostering appreciation of William Faulkner’s fiction and encouraging new scholarship, this volume seeks to deepen readers’ comprehension of Faulkner’s daring and defamil- iarizing narrative techniques. The thirteen essays included provide an extensive range of critical perspectives and offer innovative insights on perhaps the most experimental and influential American author of the twentieth century. In this volume, relatively new voices in Faulkner studies join the chorus of well-established scholars; European scholars appear alongside American scholars; and various schools of criticism blend in counterpoint and harmony. The volume opens with a consideration of Faulkner’s career, life, and influence, beginning with an overview of significant themes and techniques in Faulkner’s works, paying particular attention to the cen- tral section of Go Down, Moses (1942) as revelatory of larger themes in Faulkner’s oeuvre. This essay is followed by a helpful biographical sketch of Faulkner’s life by Lorie Watkins Fulton. The four critical context essays follow and build an introductory scaffolding, ranging broadly from cultural contextualization and critical reception and then narrowing to comparison and close textual analysis. In “‘The Past Is Never Dead’: Faulkner’s Relationship to Southern Culture and His- tory,” Karen M. Andrews explores Faulkner’s fiction in relation to its historical and cultural context, and especially regarding the legacy of slavery and segregation in the American South. Taylor Hagood con- quers the daunting task of navigating and summarizing the expand- ing ocean of Faulkner criticism in the next essay entitled “William Faulkner’s Critical Reception.” Following the contextual and reception About this Volume vii essays, Doreen Fowler’s piece, “Reading Faulkner through Morrison,” renders a comparative analysis of racial hybridity in Absalom, Absa- lom! (1936) and Toni Morrison’s Jazz (1992) in an effort to illuminate the enigmatic motives of Charles Bon. Focusing the critical lens on a single text in “Misreading ‘the Other’ as a Strategy of Narrative Empa- thy in Go Down, Moses,” Patrick E. Horn adopts a narratological and reader-response approach to examine Faulkner’s paradoxical narrative strategies that elicit a reader’s empathy in the face of white characters’ misrepresentations of African Americans. Like the first four essays and the introductory piece, “On William Faulkner,” the nine essays that follow present new scholarship and provide a variety of critical readings that elucidate Faulkner’s chal- lenging high modernist fiction. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the dialogic and intertextual nature of Faulkner’s works should provoke a profusion of comparative analyses; in fact, five of the nine articles in this section of critical readings place Faulkner in juxtaposi- tion with various modern and contemporary authors. In “Faulkner the Cannibal: Digesting Conrad,” Jacques Pothier makes a strong contri- bution to postcolonial and global south studies when he explores two of Faulkner’s early short stories as well as Sutpen’s Haitian experi- ence in Absalom, Absalom! to reveal the African “Orientalism” that Faulkner appropriated from Joseph Conrad. The profound influence on Faulkner of James Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness technique also comes to mind as readily as Conrad’s frame narratives—a topic ad- dressed in “A Furious Echo: Hearing Dublin’s Joyce in Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha,” as Kieran Quinlan reveals the transatlantic intersec- tions between Ireland and the American South and analyzes the tech- nical parallels between Ulysses (1922) and The Sound and the Fury (1929). Less recognized than Joyce and Conrad but perhaps equally significant for Faulkner’s aesthetic development was Elizabeth Madox Roberts, whose 1926 “plainfolk” novel, The Time of Man, demon- strated the complexity of ostensibly provincial characters and wielded immense influence on the verbal texture, mythical resonances, and in- viii Critical Insights terior monologues of As I Lay Dying (1930), as Mark Lucas relates in his essay, “As I Lay Dying, The Time of Man, and the Modern Folk Novel.” Skipping from the 1920s to the 1980s, from Faulkner’s influences to those influenced by Faulkner, Bryan Giemza’s essay, “‘Shall Not the Judge of All the Earth Do Right?’ William Faulkner, Cormac Mc- Carthy, and Jurisprudence,” compares the use of specialized legal lan- guage in the works of the two writers, especially in McCarthy’s Suttree (1979) and Blood Meridian (1985) and Faulkner’s The Town (1957), where the use of such legal parlance allowed the writers to investi- gate the limits of communication and the interplay between natural law and human law. Another contemporary writer, Randall Kenan, is jux- taposed with Faulkner in Mary Alice Kirkpatrick’s essay, “‘Far from Home across the Sea’: William Faulkner, Randall Kenan, and Taboo Sexualities.” Reconsidering the traditional southern trope of “place,” Kirkpatrick’s scrutiny of Faulkner’s short story, “Divorce in Naples,” and Kenan’s short story, “Run, Mourner, Run,” underscores the ways in which sites of travel and sites such as the stable “homeplace” can both “reorient the boundaries of desire.” If comparative analyses prove the most popular for this volume, a close runner-up would be discussions of Faulkner’s highly acclaimed novel Absalom, Absalom!, whose dizzying and dazzling complexity inspired several of the contributors, including Fowler, Pothier, Norman W. Jones, and Hans H. Skei, to tackle its challenging contours. While I considered grouping all of these essays together, I sought intermit- tency and variety instead, although some overlap was inevitable. In “The Haunted House: Faulkner and the Bible,” Jones closely expli- cates passages with biblical resonances from both Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury to support his claim that the Bible oper- ates as a “ghostly presence” or “intertext” in Faulkner’s fiction, acting in ambivalent ways as both an ancient text and as a prophetic force on his characters and on his readership. Taking a different approach, Skei, in his essay “‘A Summer of Wistaria’: Old Tales and Talking, Story, About this Volume ix and History in Absalom, Absalom!,” revisits