Book Reviews

BOOK REVIEWS Creating Faulkner's Reputation: end. Everywhere in the academy nowa- The Politics of Modern Literary days, the concept of disinterested literary Criticism, by Lawrence H. judgment is under assault. The basis of Schwartz. Knox,ville, Tenn.: the assault varies from critic to critic, but University of Tennessee Press, 1988, the two books under review offer a sign of the times. In Creating Faulkner's Reputa- 286 pp., $32.50 hardbound, $14.95 tion: The Politics of Modern Literary Criti- paperback. cism, Lawrence H. Schwartz makes it clear that naked politics account for why we think so highly of a writer like William Faulkner. Recalcitrance, Faulkner, and the And in Recalcitrance, Faulkner, and the Pro- fessors: A Critical Fiction, Austin M. Wright Professors: A Critical Fiction, by transmogrifies all criticism into a species Austin M. W~ght. Iowa City, Iowa: of private, dubiously motivated fiction- University of Iowa Press, 1990, 242 making. pp., $25.00 hardbound, $12.95 In both books, it should be clear, the paperback. intrinsic quality of Faulkner's art is less important than the uses to which that art James W. Tuttleton can be put in making arguments about an entirely different matter- the political, his- torical, and cultural conditions regnant in How is the reputation of a writer made? America during the past half-century. It used to be thought that a writer's stand- Faulkner, it must be said, was critically ing was based on the estimate of many, neglected during the 1920s and 1930s. His many readers of taste and conviction, ex- horrific pictures of alcoholism, incest, mur- perienced men and women whose knowl- der, and madness--in The Sound and the edge of literature was wide and deep and Fury, Sanctuary, and Light in August (to whose standards were formed by the con- name just a few novels)--were often de- tinual comparison and contrast of the style, nounced as bizarrely Gothic, morbid, per- vision, and judgment of writers. Not all of verse, and nihilistic. Worse, they were un- them were formal literary critics. But the intelligible. After the end of World War estimates of literary value by formal critics II, however, his reputation began to soar. used to be weighed carefully by the rest of I can well remember a question posed to us, who perhaps have less time to read as me in the early 1950s, in an interview for widely and weigh so judiciously. In past academic study abroad in which the Ful- ages, literary critics- Dryden, Dr. Johnson, bright Committee wanted to know how I Coleridge, T. S. Eliot, to name only a few-- could justify to foreigners the rising Amer- exercised the useful function of not only ican critical interest in a writer whose vision bringing us the news about poets, play- of the South, and of America generally, wrights, and novelists, but also of discrim- seemed based largely on Krafft-Ebing's Psy- inating amongst them; and their convic- chopathia Sexualis. Wasn't Faulkner distort- tion as to the literary distinction of each ing the wholesome character of American writer served to help the rest of us to life? establish a hierarchy of worth and impor- No one can disagree with Schwartz's tance. account of Faulkner's status with critics in Those days have apparently come to an the first two decades of his writing career. Book Renews 85 But what accounts for his dramatic rise on Schwartz, Faulkner was seized upon by the literary stock market? This is the ques- three groups who wanted to destroy the tion Schwartz undertakes to answer. influence of the old-line leftists like Alfred Kazin, Granville Hicks, and Maxwell Geis- The following study attempts to show how the mar. These three groups wanted to find confluence of literary, cultural, and commercial an important writer whose values were com- forces created and shaped Faulkner's literary patible with the cold war celebration of reputation. It investigates the individuals and institutions responsible for raising him to world- American nationalism, democratic poli- wide fame and for drawing his work into the tics, and capitalism. These three groups canon. It is a book that focuses on the "cultural were the New Critics, the New York mechanisms" that, in less than five years, made for the sudden turnabout .... What can be seen Intellectuals, and the Rockefeller Founda- in the sudden rise in Faulkner's reputation is Lion. the instability of aesthetic criteria .... Literary There is no doubt that the rise of the reputations rise and fall dramatically because the critics reflect not universal, but relative, lit- New Criticism advanced the claims of erary values which are, in large measure, Faulkner to our attention. The critical es- historically determined. says and studies by Warren, Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, R. P. Black- About these assumptions, blithely taken mur, and others had the effect of elucidat- for granted, and about the conclusions ing the tensions, paradoxes, ambiguities, drawn from them it is necessary, in part, and ironies of much difficult modernist to disagree. But for Schwartz there are literature. And a part of that project was to several reasons advanced to account for demonstrate aspects of Faulkner's literary Faulkner's delayed critical acclaim. First, genius that had been overlooked in the an argument had to be advanced-and was, previous twenty years. But were they Cold largely by Robert Penn Warren and Mal- Warriors striking a blow against the So- colm Cowley--that Faulkner had been mis- cialist Left? Most of the New Critics, it understood by his detractors and was in should be noted, were centrally concerned fact a "literary genius" and "a serious mor- with the aesthetic features of Faulkner's alist." Second, the availability of cheap pa- fiction: his techniques of fictional struc- perbacks and a vast postwar reading audi- ture, point of view, style, and symbolism. ence made it possible to keep Faulkner's To the extent that they had a cultural or books in print, thus fueling the revival of political perspective, many of them were interest in him. About these two points as much pro-Southern as pro-American and there can be little disagreement. But were distinctly critical of those pre- and Schwartz goes on to a doubtful third rea- postwar conditions that are customarily in- son, which is the real focus of the book. voked to define America: urbanism, indus- During the cold war confrontation be- trialism, liberal democracy, etc. Attached tween capitalism and communism, the as- to the "Fugitive" and "Agrarian" move- sumptions of American left-wing writers ments -- their manifesto had been declared and critics-who favored the methods of in I'll Take My Stand: The South and the realism and naturalism-had to be con- Agrarian Tradition, by Twelve Southerners tilted. How? By advancing "an elitist (Harper, 1930)--the New Critics were aesthetic-an aesthetic that claimed im- perhaps more interested in furthering the portant literature was remote, complex, reputations of "Southern Literary Renais- iconoclastic, and inaccessible, and re- sance" writers (Thomas Wolfe, Katherine quired interpretation." According to Anne Porter, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, 86 Academic Questions / Summer 1991 Ellen Glasgow, Stark Young, and Carson lectuals about how their cold war objec- McCullers) than having at the Commu- tives ought to be prosecuted. There were, nist Left, whom they largely dismissed. he reports, That the New York Intellectuals- William Phillips, Philip Rahv, Lionel Trill- three waysof supporting American letters: sub- ing, Dwight "McDonald" and Irving sidies to selected literary journals to raise the [sic], rates paid to contributors; grants in literary crit- Howe, among others--were Cold War- icism to special institutes or schools, such as riors is beyond dispute. Deriving, on the Ransom's Kenyon School of English or one whole, from a socialist background in the suggested by Blackmur at Princeton; and fel- lowships awarded direcdyto writers selectedby 1930s, they turned against Stalinism and the editors of literary journals. communism and championed a literary ex- perimentalism that sharply differed from Guess who got the money? Funds were the journalistic proletarian writing so of- doled out to Phillips's Partisan Review. Ran- ten inflated in importance by the New Masses som's Kenyon Review got emergency grants. and the early Partisan Review. That the So what? Other journals got grants too-- literary experimentalists they favored-- Poetry, Accent, etc. And some magazines, Eliot, Faulkner, Pound, and Lawrence, for like Allen Tate's Sewanee Review, didn't example--were political or cultural con- get support, largely because Tate had left servatives, made for grotesque contradic- the editorship. Although Schwartz comes tions in their thought, but nobody seemed short of claiming a conspiracy hatched by to mind. Still, why were they taken with these three so different groups, reverber- Faulkner? ations of the ominous echo in the book. I have always suspected that their aban- It would be tedious to rehearse the ev- donment of proletarian trash in favor of idence that Schwartz adduces to support writers who produced genuine literature his outlandish claim that Faulkner was can- was a form of penance, which required the onized in order to further the aims of the humiliation of acclaiming modernists who Cold Warriors. Not only is the evidence were very conservative in their social exiguous and susceptible of different in- views--although this is not a suspicion that terpretations, it also assumes that a writer occurs to Schwartz. He is of the opinion can attain canonical status and a wide read- that the New York Intellectuals mobilized ership of millions simply on the basis of in support of Faulkner to further the anti- what Malcolm Cowley or Irving Howe said Stalinist position and to show the bona about him at one time or another.

Load more