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Cleanth Brooks' Use of Faulkner As New Critical Robert Penn Warren Studies Volume 8 Robert Penn Warren Studies Article 8 2008 Recreating Faulkner: Cleanth Brooks’ Use of Faulkner as New Critical Exemplar Dana W. McMichael Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/rpwstudies Part of the American Literature Commons, and the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation McMichael, Dana W. (2008) "Recreating Faulkner: Cleanth Brooks’ Use of Faulkner as New Critical Exemplar," Robert Penn Warren Studies: Vol. 8 , Article 8. Available at: https://digitalcommons.wku.edu/rpwstudies/vol8/iss1/8 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by TopSCHOLAR®. It has been accepted for inclusion in Robert Penn Warren Studies by an authorized administrator of TopSCHOLAR®. For more information, please contact [email protected]. DANA W. MCMICHAEL 33 Recreating Faulkner: Cleanth Brooks’ Use of Faulkner as New Critical Exemplar DANA W. MCMICHAEL The works of William Faulkner hold a seemingly unshakable place in today’s literary canon, earning his stories and novels not only a spot on the university Introduction to Literature syllabus, but as the focus of entire literature seminars. In 1992, Lance Lyday observed that “William Faulkner and his writings have now been the subject of more than 6,000 essays and reviews, more than 300 books, and about 500 dissertations—more than the total amount of critical attention devoted to any other writer in English except Shakespeare.”1 Faulkner’s works, however, have not always garnered such an outpouring of critical response. Before Faulkner’s 1950 reception of the Nobel Prize for Literature skyrocketed him to literary fame, critical response to his early work was sparse: ten pieces on The Sound and The Fury, seven on Light in August, and only one on As I Lay Dying. In fact, in 1945, all seventeen of his novels were out of print, concrete evidence that his work had fallen into neglect.2 Nor were his novels universally lauded. Early reviews of The Sound and The Fury (1929) were often unfavorable, remarking that “the theme and the characters are trivial, unworthy of the enormous and complex craftsmanship expended on them,” or that after finishing the novel, the “reader feels tempted to apply for admission to the nearest insane asylum.”3 Early comments on As I Lay Dying continued in much the same vein, with one reviewer complaining that she is “maddened that Mr. Faulkner 1 Lance Lyday, “Faulkner Criticism: Will It Ever End?” South Carolina Review 25 (1992): 183. 2 Malcolm Cowley, “Introduction to The Portable Faulkner,” in William Faulkner: Three Decades of Criticism, eds. Frederick J. Hoffman and Olga W. Vickery (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1960), 96. 3 Clifton Fadiman, “Hardly Worth While,” Nation, January 15, 1930, 75; Howard Rockey, “Fiction, Largely European and Very Good in the Average,” Philadelphia Inquirer, November 30, 1929, 18. RWP: An Annual of Robert Penn Warren Studies VIII (2008): 33-48 34 RWP should lavish his talents on material which is so grotesque and so essentially insignificant,” and another asserting that Faulkner’s novel “reveals a blind, self-indulgent obsession with death and morbidity.”4 Although Faulkner’s early novels did receive a few favorable reviews, even several complimentary comparisons to Joyce, one writer’s reaction to Sanctuary is much more typical: Sanctuary “leaves one with the impression of having been vomited bodily from the sensual cruelty of its pages.”5 Implicit behind many of these early responses to Faulkner’s work stands the accusation that Faulkner somehow refuses to portray the South “realistically,” that his work reflects no objective, morally uplifting correspondence to the phenomenal world. In “A Yankee Looks at Dixie” (1936), Katharine Fullerton Gerould indicts Faulkner, along with James Gould and Erskine Caldwell, for replacing “the old sickening sweetness” of Southern fiction with a “new sickening sourness,” and remarks that although she has been assured by “bona fide Mississippians that Mr. Faulkner has only to walk out of his own front gate to encounter all his characters in the flesh,” she feels certain that “Sanctuary and ‘A Rose for Emily’ derive to some extent from Mr. Faulkner’s personal morbidness.” While Gerould doubts the accuracy of Faulkner’s character portraits, she contradictorily asserts that the sheer weight of “callousness, bigotry, and stupidity” among characters in Southern fiction necessarily reflects the reality that “citizenship in Dixie is on a lower level than elsewhere.” Ultimately, Gerould longs for literature rooted in her version of historical reality: A slavish admirer of the great Virginians of history, I have wanted nothing so much as to be ‘shown’ a people still stamped with their seal. For their sake I have been patient, all my life, with mocking birds, okra, and Southern accents. It is with a sickening disappointment that this particular Yankee turns at last from the fiction in which the magnolias rot and smell to heaven. It is a very depressing literature, my friends!6 4 Edith H. Walton, “An Eccentric Novel,” New York Sun, November 7, 1930, 31; Edwin Muir, “New Novels,” Listener, October 16, 1935, 681. 5 Harry L. Martin, “Horrifying Tale Set in Memphis,” Memphis Evening Appeal, March 26, 1931, 3. 6 Katherine Fullerton Gerould, “A Yankee Looks at Dixie,” American Mercury 37 (1936): 218-220. DANA W. MCMICHAEL 35 The month after Gerould’s article appeared, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren responded with “Dixie Looks at Mrs. Gerould.” Identifying her as a “practitioner. of the current socio-economico- pathologico-Marxist critical method,”7 Brooks and Warren dismantle Gerould’s arguments through the very kind of close reading that will later be touted as New Criticism. (Interestingly, in this essay, Brooks and Warren refer to Marxist criticism as “the new criticism” [588].) Brooks and Warren argue that Faulkner, along with several other Southern writers, must be judged on their own merits, not against a Marxist agenda, or some constructed historical standard of a “nice” Southerner. The story of Faulkner’s move from an obscure, ambivalently- received Southern gothicist to a Modernist icon forms the basis of Lawrence Schwartz’s fascinating study, Creating Faulkner’s Reputation: The Politics of Modern Literary Criticism. Schwartz focuses on Malcolm Cowley’s impact on Faulkner’s career, pointing out that “many literary historians and critics see” the publication of Cowley’s edition of The Portable Faulkner (1946) “as the turning point in Faulkner’s literary reputation.”8 Schwartz argues that the New Critics, represented by Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, and the New York intellectuals, represented by Lionel Trilling, Philip Rahv, and Richard Blackmur, fused to advance the Cold War cultural agenda. This new literary consensus used Faulkner’s work, reanalyzing it as the representative of “ahistorical art-for-art’s sake formalism,” the basis of a postwar American aesthetic determined to reject “naturalism and socially conscious literature [which] came to be identified with the ‘totalitarianism’ of the Soviet Union and Stalinist politics.”9 While Schwartz acknowledges that Cleanth Brooks “would come to dominate the New Critical interpretation of Faulkner,”10 his study relegates Brooks’ contributions to a relatively minor position, all but ignoring Brooks’ dozens of articles and book-length studies on Faulkner. 7 Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, “Dixie Looks at Mrs. Gerould,” American Review 6 (1936): 587; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text. 8 Lawrence H. Schwartz, Creating Faulkner’s Reputation: The Politics of Modern Literary Criticism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988), 10. 9 Schwartz, Creating Faulkner’s Reputation, 209. 10 Schwartz, Creating Faulkner’s Reputation, 19. 36 RWP Two book-length treatments of Cleanth Brooks apply a corrective to Schwartz’s oversight. Lewis Simpson, in The Possibilities of Order: Cleanth Brooks and His Work, collects a series of essays valorizing Brooks’ contributions to the twentieth-century American literary scene. While Simpson acknowledges that, for over twenty years, Brooks “devoted his most sustained and thorough attention” to Faulkner’s work, the main thrust of this collection is to “elaborate the complex variety of his critical motives and interests,” an agenda which necessarily treats his connection with Faulkner as one among many.11 In Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Criticism, Mark Royden Winchell attempts to understand Brooks’ relationship to modern literary criticism by offering “an extended critical biography.”12 Though Winchell pointedly sprinkles references to Faulkner throughout his text in anticipation of developing the Brooks-Faulkner connection, the chapter developing that relationship focuses exclusively on Brooks’ The Yoknapatawpha Country, a volume which Winchell claims “has set the standard for the hundreds of books and thousands of essays on Faulkner that have appeared since.”13 While Brooks certainly joins other critics already engaged in Faulkner’s makeover, his role in shaping Faulkner into a modernist icon is not negligible, nor is it confined to The Yoknapatawpha Country. From Brooks’ first printed mention of Faulkner in “Dixie Looks at Mrs. Gerould,” he argues for a different approach to reading Faulkner. He consistently denigrates readers who search Faulkner’s texts for Marxist ideology, or who insist on a Jamesian realism, or who speculate on Faulkner’s literary intentions. By arguing for a close reading of texts that underscores the importance of structure and form, Brooks helped move Faulkner criticism in new directions, repackaging him as a Modernist writer whose works were ahistorical, apolitical, and dominated by structure. Among Faulkner’s few full-length, pre-Nobel Prize critical responses, three stand out in terms of Brooks’ later reading of 11 Lewis P. Simpson, “Introduction,” The Possibilities of Order: Cleanth Brooks and His Work (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976), xx, xv. 12 Mark Royden Winchell, Cleanth Brooks and the Rise of Modern Criticism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), xi.
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