Prof. Harvey

Modern Southern Fiction

 

FAULKNER REVIEW

 

INTRODUCTION TO SOUTH

 

South may not be very much different now:
--TV/malls: culture the same everywhere

--interstate and Wal-Marts: fewer hidden country backpockets and small towns eroded

--no longer industrially sluggish: Sunbelt vs. Rustbelt now

           

But up thru Civil Rights era of 60s it was different. Most of our texts are pre-1950s, and represent a Southern difference that can be exaggerated into stereotypes:

 

1) Gorgeous countryside

--rich, fecund, edenlike

--hot/sensual and difficult to move fast: more leisurely

 

2) Rural culture/ people

--folk traditions: banjo or fiddle, tall tales, black "conjure" and blues

--less mobility = extended family/sense of community: support but also suffocating

--poverty and ignorance: grotesque stuff in film “Deliverance”

--Bible Belt fundamentalist/evangelical religion

 

3) Planter ideology/ Aristocratic myth from plantation days (review in the Cash essay)

--greater sense of class than in North

--manners/cultivation of social graces and "honor" important (“Driving Miss Daisy”)
--redneck anger/ resentment against pretentious upper-class
--Cash points out the notion of aristocratic “blue-blood” planter class being a different species is a myth

 

4) Legacy of Civil War

--romanticism of "Lost Cause"/ attachment to tradition/Dixie flag even today

--but also ambivalence about "heroic" generation

--living up to expectations of heroic "fathers"

--specter of Civil War defeat/white guilt brought on by previous generations:

--history less abstract in South: North forgets CW, South doesn’t

 

5) Racial relations/tensions              
--segregation and Jim Crow law (reviewed in Jim Crow website)

--our first two works, by Faulkner and Wright, are directly about race relations (interesting to note, however): for a book so preoccupied with “passing,” Light in August has no major black characters--perhaps in this novel Faulkner is less concerned about race per se, than the idea of race)

 

FAULKNER BIOGRAPHY

 

--1897-1962: lived most of his life in Mississippi

--moderately renown great-grandfather

--grandfather and father less successful (specter of declension makes one very conscious of history)

--late teens became fascinated with literature, but never academically inclined

--decadent/aesthetic style of late 1890s (Oscar Wilde) influenced his writing: purple prose, jaded world-weary twilight musings=ruminative style

--joined Canadian air-force

--pretended to see action: metal plate in head, limp

--brief time in college, odd jobs

--starts to write, two apprentice novels

--1929 Sound and the Fury: major modernist text/ like James Joyce

--then sequence on Yoknapatawpha County (mini fictional cosmos), many of which are consummately aesthetic but also have elements of the lurid and grotesque and gothic

 

1929--SF: idiot, suicide, etc

1930--As I lay Dying, family carries mother's corpse thru flood and fire for a week

1931--Sanctuary: pimps, criminals, college girl raped with corn husk     

1932--Light in August: ends with man being castrated

1936--Absalom, Absalom!: epic story, like Cash's frontier man become planter: son has to murder best friend  when he threatens to marry sister, because he turns out to be black half-brother

1942--Go Down, Moses: less lurid than the others

 

--many of his novels out-of-print by mid 40s: too sensational, morbid, intense, obscure

--but Faulkner was always liked in France/Europe

--continued to write: but books marred by bombastic rhetoric without substance

--lectures, hunts on a big farm he buys, flies around drunk

--eventually his fame resurges.  Now considered perhaps the most renowned 20th-Century American author

           

FAULKNER DIFFICULTIES
--written by Faulkner
--florid, ponderous oratory (all tales have a talking/oralquality, but sometimes pompous)
--grotesque/ morbid violence can be over the top (modern Southern literature has a big sub-branch known as Southern Gothic--the stories of Flannery O’Connor, for instance)
--consequences before cause: time shifts--in Light in August the burning of the house, before you know of relation b/w Christmas and Burden

--overlapping, partial character perspectives

--Faulkner uniquely conjoins modernist technique (fragmentary narrative, time shifts, interior monologue) to rural/brutal content

--there are racial/gender stereotypes

           

FAULKNER PLEASURES

--written by Faulkner
--incrediblly powerful meditative/incantatory prose

--straightforward scenes of raw poignant power

--involvement because you have to sort out action; no beginning and ending to story creates a strange, palpable viscous density that is very seductive

--intense moral and psychological drama.   

 

LIGHT IN AUGUST BACKGROUND

 

--African-American writer Nella Larsen wrote Quicksand and Passing in 1928 and 1929

--basically story about the racial-culture theme of “passing”, light skinned black passing as white, although there is no evidence anywhere that Christmas is black

--but you might more accurately say it is about the fantasy, out of dread or desire, of there being black within whiteness

--keep in mind Faulkner, born in 1897, virtually grew up with Jim Crow law at its most entrenched

--inbetween the 1896 Supreme Court “separate but equal” Plessy vs Ferguson (1896) decision

--and the Brown vs Board of Education decision of 1953 that outlawed segregation in schools

--Faulkner was not racist in the sense of believing in white superiority, but as a Southerner he also had a certain regional resistance to federally mandated change.  In a speech he once said that desegregation policy needed to “go slowly”

 

 

FAULKNER: CATEGORIES/PASSAGES TO REVIEW  (note: I could use the word “themes” here but I am not convinced that literature has “themes,” as if authors intentionally produced themes for students to later write about!  Thinking about “themes” also reduces complexity and the sense that a text might struggle over something and ultimately come to no resolution.  Rather than “themes” think of issues and tensions, even pathologies.   For instance, all the leaking/fluid/pollution images: are such registering anxiety over race or sex/gender? Maybe Christmas’s problem is that he cannot disentangle how “race” and “gender” affect his identity. Ponder these odd images for a potential paper topic: Lena pregnant, bottom 189, top 465, top 363. )

 

Lena earthiness--middle 29 (and everywhere)

 

Alienated males: Hightower and Joe Xmas 

 

Generational/parental authority stuff

 

Weird sexual stuff—top of page 107, toothpaste in orphan home scene

 

Race—near top page 74, 115

 

LIGHT IN AUGUST: “KEY” PASSAGES

 

--what I expect of you is not a comprehensive understanding of a text, but an intense understanding

--do not think of themes/symbols, think of issues that a text unconsciously ruminates upon

--good papers derive from you snagging an issue, then tracing down its permutations/cause (trauma)-effect sequence, or its ramifications for a particular character

--you can only snag an issue by paying close attention to what I loosely would call odd passages (the toothpaste scene, for example)

 

Attending to the odd toothpaste scene and other kindred ones, you might detect this pattern:


Earth principle (healthy)--female/blackness (115) vs. maleness/fatherly authority/abstraction/words.

Some characters’ (Lena’s) cognition/body seem in perfect harmony.

Some characters (Percy G.; McEachern) force a physical/cognitive harmony thru fascist/Fatherly will): see 203 gallop.

Other characters can’t unite: Hightower with the Tennyson poetry volume on lap as he dreams of Civil War ancestor, with paunchy body (363).

Other characters are taught to suppress body--Christmas obliged to recite Bible lessons from McEachern.

Other characters (J. Burden) during intimacy shout out “foul” words—what’s that all about?

 

Once you’ve detected a pattern (not drawn a conclusion, however), certain passages that otherwise would just speed by should be more salient and suggestive:

 

--take note of odd images, for example, that mix liquid/male/text/inside-outside (108: “He watched his body grow white out of the darkness like a kodak print emerging from the liquid”).

 

--or the rather cryptic passage on 326: “…empty cigarette container torn open and spread smooth, and on the white inner side was a pencilled message—a single phrase—and it was unsigned.”

 

--or the passage when Christmas is castrated on 465.

 

The JSTOR article I asked you to read the first four pages of should begin to explain some of the above.  The pleasure of the text is not just reading it; it is also chasing down threads of meaning and reading interpretations about texts.