The Social Hierarchy of the South in the Works of William Faulkner
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The Myth of the Old South, like all myths, contains some elements of truth, but like all myths, it contains some things that are not true. Faulkner has used those parts of the Myth that are true, but he has repudiated and in many cases destroyed those parts of the Myth which he has found to be the product of imagination rather than history.Keywords:
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When writers go on journeys it is as often to explore the terra incognita of their own selves as to establish the identities of strange lands; in the case of many English novelists between the great wars it was certainly true, as Douglas Veitch remarks in the study I am introducing, that their work, even as it essayed the exotic, cast an eye homeward and inward, and that they roamed the world, seeking surcease from a prevailing malaise which doubted the values of Western Civilization. ... Mr. Veitch has taken this vital element in the three novels--The Plumed Serpent, The Power and the Glory and Under The Volcano--and has used it not merely to examine these works themselves but also to sketch out the ambivalent role which landscape plays in all fiction, as omnipresent background but also as a rich source of symbols and images reflecting the human drama which a book develops. He has, as he more than once makes clear, done more than read all the relevant literature; he has himself travelled to Mexico in order to see and experience the extraordinary terrain, and, as I can vouch on the basis of my own knowledge of that infinitely attractive and repellent country, he used his senses well while he was there. --from the Introduction by George Woodcock
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Research Article| September 01 2008 John Barth's The Floating Opera and Southern Modernism of the 1950s Thomas F. Haddox Thomas F. Haddox Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2008) 54 (3): 307–338. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2008-4001 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Thomas F. Haddox; John Barth's The Floating Opera and Southern Modernism of the 1950s. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 September 2008; 54 (3): 307–338. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2008-4001 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search Copyright © Hofstra University2008 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Essays You do not currently have access to this content.
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Critics as diverse as Hodding Carter and Thadious M. Davis have asserted that Southern African American characters in Faulkner canon are his strongest characterizations - that Dilsey and Luster subvert narrative moment from Quentin and his father in The Sound and Fury (1929), that Charles Bon and the 100 savage negroes usurp narrative throne from Quentin and Thomas Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom! (1936). The focus of my inquiry here is not only to support assertion that Faulkner's African American characters are strong - indeed, often overwhelming (consider, for example, Joe Christmas in 1932 novel Light in August) - but also to assert two other related points: that a generative base of that strength in Faulkner's African American characters is their very Southerness, and that from very beginning of his career - in his very first short storie - Faulkner developed his African American characters as subtextual exemplars of true strength. At onset of short Story Ad Astra (1918), readers are introduced to four American and Irish soldiers serving as members of British Army during World War I and an Indian officer/ companion. It is noteworthy that Faulkner immediately posits color with black subadar from India, and Southerness with white segregationist soldier Sartoris and, later, M.R These two cardinal indices are integrally linked in very first paragraph of story. The war is clearly in its death throes, with Germany all but defeated, and this ragtag group is simply trying to wait out last days of official action in France without being injured. Of four, Bland is most eloquent, and it is he who, though drunk, sets tone and plane of meaning of story with this statement concerning subadar: |He can attend their schools for bleachskinned ... but he cannot hold their commission, because gentility is a matter of color and not lineage or behavior' (409). When Bland drunkenly makes his statement as he looks at subadar, he invokes a recurrent pattern in Faulkner's early short stories which concern myriad strains of racial disharmony. In these stories, there is frequently a background narrator who implies that black characters involved in plot are at least as important and as good as white, but because world values color over content, characters of color find themselves socially disadvantaged. Relatedly, Faulkner uses his narrator to foreground racial grid of all of his later novels, including The Sound and Fury, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!: The early short stories posit in minds of Faulkner's earned and intended audience his views on race so that, as a Southernwriter who will later write exclusively about contemporaneous South of United States, his views of race are posited a priori with his sincere readership. This rhetorical scheme allows narratives in novels to concentrate on development of other Southern themes, such as class conflict between white landed-gentry minority and white majority of dispossessed agricultural underclass (As I Lay Dying, 1930), myth of Antebellum-South-as-Camelot (Absalom, Absalom!.), and lure and exploitation of land (Go Down, Moses, 1942). Thus, as a proponent of Faulkner's early authoring intentions, subadar in Ad Astra occupies an extremely complex position, for which there seems no solution: By his own superior efforts, he has become an officer in very foreign army that has colonized his homeland of India, but because he is faced with color, class, and cultural discrimination, he is not allowed to give commands to whites of lesser rank in British Army. Color is for him great negator. Further, his enforced lack of authority is emblematic of his status in his chosen society. As is so often case for non-white characters in Faulknees early short fiction, subadar suffers psychological dissolution because he does not know, or cannot find, his human place in his chosen world, where he is perpetually considered an other; and in his chosen world, otherness is equivalent to being both corporeal and invisible. …
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Drew Faust's Sacred Circle: Dilemma of Intellectual in Old South, 1840-1860 is most important inquiry into mind of antebellum South since William R. Taylor's Cavalier Yankee: Old South American National Character. Emphasizing several of same southern figures--Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, William Gilmore Simms, James Henry Hammond, Edmund Ruffin (Ms. Faust makes important addition to roster, George Frederick Holmes)--both these studies suggest that dilemma of of letters in Old South ultimately centered in their frustrated effort to create somehow to motivate, set into action on its own, South apart from modern world--to which, nonetheless, save for its peculiar institution, South was inextricably joined. Suggesting further that this situation induced traumatic confusion within southern literary psyche, both studies point to ambivalence of--basically failure of--the southern of letters to fulfill themselves by becoming effective moral guides in their society. In spite of their essential agreement about failure of southern literati, however, Faust Taylor books are significantly dissimilar in their understanding of vocation of letters in South. Taylor takes it that writers of Old South more or less assumed literary occupation as given in their culture; that their anxieties arose not from their concern about literary situation in South but from their apprehension about historical predicament of South within nation. On contrary, Ms. Faust believes that Old South of letters--or men of mind, appropriately evocative term she employs instead of usual one, apparently on basis of its incidental appearance in Simms--were motivated by desperate need to achieve vocational identity. Seeking, generally speaking, to explore sociology of knowledge letters in antebellum South, author of Sacred Circle moves from treatment of context of intellectual discontent (the South of 1840's 1850's as represented chiefly by Virginia South Carolina) to consideration of how genius romantic friendship bound inspired five whom Simms dubbed a sacred circle. She is interested in how these romantic elements mitigated alienation of this group from materialistic particularly with how group's conviction of its genius, individual collective, obligated it to be active in improvement not only of Old South society but of society as whole. As Simms said, commitment to improvement was the true business of genius. members of Sacred Circle, accepting gift of genius as mandate from God, had in view nothing less than moral reformation of mind its works. world awaited, said George Frederick Holmes, an intellectual reformation analogous to Instauration Magna of Lord Bacon. Since Renaissance, Holmes held, intention of Novum Organum had been corrupted. The experimental philosophy has been only part of his [Bacon's] labours that have been cordially accepted, he observed, and Baconian instauration, thus shrunk withered has been made at once tool divinity of age. Unjustly narrowed to empiricist, Bacon has been used to justify triune divinity of nineteenth century, man, matter, money. Eagerly embracing need for a new social science ... designed to illuminate transcendent moral social laws that simultaneously prescribe foretell future course of society, Sacred Circle conceived foundation of southern instauration to be new version of history. As Holmes put it, A necessary preparation for complete ... Renovation of Knowledge would be Philosophical History of Intellectual, Moral, Social Political Progress of mankind. Regarded as series of Experiments that afford basis for selecting principles . …
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Nearly decade after Fred Hobson took first tentative steps toward defining postmodern strains in contemporary southern fiction, Matthew Guinn presents this study, his first book, to reinforce few of Hobson's points and to refute many others. Through careful and cogent readings of selected texts by nine fictionists-- including works by Richard Ford, Barry Hannah, and Bobbie Ann Mason also examined in Hobson's Southern Writer in Postmodern World (1991)-Guinn convincingly, if at times little myopically, argues for radical discontinuity between this emerging body of literature and that produced during vaunted Renaissance. Even at this late stage of literary history, Southernists have been slow to view postmodernism as viable current within southern letters, and perhaps in recognition of this fact, Guinn's first chapters are relatively conservative. Adhering to time-honored principle that southern writing (and, presumably, southern writing about southern writing) should avoid abstraction, he delineates in stark terms new mode of naturalism present in blue collar fiction of Harry Crews, Dorothy Allison, Larry Brown, and Mason. For figures who populate these authors' worlds, agrarian or quasi-pastoral values of Renaissance literature are unusable. Amidst realities of life in rural south-a life filled with screw worms, raw fertilizer, alcohol, and very palpable violence-the faded plantation culture for which John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Andrew Lytle each pined in his own tortured way becomes, for these working class writers, kind of abstraction Agrarians supposedly loathed. The South of Crews and Allison is doppelganger to Agrarians' Arcady; it is impoverished, benighted, and repressive-a sort of Third World antithesis to pastoral plenty of Agrarian conceptions (6).This description applies equally well to milieu depicted by Brown, the South's preeminent naturalist (56). And if Agrarians and their associates found accoutrements of industrial-capitalist culture dangerous, these writers, especially Mason, find a progression toward industrial ... appealing-not as product of deceptive industrial propaganda or mere laziness but as result of immediate experience with portions of rural life overlooked by Agrarianism (64). From hardscrabble, neo-naturalistic fiction Guinn moves on to consider more epistemologically, philosophically, and aesthetically sophisticated brand of writing notable for its mythoclasm-that is, its subversive treatment of southern mythology which undergirds Renaissance literature. As he explores more abstract issues raised in novels of Kaye Gibbons, Cormac McCarthy, Richard Ford, Randall Kenan and Hannah, Guinn gradually and deftly builds case for strong postmodern impulse in contemporary southern fiction. References to postmodern parody, social construction of identity, and few of Lyotard's ideas increasingly shape second half of study. Here Guinn's opposition to Hobson's rather conservative thesis-that though much has been lost to southern writers in transition from modern to postmodern era, much more abides-- becomes most evident. In discussing Richard Ford's Sportswriter (1986), for instance, Guinn offers potent, detailed counter to Hobson's claim that Ford's protagonist, Frank Bascomb, is a cousin of Quentin Compson and other such protagonists of upper-class pedigree as Warren's Jack Burden, Allen Tate's Lacy Buchan, Walker Percy's Binx Bolling and Will Barrett, and Taylor's Phillip Carver (116-17). …
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A critical study of John McPhee’s Rising from the Plains in the context of recent debates about the status of regional studies in a postmodern culture, this essay asks what it means to be authentically Western in a late-twentieth-century culture comprising simulacra.
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In 1952, Faulkner noted exceptional nature of South when he characterized it as the only really authentic region in United States, because a deep indestructible bond still exists between and his environment. The essays collected in Faulkner and of South explore Faulkner's environmental imagination, seeking what Ann Fisher-Wirth calls ecological counter-melody of his texts. Ecology was not a term in common use outside sciences in Faulkner's time. However, word environment seems to have held deep abiding meaning for Faulkner. Often he repeated his abiding interest in man in conflict with himself, with his follow man, or with his time and place, his environment.Eco-criticism has led to a renewed interest among literary scholars for what in this volume Cecelia Tichi calls, humanness with congeries of habitats and environments. Philip Weinstein draws on Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus. Eric Gary Anderson argues that F
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Wiiliam Faulkner's rich descriptions of race relations, merchant-landlord interactions, and the Civil War display a keen sensitivity to historical nuance and detail that remains forceful. For many, Faulkner's South is the South they know and love. The greatness of Faulkner's novels hardly depends upon their description of the health conditions of Southerners, but throughout his work, he does painstakingly create images of their physical traits, eating habits, and stature. Faulkner was unrelenting in his negative images of Southern physical attributes. Faulkner drank heavily himself and may well have projected his own habits onto others. And Faulkner's physically pathetic characters, with their yearning for better health, belie the reality that health and nutrition in the South was as good or better than the national average. Thus his novels, which are widely taken to capture the psychocultural "truth" of the region, present a skewed picture of its material reality.
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William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936), a story otherwise bounded by clear and uncontroverted historical markers, the central character, Thomas Sutpen, embarks on a fantastical island excursion--an adventure that accomplishes two related but seemingly distinct things: first, the journey helps Sutpen to erase the social and economic disadvantages of his impoverished childhood that had marked him as inferior, and second, the journey operates to deny the Haitian revolutionary war of independence, writing out of existence the Western Hemisphere's first black national state. About two-dozen years ago scholars noticed and began to comment on this erasure. There were two problems to address: Faulkner's seeming lapse and that of earlier critics who--for a generation from 1936 until the mid 1980s--had combed the novel closely enough to comment in earnest on a range of matters, even questions as arcane as the likely and recorded troop movements of the Confederate army's 23rd Mississippi Infantry, without appearing to notice that historical Haiti was missing. On the question of Faulkner's intentions, some have argued that inadvertence accounts for the erasure of black revolution but Richard Godden has firmly refuted the simple-error view, noting In the South, Haiti is synonymous with revolution, and ... it is not something about which Southern authors with an interest in antebellum history lightly make mistakes. Moreover, the evidence of Absalom, Absalom! suggests that Faulkner knows more than enough about San Domingo to put its revolution in the right century (686). Godden offers that, although Faulkner rewrites one of the key facts of nineteenth-century black American history, in what looks suspiciously like an act of literary counter-revolution (686), Faulkner's true aim prove(s) anything but counter-revolutionary (686); Godden attributes to Faulkner a wish to foreground the continuous potential for revolution within the institution of slavery (689). He and many others see the shape of a design that complicates the structures of thinking around racial hierarchies. (2) Given the general positive thrust of criticism making the case for Faulkner's intentional production of a non-historical Caribbean, it is not surprising that a new survey of U.S. national imaginaries that places Absalom, Absalom! in the center of a discussion of the Great American Novel would marginalize consideration of the Haitian erasure (Buell 209) or that a study widely considering the Haitian Revolution's twentieth century imprint on the literary imagination would decline to engage Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and the implications of his invented Haiti (Kaisary). Trends in recent scholarship suggest that there is little left to say and nothing of enduring importance to tackle, when considering uses of silence, erasure, and the imagination in connection with Faulkner and Haiti. I argue that contrary to the trend in literary criticism, there is indeed a fruitful discussion yet to be had about Faulkner's erasure of Haiti. My claim is that through the use of a fantastical event, Sutpen's magical, single-and bare-handed defeat of rebellious blacks on a Haitian plantation, Faulkner accomplishes the re-shaping of his fictional characters' attention to events of recorded history and by that same maneuver also manages to manipulate readers of even the most expert kind. This essay examines the mechanisms by which fantasy takes hold in Absalom, Absalom!, driving outcomes and organizing the primary patterns of the text. I use the word fantasy to denote an unrestrained and extravagant imaginative element belonging to that literary genre identified as fantasy and also to denote fabrications invented to fulfill psychological needs and desires. The amplifications, omissions, and insertions of non-mimetic elements, occasioned by a character's (or even the author's) deliberate or perhaps, just as often, un-mindful retreat to fantasy provide commentary on how people in the U. …
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In Lie Down in Darkness (1951), William Styron consciously evokes the distinctive styles of modernist writers such as Thomas Wolfe, James Joyce, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The most influential voice, however, is that of William Faulkner, whose work provides a rhetorical and conceptual frame work for the novel. Much of Lie Down in Darkness is thematically derived from Faulkner, and the immediate event of the novel, the transportation of Peyton Loftis' coffin back to her hometown of Port Warwick, Virginia, is an obvious reworking of As I Lay Dying. It is The Sound and the Fury, however, that most strongly informs Styron's novel. Members of the Loftis family correspond to members of the Compson family, specific patterns of imagery are repeated, and Peyton's suicide in New York City recalls that of Quentin Compson at Harvard. The similarities between the two works are unmistakable, and yet there are a number of strategic differences as well. These differences prevent Lie Down in Darkness from being dismissed as unoriginal and derivative. Styron's use of Faulkner is less an attempt simply to copy his style and subject matter, than a conscious revision of the earlier author. The exact natures of the differences that constitute Styron's originality, however, are not easily delineated. Many early reviewers recognized this originality, but seemed to be at a loss to explain exactly why the novel could not be dismissed as a bad imitation of Faulkner. Howard Mumford Jones, for instance, in the New York Herald Tribune claimed that despite its echoes of
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