Mesopotamian Faulkner: As I Lay Dying and the Southern Anthropocene in the 1930s

This article attempts to read William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying (1930) within the recent theoretical framework of the Anthropocene. It pays particular attention to the local appearance of the Anthropocene in the interwar American South, which became visible in flooding and deforestation. It argues that the story of the hill-farming Bundren family requires more than an ideological reading that would emphasize the eventual assimilation of the family to the modern market in the New South. It advances instead an ecological-historical interpretation, central to which is a reading of the deceased Addie Bundren as a topographical figure for the toxic southern soil. Her family are seen as continuers of a tradition of “agrilogistics” (Timothy Morton) that dates back over twelve thousand years to Mesopotamia. The article tries to identify the consequences of this reading for Faulkner’s representation of character, which can be seen as a static product of the deep time of geological periods. Finally, it argues that Darl Bundren’s subjectless, extreme consciousness is the only one in the novel that has some comprehension of the advent of the southern Anthropocene, although he has no way of extracting himself from this advent apart from absolute madness.

“It Aint Nothing But Jest Another Snopes”

This chapter investigates how William Faulkner presented poor whites and white trash across his oeuvre, with particular emphasis on his fairly unheralded Snopes trilogy. The chapter charts how poor whites are presented in different eras of his writings, from As I Lay Dying until the final Snopes novel published shortly before his death. While Faulkner is well known for his attempts at discussing the evolving racial situation in the South since the end of the Civil War, most critics have considered his depiction of whiteness as fairly homogeneous, a fact that this chapter's sustained focus on the Snopeses seeks to complicate. In short, while the Snopeses are frequently villainous characters, they are still met with language that stigmatizes them as a racial other, and as an inferior form of whiteness to the more well-to-do denizens of Yoknapatawpha.

As She Lay Dying: Locating the Gothic in Kaui Hart Hemmings’s The Descendants

This essay seeks to expand the scope of both US southern and Pacific Islander American studies by examining The Descendants (2007) in conversation with William Faulkner’s southern gothic mainstay As I Lay Dying (1930). The essay positions Hemmings’s novel in a gothic framework to reveal connections across regional gothics in the United States and expose colonial legacies. The enduring trauma of British imperialism is well-documented, but American colonialism, particularly in Hawai‘i, is rarely addressed in the continental United States, making a gothic “recontextualization” especially necessary. Both Hemmings and Faulkner interrogate the pressures the dead—both recent and ancestral—place on the living by deploying gothic tonality to illuminate social problems. In aligning gothic forms, this essay examines the literary representations of twenty-first-century plantation inheritances from the southernmost US state, Hawai‘i, and the southeastern United States. Ultimately, I argue that vestiges of the wrongs borne of their plantation origins, in both the southeastern United States and Hawai‘i, manifest across gothic forms in distress surrounding land and legacy as well as in an emphasis on futurity—all grounded in the maternal.

Toward Jerusalem: A journey of the eternal now (A Sermon)

This article is a theological-ethical Lenten sermon that attempts to discern the transcendent themes in the narrative of Luke 9-19 with an especial focus upon “setting the face toward Jerusalem” and the subsequent weeping over Jerusalem. The sermon moves from a passage from William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying through a series of hermeneutical turns that rely upon insights from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Jr., Will Campbell, Augustine, and Paul Tillich with the hope of illuminating what setting of the face on Jerusalem might mean. Tillich’s “eternal now” theme elaborates Augustine’s insight that memory and time reduce the present as, to paraphrase the Saint, that all we have is a present: a present remembered, a present experienced, and a present anticipated. The Gospel is a timeless message applicable to every moment in time and history. The sermon seeks to connect with recent events in the United States and the world that focus upon challenges to the ideals of social justice and political tyranny.