The Unsynchable William Faulkner

The early years of the “talkies,” which correspond with Faulkner’s surge into a fully realized literary modernism, brought technical problems that the cinema was slow to work out, especially the challenge of synchronizing the film soundtrack with its image stream to achieve verisimilitude. This technical crisis pointed to new creative opportunities for artists imaginative enough to seize the possibilities and extend montage effects across the visual and auditory realms. As sound film struggled through its growing pains, Faulkner experimented with new stylistic techniques of punctuation that introduced new discontinuities between speech and speaker, voice and subject, sound and source, into literary narration and onto the printed page, making his own unique contribution to his era’s aesthetic repertoire. This transmedial embrace of asynchrony went hand in hand with a new appreciation for the affective and thematic potential of silence, another aesthetic development that leaves its mark on Faulkner’s contemporaneous fictions.

Rus in Urbe

Scholars typically characterize Faulkner’s rural figures in passive terms, as objects, witnesses, or outright victims of the modernization process, set adrift on the land by the economic restructuring of southern agriculture before succumbing to the commercial and cultural allure of the small town. But in The Hamlet, As I Lay Dying, “Barn Burning,” “Mule in the Yard,” and “Shingles for the Lord,” Faulkner proves more alert than his critics to the agency of his rural characters as modernizing figures in their own right, descending on various nodes of Yoknapatawpha community to upend familiar social relations, economic arrangements, and habits of perception, in a process of creative disruption that reaches deep into the human interior while also rippling outward to inform/deform the texts’ own patterns of imagery and verbal style. These characters force us to rethink the core-periphery relations and diffusionist pathways so often cited by theorists of the modernization process.

Faulkner’s Biopolitical Fable of Modernity

A Fable returns to the Great War to reframe it as the scene of a different modernity than the one diagnosed in Faulkner’s early fiction. A Fable concerns itself less with the modernization of death than with the modernization of life, the management of biological being by emergent biopolitical state formations that the Great War presented with a crucial opportunity to tighten their grip on living populations. Thus the defining conflict of A Fable is not between war and peace, nor between death and life, but between life and life, the struggle of autonomous life to rise above life regulated and instrumentalized, life surveilled, administered, and subordinated to the interests of industry, army, media, state: the global consortium that puts all organic life forms at risk. In A Fable, the conceit of world war finds its resonance in this opposition between global cabal and planetary, interspecies collectivity.

Slavery, Modernity, and the Turn towards Death in the Black Atlantic World of Yoknapatawpha County

As Faulkner wrote his way into the crisis of Mississippi race relations across the 1930s and 1940s, he turned with increasing frequency to the subject of slavery and the figures of black slaves. In these figures he progressively recognized what Paul Gilroy identifies as a counter-Hegelian modernity that rewrites Hegel’s master–slave dialectic along new lines. Where for Hegel the struggle for recognition between lord and bondsman was predicated on the latter’s inevitable submission to the former, Faulkner’s fictions of slavery come more nearly to evoke a black intellectual legacy in which the dialectic pivots not on the slave’s fear of death but on what Gilroy calls the turn towards death. Here death functions not as an index of despair, surrender, or flight, but as a powerful ontological resource, a revolutionary negation of Atlantic slavery whose eschatological implications point to the possibility of a freer and more just world elsewhere.

The Philosophy of Furniture, or Light in August and the Material Unconscious of Mississippi Modernity

Chapter 2 turns from agriculture to silviculture to trace the unexpectedly comprehensive way in which the modernization of the timber and lumber industries in the US South leaves its mark on Faulkner’s 1932 novel Light in August. The modern economy of wood in all its phases, from timber extraction to lumber manufacture to the production, distribution, circulation, and even the occasional destruction of furniture, underpins, and at key moments surfaces to undercut, Faulkner’s anatomy of Jim Crow’s psychological and social orders. The turbulent forces of this extractive economy shadow the novel’s principal figures at every step, setting them in motion, by turns shaping and upsetting their itineraries—and haunting novelistic form and technique.

Genealogies of White Deviance

Chapter 5 examines Faulkner’s engagement with eugenics discourse as that Progressive-era reform movement began making inroads into the South in the twenties and thirties. Eugenics was riddled with contradictions: in addressing itself to the purification of modern whiteness, it ironically divided whiteness against itself, positing deviant, degenerate forms that supposedly sapped the vitality of the nation’s economy and racial stock—a problem with distressing implications for the strict biracial order of Jim Crow. In his first five Yoknapatawpha County novels along with the early Snopes narrative “Father Abraham,” Faulkner appropriates many of the signature features of eugenics discourse—its fondness for elaborate genealogies, its use of the family-study genre, its rhetorical framing of heredity as problem or doom, its concept of “feeblemindedness” and emphasis on the compulsory segregation and sterilization of the unfit—in ways that by turns collude in and powerfully critique the guiding assumptions of the movement.

Faulkner on Speed

Chapter 3 traces a long arc from rural to urban, and from the railroad to the automobile, the airplane, and finally the telephone, as the culture of modernity scales up human velocities—of movement and of thinking—asymptotically toward light speed, with all the attendant epiphanies, stresses, and blindnesses such radical transformation brings. At the center of this analysis are the 1931 novel Sanctuary, with its conspicuous flirtations with popular formulae; the 1932 story “Death Drag,” which hinges on an aerial stunt performed by a Depression-era barnstorming outfit; and the 1935 novel Pylon, typically dismissed as “minor” Faulkner despite its explicit overtures toward the style and subject matter of international high modernism. In these fictions, speed also poses technical challenges to the author, who experiments with characterization, imagery, diction, and point of view to evoke the distortions, estrangements, and other intensities that modern velocities impose/bestow on human interiority and behavior.

Introduction

The Introduction defines the key terms of modernization, modernity, and modernism that inform the study as a whole. It then traces the development of Faulkner scholarship from a primarily aesthetic understanding of literary modernism, through a primarily philosophical and intellectual one, toward the culturalist and materialist emphases of the new modernism studies. It details Faulkner’s prolific early efforts to become a modernist writer in two novels and numerous short stories dealing with World War I, before The Sound and the Fury made “Great War modernism” the first version of modernism he was to put behind him as a novelist. Finally, it sketches the book’s four-part architecture and provides an overview of the seven chapters that follow.