“Saturated” with the Past: William Faulkner, C. Vann Woodward, and the “Burden” of Southern History

This chapter explores how “two of the South's ablest interpreters, William Faulker and C. Vann Woodward, may have complemented, supplemented, or contradicted each other as they examined a common time and place ” Both struggled, for instance, to give African American figures the same historical weight and agency attributed to whites, and both at times cast a sympathetic eye on the antebellum planter class. Moreover, Woodward drew directly on Faulkner in developing his account of what he called the “burden of southern history”: a historical experience and consciousness among southerners that he nominated as an alternative to white supremacy as the basis of a distinctive regional identity and the central theme of a distinctive regional history.

“Who Are You?”: Modernism, Childhood, and Historical Consciousness in Faulkner’s The Wishing Tree

This chapter considers an “uneasy yet potentially fruitful confluence” between modernist writing and children's literature in the only Faulkner tale penned specifically for children. Drawing on “the Romantic reverence for the child as transcendent and inspirational,” a reverence qualified to some degree by twentieth-century psychoanalysis and its suspicion of childhood innocence, modernist artists portrayed the child as “a vessel of consciousness” and “instinctual, intense perceptions,” and thus a source of “defamiliarizing perspectives” that fostered artistic experimentation. In The Wishing Tree, writing for young readers may have helped Faulkner awaken his creative potential. The Wishing Tree's rich mix of fantasy and history “works to imbue the child reader with a sense of historical consciousness” while recognizing her as the bearer “of a more hopeful future”.

“The Paper Old and Faded and Falling to Pieces”: Absalom, Absalom! and the Pulping of History

This chapter examines how Faulkner's dramatization of the historical endeavor reflects the print culture conventions of his era. It argues that Absalom's “fluid and flexible” relationship to history amounts to a “pulping” of the historical record, “self-consciously destroying, recycling, and repurposing” it in ways gleaned from the “popular literary production” of the 1920s and 1930s. The so-called shudder pulps, with their emphasis on terror and the occult; “hero pulps” and other modes of popular adventure fiction; Black Mask-school hard-boiled crime fiction; Yellow Peril narratives and other tales depicting “racialized threat[s] to sexual purity” and the domestic sphere—the novel employs all of these pulp genres to shape and sensationalize the Sutpen saga and its central figures, in what amounts to a lowbrow version of the “emplotment” process that Hayden V. White finds at work in all historical narrative.

Mr. Cowley’s Southern Saga

This chapter reexamines Malcolm Cowley's efforts to resuscitate Faulkner's reputation by moving our attention away from the Faulkner who earned the esteem of influential critics. Instead, it looks at the ways in which Cowley used Faulkner to write a version of southern history that met the demands of a wartime book industry. The Faulkner that emerges from Cowley's Portable Faulkner was not the purveyor of the grotesque of the 1930s; nor was it the Faulkner of the late 1940s and 1950s who represented “the complexities and paradoxes of Cold War existential angst, artistic freedom, and unrelenting struggle.” Rather, it was the Faulkner who was needed in the national effort defined by the Second World War and its aftermath, the autochthonous Faulkner who loved the land and the people who inhabited it.

Faulkner and the Freedom Writers: Slavery’s Narrative in Business Records from Nineteenth-Century Abolitionism to Twenty-First-Century Neoabolitionism

This chapter contextualizes and explores the interplay of historical narrative and imaginative literature, surveying the historiography to which Faulkner and later writers contributed. Drawing on categories formulated by historian David W. Blight, it races a dialectical movement from an “abolitionist script” (grounded in antebellum ex-slave narratives) that “contrasted the humanity of enslaved people with the instrumentality of paper used to mediate slave transactions,” through a proslavery rhetoric that ignored economic context and ascribed paternalistic qualities to slaveholders, to an uneasy synthesis in antislavery novelists like Harriet Beecher Stowe, who decried “slavery's immoral accounting” while generally “affirm[ing] plantation paternalism.” The postbellum years saw a similar cycle, as emancipationist and white supremacist scripts collided before New South writers combined elements of both into a sentimental “reconciliationist script” that won popular support and influenced many of the era's professional historians.

Faulkner Networked: Indigenous, Regional, Trans-Pacific

This chapter attempts to reclaim Faulkner as a “regional” writer: but regional in a new sense, embracing a new set of geographical coordinates, and a new set of historical references. What brings all of these into play is a psychology locally felt yet globally shareable, a sense of being somehow on the wrong side of history that different groups must have experienced at different points, when they have fought for something and fought in vain. It is not a good feeling, but some good might come of it nonetheless. It has the most potential for good when it is oriented outward, imagined as a principle of connectivity extending beyond Mississippi, a basis for reaching out to other localities with not much else in common. This transregional arc might turn out to be one of the most enduring aspects of Faulkner's thinking about history. This kind of regionalism is referred to a “networked” regionalism.

The Noble Experiment? Faulkner’s Two Prohibitions

This chapter argues that Sanctuary (1931) dramatizes the failure of the Prohibition movement “to 'cure' the American alcoholic republic and restore domestic order” in a society where liquor “was demonized as morally wrong by some” but “recklessly consumed by many.” Requiem (1951), on the other hand, unfolds against the midcentury Sobriety movement (led by Alcoholics Anonymous), which “retooled the temperance paradigm” by approaching alcoholism “as a physiological disease rather than a disease of the will.” These paradigms reflected gendered assumptions about drinking.

Massachusetts and Mississippi: Faulkner, History, and the Problem of the South

This chapter examines the cultural framing of the American South as a national problem, a view of the region that spanned the entire twentieth century and left its mark on Faulkner's imagination. It takes up Faulkner's interrogation of and response to this national discourse of regional othering in the Compson novels, The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!, texts which double as Harvard novels. Quentin's brief tenure at Harvard overlaps with the career of Albert Bushnell Hart, an important period commentator who contributed to the national debate over the “Problem South.” In a thought experiment, the chapter proposes that Quentin and his roommate Shreve might have enrolled together in Hart's celebrated History class, an undergraduate introduction to American political history, during the fall 1909 semester at Harvard.

Reading Faulkner’s Readers: Reputation and the Postwar Reading Revolution

This chapter examines the reception history of Faulkner's work, focusing on what his encounters with midcentury readerships reveal about how they approached his work and indeed literature more generally. It utilizes recently digitized sound recordings of Faulkner's interview sessions at the University of Virginia in 1957 and 1958 as “a previously neglected archive of reader response” that documents how everyday readers experienced Faulkner as author and oeuvre. Highlighting their questions rather than Faulkner's answers, the chapter explores four distinct lines of response. Readers “engaged with cultural hierarchies,” often challenging the boundaries between highbrow and lowbrow literary forms; they “enacted formalist reading strategies,” marshaling their close-reading skills to pose questions about symbolism, irony, point of view, and style; they “interrogated the function of literature,” querying Faulkner about reading protocols and literary value; and they exhibited a preoccupation with “matters of rank and reputation,” inviting Faulkner to join them in constructing an American literary canon.

Interrogation, Torture, and Confession in William Faulkner’s Light in August

This chapter explores the issue of police brutality Faulkner's seventh novel, Light in August. The novel locates the violent questioning of an African American detainee by the Yoknapatawpha County sheriff and his deputies within a national debate over custodial interrogation tactics that arose in the years after World War I, which became “a staple in American popular culture” as Faulkner was reaching maturity as a novelist. It shows that “the third degree,” as it came to be called, could be found not only in the legal and penal spaces of the Jim Crow South but also in the nation's metropolitan police departments. Faulkner demonstrates how “the difficulty of knowing, the indeterminacy of truth, and the ambiguity of identity” work to elicit and to compound the racialized violence of Light in August.