July 26, 2024: Revisiting the Canon: William Faulkner

[This pastweekend we celebrated ErnestHemingway’s 125th birthday. While I’ve been very glad to do mypart to diversifyour curricula way beyond the canon, I also believe there are still lotsof valuable AmericanStudies reasons to read canonical authors. So this weekI’ll make that case for Hemingway and four other canonized folks!]

On how aclassic author’s struggles can be as illuminating as their triumphs.

In thisblog post focused especially on August Wilson and his ten-play Pittsburgh Cycle,I briefly made the case for William Faulkner’s ambitious, messy, amazing book Absalom,Absalom! (1936) as “America’s most morally powerful novel.” I stand by thatcase, also a central subject of myfirst academic article way back in the day, and would ask you to check out thatpost (or that article if you’re feeling as ambitious as Faulkner was!), andthen come on back for some further thoughts on Faulkner’s successes andfailures.

Welcomeback! As I also argued in that article, one of the single most frustratingfacts in American literary history is that Faulkner’s immediate follow-up to Absalomwas TheUnvanquished (1938), a Civil War-set novel that pretty consistentlyendorses Lost Cause andwhite supremacist narratives of the war and race in Southern and Americanhistory. (Although this2015 article makes a more positive case for Unvanquished’s politics,so maybe I should give it another chance.) While Faulkner certainly didn’t writeabout those subjects across his career in ways that echo the worst of ThomasW. Dixon or Margaret Mitchell, it’s fair to say that his default wasn’tnearly as nuanced and powerful as Absalom either—I’d argue that a moreapt reflection of Faulkner’s limited ability to write or even truly think aboutAfrican American characters, for example, is his single-sentence description ofDilsey in the 1945Appendix to The Sound and the Fury: “They endured.” Not blatantlydiscriminatory and not inaccurate, but, compared to the huge swaths of new texthe creates about the other (white) Compson characters in that Appendix, anillustration of Faulkner’s relative lack of interest in the identity and lifeof a character like Dilsey—of whose family, not coincidentally, he also writesthere, “These others were not Compsons. They were black.”

While nosingle author can or should write about everyone or everything, Faulkner’sfailures when it comes to African American characters and stories, communitiesand histories, do to my mind mean that we can’t consider him one of ourgreatest novelists. But he was hugely talented and an important literary andcultural voice, and if we can include his struggles and failures along with hisstrengths and successes as complementary and interconnected parts of ourreading and response, I’d argue that only makes an even more compelling casefor teaching him and his works. To round off the whole of this week-longseries, part of the problem with the canon as it developed was precisely thatit treated authors and works as “classics” to be praised, rather than complexand multi-layered subjects worthy of our critiques along with every other formof engagement and analysis. We can’t read or teach everything, much as I wishwe could; and when we’re making choices about what to engage, it’s not just (orto my mind even mostly) about what’s great, but also and especially about what’smost illuminating. I’d say that’s the case for every one of the authors Ihighlighted this week, and it’s most definitely the case for William Faulkner.

July Recapthis weekend,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?