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The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner
This collection of essays explores Faulkner's widespread cultural import. Drawing on a wide range of cultural theory and writing in accessible English, ten major Faulkner scholars examine the enduring whole of Faulkner's work and bring into focus the broader cultural contexts that lent resonance to his work. The collection will be particularly useful to the student seeking a critical introduction to Faulkner, while also serving the dedicated scholar interested in recent trends in Faulkner criticism.
236 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
November 11, 2012
I try to understand William Faulkner. I want to like reading him. I think I should appreciate him, but I find him very hard to take. To me reading Faulkner is like trying to suck molasses through a narrow paper straw. So I keep reading books and essays about Faulkner to try to discover there what I'm not finding for myself in his own hypnotizing words.
I just finished reading The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner, and I found it to be replete with valuable insights, although a few of the essays tend to the more airy and ethereal kind, but that's what one should expect in such a compilation. Sometimes (often), in my opinion, or with respect to my own tastes and sensibilities, Faulkner's obsession with style interferes excessively with his storytelling, and by that I'm not at all restricting myself to consideration of plot. I simply can't penetrate through the syntactic jungle to locate the garden beneath. The authors of the essays in this volume are best when they can get to the heart of Faulkner and worst when they swoon over the jungle, mystifying the rhetoric, which is the least important part. I'm reminded of Hemingway on Faulkner:
Several very insightful essays are found in this volume, but easily the most important is Dr Cheryl Lester's "Racial Awareness and Arrested Development: The Sound and the Fury and the Great Migration (1915-1928)." I think anyone teaching Faulkner, even just a story or two in high school, would do well to begin with this essay as required reading. Its insights into The Sound and the Fury are trenchant, but of no less importance this essay firmly establishes Faulkner in his proper place and time in a way that no other source I've found has come close to doing, for it reveals a secret Southern history and early- to mid-20th Century (post-Reconstruction) ethos which still, all this time later, by and large remains invisible to the world outside the South, and remains subject to preponderate and enduring denial within the South.
Most of the deep history of America is the history of racism, and even now when we have come very far our currently unfolding history is very clearly continuing to spin out from our racist past; if you doubt that, simply reflect on how the South has never yet ceased to function as a predictable social, cultural and political bloc even while the talking points have been refined over the decades. There are historical reasons why attitudes and psychologies remain geographically stratified. I think it's not too difficult to argue that the history of the South has been a black history in which whites have intruded substantially.
When I was reading Dr Lester's essay it took me a little while to notice that she was using the word "racialism" instead of "racism." I had to look it up because I wasn't sure I knew what the word meant, or how she was using it. This reminded me of my ongoing concern with the superabundance of attitudes involving race in America, and how rich and changing those attitudes have always been, and how we have never created sufficient words to express that whole host of subtle meaning and distinction. I mean, the Inuit have how many words for "snow" again? Abraham Lincoln was more of a white supremacist than he was a racist, but to call Lincoln a white supremacist misses the mark by far, for example, but we lack words with better resolution to clearly express Lincoln's take on blacks in America. I think that's an astonishing truth to which we're generally blind. The word "racism" itself is made to carry the burden of almost all interracial conflict, mild to extreme, and so while being a red flag word it also in the end has very little reliable denotation. When, given our severely truncated vocabulary, we say something like "Racists judge people by the color of their skin," we are not only doing real violence to a much more complex psychological process underway, but we are also reinforcing oversimplified memes and raising levees against tidewaters of more powerful signification. There must be, I sometimes think, a psychological injunction embedded in the collective national psyche that inhibits creating an acceptable and functioning lexicon in order to actively block constructive discussion about matters of race.
When I looked up "racialism" at first I thought it referred to a pseudo-scientific accounting for racial differences used to justify racist attitudes, but it became clear enough rather quickly to me that this was partly, but not entirely, how Dr Lester was using the word. I came to understand, or at least to believe, that she was referring to a white Southern perception of blacks not in terms of skin color but as a kind of projected cultural Otherness: a cultural perception in which pigmentation need play no role whatsoever. Pigmentation then becomes a crutch, a phenotypic observation standing in for much deeper psychological belief structures. The word "racism" tends to sweep this critical distinction under the rug.
I was troubled by the word racialism, not by Dr Lester's use of it which was not only acceptable but in fact illuminating, but by the mere difficulty that we should require a word that ties back to such a despicable concept which its originators were incapable of perceiving to be notorious; that is, the defense of genetic markers to account for racial differences: facts of biometrics which are scientifically reproducible but psychologically and socially irrelevant and abhorrent. When I encounter such words they always leave me cold and feeling disturbed, for their use tends to empower their concealed original meanings. The best modern example I can give is that of "ethnic cleansing." Whenever I hear the term used in a news story I always cringe, because although it's being used to suggest an abhorrent action, and a certain variety of genocide, the very use of the term also seems to imply validation of the original concept. Now, I do not advocate discarding the term in an Orwellian sense, but I do think it's dangerous to use such terms or words too liberally and without regard to their history.
Like Faulkner, perhaps, I'm a bit stymied at how to end this review . . . I found this volume to be the most helpful so far in my own grappling with its literary subject. Dr Lester's essay is the most important, but certainly not the only important one here, and I'm happy to report that she's currently expanding the ideas she expresses here into a book-length work, which I very much look forward to reading one day.
I just finished reading The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner, and I found it to be replete with valuable insights, although a few of the essays tend to the more airy and ethereal kind, but that's what one should expect in such a compilation. Sometimes (often), in my opinion, or with respect to my own tastes and sensibilities, Faulkner's obsession with style interferes excessively with his storytelling, and by that I'm not at all restricting myself to consideration of plot. I simply can't penetrate through the syntactic jungle to locate the garden beneath. The authors of the essays in this volume are best when they can get to the heart of Faulkner and worst when they swoon over the jungle, mystifying the rhetoric, which is the least important part. I'm reminded of Hemingway on Faulkner:
"He has the most talent of anybody and he just needs a sort of conscience that isn't there . . . he will write absolutely perfectly straight and then go on and on and not be able to end it. I wish the christ I owned him like you'd own a horse and train him like a horse and race him like a horse – only in writing. How beautifully he can write and as simple and as complicated as autumn or as spring."
Several very insightful essays are found in this volume, but easily the most important is Dr Cheryl Lester's "Racial Awareness and Arrested Development: The Sound and the Fury and the Great Migration (1915-1928)." I think anyone teaching Faulkner, even just a story or two in high school, would do well to begin with this essay as required reading. Its insights into The Sound and the Fury are trenchant, but of no less importance this essay firmly establishes Faulkner in his proper place and time in a way that no other source I've found has come close to doing, for it reveals a secret Southern history and early- to mid-20th Century (post-Reconstruction) ethos which still, all this time later, by and large remains invisible to the world outside the South, and remains subject to preponderate and enduring denial within the South.
Most of the deep history of America is the history of racism, and even now when we have come very far our currently unfolding history is very clearly continuing to spin out from our racist past; if you doubt that, simply reflect on how the South has never yet ceased to function as a predictable social, cultural and political bloc even while the talking points have been refined over the decades. There are historical reasons why attitudes and psychologies remain geographically stratified. I think it's not too difficult to argue that the history of the South has been a black history in which whites have intruded substantially.
When I was reading Dr Lester's essay it took me a little while to notice that she was using the word "racialism" instead of "racism." I had to look it up because I wasn't sure I knew what the word meant, or how she was using it. This reminded me of my ongoing concern with the superabundance of attitudes involving race in America, and how rich and changing those attitudes have always been, and how we have never created sufficient words to express that whole host of subtle meaning and distinction. I mean, the Inuit have how many words for "snow" again? Abraham Lincoln was more of a white supremacist than he was a racist, but to call Lincoln a white supremacist misses the mark by far, for example, but we lack words with better resolution to clearly express Lincoln's take on blacks in America. I think that's an astonishing truth to which we're generally blind. The word "racism" itself is made to carry the burden of almost all interracial conflict, mild to extreme, and so while being a red flag word it also in the end has very little reliable denotation. When, given our severely truncated vocabulary, we say something like "Racists judge people by the color of their skin," we are not only doing real violence to a much more complex psychological process underway, but we are also reinforcing oversimplified memes and raising levees against tidewaters of more powerful signification. There must be, I sometimes think, a psychological injunction embedded in the collective national psyche that inhibits creating an acceptable and functioning lexicon in order to actively block constructive discussion about matters of race.
When I looked up "racialism" at first I thought it referred to a pseudo-scientific accounting for racial differences used to justify racist attitudes, but it became clear enough rather quickly to me that this was partly, but not entirely, how Dr Lester was using the word. I came to understand, or at least to believe, that she was referring to a white Southern perception of blacks not in terms of skin color but as a kind of projected cultural Otherness: a cultural perception in which pigmentation need play no role whatsoever. Pigmentation then becomes a crutch, a phenotypic observation standing in for much deeper psychological belief structures. The word "racism" tends to sweep this critical distinction under the rug.
I was troubled by the word racialism, not by Dr Lester's use of it which was not only acceptable but in fact illuminating, but by the mere difficulty that we should require a word that ties back to such a despicable concept which its originators were incapable of perceiving to be notorious; that is, the defense of genetic markers to account for racial differences: facts of biometrics which are scientifically reproducible but psychologically and socially irrelevant and abhorrent. When I encounter such words they always leave me cold and feeling disturbed, for their use tends to empower their concealed original meanings. The best modern example I can give is that of "ethnic cleansing." Whenever I hear the term used in a news story I always cringe, because although it's being used to suggest an abhorrent action, and a certain variety of genocide, the very use of the term also seems to imply validation of the original concept. Now, I do not advocate discarding the term in an Orwellian sense, but I do think it's dangerous to use such terms or words too liberally and without regard to their history.
Like Faulkner, perhaps, I'm a bit stymied at how to end this review . . . I found this volume to be the most helpful so far in my own grappling with its literary subject. Dr Lester's essay is the most important, but certainly not the only important one here, and I'm happy to report that she's currently expanding the ideas she expresses here into a book-length work, which I very much look forward to reading one day.
June 30, 2026
Great critical commentary on Faulkner. The stand out essay goes to André Bleikasten, who evaluates Faulkner’s place among the 12 literary giants of the 20th century (including Kafka, Joyce, and Woolf), and finds his unique contributions and qualities.
September 15, 2022
One critic said how incongruous the various modernist writers look when you put them together. I agree. He also said that this is because modernism is so close in time to us that we seem to prefer them. I disagree. I'm sure there were many different types of playwrights during the Renaissance, but 500 years later we're only studying Shakespeare. So is modernism.
Centuries later, no one will remember Faulkner, Picasso and his cubism, modern/minimalist architects, or all those painters who painted stripes (I do love Art Deco and Joseph Conrad tho), Because people will realize that those are just ugly and uninspired experiments.
Half of the analysis in this volume is about how to psychoanalyze race and relationships within the family. However, psychoanalysis is perhaps the biggest and stupidest modernist error of all (including all the modernist movements I mentioned above). Freud's psychology was a complete fantasy and simply did not correspond to social and psychological reality. Therefore, all subsequent cultural movements, including literary theories based on it, are simply stupid and false rubbish, because no son thinks of their father in an Oedipal way. And those who do so because they are influenced by Freud are simply pathetic fools (including Faulkner and the psychoanalysts in this volume).
Centuries later, no one will remember Faulkner, Picasso and his cubism, modern/minimalist architects, or all those painters who painted stripes (I do love Art Deco and Joseph Conrad tho), Because people will realize that those are just ugly and uninspired experiments.
Half of the analysis in this volume is about how to psychoanalyze race and relationships within the family. However, psychoanalysis is perhaps the biggest and stupidest modernist error of all (including all the modernist movements I mentioned above). Freud's psychology was a complete fantasy and simply did not correspond to social and psychological reality. Therefore, all subsequent cultural movements, including literary theories based on it, are simply stupid and false rubbish, because no son thinks of their father in an Oedipal way. And those who do so because they are influenced by Freud are simply pathetic fools (including Faulkner and the psychoanalysts in this volume).
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews