Even given the dominant critical paradigm I have noted above, the drive to remove Faulkner from his Southern context as a point of necessity for placing him within a modernist context, there remains a strong critical drive to, in a manner of speaking, return the author to this same context and in doing so reify the South within schemes of national and global exchange. Even more compelling are the critical studies that
capitalize on precisely those elements of Faulkner’s fiction that seemed, to Cowley and the New Critics, to act as an obstacle to his globalization. For example, African diaspora academics such as Glissant and Houston Baker find his strong regionalist, even Agrarian, themes a potent commentary on how U.S. literary history and popular imaginings of literary tradition tend to minimalize troublesome racial themes in favor of politically neutral assertions of aesthetic value. Postsouthern critics such as Martyn Bone have also linked the regionalist ‘sense of place’ essential to Faulkner’s fiction and certain of its varied international interpretations to 21st-century reconceptions of place within the context of real estate and remappings of urban spaces. In these manners, I might note, we see the “secret history” to which I have alluded above returning to popular academic discourse, which has begun to realize the inextricability of Faulkner’s modernist and regionalist sentiments. In other words, as I will show in regards to Walcott in an upcoming chapter, we see the region continually reassert itself synonymously with, and indeed contingent upon, the regional text’s international circulation.
What is particularly intriguing about the modernist relationality and corresponding regional isolationalism in Faulkner’s career is that it operates not only contextually, in terms of critical readings and interpretations of his work, but also textually, in the author’s later writing and subsequent comments on the role of the writer.
To many of his readers, the blending of these two elements may seem to be evidential of a sort of regional schizophrenia, in which the form and function of the same region repeatedly changes, and the region continually and unexpectedly intrudes on narratives that seem predominantly concerned with international (high) modernism. In assessing Faulkner’s views toward the region in his later career, we might do worse than to
examine his most famous epigraph, emanating from a 1956 interview with the Paris Review:
I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it, and by sublimating the actual into [the] apocryphal I... opened up a gold mine of other peoples, so I created a cosmos of my own. I can move these people around like God, not only in space but in time too (Lion in the Garden, pp.
255).
If we read the above comment on Faulkner’s part within the context of the efforts of Cowley (among others) to interpret the author’s regional concerns as a point of access for
“universal” meanings, we might find in his stamp / cosmos rhapsodizing strong evidence for the sublimation of his regionalism into the spectrum of international modernism.
However, it is important to remember that Faulkner is making this statement in 1956, after his reputation as a modernist, by most accounts, had already been made. The statement is thus less a strong assertion of Faulkner’s dedication to and realization of the potential of the region than it is a retrospective reconstruction of what he found, or would have liked to find, in that region. The moment is typical of Faulkner’s later career:
though he seemed to embrace his post-Nobel status as a respected modernist writer, he repeatedly returned to his region in unexpected ways.
Faulkner was fond of calling himself a “failed poet” in order to dismiss his earlier (pre-Sartoris) works as ultimately unsatisfactory flights of fancy. I might invert this claim by stating that, in his later years, Faulkner was a failed modernist to the extent that he was unsuccessful participant in the broad-based elements of international artistry that the country required of a modernist of his stature. In this vein, Michael Kreyling has suggested that, in his later career, Faulkner was less a cultural crusader than a writer consumed by deep-seated ambivalence on all topics of national interest (Faulkner at 100,
23).21 It would seem that, despite his work for the State Department and his many overseas visits and speeches, whatever Faulkner may have been in his later years, he was not a policymaker. Barbara Ladd notes that, though he agreed to chair the writer’s group portion of Eisenhower’s People to People program, an organization designed to promote the spread of pro-American propaganda abroad, he remained “uncomfortable in the role of public man and ultimately disappointed in the results of his efforts to use a national voice” (Resisting History 80). His suggestion that all American books should be stamped
“True” or “Not True” prior to their inclusion in foreign libraries and his advocacy of “a year of American silence” to promote “international understanding” serve as further proof to Ladd that “he did not take his charge too seriously” (80-81).22 This brand of half-joking fatalism informed virtually all of Faulkner’s public statements in the late 1950s, most prominently his address to the National Commission for UNESCO in 1959,
21 It is important to note that, even if Faulkner did in fact have nothing definitive to say about United States policy, this did not prevent those in power from leveraging his international reputation into ideological talking points. For example, Helen Oakley’s
“William Faulkner and the Cold War: The Politics of Cultural Marketing” theorizes that Faulkner’s 1954 visit to Brazil was part of a larger “anticommunist plot staged by the U.S. government” in order to “eliminate what was perceived as the infiltration of communism from Latin America” (Look Away! 413, 412). Even if Faulkner did not have strong anti-Communist sentiments, his great cultural currency could be bent to a nationalistic purpose. Kreyling takes note of this fact in Inventing Southern Literature, writing that, in Faulkner’s later years, “the needy causes of southern literature, the Department of State, and other official cultural interests loaded the author with claims of
‘Faulknerian’ wisdom that the writer often found beyond his desire or inclination to fulfill” (129).
22 Faulkner was, on the whole, reluctant to support or critique any form of government.
In response to a question about Communism he received during a colloquium at Nagano, he stated “I don’t like any form of totalitarian government,” “I thought that communism in theory would be very good for people,” and “democracy as we talk about it in my country is a very clumsy, inefficient way for people to govern themselves, but so far I don’t know a better one” (Faulkner at Nagano 130-131). This is hardly the language of a cultural crusader, even one who, shortly after speaking at Nagano, stated that the then- state of world politics was “one ideology against a simple natural desire of people to be free” (Meriwether and Millgate, 199).
at which he proclaimed: “The last sound on the worthless earth will be two human beings trying to launch a homemade space ship and already quarreling about where they are going” (Essays, Speeches, Public Letters 167).
What seems like an innocuous and ironic moment in Faulkner’s public life is in fact a telling incident of the author’s late self-fashioning and self-citation. The scenario—and even the language—of the UNESCO address is the same as that of the Nobel Prize Speech, which I must give more attention here as Faulkner’s most cited reaction to global politics, if it is a reaction at all. In the speech, pace Faulkner’s comments to UNESCO, the last sound left in “the last red and dying evening” is that of man’s “puny inexhaustible voice, still talking” (Essays, Speeches, Public Letters, 120).23 Combine this ethos of endurance with the presence of apocalyptic menace (“there is only one question: when will I be blown up?”) and the primacy of universalized elements (“the old verities and truths of the heart, the universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed”) and it is easy to see how, in Raoul Grunquist’s phrase, the Nobel Prize recipient is both universalist and universalized—they acknowledge that, owing to the nature of the award, they must necessarily speak to a wider audience (Faulkner: “using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to”) and immediately adopt their own writing and ethos to suit that audience.24 In Faulkner’s case, we see a philosophy that he did not seem to hold so sacrosanct that he was unable to satirize it at the UNESCO meeting nine years later instantly being recast as a powerful statement of Cold War-era terror and the dominance of American values. Priscilla Wald,
23 In Gray, Mastery’s End, pp. 239.
24 “Does it Matter Why Walcott Received the Prize?” in Research in African Literature 25 (1994). Cited in Grimwood pp. 239.
for one, has seen in the Nobel Prize speech and subsequent statements by the author (The American Dream: What Happened to It?, Faulkner’s unfinished, scattered work of political and social commentary) a move toward transmuting the South’s shameful past into a cautionary example through which the American Dream can be “renovated and globalized,” resulting in “an America that is feared worldwide not because of domination, but because it demonstrates the practice of freedom” (Faulkner’s Inheritance 38).
What is perhaps most intriguing about Wald’s claim is the manner in which it replicates the movement I have noted on the part of Faulknerian criticism away from his associations with the South and toward his inclusion in international modernism.
However, here the contemporary movements of globalization, resistance to “domination,”
and “freedom” stand in for the aesthetic integrity that proved so attractive to Faulkner’s New Critical champions. And, as with the New Critics, there is an unacknowledged undercurrent, a regional attachment that this interpretation overlooks. In fact, several critics have noted the discrepancy between Faulkner’s statements in the Nobel Prize speech and his regional (not to say Agrarian) sentiments. Michael Grimwood, for one, has called the Nobel Prize speech an expression of doubt rather than an affirmation of the writer’s role in society (Grimwood 304-305). Shelby Foote is even more directly critical of the sentiment of the Nobel speech (though he acknowledges that his position is
“heresy”), claiming that the gap between the stirring message of the speech and the pessimistic slant of Faulkner’s novels acts to “underrate the thing he did best and to overrate the thing that caused whatever flaws there are in his later work” (The South and Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha 163). Foote sees Faulkner, in the Nobel speech, “delivering himself of something that would be the most effective and what would strike people as
expected once they heard it” (162). The latter statement on Foote’s part is compelling inasmuch as it suggests the Nobel Prize speech is less a stirring, impassioned defense of principles that Faulkner held dear than a prepackaged, carefully formulated appeal to public opinion, and Faulkner himself less an astute commentator on worldwide literary and political events than a regionalist fish out of water.
This interpretation seems to be supported both by Faulkner’s repetition of the language of the Nobel Prize speech in his UNESCO address and within the text of A Fable (1954). Toward the end of that book, we find the corporal and the old general discoursing on what might reasonably be called the fate of all mankind, a topic that leads to what must surely rank among the most bizarre passages in any of Faulkner’s novels:
the old general’s postulation of an apocalyptic future, “the entire earth one unbroken machined de-mountained dis-rivered expanse of concrete” in which the only sound is the
“polysyllabic and verbless patriotic nonsense” bellowed by the machines that have subjugated the human race. Yet, the old general continues, man will survive these travails
because he has that in him which will endure even beyond the ultimate worthless tideless rock freezing slowly in the last red and heatless sunset,
… his puny and inexhaustible voice still talking, still planning; and there too after the last ding dong of doom has rung and died there will be still one sound more: his voice, planning still to build something higher and faster and louder, more efficient and louder and faster than ever before (353-54).
And, bringing conclusion to the entire scenario, the general claims: “I respect and admire him… Because man and his folly—’ ‘Will endure,’ the corporal said. ‘They will do more,’ the old general said proudly. ‘They will prevail’” (355). There are many potential explanations for why Faulkner chose to repeat the language of his Nobel Prize speech in
the text of A Fable, but perhaps the simplest is one that appealed to both Faulkner and his critics: the author wrote what he knew, and he knew that the aforementioned speech had been almost universally praised. The remainder of A Fable seems to bear out this contention: Faulkner knew something of World War I, knew something of the French and something more of airborne warfare, but little enough of British and German combatants, who appear in the novel as little more than cardboard conflations of U.S. stereotypes.
But Faulkner also knew the South, for better or worse, and did not hesitate to narrate it, even in contexts that did not seem to support it. In the middle of the novel, the primary war story is interrupted, for a period of over sixty pages, by the far-fetched tale of a stolen (three-legged) race horse and its comic grooms. The whole affair begins when: “the van containing the horse and the two grooms, the white one and the black one, plunged through a flood-weakened trestle: out of which confusion and mischance were born the twenty-two months from which the English groom emerged at last a practicing Baptist: a Mason: and one of his time’s most skillful manipulators of or players at dice”
(153). If this sounds like the setup for a typically Faulknerian tale of thieving, scheming, and general mischief, it’s because it is precisely that; all of the elements of his major writings are present in this narrative. They include, but are not limited to, the Southern setting, the mad chase after escaped livestock, the quixotic triumph of said horse over wave after wave of competitors, even a stirring man-against-the-mob scene in front of a courthouse that seems ripped from the pages of Intruder in the Dust. The seemingly derivative aspects of the narrative are perhaps not entirely coincidental; in fact, this entire section of the novel dates back to 1950, when it was published as a short story under the
title “Notes on a Horse Thief.” 25 Gary Harrington, in Faulkner’s Fables of Creativity (1990) notes that A Fable underwent “an extraordinary number of rewritings and revisions” before publication, and the book is certainly lengthy (and uneven) enough to support a diversion of this magnitude (95). Moreover, the horse thief episode in A Fable provides a potent reminder of how, even as Faulkner attempted, as Kreyling writes, to fashion “a complex fable of self-representation to an audience that had been schooled to expect of ‘Faulkner’ what Irving Howe (and many others) called the ‘big book,’” he continued to veer toward regionalism.26
Similarly to his earlier works, critical irritation at whatever stylistic failings A Fable possessed paled in comparison to the discomfort and even outrage toward the concept of mixing regionalism and international modernism that his readers displayed.
Lothar Hönninghausen was speaking with diplomatic aplomb when he stated, at the Faulkner and War conference, that the presence of the “tall tale” of the racehorse in A Fable “has upset many readers,” gamely attempting to prove that “Faulkner has made every effort to integrate the alien race-horse plot into the World War I plot” (Faulkner and War 128). Other readers were far less forgiving of Faulkner’s diversion. Cleanth Brooks, in Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond (1978), blustered: “what is this account of a string of equine miracles doing here?” and stated that the story is likely to “promote a certain queasiness in the serious reader” (233). The dominant critical trend, pace
25 See Robert W. Hutten, “A Major Revision in Faulkner's A Fable,” American Literature, Vol. 45, No. 2. (May, 1973), pp. 297-299.
26 Inventing Southern Literature, pp. 137. Here I should note that Kreyling distinguishes, in the author’s later career, between “William Faulkner” and “Faulkner,” the former being the man himself, subject to his own peculiar desires, idiosynchracies, and failings, and the latter the composite image that his critics made of him: a chronicler of the South, an international modernist, and, ultimately, an astute commentator on the whole swath of the human experience. Here, of course, Kreyling is discussing the latter identity.
Hönninghausen’s attempt to represent the two as compatible, seems to be that there were essentially two inherent master themes in Faulkner’s fiction: one that seems avowedly concerned with regional particularities and one that makes strong statements on worldwide literary or social phenomena. David Minter accurately summed up the competing global / regional aspects of the text in William Faulkner: His Life and Work (1980), in which he stated that A Fable signified Faulkner’s desire to move “from modes of fiction that made ‘nothing happen’ toward modes that were at least arguments for change,” yet in doing so unsuccessfully attempted to master “a literary mode that was less congenial with his talent” (200).
The allowance for the possibility of regional writing itself constituting a form of global engagement in Faulkner’s Nobel Prize speech is, perhaps, why that speech attained such popularity while A Fable, with its synthesis of local and global concerns, was an almost unmitigated critical disaster. V.S. Pritchett, in a 1954 piece in The Partisan Review, made reference to A Fable’s “rather laden majesty” through which “a universal subject has been treated as the compendium of a word-drunk mind” (Claridge 221). Peter Swiggart’s The Art of Faulkner’s Novels (1962) calls it a “splendid failure,” noting that it
“suffers from poor organization and rhetorical excess,” yet nonetheless “represents the author’s most impressive dramatization of moral and philosophical themes that dominate his later fiction” (194, 184). Kiyoko Toyama, in Faulkner and the Modern Fable (2001) noted that it has been predominantly “neglected or ignored by critics and readers alike,”
and tallies unfavorable commentaries from such Faulkner luminaries as Noel Polk, Andre Bleikasten, and Joseph Blotner (124). Even the perennial Faulkner advocate Cleanth Brooks, a lifetime enemy of what he viewed as the increasing secularization of literary
writing and, one would expect, a proponent of such an avowedly theological text, admitted, in 1978, that “it is not easy to be fair to this novel” (Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond, 230). The difficulty that these critics feel in attempting to account for the horse-theft section of A Fable, and, on a larger scale, the corresponding difficulty they find in squaring the internationalist bent of the text with Faulkner’s more avowedly regional works, is the same difficulty to which I have alluded elsewhere in this chapter of synthesizing the “modernist” and “secret” histories of Faulkner’s interpretation. To combine the two within one master interpretation, aside from the possibility of deep- seated literary schizophrenia on Faulkner’s part, seems impossible. To maintain both the regionally specific, localist narrative and the more far-reaching global commentary as mutually exclusive and oppositional encapsulated entities, on the other hand, would seem to destroy the unity of the text and lead to unsatisfying conclusions: Faulkner’s work can only deal with the region and the globe separately, as inviolable monoliths that have no bearing on each other.
Glissant and other contemporary theorists have suggested that literary regionalism and globalism, whether in terms of the text’s address of worldwide themes or its circulation within international circles, are not mutually exclusive, but interdependent, a theory I have returned to on several occasions within this work. Faulkner’s works, and the critical corpus that surrounds them, seem to bear out this assumption, but the combination of his regionalism and globalization seem not to result in any comprehensible final product. Purely regional apprehensions of his work are represented as adversarial to, and consequently sundered from, proclamations of his inclusion in either international modernism or global affairs, and when they share textual space in A