Modernism/modernity

There are, it seems, two kinds of Faulknerians. Or there used to be. Although not contending critical camps per se, these two approaches to the long career of this modernist from the American south nevertheless partake of very different ways of considering the canonical writer. In the process, they seek to maintain Faulkner’s continuing relevance in ways that say much about his contribution to a uniquely American and regional modernism as well as a body of work marked, particularly in his later novels, by post-Second World War—if not also postmodern—practices and concerns.

These two recent volumes from the long standing Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha series offer strong examples of both “versions” of the Bard of Oxford. At first glance, the topics of these two books might seem to trace a divide between traditional and contemporary approaches to Faulkner. “Inheritance” suggests a concern with pasts and origins, powerfully held to in the Old South, that Faulkner both thematizes and complicates in major novels such as Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses. Material culture is, of course, a not-quite new methodology that offers critics a way to approach Faulkner through what is considered a democratizing, forward-looking perspective—one in which the literal detritus or material things in his fictional world matter more than grand, master narratives about the lingering effects in the South of rules of primogeniture.

The modernist Faulkner would be one for whom, as Patricia Yeager described in a recent issue of PMLA, “the past [and] tradition become [End Page 803] . . . a source of gleams.”¹ Offering here “the history of what shines,” Yeager describes a difference between modernist and postmodern understandings of trash in the light of a numinous, sublime contemporary aesthetic (associated with landfills, a decaying but toxically charged ecology, and a DeLilloean aporia at the end of Underworld). As one of the contributors to the Faulkner and Material Culture volume, Yeager would seem to relegate Faulkner to an earlier, modernist treatment of gleaming. After all, for characters like Gail Hightower, Quentin Compson, and Horace Benbow, Southern history shines strong and hard.

Yeager’s own essay in Faulkner and Material Culture (“Dematerializing Culture: Faulkner’s Trash Aesthetic”) suggests the interesting fault lines in Faulkner studies. It would be reasonable, and largely true to say that Faulkner’s writing from the period before 1942 constitutes his more recognizably high modernist stage. Yet as Yeager and others throughout these books demonstrate, much of what appears in Faulkner before the 1940s demonstrates what critics here and elsewhere have described as postmodernist strategies and perspectives. While the idea of Faulkner’s “inheritance” may seem to refer to a modernist fascination with the past, several essays in both volumes are themselves inflected with more recent critical perspectives or find in Faulkner a different kind of modernist then the one with which we are perhaps familiar.

Yeager sees Abner Snopes in “Barn Burning” as a postmodern, productive defiler of hautbourgeois and aristocratic objects, and of social positioning. “Snopes’s laborious obliterations [of de Spain’s rug and others’ property] have a logic, as well as a resonance with postmodern destructivist artists who produced gorgeous, ruined work in the 1960s and ‘70s [such as Rafael Montaňez Ortiz and Gordon Matta-Clark].”² This is rather different from the Faulkner who was once understood as the great lamenter of the Old South’s passing.

For Yeager, the two Faulkners exist in conflict in the same story. “Barn Burning” ends with an aesthetic, even Romantic celebration of natural sublimity. Opposing his father by alerting the authorities to Ab’s barn burning plan—and thus, siding with landed property (or with inheritance)—at story’s end Sarty awakens to “the dark woods within which the liquid silver voices of the birds called unceasing—the rapid and urgent beating of the...