Faulkner and the Great Depression: Aesthetics, Ideology, and Cultural Politics

Mississippi Quarterly, The, Winter, 2005 by Caroline Miles

Faulkner and the Great Depression: Aesthetics, Ideology, and Cultural Politics by Ted Atkinson. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2006. 271 pp. $39.95 hardcover.

THIS IS THE FIRST STUDY OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FAULKNER'S FICTION and the Depression era, and a fine contribution to historicist and cultural studies scholarship on Faulkner's work. In this well-researched, interdisciplinary analysis of Faulkner's aesthetic and ideological response to the anxieties that characterized the South and the nation during hard times, Atkinson makes a convincing argument for re-evaluating Faulkner's fiction between 1927 and 1941 in the context of dominant social and political debates going on at the time. Atkinson makes logical connections between history, biography, cultural theory, and close textual analysis of individual works to highlight Faulkner's insightful engagement with the cultural politics that defined the thirties. While the particular focus of this book is the Great Depression, Atkinson's persuasive refutation of the claim that Faulkner's experimental fiction is detached from social, political, and economic realities invites others to further examine Faulkner's work as reflective and constitutive of the social milieu in which he lived and wrote.

In charting the history of political debates over literary aesthetics, Atkinson investigates the reasons behind Faulkner's longstanding reputation as apolitical and "regionally challenged" (4). He provides a thorough overview both of the perceived schism between proponents of formalism and those of social realism, and of the recent theory illustrating the complex negotiation between them. Atkinson presents interesting material showing the positive reception of Faulkner in the thirties by advocates of proletarianism, such as publications like New Masses, before launching into a careful analysis that effectively demonstrates how some of Faulkner's most modernist works defy the simplistic polarity between formalism and realism that according to Atkinson has blinded critics to the political Faulkner and prevented them from sufficiently seeing Faulkner "as a writer with his finger on the pulse of American cultural politics" (68).

By situating Faulkner in the context of the relationship between art and politics, Atkinson provides acute and lucid readings of Faulkner's fiction. He sees Mosquitoes as Faulkner's effort to deal with the changing role of the artist amidst a new rise in social consciousness in the thirties, and The Sound and the Fury as a representation of the inevitable relationship between literary and capitalist modes of production. Other texts, according to Atkinson, mediate some of the central economic and political concerns of the Depression era; he reads representations of rape, lynching, and mob violence in Sanctuary, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and "Dry September" in the context of fascism and the popularity of Hollywood gangster movies during the thirties, and examines depictions of revolutionary sentiments in As I Lay Dying, "Barn Burning," The Hamlet, and "The Tall Men" in the context of rural dissent, federal relief, the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, and the social activism of groups like the STFU (Southern Tenant Farmers' Union) and the SCU (Share Cropper's Union). Finally Atkinson understands The Unvanquished as part of a broader trend in American popular culture in the thirties to view the Great Depression through the Civil War, and considers the figure of Granny both as a Southern matriarch and as a gangster figure. Constantly scrutinizing the relationship between text and context, Atkinson reads Faulkner's texts both as works of art and as cultural artifacts produced by and engaged with the multiple and often contradictory socio-cultural forces of the time.

While Atkinson offers interpretations of specific characters and texts, he resists decisive readings of what Faulkner's texts reveal about politics, ideology, and the nature of capitalism; rather, he claims to approach Faulkner's fiction and life "by accepting, rather than trying to resolve, the dialectical forces of contradiction" and "thus reading his texts in context as sites of intense ideological negotiation and political struggle" (11) that give aesthetic expression to the Depression-era desire to navigate and order multiple voices. In my opinion, this methodology is paradoxically both a strength and a limitation. On the one hand, as Atkinson draws attention to the many competing visions of the American experience embedded in the interplay of ideas within and between Faulkner's texts, he is able to present Faulkner's "nuanced" and "complex" treatments of social relations (220) that produce "a kind of realism cast aside in the utopian endeavors of social realism" (211). Such an approach allows Atkinson to grapple with modernism's simultaneous escape from and attachment to ideology, Faulkner's "ambivalent agrarianism" (175), and the conflict in Faulkner's work between the critique of a socioeconomic order rooted in capitalism and the defense of classical liberalism.