Faulkner and the Politics of Reading - Book Review

Criticism, Wntr, 2003 by John Bassett

by Karl F. Zender. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. Pp. 179 xx. $29.95.

For nearly thirty years Karl Zender has been one of the most thoughtful and astute Faulkner critics and scholars in America, and for a number of years he did the annual review of Faulkner scholarship. He is one of those critics sophisticated about the changes effected in literary study by post-structuralist approaches and able to employ some of them effectively in his own work, yet with reservations about the dogmatic oppositional quality of so much work associated with them. He continues to believe that we learn about life from poetry and fiction itself as well as from studying the silences that surround texts, that the aesthetic response to literature remains important, and that social and political institutions in the West can change and have changed incrementally for the better, perhaps in some small part because of the influences of art and literature.

Zender remains outside the traditionalist or conservative framework of the profession but not perhaps of primary interest to oppositional critics, yet Faulkner and the Politics of Reading, like The Crossing of the Ways: William Faulkher, the South, and the Modern World (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), provides a great deal from which all readers of Faulkner can learn. Tying the six essays in Zender's new book together are two themes--drawing "together the accepting and resisting halves of my response to the new methodologies" and a sense of the dynamics, the changing nature, of Faulkner's own perspective on himself, his world, and his craft, a sense that only by appreciating those changes does one approach the figure in Faulkner's carpet. Earlier versions of half the pieces have been published separately. While all in one way or another do reflect a self-conscious concern by Zender with the works of his post-structuralist colleagues, whom he treats quite fairly, they will generally be read as discrete essays.

The most demanding piece is the first, "The Politics of incest," which appeared in an earlier version in 1998 in American Literature. Zender's purpose is to revise the way readers look at a central pattern in Faulkner's fiction, to replace the notion that incest is used consistently throughout the novels as either a moral-religious paradigm or an oedipal motif. Zender adopts a developmental approach to show that Faulkner at least until 1940 struggled with the theme and revised its function. He cites Faulkner's own wide reading in the Romantic poets, who distinguished between father-daughter incest as an expression of tyranny and brother-sister incest as an egalitarian symbol, and also Faulkner's awareness of relevant intellectual currents around incest in the 1920s and 1930s.

The central texts are The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, and Go Down, Moses. In the Compson novel Faulkner first used the incest theme seriously, going beyond the satiric use in Mosquitoes and nostalgic use in Flags in the Dust. Still, however, it remained tied in his mind to issues of southern regionalism, even as he rejected conventional associations such as those propagated by the novels of Erskine Caldwell. Incest is the key to Quentin's "inability to face the implications of Caddy's transgressions in himself," but the ahistoncism of the novel moderates Faulkner's shift away from the uncoupling of incest to Southern chauvinism. In Absalom, Abaslom! Faulkner "implicates the incest motif" in culture and history as he also connects it to miscegenation. Quentin, who was of course not originally in the manuscript and who--like Shreve and Mr. Compson--is a much different character in the later book, struggles against the weight of Southern history but can never achieve any real political understanding of his region. Rather, he can only sense the "tragic dimension" of the story he has heard. At the novel's center therefore are the "tragic consequences of the lack of political maturation" rather than the social and political dimensions of the history behind the tragedy. Zender also connects the incest theme of the novel to politics of the 1930s and the distinction between the right's image of "fatherland" and the left's image of "brotherhood," both drawing on implications of incest. This passage is too sketchy to be convincing but does smooth the transition to Zender's discussion of Go Down, Moses, where Faulkner connects the incest trope to the history of slavery. In the end, of course, the book's rich historical context must be balanced against Ike's, and Faulkner's, refusal to accede to New Deal liberalism and what is described as Northern governmental control. Ike retreats into sentimental populism and hysteria, and like Quentin ends in a failed maturation. Faulkner, moreover, provides in neither "Delta Autumn" nor "Go Down, Moses" much of an alternative vision for the African American. Some recent Faulkner critics do justify the novel politically as having a kind of enlightened postmodernism beneath it. Zender will have none of that, but still values it highly for its wrestling with and deeper understanding of the emotional meanings of love, inequality, and marginalization.