[This past weekend we celebrated Ernest Hemingway’s 125th birthday. While I’ve been very glad to do my part to diversify our curricula way beyond the canon, I also believe there are still lots of valuable AmericanStudies reasons to read canonical authors. So this week I’ll make that case for Hemingway and four other canonized folks!]
On how a
classic author’s struggles can be as illuminating as their triumphs.
In this
blog post focused especially on August Wilson and his ten-play Pittsburgh Cycle,
I briefly made the case for William Faulkner’s ambitious, messy, amazing book Absalom,
Absalom! (1936) as “America’s most morally powerful novel.” I stand by that
case, also a central subject of my
first academic article way back in the day, and would ask you to check out that
post (or that article if you’re feeling as ambitious as Faulkner was!), and
then come on back for some further thoughts on Faulkner’s successes and
failures.
Welcome
back! As I also argued in that article, one of the single most frustrating
facts in American literary history is that Faulkner’s immediate follow-up to Absalom
was The
Unvanquished (1938), a Civil War-set novel that pretty consistently
endorses Lost Cause and
white supremacist narratives of the war and race in Southern and American
history. (Although this
2015 article makes a more positive case for Unvanquished’s politics,
so maybe I should give it another chance.) While Faulkner certainly didn’t write
about those subjects across his career in ways that echo the worst of Thomas
W. Dixon or Margaret Mitchell, it’s fair to say that his default wasn’t
nearly as nuanced and powerful as Absalom either—I’d argue that a more
apt reflection of Faulkner’s limited ability to write or even truly think about
African American characters, for example, is his single-sentence description of
Dilsey in the 1945
Appendix to The Sound and the Fury: “They endured.” Not blatantly
discriminatory and not inaccurate, but, compared to the huge swaths of new text
he creates about the other (white) Compson characters in that Appendix, an
illustration of Faulkner’s relative lack of interest in the identity and life
of a character like Dilsey—of whose family, not coincidentally, he also writes
there, “These others were not Compsons. They were black.”
While no
single author can or should write about everyone or everything, Faulkner’s
failures when it comes to African American characters and stories, communities
and histories, do to my mind mean that we can’t consider him one of our
greatest novelists. But he was hugely talented and an important literary and
cultural voice, and if we can include his struggles and failures along with his
strengths and successes as complementary and interconnected parts of our
reading and response, I’d argue that only makes an even more compelling case
for teaching him and his works. To round off the whole of this week-long
series, part of the problem with the canon as it developed was precisely that
it treated authors and works as “classics” to be praised, rather than complex
and multi-layered subjects worthy of our critiques along with every other form
of engagement and analysis. We can’t read or teach everything, much as I wish
we could; and when we’re making choices about what to engage, it’s not just (or
to my mind even mostly) about what’s great, but also and especially about what’s
most illuminating. I’d say that’s the case for every one of the authors I
highlighted this week, and it’s most definitely the case for William Faulkner.
July Recap
this weekend,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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