My beef with Bill

I don't want to merely reiterate established facts and theories about Faulkner's life and work. I'd like to work through a few problems that I have with some accounts of his work, and I'd like to bring some of my background in literary regionalism during the period to bear on Faulkner. I think that his work is enormously important to the study of literary regionalism for two different reasons:

1. Faulkner's detractors, especially before WWII and especially critics with a more socialist, "realist" agenda, belittled Faulkner as a mere "regionalist" or local colorist. They cited his use of melodrama and extreme violence as evidence that he was too caught up in sentimentality and shock value. When his reputation was recuperated by critics such as Cleanth Brooks, comparisons were made between Faulkner and Robert Frost, or Faulkner and Thomas Hardy. It was the microcosm/macrocosm argument - if his fiction was about the individual struggling against the larger world, it didn't matter where that individual struggle took place, so they said. And, again and again, references were made to his "language." This is an extremely problematic part of his work and his critical history, and I think that it should be mentioned here too - I might write a book about his "language" some day, but for now let's just notice that there were inconsistencies in the way that the "regionalist" label was used.

2. Faulkner's life and work are deeply entwined in the regionalist tradition. Not only did he read and write about several prominent "local color" writers, he also participated in the so-called "Southern Renaissance." He patterned his material after well-known local colorists such as Albert Pike (as in "The Horse Swap" and how it appears in The Hamlet). He also experimented heavily with form and genre. He crafted his work in ways that work against the traditional structure (and therefore meaning) of the novel. Absalom, Absalom is an experimental novel that plays with multiple modes of narration, telling and re-telling the same events through different voices in an attempt to understand both the meaning of those events and the particular relevance of the speaker to the message.

I think it's important to use the word "voice" here, because I think that Faulkner was obsessed with voice throughout his career. I think that this obsession comes through much of his early work - especially The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom, but also in As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Go Down, Moses. By finding a way (or multiple ways) to incorporate multiple voices in his novels, Faulkner succeeded in making the novel less about individual struggle, and more about family, community, and region. I'm not sure how to elaborate this point yet, but I think that trying to explain why the multivocality of Faulkner's work can be considered a formal experiment is a good beginning.