Saturday, January 19, 2008
Importance of Genre?
I've gone back to teaching for a bit, and I've gotten bogged down in teaching-related responsibilities. I haven't seriously dented any of the Faulkner books that I've been promising myself I would read. That will need to change, of course.
Thursday, January 3, 2008
The Big Sleep
I finally watched this movie. Faulkner was one of the screenwriters, and he wrote this Bogart-Bacall flick in the "dark ages" of his career. He published Go Down, Moses in 1942 and wrote almost nothing until Intruder in the Dust, and it took quite a bit of cajoling to get him out of the funk that he was in during this period. In other words, Faulkner appeared to have resigned himself to the fact that he was not a writer, or at least not a writer anymore. He was well aware that people in other countries - notably Jean-Paul Sartre - considered him a great writer, and I'm sure that there was considerable bitterness there.
In this movie, The Big Sleep, Faulkner's touch is difficult to discern. He was not the sole scriptwriter, of course. Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman collaborated. I'm not sure about the details of this collaboration, though I might make that the subject of a later post. I really noticed some Faulknerian language/dialogue in the opening scene with General Sternwood in the greenhouse, with the "stink of corruption" and the description of the orchid. It was almost too heavy for the film, I think, and probably meant to be so.
I think it's interesting to wonder about the influence of this on Faulkner's writing. Many critics think that he fell apart as a novelist after this. His "major phase" ended by this time. Most critics put the end of this canonical period at 1940, with the publication of The Hamlet. Some extend that to Go Down, Moses. I think I've heard of one critic who considers Intruder in the Dust a major work, but that's the exception and not the norm. Intruder in the Dust became a film almost instantly, and was heavily promoted by Random House. It sold better than much of his earlier work, and it helped attract enough attention to get him the Nobel Prize two years later. It's interesting that it's not usually considered a "great work." It's a murder mystery not unlike Sanctuary; though considerably less shocking, it is not without some parallels.
I think it might be interesting to conjecture (and that's all that it is at this point) that Faulkner's Hollywood concerns, the War, and perhaps even the Portable Faulkner (published in 1946 by Malcolm Cowley) turned Faulkner away from the kind of work that made him a successful "great" writer in the 30's. Or, stated another way, the kind of writing that Faulkner produced after this interregnum (I think I like that word to describe this period) was not the kind of writing that Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren would champion in the 50's.
There are a lot of things rolled up into that paragraph. Let me think about this and try to untangle some of the claims in there.
For now, here are some clips from YouTube from The Big Sleep:
Here is the restaurant scene added to the 1946 version after requests from Lauren Bacall's agent to cut an earlier, more chaste scene involving Bacall and a veil in Bogart's office:
Here's an earlier scene, just after the greenhouse scene:
And a lame reference to Proust:
The plot is a little (okay, a lot) mixed up, with several murders and murderers. I've also heard the story about Faulkner calling Raymond Chandler to ask him who the real killer was, and Chandler sounding offended and insulting Faulkner's ability to figure it out. According to one version of the story, Chandler later called back and apologized, saying that it wasn't clear and that he wasn't sure who the killer was either. So Faulkner had to make a guess, and Chandler (I think) seemed to agree.
In this movie, The Big Sleep, Faulkner's touch is difficult to discern. He was not the sole scriptwriter, of course. Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman collaborated. I'm not sure about the details of this collaboration, though I might make that the subject of a later post. I really noticed some Faulknerian language/dialogue in the opening scene with General Sternwood in the greenhouse, with the "stink of corruption" and the description of the orchid. It was almost too heavy for the film, I think, and probably meant to be so.
I think it's interesting to wonder about the influence of this on Faulkner's writing. Many critics think that he fell apart as a novelist after this. His "major phase" ended by this time. Most critics put the end of this canonical period at 1940, with the publication of The Hamlet. Some extend that to Go Down, Moses. I think I've heard of one critic who considers Intruder in the Dust a major work, but that's the exception and not the norm. Intruder in the Dust became a film almost instantly, and was heavily promoted by Random House. It sold better than much of his earlier work, and it helped attract enough attention to get him the Nobel Prize two years later. It's interesting that it's not usually considered a "great work." It's a murder mystery not unlike Sanctuary; though considerably less shocking, it is not without some parallels.
I think it might be interesting to conjecture (and that's all that it is at this point) that Faulkner's Hollywood concerns, the War, and perhaps even the Portable Faulkner (published in 1946 by Malcolm Cowley) turned Faulkner away from the kind of work that made him a successful "great" writer in the 30's. Or, stated another way, the kind of writing that Faulkner produced after this interregnum (I think I like that word to describe this period) was not the kind of writing that Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren would champion in the 50's.
There are a lot of things rolled up into that paragraph. Let me think about this and try to untangle some of the claims in there.
For now, here are some clips from YouTube from The Big Sleep:
Here is the restaurant scene added to the 1946 version after requests from Lauren Bacall's agent to cut an earlier, more chaste scene involving Bacall and a veil in Bogart's office:
Here's an earlier scene, just after the greenhouse scene:
And a lame reference to Proust:
The plot is a little (okay, a lot) mixed up, with several murders and murderers. I've also heard the story about Faulkner calling Raymond Chandler to ask him who the real killer was, and Chandler sounding offended and insulting Faulkner's ability to figure it out. According to one version of the story, Chandler later called back and apologized, saying that it wasn't clear and that he wasn't sure who the killer was either. So Faulkner had to make a guess, and Chandler (I think) seemed to agree.
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
Faulkner and Film
There's a surprising amount of work already done on this. I found copies of two films directly related to him at the library. The first I want to look at is The Big Sleep. It's a film-noir, Bogart-Bacall flick from just after WWII (1946 was the official US release). The other is The Long, Hot Summer, a late 50's take on The Hamlet. This was in Faulkner's heyday, at a time when the old Southern writer was being treated as an international celebrity and embraced by the US government and the academy. It's not that easy to imagine anymore.
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
Key Questions
Let's ask a few key questions to help focus our discussion here:
1. What does Faulkner have to do with, and how does his work interact with the so-called "ideology of form"?
2. To what extent can Faulkner can be considered a regionalist, and why does that label matter?
3. Can we fairly and adequately analyze Faulkner's work, given the disorienting number of emendations, edits, revisions, and republications?
The order of these questions might be inappropriate, but these are the central concerns as I see them right now. I think that there is a great deal to be said for labeling Faulkner a regionalist, but I don't know for sure that it's important or meaningful to do so. I'd like to think that it is, but it's tough to say for sure. I think that Faulkner's work can usefully show the ideology of form precisely because he works so hard to stretch and manipulate that form. It's difficult to talk about this topic because it's so vague, and because it's so vast. That doesn't make it uninteresting, though. And, lastly, how the heck do we ignore the shifts and revisions? I mean, it's crazy to think about some of the changes that have been done to Faulkner's work, both by the author and by his editors and publishers. How can we make sense of all of this?
Before I chuck everything in the garbage and go study something else, I'd like to puzzle out a few things. I think it would help to focus on some individual texts. I'm going to look at some of the books that I haven't read yet, and come back to talk about that.
I should confess that my reading habits have mostly focused on the "major phase," the books that were written in the 30's and 40's. For example, I've read Light in August five times, The Sound and the Fury three times, Absalom, Absalom five times, As I Lay Dying four times, Go Down, Moses twice, and Sanctuary four times. I've read the Snopes trilogy (The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion) once, and I've read five or six of the short stories. But there are several novels I haven't read - Pylon, Sartoris, Mosquitoes, Soldier's Pay, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (originally The Wild Palms), The Reivers, Requiem for a Nun, Intruder in the Dust, A Fable, and The Unvanquished. I'm going to plow through these and try to go back through to focus on novels that are good examples of Faulkner playing with literary form. I'm thinking especially of The Hamlet - a re-writing of an earlier published story and including a section published separately as "Spotted Horses" - Go Down, Moses - because of the way that it was assembled from other stories intended for separate publication yet it tells a coherent narrative in a strange nonlinear fashion - and Absalom, Absalom. I suppose some of these other novels could be appropriate subjects for this study, but I don't know them well enough to say.
1. What does Faulkner have to do with, and how does his work interact with the so-called "ideology of form"?
2. To what extent can Faulkner can be considered a regionalist, and why does that label matter?
3. Can we fairly and adequately analyze Faulkner's work, given the disorienting number of emendations, edits, revisions, and republications?
The order of these questions might be inappropriate, but these are the central concerns as I see them right now. I think that there is a great deal to be said for labeling Faulkner a regionalist, but I don't know for sure that it's important or meaningful to do so. I'd like to think that it is, but it's tough to say for sure. I think that Faulkner's work can usefully show the ideology of form precisely because he works so hard to stretch and manipulate that form. It's difficult to talk about this topic because it's so vague, and because it's so vast. That doesn't make it uninteresting, though. And, lastly, how the heck do we ignore the shifts and revisions? I mean, it's crazy to think about some of the changes that have been done to Faulkner's work, both by the author and by his editors and publishers. How can we make sense of all of this?
Before I chuck everything in the garbage and go study something else, I'd like to puzzle out a few things. I think it would help to focus on some individual texts. I'm going to look at some of the books that I haven't read yet, and come back to talk about that.
I should confess that my reading habits have mostly focused on the "major phase," the books that were written in the 30's and 40's. For example, I've read Light in August five times, The Sound and the Fury three times, Absalom, Absalom five times, As I Lay Dying four times, Go Down, Moses twice, and Sanctuary four times. I've read the Snopes trilogy (The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion) once, and I've read five or six of the short stories. But there are several novels I haven't read - Pylon, Sartoris, Mosquitoes, Soldier's Pay, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (originally The Wild Palms), The Reivers, Requiem for a Nun, Intruder in the Dust, A Fable, and The Unvanquished. I'm going to plow through these and try to go back through to focus on novels that are good examples of Faulkner playing with literary form. I'm thinking especially of The Hamlet - a re-writing of an earlier published story and including a section published separately as "Spotted Horses" - Go Down, Moses - because of the way that it was assembled from other stories intended for separate publication yet it tells a coherent narrative in a strange nonlinear fashion - and Absalom, Absalom. I suppose some of these other novels could be appropriate subjects for this study, but I don't know them well enough to say.
Regionalizing Premises
I should point out a few of my critical heroes.
1. Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse. These two women have done a lot for me as a reader and thinker. I really admire their critical project as embodied in Writing Out of Place and American Women Regionalists, the anthology of works that fit the project laid out in the scholarly volume. I'm going to need to spend some time on them at some point, but for now let's just briefly outline their claims. They establish a distinction between "regionalism" and "local color," and they emphasize that regionalism, according to this distinction, happened to be exclusively written by women. They establish a rough time period - about the 1850's to around World War I - and then outline a series of traits. The basic premises focus both on form and content. Regionalism usually involves "sketches," plotless literary work that describes character without simple, linear narrative. And it manages to represent alternative lifestyles, where women are given or are shown to have power without the intervention of men. Local color usually has strong or clear plot, and subjugates or limits the other. Local color is colonizing or circumscribing the out-of-the-way place. To illustrate this more clearly: a regionalist might depict the life in a country town as meaningful and fulfilling (as in The Country of the Pointed Firs), while a local colorist might want to show how life in the country is quaint or backward (as in "Gander Pulling" or anything by Thomas Nelson Page). This distinction becomes interesting in two ways for me: first, when regionalism becomes an influence and an avenue to publishing for minority writers and minority subjects, as in Charles Chesnutt; and, second, when certain writers appropriate the local color tradition for racist or nationalist purposes, as in Thomas Dixon. I suppose the other interesting question, for me, comes from the ways that Fetterley and Pryse connect this distinction to literary form. It isn't possible, they say, to write a regionalist novel, in the strict sense. Cather comes close, they say, especially in The Song of the Lark, but there are no regionalist novels, in their view. The novel, because of something that Fetterley and Pryse call the "ideology of form," cannot be used for regionalist purposes.
2. Raymond Williams. This guy just rocks. Dizzying erudition, incredibly incisive analysis, clear and careful writing. A critic's critic. I've been trying to read everything he's written, and that hasn't been easy. His book, The Country and the City, is vastly important to my study of regionalism, and worth reading again.
3. Edward Said. I'm not really sure too much about this guy. I mean, it's not all that obvious why he's important to me. He's not fashionable anymore. I've never really had a professor - with one exception, and she wasn't all that crucial to my studies or my development - recommend or praise him. I suppose he's so mainstream that it's not saying anything to admit to this. But he's still important to me.
4. Anna Tsing. I had to read a book of hers for a class. It made a significant impression on me, and I think that it helped me with regionalism. She's an anthropologist, and she studied with James Clifford. She's done a lot of work in Indonesia, and I like the way that she situates the discussion of out-of-the-way places.
5. Michel Foucault. I worked pretty hard to make sense out of this guy in graduate school. As a result, I feel like I have a good grasp of most of his claims, and his work has become an integral part of my understanding of the field. It's hard for me to notice his influence sometimes because it is so pervasive.
6. Stuart Hall. I've read a few articles, and I continue to learn a lot from him. He's been important since my prelim.
7. Fredric Jameson. He's an important part of my understanding of extrinsic criticism. I've read a lot of his early stuff, and it's pretty central to my understanding of literary criticism.
I'll update later. There are a few more that are important.
1. Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse. These two women have done a lot for me as a reader and thinker. I really admire their critical project as embodied in Writing Out of Place and American Women Regionalists, the anthology of works that fit the project laid out in the scholarly volume. I'm going to need to spend some time on them at some point, but for now let's just briefly outline their claims. They establish a distinction between "regionalism" and "local color," and they emphasize that regionalism, according to this distinction, happened to be exclusively written by women. They establish a rough time period - about the 1850's to around World War I - and then outline a series of traits. The basic premises focus both on form and content. Regionalism usually involves "sketches," plotless literary work that describes character without simple, linear narrative. And it manages to represent alternative lifestyles, where women are given or are shown to have power without the intervention of men. Local color usually has strong or clear plot, and subjugates or limits the other. Local color is colonizing or circumscribing the out-of-the-way place. To illustrate this more clearly: a regionalist might depict the life in a country town as meaningful and fulfilling (as in The Country of the Pointed Firs), while a local colorist might want to show how life in the country is quaint or backward (as in "Gander Pulling" or anything by Thomas Nelson Page). This distinction becomes interesting in two ways for me: first, when regionalism becomes an influence and an avenue to publishing for minority writers and minority subjects, as in Charles Chesnutt; and, second, when certain writers appropriate the local color tradition for racist or nationalist purposes, as in Thomas Dixon. I suppose the other interesting question, for me, comes from the ways that Fetterley and Pryse connect this distinction to literary form. It isn't possible, they say, to write a regionalist novel, in the strict sense. Cather comes close, they say, especially in The Song of the Lark, but there are no regionalist novels, in their view. The novel, because of something that Fetterley and Pryse call the "ideology of form," cannot be used for regionalist purposes.
2. Raymond Williams. This guy just rocks. Dizzying erudition, incredibly incisive analysis, clear and careful writing. A critic's critic. I've been trying to read everything he's written, and that hasn't been easy. His book, The Country and the City, is vastly important to my study of regionalism, and worth reading again.
3. Edward Said. I'm not really sure too much about this guy. I mean, it's not all that obvious why he's important to me. He's not fashionable anymore. I've never really had a professor - with one exception, and she wasn't all that crucial to my studies or my development - recommend or praise him. I suppose he's so mainstream that it's not saying anything to admit to this. But he's still important to me.
4. Anna Tsing. I had to read a book of hers for a class. It made a significant impression on me, and I think that it helped me with regionalism. She's an anthropologist, and she studied with James Clifford. She's done a lot of work in Indonesia, and I like the way that she situates the discussion of out-of-the-way places.
5. Michel Foucault. I worked pretty hard to make sense out of this guy in graduate school. As a result, I feel like I have a good grasp of most of his claims, and his work has become an integral part of my understanding of the field. It's hard for me to notice his influence sometimes because it is so pervasive.
6. Stuart Hall. I've read a few articles, and I continue to learn a lot from him. He's been important since my prelim.
7. Fredric Jameson. He's an important part of my understanding of extrinsic criticism. I've read a lot of his early stuff, and it's pretty central to my understanding of literary criticism.
I'll update later. There are a few more that are important.
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