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.