Thinking again about proposal

I took a few more significant steps toward finishing the proposal last night. I was pretty happy that I was able to sit down and compose a few things that were on my mind, and the immense period of time between my last serious effort and this effort has worked in my favor.

First, I articulated the things that really get in the way - for me - of serious thinking about Faulkner. Or, more precisely, the things that make that kind of appropriate scholarship difficult.

1. That so many books and stories were originally edited and published, then un-edited and re-published. For example, Faulkner's original version of Sanctuary was heavily cut and edited by his publisher. Decades later, the original version - un-edited - was published. There are now two published versions of the novel. Which one is Sanctuary?

2. The "corrected" texts. Noel Polk went through and made adjustments to almost all of Faulkner's novels to correct typographical and printing errors that had caused multiple versions of several books. Supposedly, these "corrections" are a good thing. I'm not so sure.

3. Faulkner's constant re-working of his fiction - taking a published short story and expanding it into a novel ("Spotted Horses" becoming The Hamlet, several published stories revised and combined into Go Down, Moses), pulling parts of a story out of a novel and publishing it separately ("The Bear," with a section excluded, taken from Go Down, Moses).

4. The Yoknapatawpha cosmos - the way that Faulkner's novels constantly refer back to each other, and how they all take place in his fictionalized Mississippi county. Characters recur, sometimes with small shifts and inaccuracies. Plots and stories intertwine, as the Compson family - the stars of The Sound and the Fury - play an important part in the telling (and the listening) of Absalom, Absalom.

5. Faulkner's own confusing and misleading remarks about his work in Faulkner in the University. Too many critics have used his remarks as a way to interpret his work and found themselves fooled or otherwise taken in. Not only does he forget and make accidental mistakes - not unusual for someone speaking in detail about books completed decades in the past - but he also seems to be outright lying and exaggerating. Sometimes he even contradicts himself.


There are two ways to deal with these problems - give up on Faulkner and find someone less complicated to think about (I haven't yet mentioned the challenges of Faulkner's fiction without adding this context), or try to wade through the complexity and address some small part of this confusing (and confused) universe.

As I have already said in this blog, I am interested in the ways in which Faulkner makes use of form/genre. I believe that there are significant connections between regionalism (as in Mary Murfree, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and some of Willa Cather's work) and Faulkner, and local color (which isn't the same thing) and Faulkner, and - to some extent - realism (as in Dreiser and Norris) and Faulkner. All of these labels apply, in some way, to Faulkner's texts, and I want to make the case that Faulkner stretches the novel genre in ways that previous writers had not. One of the ways that he stretches the genre is through his choice of subject. More significant, though, is the way that he shapes his novels around his subjects. The Snopes trilogy, for example, is about the great evil that Flem Snopes represents, and the way that the petty vices of his relatives are pushed aside.

Yet the Snopes trilogy is an odd collection of books. The first book, The Hamlet, is often included in Faulkner's "major phase," and many more people are familiar with this book than either of the other two novels in the trilogy. The Hamlet uses several conventions of old Southwest humor, and is mostly a series of episodes in a hard-fought battles (of wits) between Flem and Ratliff. The second book, The Town, uses several first-person narrators, similar in some ways to the earlier As I Lay Dying. Many of the characters from the first book re-appear, and Faulkner continues to expand on the contrast between Flem and his lesser kin. In the final book, The Mansion, Mink Snopes occupies more narrative space than his importance to the story seems to warrant, and the microscopic setting of the books begins to stretch beyond Yoknapatawpha in ways that don't suit it.

The shifts in the books make them seem less like a trilogy than just a trio of books about related subjects.

The point that I want to make, for now, is just that Faulkner studies are extremely complicated, and someone needs to untangle the role that Faulkner plays in the shaping of the modern (and postmodern) novel.