Faulkner, race, and the eye of the beholder

Now with a bit of additional writing.

Faulkner's burial, Oxford Mississippi, July 7, 1962. Image found here.

"[R]acism is in the eye of the beholder." --Andrew Breitbart

(Well, yes, in some sense. And the corollary of that remark is that if the beholder has designated himself to be a hammer, everything looks like a nail.)

The immediate context for Breitbart's quote was his (stated) understanding of what the 2-minute excerpt of the Shirley Sherrod video showed. I've already said my piece about all that. But I've been experiencing all that through another context yesterday and today, that of some reading I've been doing for my book project--in particular, some older (late-'80s and early-'90s) criticism on William Faulkner's novel, Go Down, Moses. As those who, like me, were in graduate literature programs back then may recall, those were the days of the ascendancy of theory and the resulting intra-departmental turf wars among the New Historicists, post-colonialists, feminists, Marxists, etc., etc.; the desire to expand the canon and, for some, seeing theoretical work as a way to do some not-so-incidental political work via inserting the inevitable "oh, by the way" kinds of passages in articles and books that point out the sociocultural blindnesses of the author and/or the characters s/he has created.

Just about the only work those moments accomplish in these pieces is that they inoculate their writers from the potential charge that they, too, must be blind to their subjects' blindnesses for not having pointed them out. They are purely defensive moves that add little to the reader's understanding of the text . . . apart from reminding us of the bleedin' obvious, that human beings, try as they might, can never fully erase from their language or behavior whatever virtues or prejudices their environment have imprinted on them.

As you've probably gathered, I've run into a couple such pieces during my reading yesterday and today. Of course, given that these articles' subject is Faulkner's depictions of African-Americans in Go Down, Moses, it would be naïve not to expect them. Moreover, because this novel is dedicated to Caroline Barr, the hundred-year-old black woman who served the Faulkner family from the time that William was a small boy and who died during the writing of the material that would become the novel, we're provided with a legitimate excuse to examine the novel in comparison with Faulkner's (genuine, heartfelt, but yes, socially and culturally awkward (at best; offensive, some have characterized it) with regard to Barr's family's wishes) public actions and statements about Barr before and at her death. But this post isn't about that, exactly. Rather, it's to ask a question: What would we have Faulkner do about this? It is difficult to speak with him about his attitudes regarding race, seeing as he's inconveniently dead (see the picture at the top of this post); however much we may wish otherwise, he's no longer in a position to revisit and rethink them.

That may sound a bit snarky, but the fact either not well known or forgotten or ignored is that when Faulkner was alive and given the opportunity to do so, he did revisit his public statements on race and, as he felt necessary, revised them. Louis Daniel Brodsky recounts (.pdf) the public response to Faulkner's "Letter to the North," published in Life on March 5, 1956, regarding the Supreme Court-imposed integration of the University of Alabama. The quickie summary: Faulkner gave a couple of interviews during this time while quite drunk and said some things that, had he been sober, he never would have said, not even in jest; in his writing, though, his position on desegregation was that it was just, it was inevitable, and it must happen, but that he wanted it to happen on the South's terms, not imposed from without by the federal government. I don't know if it was he who popularized the phrase "go slow," but those exact words appear in some of his writings on the subject. You can imagine how this played. Some blacks and white Northern liberals accused him of deliberate delay; white Southerners called him a scalawag and sent him threats via the mail. Moreover, you can imagine how some people read all this now: Why advocate moderation (read: delay) when you yourself say desegregation is both just and inevitable?

There are two replies to this. The first is, Faulkner didn't have to say a word on this subject to begin with, and certainly not in fora as public as Life magazine. However, as a result of having won the Nobel Prize for literature, he took on, uncomfortably to be sure, the role of public figure; in the specific case of the court-ordered desegregation of the University of Alabama, he feared that people would be killed and felt obligated to do whatever he could to keep that from happening. Given the time and circumstances, he was pretty damned brave. The other reply also has to do with time and circumstance: My mother, not quite 70, remembers swimming in a whites-only swimming pool in Austin (yes--Austin, that bluer-than-blue island in the very-red state of Texas) when she was a kid. I mention that to make two points: a) How those times are not all that distant from our own; b) how dramatically, how fundamentally our society has changed in that short a time, thus making it exceedingly difficult to remember how, not so long ago, people fought and died both for and against even the smallest incremental changes in the status quo. Sure, Faulkner's moderate course seems mealy-mouthed now--how could it not?--but, as I noted above, extremists on both sides of the desegregation question were driving the debate, and his position, calculated to ensure that as few people were killed as possible, was both brave for him to make as a white Southern man, and sane.

Another way of putting all this: Passing judgment on the racial attitudes of someone living in a time and place very different from our own frankly seems like a cheap way to score rhetorical points, especially if we're not asking an equally-important question: had we been living in the same time and place, would we have done differently? Or better? Or, for that matter, anything at all?

I think it's also true of Faulkner that he was even braver on the issue of race in his fiction and that it's possible to see his thinking evolve over the course of his career, Go Down, Moses being, again, not as direct and affirming of social justice as we in our own relatively-more-enlightened time might wish, but (at least as I read it) powerfully moving--perhaps (I contend) in ways that Faulkner doesn't fully control.

Like all of us, Faulkner was a product of his place and time. He was wise enough to see the South, a place he loved deeply, as terribly flawed by the legacy of slavery, its blacks' and whites' mutual fear and hatred and mistrust, and felt compelled as an artist to explore, as honestly as he knew how, all that very unpleasant heritage. All of which makes quite funny a short "P.S." in a letter he received from a New Yorker in support of Faulkner's "Letter to the North," which Brodsky quotes in his article:

"I was fascinated by the 3 novels of yours that I read. If only you had grown up in N.Y.!"

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In which the Meridian becomes the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross of literary criticism

The abandoned--and more-or-less-preserved--room of David Rodinsky, a reclusive Jewish scholar living in England who disappeared in 1969 but whose residence (this room--itself inside a long-forgotten former synagogue) wasn't found until 1980. More information here; image found here. You'll see at the latter link a critique of projects involving Rodinsky that they often end up saying less about Rodinsky than they do about the project-maker--which, of course, is the way it often goes in the lit. crit. game.

Hey! A new decade (and its first Epiphany, at that) requires a new paradigm!

Over at the House of Leaves forum's "Out of the Way" section, forum participant katatonic alerted us to something called My Life Is Twilight, in which people, some of whom are fans, some of whom are tugging the reader's leg with the intent to dismember, share brief vignettes about how moments from and people in their lives have come to resemble events and characters in Stephanie Meyer's tetralogy. (Full disclosure: I finished reading Eclipse a couple of days ago and had shared this in the forum, prompting kat's post.)

Looking at My Life Is Twilight led me to wonder how many, if any, of the post-ers there would move on to a more sophisticated engagement with the books; one thing led to another, and . . .

The Five Stages of Literary Criticism

(Aren't y'all glad y'all checked y'all's Google feeds today?)

First Stage: "Incoherent Admiration/Hatred." This stage occurs upon an initial encounter with a book; it consists chiefly of gasps of pleasure/anger and nothing more. It's an entirely visceral, all but unarticulated response to the book. This is not a bad thing, I hasten to add. One has to start somewhere. Besides: This is the make-or-break stage for the book-reader encounter.

One of my most memorable First Stage encounters with a book occurred just this past fall, as I sat down one day at Barnes & Noble to read the first few pages of a new book, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Reif Larson. After a few minutes of reading, I noticed my mouth was aching and wondered why. It was because, I realized, I'd been smiling so broadly almost from the get-go. I felt two things in that moment: a) a bit goofy; b) certain that this was a good book if it was making me smile like that. If you've not seen this book yet, go. Now. It's beautifully-made and beautifully-written (what I've read of it).

Second Stage: "Admiration/Hatred Incorporating Subjects, Verbs and Modifiers and, Often, Ellipses and Exclamation Points." The last two sentences of the above paragraph are examples of the Second Stage. This is the territory of the Blurb. You know the rhetorical work of this stage: It's the provocatively-unbuttoned blouse, the exposed bulging pectorals of the book-promotion world, intended to (a)rouse interest in the book-browser to the point of turning him/her into a book-buyer. It is, in its essence, the First Stage put into words, with a dash of an ethos appeal in the form of the reviewer's name and/or the publication where the review appeared: It conveys, mostly, the reviwer's emotional response to the work but shies away from an actual reading (that is, an interpretation) of the book.

Because the Second Stage is what it is, it is the most disingenuous of the stages. It's most often deployed to Sell Books. Among friends, it's harmless enough: we want to encourage others to read what we've enjoyed reading. The thing, in either case, is not to mistake the Second Stage for being more sophisticated than it actually is.

The remaining stages are below the fold.

Third Stage: "Confusion of Book with Real Life." The Third Stage incorporates not just stuff like My Life Is Twilight but also, in my experience, a whole lot of supposedly-sophisticated lit. crit. of the sort popular in the '80s and '90s. This is the territory of those who argue that Huckleberry Finn is a racist novel because of the number of times the word "nigger" appears in it--or, for that matter, that it is the most-enlightened novel on the subject of race in the American canon. (Neither is true.) This is the territory of theory-driven readings, of over-reading (the mistaking of one's own predilections or obsessions or personal knowledge or experiences or beliefs for those of the novel or its characters or narrator or author), the territory of arguing that some sort of modern-day academic/patriarchal/matriarchal/liberal/conservative conspiracy has to have kept a given work out of the canon because of its challenge to said cabal. Most Third Stage criticism is sincere and well intended, I'm persuaded. It's just awfully limited and, I'm afraid, pretty simplistic. Its simultaneous virtue and liability is that it is easy to write. Much of it will be forgotten within 10 years of its being written.

Fourth Stage: "The Book Becomes Text" (also known as, "Actually, You Know, Reading the Damned Thing"). I think I ran into one of these just today at the bookstore. While browsing the shelves, I saw yet another paperback edition of Don DeLillo's great postmodern novel White Noise, this one with an introduction by a novelist I much admire, Richard Powers. In the intro., Powers talks about his memory of first reading the novel, almost 30 years ago now, and then the experience of re-reading it now for purposes of writing the intro. To engage in a bit of Second-Stage crit. here, Powers discusses it honestly: he notes that some particulars in DeLillo's novel have dated, but its depiction of an information-saturated world filled with gizmos we've got to have but barely understand, a world where truth is relative (if it exists at all) but we still seek Ultimte Answers remains at once very funny, very sad, and very true. It's a good Fourth-Stage intro, in other words: he claims nothing more or less for the novel than what it is, but it's not a full reading. That comes in the . . .

Fifth Stage: "Sober, Thoughtful Assessment (That Still Can Be Extraordinarily Wrong-Headed)." This is the realm of the New York Review of Books-style long review and the book-length study of a writer, and individual work, or a theme. These are the works that don't become dated come the next decade's -isms (those would be examples of Third Stage work) but, instead, remain starting points for the work of others, works to be built on further or argued against so as to set up what one hopes is one's own Fifth Stage work.

As to examples, I have numerous ones I could name, but one I'll mention here is one I've blogged about here several times before, Richard Poirier's A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature. At least for the ways of talking about American literature that I think are most valuable, Poirier's book, now over 40 years old, remains for me the embodiment of Fifth Stage lit. crit.

And one last thing: As you all know, Dr. Kübler-Ross's fifth stage of dying is Acceptance. While it's very true that much criticism seems more interested in itself than in the work it purports to explicate, Fifth Stage lit. crit., I'd contend, actually gives new life to the work or idea in question. It helps the reader to see that work or idea in a new way.

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So: there you go: the first paradigm of the new decade! I feel like I can sit back and take it easy for a couple of years now.

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