"The Faulkner Factor: Influence and Intertextuality in Southern Fiction since 1965."

TY - CHAP

T1 - "The Faulkner Factor: Influence and Intertextuality in Southern Fiction since 1965."

AU - Bone, Martyn Richard

N1 - The New Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner offers contemporary readers a sample of innovative approaches to interpreting and appreciating William Faulkner, who continues to inspire passionate readership worldwide. The essays here address a variety of topics in Faulkner’s fiction, such as its reflection of the concurrent emergence of cinema, social inequality and rights movements, modern ways of imagining sexual identity and behavior, the South’s history as a plantation economy and society, and the persistent effects of traumatic cultural and personal experience. This new Companion provides an introduction to the fresh ways Faulkner is being read in the twenty-first century, and bears witness to his continued importance as an American and world writer.

PY - 2015/1/1

Y1 - 2015/1/1

N2 - In Barry Hannah’s posthumously published short story “Fire Water” (2010), two Mississippi “literary women” ponder how “Both of them had worked in the shadow of this statue. Faulkner.” They conclude ruefully that, “Compared, they were only mild grannies with a patient light bulb inside.” Hannah’s characters are merely the latest in a long line of U.S. southern writers who have confronted the daunting legacy of William Faulkner. What one might term the Faulkner factor in southern fiction was first identified by Flannery O’Connor fully fifty years before Hannah’s story appeared: “The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.” Faulkner himself was still alive in 1960, and critic Michael Kreyling has argued that, after winning the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature, “William Faulkner lived with an additional burden[:] … himself as institutionalized cultural force.” Witnessing the retrospective valorization of his “great” period (from The Sound and the Fury in 1929 to, at the latest, Go Down, Moses in 1942), Faulkner was the first writer to come “under the influence of his own formidable example” – an “anxiety of influence” that, Kreyling suggests, Faulkner attempted to neuter through self-parody. The Faulkner factor in southern fiction – or perhaps more pointedly, in southern literary studies – has deep roots. Though Allen Tate declared in 1945 that “the Southern literary renascence … is over,” the hyper-canonization of Faulkner between publication of The Portable Faulkner in 1946 and the Nobel award in 1949 also renewed the cultural capital of southern literature. Already in 1950, Tate’s Agrarian fellow traveler Donald Davidson could answer his own rhetorical question, “Why does the modern South have a great literature?” by repeatedly referencing the singular achievement of Faulkner.

AB - In Barry Hannah’s posthumously published short story “Fire Water” (2010), two Mississippi “literary women” ponder how “Both of them had worked in the shadow of this statue. Faulkner.” They conclude ruefully that, “Compared, they were only mild grannies with a patient light bulb inside.” Hannah’s characters are merely the latest in a long line of U.S. southern writers who have confronted the daunting legacy of William Faulkner. What one might term the Faulkner factor in southern fiction was first identified by Flannery O’Connor fully fifty years before Hannah’s story appeared: “The presence alone of Faulkner in our midst makes a great difference in what the writer can and cannot permit himself to do. Nobody wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.” Faulkner himself was still alive in 1960, and critic Michael Kreyling has argued that, after winning the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature, “William Faulkner lived with an additional burden[:] … himself as institutionalized cultural force.” Witnessing the retrospective valorization of his “great” period (from The Sound and the Fury in 1929 to, at the latest, Go Down, Moses in 1942), Faulkner was the first writer to come “under the influence of his own formidable example” – an “anxiety of influence” that, Kreyling suggests, Faulkner attempted to neuter through self-parody. The Faulkner factor in southern fiction – or perhaps more pointedly, in southern literary studies – has deep roots. Though Allen Tate declared in 1945 that “the Southern literary renascence … is over,” the hyper-canonization of Faulkner between publication of The Portable Faulkner in 1946 and the Nobel award in 1949 also renewed the cultural capital of southern literature. Already in 1950, Tate’s Agrarian fellow traveler Donald Davidson could answer his own rhetorical question, “Why does the modern South have a great literature?” by repeatedly referencing the singular achievement of Faulkner.

KW - Faculty of Humanities

KW - William Faulkner

KW - intertextuality

KW - Southern Fiction

M3 - Book chapter

SN - 9781107689565

SP - 134

EP - 147

BT - The New Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner

A2 - Matthews, John T.

PB - Cambridge University Press

ER -