Faulkner at 100: Retrospect and Prospect : Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1997

Faulkner at

100

FAULKNER AND YOKNAPATAWPHA

1997

This page intentionally left blank

Faulkner at 100 RetrosDect and ProsDect FAULKNER AND YOKNAPATAWPHA,

1997

EDITED BY DONALD M. KARTIGANER AND ANN J. ABADIE

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI JACKSON

www.upress.state.ms.us Copyright 0 2000 by University Press of Mississippi All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America 08 07 06 05 04 03

02 01 00

63

4 3

2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference (24th : 1997 : University of Mississippi) Faulkner at 100 : retrospect and prospect / edited by Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-57806-288-8(alk. paper)-ISBN 1-57806-289-6(pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Faulkner, William, 18g7-1g62-Criticism and interpretation-Congresses. 3. Mississippi2. Yoknapatawpha County (Imaginary place)-Congresses. I. Kartiganer, Donald M., 1937- 11. Abadie, Ann J. In literature-Congresses. 111. Faulkner, William, 1897-1962. IV. Title. PS35ii.A86Z78321186 1997 8 13’.5241221 00-027753 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

For Evans Harrington 1925-1997

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

xi

Evans Harrington In Place of an Introduction: Reading Faulkner

...

Xlll

DONALD M. KARTIGANER

xxvii

A Note on the Conference

xxix

A Note on the Faulkner Centennial Some Brief Recollections of Then-for

Now

1

JOSEPH BLOTNER

Who Was William Faulkner ? Growing Up in Faulkner’s Shadow

6

W . KENNETH HOLDITCH

Faulkner, the Role-Player

12

LOTHAR HONNIGHAUSEN

Was Not Was Not Who Since Philoprogenitive

18

NOEL POLK

Defining Moment: The Portable Fuulkner Revisited

26

MICHAEL MILLGATE

Why Faulkner?

“A Sight-Draft Dated Yesterday”: Faulkner’s Uninsured 45

Immortality PHILIP M. WEINSTEIN

Faulkner’s Playful Bestiary: Seeing Gender through Ovidian Eyes GAIL MORTIMER

vii

53

...

CONTENTS

Vlll

Faukner’s Continuing Education: From Self-Reflection to Embarrassment

60

RICHARD C. MORELAND

Whose America? Faulkner, Modernism, and National Identity

70

JOHN T. MATTHEWS

The Career of William Faulkner “Faulkner before Faulkner”: The Early Career As a Construction in Retrospect

93

HANS H. SKEI

Absalom, Absalom! and the Challenges of Career Design

100

JUDITH BRYANT WITTENBERG

Faulkner’s Career: Concept and Practice

109

KARL F. ZENDER

Faulkner’s Grim Sires

120

CAROLYNPORTER

Faulkner and America Reading the Absences: Race and Narration in Faulkner’s

Absalom, Absalom!

132

DOREEN FOWLER

The Strange, Double-Edged Gift of Faulkner’s Fiction

140

DAVID MINTER

Not the Having but the Wanting: Faulkner’s Lost Loves

154

JOHN T. IRWIN

Race Cards: Trumping and Troping in Constructing Whiteness THADIOUS M. DAVIS

Untapped Faulkner What Faulkner Read at the P.O.

180

THOMAS L. McHANEY

Faulkner and Love: The Question of Collaboration

188

JUDITH L. SENSIBAR

Faulkner’s Other Others ARTHUR F. KINNEY

195

CONTENTS

Faulkner in the Singular

ix 204

ANDRE BLEIKASTEN

Response Whose Faulkner Is It Anyway?

219

SUSAN V. DONALDSON

Whose Faulkner?

226

MINROSE C. GWIN

A Response in Forbidden Words

231

WARWICK WADLINGTON

Me and Old Uncle Billy and the American Mythosphere

238

ALBERT MURRAY

Coda William Faulkner Centennial Celebration Program, The University of Mississippi Welcome

250 253

ROBERT C. KHAYAT

A Eulogy for Faulkner

255

T H E RIGHT REVEREND DUNCAN M. G U Y JR., D . D .

“He Was Writing”

26 1

DONALD M. KARTIGANER

For Literature, for Faulkner

264

RICHARD HOWORTH

A Tribute to William Faulkner

267

LARRY BROWN

“Like a Big Soft Fading Wheel”: The Triumph of Faulkner’s Art

272

ROBERT W . HAMBLIN

Faulkner Centennial Celebrations

285

Contributors

289

Index

295

This page intentionally left blank

Evans Harrington

“Faulkner at 100: Retrospect and Prospect” was the last conference Evans Harrington attended. Cofounder of the conference in 1974, with Ann J. Abadie, and its director through 1993, he died of cancer December 1,1997. At the 1998 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, Donald Kartiganer, who succeeded Evans as director, made the following remarks. Before introducing the speaker for this evening, I want to say a few words about the man who, with Ann Abadie, cofounded Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha twenty-five years ago. Evans died this past year of cancer at the age of seventy-two. Although many of you here tonight may not have known Evans, simply by virtue of your presence you are sharing in his legacy, for certainly one of the most significant of his many contributions to our lives and to literary study was Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha. Together, Evans and Ann created a literary event that reflected perfectly Evans’s conception of what literature is and what it is for: Faulkner’s work positioned in the context of its writing, the books considered not as isolated, breathless wonders, like stars, but as living organisms, intimately related to, reflecting the real world in which and of which they were made. The conference came to represent the genuine liberalism of Evans Harrington: a gathering not just of scholars and critics but of people from all walks of life bound together by a fascination with Faulkner’s fiction. I do not think there is a gathering quite like it in America. The general reader-it was something Evans Harrington, for all his advanced degrees, never ceased to be, and never ceased to respect-the general reader is alive and well, assembling in one-hundred-degree heat in Oxford, Mississippi, to listen to academic lectures on one of the most difficult writers in American literature. Evans believed that, as someone said about war and generals, Faulkner was too important to be left to the scholars. In Oxford Evans’s achievement and value were so well known that, at his passing, we have hardly had to deliberately, formally remember them, since they have never been really very far from our minds. But there is a time for public, communal acknowledgment. So let me say this. He was a good novelist; he was a superb teacher; he was a passionately xi

xii

E vans Harringt on

involved, deeply committed citizen; he loved this town and this Southern land and people and was fearless in his desire to make them worthy: as Faulkner has Chick Mallison think in Intruder in the Dust: “thatfierce desire that they should be perfect because they were his and he was theirs.” And so, along with everything else, this university professor, this writer and teacher, this creator of academic conferences, became, when the times demanded, a hero as well. When the crises came to Mississippi and Oxford: the registration of James Meredith at the University in 1962, the integration of the Southern Literary Festival in 1965, the attempt to censor a student literary magazine in igp-in each case, Evans Harrington was there: standing up, being counted, the right man at the right time, one of those necessary people without whom nothing truly important ever gets done. There are passages from Faulkner’s Nobel Prize speech that are among the most quoted of all his writing. I must confess that I have never been quite as enamored of these passages as others are. For me they seem too abstract, too remote from the real ground of his power and his meaning. And yet, thinking now about Evans Harrington, I can finally put a concrete life behind some of those elegant, high-sounding words. Think of Evans, what he was and how he lived: “courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice.” And if you could just add a glorious sense of humor, you’d have something like the man.

In Place of an Introduction: Reading Faulkner

In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent: a thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had in us, so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out and stood in the light, lashing his tail. -CZESLAW MILOSZ, ‘Xrs Poeticu?”

Two images, Centennially inspired: Faulkner in the fall of 1928. Lean, stif-backed, dark-haired, dark-mustached, with a manner at once courteous and cocky, the arrogance of absolute confidence, crossing the cool October morning streets of Greenwich Village, carrying the typescript of a novel he has finished revising the day

before--perhaps thinking, as he would later write, “I wont have to worry about publishers liking or not liking this at all, even as he is convinced that he has created “‘somethingto which the shabby term Art not only can, but must, be applied.” He walks into the apartment of Ben Wasson-his friend and occasional agent and editor--and casually tosses The Sound and the Fury on the bed: “Read this, Bud. It’s a real son of a bitch.” Faulkner in the summer of 1997. Represented in an oversized framed photograph suspended on a backdrop of the stage of an auditorium at the University of Mississippi: hair turned white, the mustache still striated with black yet fuller and curving upward to the illusion of a smile; the old arrogance replaced by benign aloofness, the quiet confidence of completion-perhaps thinking, as he had anticipated, “that it was all pretty good,” but that now he has ‘butit all away forever that I anguished and sweated over, and it [will] never trouble me anymore.” He seems to be listening intently, but to a voice only he can hear, as a speaker at the front of the stage holds forth before an audience of over four hundred people, gathered from around the world to celebrate, pay homage, continue the task of making plain. Does he r e m e m b e r 4 o e s anyone?-what it was that made that novel of sixty-eight years ago a ‘