Date: Wed, 2 Aug 2000 16:50:15 -0400 (EDT)
From: Howard Hastings <hhasting-AT-osf1.gmu.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: Faulkner


On Wed, 2 Aug 2000, Barron wrote:

> These statements you have enumerated are obviously quite valid but don't
> excuse poor scholarship. I can't help but remember a very thoughtful and
> enjoyable article (references by request) that in a very detailed manner
> compared Flannery O'Conner's novel _Wise Blood_ with some popular work by
> Freud. The similarities and commonalities were remarkable and specific yet
> O'Conner claimed never to have read Freud or to have been largely enfluenced
> by his work. The author of the article insinuated that maybe O'Conner wasn't
> quite honest about this, based on the author's article! I'm fairly familiar
> with O'Conner. She was a very honest and candid lady. My _opinion_ is that
> this article was simply overly ingenious and it's value little more than
> entertainment. I think any similar scholarship is open to similar
> judgements. 

Certainly there are scholarly standards that scholars ought to strive to
maintain.  And there is such a thing as bad scholarship.  The article you
allude to might certainly be a case of this.  On the face of it, I see no
reason to doubt O'connor.  I do doubt very much that she ever read any
theory and then decided to "use" it in story , or something like that.
Also, given the pervasiveness of Freudian theory, it is quite possible
that she was influenced in many and various indirect ways without having
actually read Freud.  And then there is the possibility that she could be
observing something that Freud also observed.  Balzac describes the class
structure of mid-19th century French society very accurately. That is not
evidence that he read Marx.
 
On the other hand, if O'connor were using Freudian terminology or
something, I might be a little suspicious.  But I agree with you that
efforts to show what authors believed from their stories  are often very
clumsy and posit a very unsophisticated relation between conciously held
beliefs and the imaginative activity of narrating a story. 

> > Is there anyone out there who will assert that because characters in a
> > novel do not verbalize their author's views, the author's views therefore
> > do not get communicated, that his/her fundamantal assumptions about human
> > and social nature do not find their way into the work and perhaps even
> > shape other peoples beliefs, judgement, sensibilities?
> 
> Of course not. But, in exploring the author's views I think we would all
> equally agree that we must be cautious in finding a writer's views only in
> certain characters and if we do so we should be prepared to objectively
> defend the selection.

Certainly.

> > And if I discern racism in this, it is not because I mistake a character's
> > beliefs for an authors. It is not because I am on a witch hunt to find
> > racism. 
> 
> So why do you or would you or would anyone discern racism in this 'stream of
> consciousness' description of a persons odor?

A description of a black person's odor in a racist society which often
degraded black people by such assertions--why would I want to discern
racism in that, or determine the degree to which it reflected the
author's rather than the character's worldview? 

THis goes back to a larger question of why anyone would want to discern
racism in novels or anywhere else, and in what institutional
circumstances.  It has been a long time since I taught Faulkner, and when
I did, it was never in a course devoted to Faulkner, but in an American
lit survey or introduction to the novel.  And in none of these courses did
I ever introduce or characterize Faulkner as "racist" or encourage
students to search through his texts finding proof of this.  At that
introductory level, my energies were pretty much devoted to whatever
enabled students to read Faulkner as literature and to contrast modernist
fiction with that of realist and naturalist writers.  Given that beginning
students generally are not very concerned about context or distinguished
between an author's views and a character's views, it would be pretty
stupid to point to some remark in a Faulkner novel and claim it proves he
was racist.  The result would be three or four students, trying to figure
out what the teacher wants them to say, reading the novel looking for
proof of racism.  

I did, however, talk about both race and class with respect to the world
portrayed in Faulkner's short stories and in The Bear (the only Faulkner
novel I have actually taught), because I do find that appropriate for an
introductory level course.  And it is appropriate to raise the issue of
the directness or indirectness of novelistic representations of reality.
Faulkner can be quite an astute critic of capitalism while still
underwriting that centerpiece of capitalist ideology--the autonomous
individual. 

Were I ever to teach an upper division course on Faulkner, or a graduate
seminar (won't happen, just not my area), I would raise the issue of
Faulkner's racism. By raising the issue, again, I do not mean pointing to
a passage and saying "this proves that".  I mean the raising the issue of
whether he was, and to what degree it matters.  And I would make it clear
that it matters a lot whether English teachers decide to ignore the
question or not.  The point is not to determine which authors are racist
and the not teach them. The point is to see how it has permeated the
writing of acknowledged masters, if it has, and not to exclude this
recognition from the business of teaching literature. 

If am discussion what the profession ought to be and do with other
teachers of English, then I would certainly oppose any idealist approaches
which ignored the question of racism--both in Faulkner and in our present
institutions--on the grounds that literature is above all that and it is
not our business to meddle in politics.  Racism is still with us and
supported implicitly where people are taught not to recognize it, and I am
against it, and that is why I take the trouble to discern racism in a
stream of consciousness description while taking part in an email
discussion involving teachers of English, among other things.

 hh
.....................................................................




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