File spoon-archives/phillitcrit.archive/phillitcrit_2000/phillitcrit.0008, message 31


Date: Sun, 06 Aug 2000 21:12:54 -0400
From: Michael Harrawood <mharrawo-AT-fau.edu>
Subject: Re: PLC: Fairness to Faulkner


Hey, hh!

I much admired and enjoyed your post of 8/2, and think I try for the same
kinds of things when I teach the Faulkner and any other writer.  But since
George and others have come at this problem again, I wanted to have another
run at it. Okay? 

My concern, which I think runs alongside the position you were taking in
your 8/2 post, is about how we categorize racism and how we enable
ourselves to make the denunciations that George's post made (racism, pure
and simple).  And so, the question I recycle below about Faulkner is about
how we as a community can create and identify categories like "racist."
George's seemed to be a quick-kill model, (Barron's post just came in
calling it "absolutist"; I would agree), and I was hoping we could
complicate it a little.

Your post to Pat Sloan came in while I was writing this and seems to me to
run along the ideological lines followed by most people teaching in English
departments these days.  It is certainly the way I try to teach.  But, I'm
not entirely easy with what is supposed to be going on in the classroom.
If, as you say, canonical authors are institutionally created, then we're
the ones creating them, yes?  Or at least moving the process along.

Since we've been talking about Faulkner, we should probably recall also the
particularly tortured way in which the academy constructed Faulkner as a
subject of study.  When William Bennett was the education czar in the 80s
he liked to mention three figures in particular that he felt should be
taught in university lit classes: Shakespeare, Milton, Faulkner.  I think
he wanted to get one of our boys in there.  But, as I'm sure you know,
Faulkner has always had a uncomfortable relation to the professoriat.  We
probably ought to be embarrassed by it and keep it in mind as we make our
pronouncements here.  Who wouldn't laugh today at Clifton Fadiman's
infamous review of _Absalom, Absalom!_, which coined the phrase "Southern
Gongorisms."  (Troy, I hope your prof had you all cruise the scholarship on
Faulkner's works in the 30s and 40s, which was, with one or two very famous
exceptions, devastatingly judgmental, contemptuous and which looks today so
obviously wrongheaded.  I hope also he pointed out how demonstrably
concerned Faulkner was in the occasional prose he wrote for Life and Look
magazines to prove his anti-communism in the 50s. . . his self-conscious
playing around about snobs in the UVA tapes printed up in the volume
_Faulkner in the University_.)  When he got nominated for the Nobel prize
all of his novels were out of print in this country, and he was being read
mostly in Japan and France, where his comments on melanin and odor must
have played into a different set of cultural values.

So, as a player in the historical game of making pronouncements, I'm just
wondering how we find the categories (racism, pure and simple) that inform
our judgments.  One day, the profession will no doubt be laughing at all of
us.

Michael Harrawood

At 06:16 PM 8/6/00 -0400, you wrote:
>On Sun, 6 Aug 2000, Michael Harrawood wrote:
>
>>  that Faulkner believed in and wrote down a number of things about
>> race relations that we might feel won't advance the cause of race equality
>> in this day.  But does that mean we have to say he was "racist"?  And if we
>> do, what would be the point of such an exercise?
>
>I thought I already answered that in my post of 8/2.  
>
>hh
>.....................................................................
>
>
>
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