H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Southern-Lit@h-net.msu.edu (June 2008)

Charles Hannon. _Faulkner and the Discourses of Culture_. Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 2005. x + 195 pp. Notes,
bibliography, index. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8071-2986-0.

Reviewed for H-Southern-Lit by Heather Holcombe, Department of
English, Boston University

Discursive Faulkner: Subjects in Historicity

Charles Hannon's _Faulkner and the Discourses of Culture_ won the
Society for the Study of Southern Literature's C. Hugh Holman Award, a
prize given annually for the best book of literary scholarship or
criticism in the field of Southern literature. Anthony Sczcesiul,
chair of the award committee, explained that "Hannon's deep historical
knowledge thickens the context for our understanding of the author and
his world, while his close textual analysis, with readings often
hinging on [William] Faulkner's revisionary processes--opens up the
texts in exciting and often surprising ways."[1] While Sczcesiul's
comment addresses Hannon's meticulous and impressive work as both a
historicist and a close reader of Faulkner's texts, it overlooks the
significant theoretical contribution that Hannon makes. If Faulkner
scholars will appreciate Hannon's ability to locate in Faulkner's work
a deep engagement with historically specific developments in
discourses of law, labor, ethnography, and historiography--not least
among these W. E. B. Du Bois's efforts as a revisionist historian and
New Deal representations of agricultural life--historicists working in
other areas of study will appreciate the elegance with which Hannon
theorizes a place for the author within practices of reading that
privilege the cultural and discursive origins of a text.

Referring to his aim of mediating between Bakhtinian and Foucauldian
understandings of the author's agency while maintaining (as each of
these two thinkers, however problematically, would) that Faulkner's
work is socially produced, Hannon states in his introduction that the
book as a whole "stake[s] out a territory between authorial intention
and cultural analysis that some readers might find uncomfortable" (p.
17). Yet, discomfort is hardly a fair characterization of reading
Hannon's well-thought out and remarkably well-researched study.
Drawing on Michel Foucault's late work and its acknowledgment of the
social and institutional deployment of discrete discursive
disciplines--such as history and law--he explores the ways in which
the production of multiple subject positions within these disciplines
can facilitate "eruptions" that expose and alter the mechanisms of
discourse, and that, therefore, make new subject positions available
within them. All this is to say that Foucault recognized that the
disciplinary modes of discourse are contested by interested parties
and that they change abruptly, and often violently, through time. For
Hannon, such a recognition gives rise to two notions at the core of
his reading of Faulkner: first, that a Bakhtinian heteroglossia of
competing voices is audible even within the enclosed mechanisms of
discursive disciplines; and second, that the author, as a subject
produced by and writing within the available discursive disciplines,
will respond to the eruptions and alterations that occur within those
disciplines over time.

It is due to this interest in the revisionary potential of discursive
eruption that Hannon often follows, with great care, the alterations
Faulkner makes to his texts throughout his career--a career marked,
Hannon argues, by an extraordinary number of discursive eruptions that
occurred in the wake of the events of modernization and with the
approach of desegregation, and which make possible an ever-new
vocabulary to employ and ever-new subject positions to represent. The
first discursive eruption Hannon reads, and whose effects he
subsequently traces through Faulkner's work, is Du Bois's _Black
Reconstruction in America_ (1935). This work, Hannon argues, unsettled
practices of American historiography, which "operated according to a
system of rules that guaranteed the continuous recirculation of
proslavery stereotypes of African Americans" by recognizing only "the
qualifications of a particular kind of historian," and "particular
kinds of historical documents, evidence, and conclusions"--namely,
those that affirmed white superiority and black passivity (p. 14). It
was historiography's disciplinary production of Du Bois as an excluded
subject, however, that made possible his intervention; denied access
to the protected archives of white historians, Du Bois necessarily
redefined what constituted historical evidence, and in so doing, made
space in national narratives of history for accounts of black
suffering and black agency effaced by the "story of loyal slaves,
munificent planters, and scurrilous Yankees and carpetbaggers" that
had been circulating since the Civil War and Reconstruction (p. 14).

Hannon begins with Du Bois's revisionist historiography in his
introduction as an example of the kinds of discursive eruptions that
he examines throughout the book. The introduction is followed by five
chapters that are highly readable, either individually or as a book-
length study. Each discusses Faulkner's work in the context of an
eruption within one of five disciplinary discourses: historiography,
law, labor, ethnography, and film. Chapter 1 continues to engage Du
Bois by examining the ways that Faulkner, in 1937, transformed his
1934 story "The Ambuscade" into the opening chapter of _The
Unvanquished_ (1938). Hannon argues that the alterations to Loosh's
character--particularly the heightened emphasis placed on his role in
destroying Bayard Sartoris's model of Vicksburg, the symbolic seat of
the Confederate South--demonstrate an increased awareness of black
"wartime agency," which was "restrained in the early version but
forcefully asserted in _The Unvanquished_," and which constitutes "a
good example of the homology that exists between Faulkner's revisions
and the work of revisionist historiographers of the Civil War and
Reconstruction" (p. 29). Because the two versions of Faulkner's story
bookend the publication of Du Bois's _Black Reconstruction in
America_, Hannon reads Faulkner's adjustments as responsive to the
shift in the discursive practices of historical narration and the
subject positions produced within them.

Loosh's subject position is not, however, the only one altered within
this discursive eruption; neither is it the only one revised in _The
Unvanquished_. Hannon also charts Faulkner's development of Sartoris,
whose now retrospective narration of Loosh's behavior, he asserts,
functions as a return to a primal scene that reveals "the South's
vulnerability, and the self-delusions of those southerners who denied
it" (p. 27). Viewing this later Sartoris as "less sure of himself as a
member of the ruling class" than he was in "The Ambuscade," Hannon
correlates Sartoris's newly threatened subject position with
discursive strategies developing among landowning southern whites in
the 1930s in response to the recent emergence--via the work figures
like Du Bois--of the "irrepressible" knowledge of black agency (p.
33). In particular, Hannon reads Sartoris through the lens of the
Nashville Agrarians and their attempts to delegitimate black land
ownership. Hannon's reading of the multiple effects of the
historiographic eruptions producing and circulating within Faulkner's
revisions of "The Ambuscade" is too intricate to repeat here, but it
is representative of the carefully rendered connections he draws
throughout his study.

In chapter 2, Hannon follows Faulkner's shifting portrayal of the law
through the figures of V.K. Ratliff and Gavin Stevens. Focusing on
_The Hamlet_ (1940) and _Knight's Gambit_ (1949), Hannon demonstrates
alternating representations of justice (as derived through legal
precedent versus factual evidence), and he sees these alternations as
mirroring the tension between philosophies of legal formalism and
legal realism in the 1930s and 1940s. Chapter 3 explores _Absalom,
Absalom!_ (1936) with particular attention to the multiple narrations
of Thomas Sutpen's "grand design" for Sutpen's Hundred; Hannon argues
that these narrations perform and reveal the ways that fictions of
individualism and entrepreneurship mask "the realities of exploited
and degraded labor" behind the romance of both Old South plantation
owners and 1930s capitalists (p. 77). According to Hannon, Faulkner is
able to make these maskings visible in _Absalom, Absalom!_ because his
text is "conditioned by disruptions in the discourse of labor
contemporary with the novel's production"--specifically, Marxist
accounts of the Civil War and the organization of both women factory
laborers in the South and studio workers in Hollywood (p. 79).

Chapter 4 returns to _The Hamlet_, and explores Ratliff as Faulkner's
meta-critical portrayal of the transition from Victorian practices of
anthropology to modern practices of ethnography. Hannon positions his
reading of _The Hamlet_ within the context of New Deal initiatives to
photograph and document the lives of Americans in the Great
Depression, and he considers Ratliff as embodying the limitations of
the ethnographer's interest in field work, in self-conscious
narration, and in the presentation of a culture from a local point of
view. Finally, in chapter 5, Hannon turns to _Intruder in the Dust_
(1948), arguing that Clarence Brown's adaptation of the novel
preserves for white audiences--through the illusion of mastery unique
to the medium of film--the dialectic of dependence and disavowal on
which fantasies of white purity and superiority rely, even as the
historical realities of the 1940s threatened to undermine the
possibility for such a dialectic. Hannon also reads in the film the
ways in which _Intruder in the Dust_ initiates a compensatory
dialectic around which the middle- and upper-class white South
constructed its entrance into modernity by figuring the
"unreconstructed" agrarian, racist South as the province of poor
whites (p. 153).

Hannon closes his study with a return to discussions of methodology,
likely in anticipation of critiques grounded in his early admission
that rarely does he "demonstrate a direct, traceable influence between
a discursive shift and its textualization in Faulkner's novels and
stories" (p. 17). However, a demand for tidy archival evidence or an
easy "causality" between the events of history and their
representation would violate the spirit of his work (p. 162). Hannon
embraces the full implications of understanding the author--and the
subject more generally--as a discursive entity. Rather than
disempowerment, however, he finds in discursive subjectivity a means
of accounting for the work of a writer like Faulkner, who, as a
subject produced by the shifting discourses within his lifetime,
created art alive with and responsive to the richness, the
contradictions, and the instabilities that signify those discourses.
Such a position is a way around what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has
famously called the "good dog/bad dog" tendencies of literary
criticism: while neither letting Faulkner's texts off the hook for
their sometimes unpalatable politics nor granting Faulkner a
privileged artistic access to subversive insight, a discursive
understanding of Faulkner allows his work to speak multiply of not
only those disciplines that require contestation, but also with the
voices of those who contest.[2] Perhaps the best defense is to turn,
as Hannon does, to the words of Faulkner himself on the matter: "'You
know, sometimes I think there must be a sort of pollen of ideas
floating in the air, which fertilizes similarly minds here and there
which have not had direct contact'" (p. 15).

Notes

[1]. Sczcesiul's remarks can be found on the Louisiana State
University Press Web site,
<http://lsupress.typepad.com/lsu_press_blog/literary_studies/index.html
 >.

[2]. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Queer Performativity: Henry James' _The
Art of the Novel_," in _The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and
Theory 1900-2000_, ed. Dorothy J. Hale (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing,
2006), 605-620.



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