William Faulkner: Seeing Through the South

Citation

Stuart, G. (2010), "William Faulkner: Seeing Through the South", Library Review, Vol. 59 No. 9, pp. 723-724. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242531011087088

Almost 50 years after his death, William Faulkner continues to be one of America's most vital and paradoxical authors. Traditionally viewed as a “Southern writer” thanks to his lifelong association with Mississippi and the fictional county of Yoknapatawpha in which many of his novels were set, Faulkner was nonetheless deeply ambivalent about the region's traditions and values. During a period of exceptional creativity starting with the 1929 publication of The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner exposed and analysed themes such as family, racial politics, and above all the coming of modernity set against a backdrop of the southern states in turmoil.

John T. Matthews' critical and biographical examination of Faulkner sets out to examine the apparent irony between the traditional and the modern that characterises his writing. In the introduction to William Faulkner: Seeing Through the South, Matthews states: “He was a foremost international modernist, yet his subjects and characters are unimaginable apart from the history and sociology of what was the most backward state in the Union”. The sweeping changes of the inter‐war period informed Faulkner's writing as much as his Southern background, Matthews affirms, and an understanding of the age is essential to understanding the man and his work.

The first section of the book, titled “Faulkner's apprehension of modern life”, provides this historical context for Faulkner's writing. Faulkner famously remarked that “life is motion”, and Matthews argues that the changes happening in the world around him affected the young writer as much as his Mississippi upbringing. Faulkner's characters inhabit this world of upheaval, and their stories come from the tensions wrought between tradition and modernity. “The South of the 1920s”, he writes, “experienced strong shifts towards modernity: the arrival of automobiles; plentiful consumer goods; electrification; the attempt to secure greater personal liberties by black Americans; the extension of the ballot to women; the popularity of movies and a culture of celebrity; and the inevitable rearrangements of wealth, social prestige, and power in communities of the Deep South”.

These tensions are evident in all of Faulkner's writings, from his earliest short stories to his most celebrated novels. But the era informed more than his characters and stories: Matthews notes that without this backdrop, Faulkner's language and technique would never have evolved. From his first novel, Soldier's Pay (1926), the author was experimenting with cadence, diction, and stylistic technique. The story of a young man returning home from the First World War, deals with the same themes of loss and devastation that were being worked on elsewhere by T.S. Eliot, Kafka, Woolf and Fitzgerald, and Faulkner was determined to create work that was equally as modernist as these writers. Matthews devotes chunks of his book to Faulkner's extraordinary style and his ability to create “breathtakingly eloquent” imagery, as well as analysing the effects of his environment on his language.

William Faulkner: Seeing Through the South is a triumph on many levels. As a primer for the Faulkner newcomer it is an easy recommendation, while for those who have read some or all of his work it is an ideal travelling companion that shines a light on some areas of Faulkner's work that have previously been neglected. Comprehensive yet utterly readable throughout, William Faulkner: Seeing Through the South is quite simply an essential read.