Introduction: Faulkner and the metropolis.

Lurie, Peter

In an overlooked passage in Light in August, Joe Christmas reads a detective magazine in the forest. This is an odd conjunction. Sitting in the woods outside Joanna Burden's mansion, Joe contemplates a decidedly urban reading matter--stories of detectives that are set in the city and that appeared in the glossy pulp magazine of the type often distributed and purchased at city newstands. As we know, by this point in the novel, Joe has travelled extensively in urban centers like Detroit, only to return to the rural Mississippi to which he was brought as an infant by the McEacherns. We might also recall the reference in the novel to Joe's fifteen-year wandering down the same extended city street, one that takes him to Detroit and Memphis and, presumably, many other points between. (1)

Joe Christmas is in fact not unique in Faulkner's fiction for this novel's use of the urban topos. From the New Orleans setting of Mosquitoes and the New Orleans Sketches to Bon's infamous scandalizing of Henry Sutpen in one of the city's bordellos; from the role of Memphis in Sanctuary to its appearance in The Reivers and several works between; from the fact of the reporter's job in Pylon on the city desk in New Valois and the fluttering, New York-accented newsboys calling "Boinum Boins!" to Charlotte and Harry's sojourn in Chicago with the Irishman McCord, a staple of the city's immigrant population, in "Wild Palms"; from Jason Compson's obsessive concern over the cotton market and its manipulation by "New York jews" to the naming of Eckrum's son "Wallstreet Panic" in The Hamlet; from references in the short stories to Pennsylvania Station and to Hollywood's silver dream and golden land; from Paris as a setting for stories or story fragments (such as Temple in the Luxembourg Gardens, a passage Faulkner composed originally as a prose poem) to its historical, imaginative, and spatial presence in A Fable; from the attention to gangsters in "The Big Shot" to Faulkner's troping of gangster and detective fiction in Sanctuary; from Quentin traversing Cambridge, Massachusetts on his final day at Harvard to Horace Benbow's degree from Oxford University, England; from references to an urban phenomenon like the cinema in several short stories and novels to the less direct but no less important influence of film on Faulkner's writing; from the hints of mass politics and the power and potential violence of crowds in Sanctuary, Light in August, and Pylon to the same presence and its movement in A Fable; from glimpses of black social mobility and urban migration in Sanctuary to an attention to demography and motion in The Unvanquished and Go Down, Moses; from an urban aesthetic of speed and shock manifest in his modernist experimentation to a focus on amplification, flight, and modern industrial production and the technology of war in Pylon, the aviation stories, and in A Fable--all of these cases show a metropolitan presence or cast of thought that runs through Faulkner's writing. While this dimension of his work has in fact been interpreted well, it has not provided a sustained inquiry into Faulkner's urban imagination. This special issue addresses that gap.

The case of Joe Christmas is instructive, as he traverses several environments and types of geographic space. His story's origin is in the decidedly urban setting of the orphanage where he spends his childhood. But Joe's maturing plays out in the countryside on McEachern's farm, before he leaves that life decisively only to return to the small Southern community of Mottstown. His manner of doing so, moreover, is notably abstract, an example of what Philip Weinstein describes in his book, Unknowing: The Work of Modernist Fiction, as a modernist rejoinder to realist depictions of movement and time. Such "uncanny" mobility through space is itself suggestive for Faulkner's treatment of the urban (111-14). In contrast to notions of spatial visibility and clarity associated with Haussmann's Paris or Robert Moses's New York and the city as a knowable, mapable terrain, Faulkner's texts like Light in August and others reveal ways that the city's influence can permeate a character's--or a reader's--experience indirectly. The presence of the city as spectral, hinted at, or silent is true on the level of his fiction's events as well as its language, as several of the works in this special issue attest.

Admittedly, Jefferson, Mississippi and the surrounding Yoknapatawpha County do not form an urban community. Yet this seemingly simple observation is belied by important aspects of both Faulkner's oeuvre and ongoing accounts of literary modernism, discussions that often do not include Faulkner. Most readers of his fiction know that Faulkner devoted major novels and sections of them to cities such as Memphis, New Orleans, Paris, and Chicago, and key short stories are set in the metropolitan centers of Los Angeles and New York. As recent discussions of modernism have asserted, modernity and its aesthetic manifestations can be found in a range of spaces, regions, and periods beyond traditional emphases on capitals or on the metropole-hinterland dichotomy. This special issue addresses those aspects of Faulkner and related conceptualizations of modernism, seeking thereby not to make him an urban writer per se, but to show how his modernism is more capacious and even cosmopolitan than is generally understood.

With this more expansive version of modernism, we might well see how much of Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha are, if not constitutively urban, then surely linked to the metropolis in both historical fact and imaginative figuration. Susan Willis and others have shown how even the most seemingly pristine rural spaces of the frontier are, in Faulkner's awareness of them, deeply imbricated with a dynamic interplay of country and city. Similarly, the Choctaw chief Doom in "A Justice" returns to Yoknapatawpha County--still only a barely developed hamlet--from seven years in New Orleans "Thoroughly citified" (Lehan 184). Private property and ownership leave a mark in Faulkner's wilderness that ties it to patterns of urban development, a fact that some readers of Faulkner have long recognized. With such a view, we might go so far as to say that there is little in Yoknapatawpha not defined by its spatial as well as temporal contiguity with the city.

If Faulkner's critics and other modernist scholars generally have not been willing to go that far yet, several critics have touched on the role of the urban and of metropolitan modernity in particular Faulkner works. They have done so, moreover, by way of attention to certain mainstays of urban phenomena, experience, and material history. Patrick O'Donnell's incisive essay, "Between the Family and the State: Nomadism and Authority in As I Lay Dying" shows the Bundrens negotiating an elaborate shift of identity both as a family unit and as modern individuals that is governed by relations to state apparatuses of mobility, public and civic space, and the law. (2) John Matthews takes up the paradigmatic figure and presence of classical urban theory such as Henri Lefebvre's crowd when he writes about the potential for unrest in Pylon and in New Valois in "The Autograph of Violence in Faulkner's Pylon" The confetti-strewn revelers of Huey Long's New Orleans take on a revolutionary depth or potential, despite their shadowy presence in the novel, due to Matthews associating them with the exploited laborers of the airshows: the pilots and mechanics like Shumann, Burnam, Jiggs, and Holmes. (3)

Such forays into an urban Faulkner are important, and they do much to help broaden our sense of him as far more than a rural writer or even a regional modernist. But as striking and original as these pieces are, they focus on one particular work and they do not reveal--nor do they seek to--a more pervasive urbanism at play in or informing Faulkner's modernism. As the essays collected in this issue show, Faulkner's urban awareness was manifest across many of his works and at several points in his career.

One way to frame an approach to Faulkner and the metropolis is by way of recent work on modernism that draws attention to how the terms for understanding it have been determined. In two separate essays, Susan Stanford Friedman seeks to expand on earlier, binaristic and exclusionary models of modernism and modernity, tracing discussions of them that rely on a Western (and largely urban) point of view. In arguing for the need for both a nominal and a relational approach to defining the terms modern, modernism, and modernity, she avoids omitting certain kinds of writing (namely non-Western, nonwhite, or postcolonial) while also claiming the need to maintain definitional categories ("Definitional Excursions" 23-24). Above all, Friedman is interested in the ways in which modernist strategies effect or produce a traditional order at the same time they break from it (24, 30). For many readers, Faulkner's settings in the rural South or its small towns suggested a lingering traditionalism or a harkening for forms of life that modernity threatened. Yet other readers also recognize that the focus of Faulkner's attention is always on the contradictions, transformations, and negotiations between these seemingly opposed orders of country and town.

Though Faulkner is often among those privileged authors who are solidly placed among canonical modernists, and Friedman asserts as much directly, this is not always so ("Definitional Excursions" 27). She cites Hugh Kenner's insistence, for example, on international, exiled, or cosmopolitan figures like Joyce, Pound, or Beckett. Yet if Faulkner has at points enjoyed a more ready or thoroughgoing position within modernism, this has not been due to perceptions of his fiction as urban. Friedman's approach is helpful for its emphasis on redefining modernism and modernity as a series of encounters or transformations that occur beyond familiar nexuses. As she puts it, a "particularlized modernity located in space and time could potentially emerge wherever and whenever the winds of radical disruption blew" (22). One of the curiosities about Faulkner is the way in which his prose style and formalism appear radically disruptive of conventional literary method while his stories, or at least their settings, are aligned with more traditional-seeming locales.

We might assert simply that his writing's formal complexity--its insistence on fragmentation, point of view, subjectivism, verbal density or stylization, and interior monologue--bears the traces of cosmopolitan and metropolitan literary practices into Faulkner's rural and small town realm. Perhaps better conceptualized is the view Friedman offers of a modernism defined, not from an historical or spatial point beyond the event of rupture, change, or radical reordering, but within and at such locations and historical moments where and when they occur:

[M]odernity encompasses both centripetal and centrifugal forces in contradiction and constant interplay. I pose this neither as a concept of historical stages nor as utopian dialectic. Rather, I insist upon a meaning produced liminally in between, a dialogic that pits the contradictory processes of formation and deformation against each other, each as necessary to the other. ("Definitional Excursions" 24)

One formulation of this point would be that Faulkner's modernism encompasses a formal break with literary tradition while preserving a sense of the rural communities that an urban modernity was seen to threaten. His fiction, in other words, functions as something of the modernizing impulse against--but also with--the ongoing appearance of rural and small town ways. We might then say that his novels' particular textual qualities operate, if not "like cities," than as the harbinger of a modernism that has often or exclusively been seen as a response to urban modernity.

Yet such a formulation also understates the actual presence or role of the city in Faulkner's writing. His awareness of the metropolis is in fact highly pervasive, as the following essays show. Shifting attention to a modernity understood as the ongoing transformations wrought by the encounter between the traditional and the modern, rather than on a modernism that reflects back on tradition, allows us to see the metropolis as more central to Faulkner's modernism than has generally been allowed.

Apposite to this question was a recent a posting on the Faulkner discussion listserv. In it, a participant asked why Faulkner is less often mentioned in considerations of American modernism, a discourse that favors poetry and notions of modernist spareness or minimalism. In the various responses this question prompted, one explanation that was offered speaks directly to the question of the city. "Part of the reason," speculated the original query, "is certainly that Faulkner doesn't fit the still dominant conceptualization of modernism (with its emphasis on the urban and the cosmopolitan)." One respondent offered a variation on this assumption: "Many critics still seem to equate modernity tightly with urbanity. And of course, 'southernness' in general--and typical readings of Yoknapatawphan southernness in particular--seem indelibly troped with rurality, so by the transitive property, get relegated to alternative status" This alternative, rural or regional aspect to Faulkner has always defined his writing--provided one accepts the idea of his fiction as marked above all by its difference from the recognizably cosmopolitan work of writers like Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, or Pound or the urban-themed texts of Dos Passos, Hart Crane, or Fitzgerald.

Such an assumption, however, overlooks other key affinities between Faulkner's work and that of other modernists. Moreover, it uses a particular quality or set of qualities presumed to be absent from his fiction, namely, the presence and/or influence of the city. The authors in this special issue do not accept that assumption. Their individual articles address the city as both an actual social space and an historical phenomenon as well as an imaginative, felt presence in Faulkner's narratives. While these references and evocations are not dominant throughout his writing, neither are they negligible or anomalous. Importantly, they play a key role in precisely the ways in which Faulkner's modernism is understood to intersect with his period's modernity, including the history and development of the metropolis both inside and outside his native South. In this light, such aspects of Faulkner are relevant to the ongoing discussion of what, precisely, constitutes literary modernism, a field that in recent years has gone through considerable extension and revision. (4)

One important reason Faulkner has not always been recognized, not only as a fully modern author--one identified by associations with urban industrial modernization--but as a full-blooded modernist has to do with his fiction's presumed content. While many of his works take place in what critics and readers outside the South would term a regional ruralism, many, if not most of his novels and stories concern the decidedly nonrural space of Jefferson as well as major cities and capitals. The notion of Faulkner's provincialism follows from understandings of his work that are either limited to novels (or parts of novels) like "The Bear," As I Lay Dying, The Hamlet, portions of The Unvanquished, or stories such as "Barn Burning" or "Red Leaves." Yet even a story as widely read and anthologized as "Dry September" includes references to urban-industrial phenomena like the ice plant where Will Mayes is beaten and, significantly, the Jefferson cinema, another mainstay of urban modernity.

Several qualities that for classic scholars of urbanism and literature betoken the city also appear in Faulkner and in his novels' most putatively rural or isolated settings. Following descriptions by Wordsworth and Thomas Hardy of city experience, for example, Raymond Williams refers to their sense of "an absence of common feeling, an excessive subjectivity, that seems to be characteristic" of urban life (Williams 215; emphasis mine). Such excessive subjectivism has always been a hallmark of modernism and Faulkner's version of it. What do we make of the fact, then, that characters such as the Bundrens evince just such a quality of atomized identity and experience, one figured in the novel's formalism as well as in its profound emphasis, like The Sound and the Fury's, on internal, subjective states of mind and feeling? This is what I have meant to describe as an urban quality to Faulkner's formal modes, one that we might see as sharing aspects with city experience while focusing, topically, on rustic characters and locations.

Another version of this question could follow from early accounts of the city's essentially (and paradoxical) antimaterialist basis. Lewis Mumford makes the Marxian argument that the dissolution of the marketplace beginning in the eighteenth century and the move to the increasingly abstract functioning of the capitalist economy was paralleled by the city's increasing loss of concrete form and sense of centrality. Describing this process, Mumford writes,

   These new disciples of Midas no longer dealt with commodities and
   men ... but with abstract magnitudes. They were concerned almost
   exclusively with what Thomas Aquinas called artificial wealth, upon
   whose acquisition nature, as he pointed out, had placed no limits.
   This absence of limits became not the least significant mark of the
   commercial city: it partly accounts for the steady loss of form
   that went on after the eighteenth century. (412)

Referring as he does to the "loss of form" in cities themselves, Mumford's analysis extends to the seeming loss of form in the novel genre following its adhering in the eighteenth century through its centripetal shifts in modernism--Faulkner's as well as those of more visibly urban novelists. While I offer this as a way of considering Faulkner and modernist form, Mumford's seminal urban study pertains in terms of his novels' content also. When Mumford goes on to claim that "With capitalist accountancy went the need for a secular bureaucracy: an army of clerks and paid agents to keep accounts, to attend to correspondence, even to furnish the news necessary in order to take advantage, if possible before anyone else, of changed conditions in the market," it is hard not to think of the encroaching Snopeses or their avatar in Jason Compson, obsessing over the market report at the telegraph office in Jefferson (412). (5)

Mumford also offers a useful way to consider a commensurate aspect of this material history of the capitalist city. With the abstractions of exchange value, an older, Medieval city was divested of concrete value, meaning, and monumentalism. As merchant activity became transnational as early as the sixteenth century, cities lost a heft and presence that Marshall Berman famously detailed in All That is Solid Melts Into Air. It is against such a move toward impermanence and dissolution that we might consider Barbara Ladd's assertion in this issue of a unique monumentalism in A Fable, a novel nowhere concerned with capitalism, overtly, but one that in Ladd's account offers baroque Paris as a rejoinder to what Berman, pace Marxian materialism, saw as an irretrievable loss of such urban presence and solidity.

Mumford's emphasis on "abstract magnitudes" as a constitutive element of the city recalls another seminal urban theorist whose views may offer further ways to consider Faulkner's urbanism. Written in the first years of the twentieth century, Georg Simmel's 1903 essay, "The Metropolis and Mental Life," also stresses the ever increasing distances and withdrawals between urban dwellers wrought, on the one hand, by the atomizing of experience and on the other by the demands for abstraction made by the money economy. Simmel also describes the rapidly shifting visual field encountered in the city, the constant shocks and shifts in perception that epitomize metropolitan reality. As he put it, "The psychological basis of the metropolitan type of individuality consists in the intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli" (175). These constant changes indeed mark urban experience from the more steady and constant visual field of the countryside. They also, however, are a reasonable model for describing the quickly altering voices and perspectives we find throughout Faulkner. What might it mean, in other words, to read Faulkner's novels alongside conceptions of the city, with the latter standing as a kind of text, one whose rhythms, speed, and visual dynamic Faulkner's formal strategies resemble? As Richard Lehan suggests, "we see that the city and its literature share textuality--that the ways of reading literary texts are analogous to the ways urban historians read the city" (8). Lehan's remark and his book address recognizably urban writers such as Eliot, Fitzgerald, Dreiser, and Pynchon (in The Crying of Lot 49), and he uses conceptual systems of understanding the city like those of Spengler, Durkheim, and Robert Park to claim the urban properties of these authors' works. While Lehan is not operating in an especially theoretical way, I think his perspective clearly invites theories and methodologies (like cultural studies) that wish to extend the realm of textuality to urban spaces and phenomena. If an affinity or reciprocity may be said to exist between texts and cities, then, it seems reasonable to consider whether a less recognizably urban writer like Faulkner may allow a way of reading metropolitan textures, rhythms, or flows (of energy, people, capital, or goods) in his fiction.

II

A clear case of this metropolitan understanding informs the opening essay of this issue, Anne Hirsch Moffitt's "The City Specter: William Faulkner and the Threat of Urban Encroachment." In it Moffitt offers a fluid and permeable relationship between the city's influence and presence--namely, that of Memphis--in various novels and, especially, in "Delta Autumn" from Go Down, Moses. She orients her reading from earlier and avowedly rear-guard positions such as the Agrarian critics', arguing against a Faulkner that is isolated historically or spatially from the modern city. As she does so, Moffitt attends to both actual historical developments as Faulkner relays them but, also importantly, to not fully articulable effects on characters and their interactions. As Moffitt declares at her outset,

   Far from existing in true isolation ... the integral strength and
   poetic effect of Yoknapatawpha's rural insularity is, in fact,
   founded in its prevalent and increasingly open confrontations with
   the modern metropolis's emergent paradigms. Faulkner's successful
   presentation of 'modern' consciousness in rural subjects engages
   northern Mississippi not as an alternative universe, sequestered
   from time, but as a conjunction of the rural in dialectic with the
   urban from which Faulkner could dramatize the modes of resistance
   and accommodation to modernity that his characters undertake.
   (17-18) (6)

Moffitt also productively complicates premises like Williams's in The Country and the City that detail a more directly antagonistic relationship to rural spaces on the part of the metropolis or a stubborn dichotomy between them. (7)

In a similar manner, Cheryl Lester shows the indirect ways in which Sanctuary demonstrates white fears about black mobility. Continuing her earlier work on the importance of migration in Faulkner's South here, her essay, "'Same as a Nigger on an Excursion': Memphis, Black Migration, and White Flight in Sanctuary" contends that Horace Benbow's and Temple Drake's movements between various nodes suggest how the "nightmare world" of Memphis reveals deep-seated anxieties among the novel's characters--as well as its contemporary readers--about the impact of demographic and social change. Focusing on aspects of the novel that for Lester evoke, rather than explicitly detail such shifts, she shows how the South's urbanization figures in the novel's world:

   As an understated element of [Sanctuary's] background, Memphis and
   the urbanization and suburbanization of the Mississippi Delta offer
   a context for connecting the excursions of the primary characters
   of the novel to geographic mobility, mass black migration, emerging
   black autonomy, and embattled white supremacy. Sanctuary figures
   the increasing geographic, economic, cultural, and ideological
   interconnections of Yoknapatawpha County to Memphis as sources of
   contradiction and anxiety." (38)

Lester's article traces how such human flows contribute to the deeply unsettled world of Sanctuary and to the South's particular version of modernity.

Another significant component of both the metropolis and modernity is their strong association with the early twentieth century's new cultural forms. Notwithstanding work by Robert C. Allen that effectively points to the rural experience of moviegoing, particularly in the South, it remains true that most Americans saw movies in cities. Many critics and theorists work with the notion of the cinema as itself an urban space. (8) The importance of film as an urban phenomenon is the ways in which it furthers our sense of Faulkner's works' influence by and affinity with the city. Earlier work on Faulkner and film has pursued these connections. (9) Two of the authors in this special issue return to the cultural field of Faulkner's period, focusing both directly, in Phil Smith's case, and comparatively in the article by Cynthia Dobbs. Smith's thorough attention to aural and visual stimulation in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem shows how pervasive the effects of film and mass culture were and how they deeply marked the subjectivity of urban and nonurban characters alike as well as shaped the form of the novel: "Here [in Jerusalem] Faulkner will fully address, interpolate, and replicate the 'garblement' of the city and all its attendant media forms--the mass press, the movies, radio, newsreels, and the animated cartoons, reveling in the disorientation these forms create" (77). Finding both Faulkner's fascination with and his chagrin toward such forms, Smith fashions an important way of reading the novel's own split vocality and its depiction of a "cacophonous" metropolitan culture.

Dobbs also turns to film to help vivify Faulkner's depiction of the urban scene. She spends the majority of her article discussing Faulkner's less-considered collection New Orleans Sketches, focusing on the story "New Orleans" itself to show how the development of his modernist method owed much to his effort to depict the city's denizens in original ways. From there she makes a striking, if also surprising, comparison to a director with whom Faulkner may seem to have little in common: Spike Lee. Yet in Dobbs's deft analysis, she shows how both men use their respective medium to fashion a meaningful and salutary use of artistic form to both foreground (and thus honestly acknowledge) artifice and, in so doing, maintain their subjects' and characters' dignity. For Faulkner, this meant depicting the ways in which the city's Creole identities and voices are rendered poetic or strange, but thereby more vivid by their presentation in a cosmopolitan modernist aesthetics. In Lee's case this self-conscious and self-referential aestheticism is manifest in a sensitivity toward the displacements of Hurricane Katrina in his film When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. Acknowledging, indeed foregrounding, the sense of Faulkner and Lee as an unlikely pairing, Dobbs uses the notion of "vernacular kinship" to link their approaches to a Creole subject and the ways in which that figure informs the two artists' respective work. As she says, "I hope to establish a useful working concept of ... improvisational acts of affiliation, across difference, between persons dedicated to the local, the regional, and the vernacular. In this essay, I show how Lee and Faulkner emerge as surprising authorial 'kin' in their attempts to represent the Creole City through the voices of its racialized and displaced citizens" (58).

Urban modernity and the politics of the crowd inform Michael Zeitlin's work with Pylon. In another from a series of powerful readings of this novel, his "Pylon and the Rise of European Fascism" shows the ways in which efforts at social organizing and control in Europe make themselves felt in New Valois. Faulkner's response to the rise of dictatorships and their menace abroad, Zeitlin argues, reveals his awareness of not only a global awareness on the Southern writer's part, but also a link between fascism's ugly presence in European cities and Pylons nocturnal, phantasmatic world. Zeitlin finds that link in the novel's images of the fascinated urban crowd, a figure of the masses that were gathering in Europe at the time of Pylon's writing and, like the audience for the novel's airmeet, were drawn by the image of technological and militaristic power. Marshalling continental theory to connect the reporter to Baudelaire's flaneur (and to a context for "seeing New Valois as not only a real Southern regional space, but also an imaginary world space, a site in which the essential patterns of an emerging global logic can be isolated and explored in miniature" [97-98]), Zeitlin shows a sensibility at work in the novel and its language that augers the cataclysmic future of Europe. He finds in details of coloration, description, and the "Duce"-like figure of Colonel Feinman an echo of events and figures abroad:

   [T]he textuality of Pylon is densely woven with ... suggestive
   symbols and hidden intertextual keys, [that] ... [need] to be read
   in relation to the overall matter of a certain fascist vertigo in
   the 1930s involving the gathering of large crowds (whether in
   Berlin, Munich, Rome, Chicago, or New Valois), especially in
   celebration of the militarization of flight. (108-09)

Zeitlin is one of the few Faulkner scholars to adumbrate a sense of the author's awareness of the rising shrillness in world urban centers in the mid-1930s and the only one to relate that awareness to this novel and its stylistic uniqueness in Faulkner's canon. Lest we are misled--like the reporter--into exalting flight in the novel's depictions of the pilots, Zeitlin cagily asserts that, "In Pylon the acceleration of history and technology signifies a global system organizing itself for something truly horrible, masquerading for now as transcendence" (111).

Appearing at the end of the issue, Barbara Ladd's essay, "Faulkner's Paris: State and Metropole in A Fable," is a superb version in praxis of what recent discussions of an expanded sense of modernism conceptualize. (10) Locating much of the novel's force in its awareness of a history determined by rupture and radical change that is decidedly premodern or baroque, Ladd shows another modernity informing Faulkner's historical sense. Paris may well have been the capital of the nineteenth century for Walter Benjamin and, as others have concurred, a flashpoint for what in fact became common understandings of modernity in design, art, literature, and the urban environment. Yet it also, as Ladd demonstrates, includes a deeper history, dating to the Medieval and even Roman periods, which only gave way to Haussmann's supremely visible "city of lights" in the middle nineteenth century. Ladd's attention to the city's imperial perspective and global reach dating from an earlier period allows a way to see modernity and imperial sway at work in both the novel's urban setting and in Faulkner's historical imagination. Referring to the modernists' interest in the past as well as their urge to make it new, Ladd writes that

   France, especially Paris, would function as a touchstone in
   [Faulkner's] explorations of patriotism, history, and the growth of
   the state in the twentieth century, especially in his 1954 World
   War I novel A Fable, a rumination on the modern state--i.e., on
   state-sponsored nationalism, colonialism, and empire--on diaspora,
   and other related forms of loss of place. (116)

Ladd shows that, while Faulkner was aware of the actual, modern Paris as well as of France's history, he primarily operates with "invented, imaginative appropriations of recollected places, or taken from Western urban history more broadly--making his Paris and its environs a kind of synecdoche for the metropolitan idea in the history of the West." That idea is notable for its affinities with vision, surveillance, and the consolidation of power in the modern state.

III

The articles here represent important forays into Faulkner and his work's encounter with the metropolis. Before turning to the articles themselves, it bears mentioning that this topic, as defined originally as a panel presentation at the American Literature Society conference in 2009, took the metropolis as its designation purposefully. The word's connotations are more evocative of the idea of the city and urban space than strictly empirical, historical, or geographic terms can be. Moreover, in this regard the metropolis can stand for a sense of what either a specific city (Memphis, New Orleans, Paris) might have once been as well as what the general concept of the metropolis--or those same cities--might one day yet become.

There remain important questions that these articles raise and that other scholarship exploring Faulkner and the metropolis might pursue. The South's ongoing demographic growth and examples of suburban/urban explosion (as well as their model of a boom-and-bust economy) merit retrospective consideration of the shifts of capital, goods, and services that Faulkner's novels detail. Similarly, events such as Hurricane Katrina and its impact on New Orleans point to the lingering vulnerability of the South and its cities, a potential for decline that still troubles such spaces and parts of the country and for reasons that Faulkner's fiction vividly details and, thus, may also be said to anticipate. Work like Taylor Hagood's on New Orleans history in Faulkner's Imperialism: Space, Place, and the Materiality of Myth as a context for understanding Mosquitoes and Absalom, Absalom! complements Dobbs's approach here. New Orleans's complex history runs throughout Faulkner's writings in both minor references and ongoing thematic roles; a sustained attention to it across Faulkner's corpus would provide a major focus on the writer's urban vision.

Like other modernists, particularly those celebrated for their rigorous focus on the city, Faulkner's use of the metropolis is palimpsestic, overlapping with not only other, earlier structures and edifices but with other urban texts (and their cities), as Ladd's essay on Paris demonstrates or that others have compared to Joyce's Dublin and Nighttown. (11) The idea of a diachronic play of time as well as a contiguous spatial sense between cities and regions in Faulkner has been suggestively broached by Leigh Ann Duck in The Nation's Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism. Her account of various temporalities and of a Gothic modernism in Faulkner and others offers a unique way to trace an urban effect or influence within Yoknapatawpha. Cities like Boston (or Cambridge) and their role in novels such as The Sound and the Fury, or Los Angeles in Faulkner's other writing--including his screenplay work-might offer new insight to the role of such cities in Faulkner's imagination. Any critic writing about Faulkner in relation to film or media will, perforce, follow the lead of Phil Smith here and others elsewhere in turning attention from film and radio to digital media and its own ways of treating spatial relations and visual imagery. The very idea of "town" as it functions in several Faulkner works, or of Jefferson as a decidedly nonrural space, may also be usefully considered under the intentionally broad rubric of the metropolis. As in accounts of his position within a global South, the work of this special issue and its efforts to understand the full range of Faulkner's spatial and geographical reach extends not just his postage stamp of native soil, but broadens our sense of the very terms "modernism" and "modernity." As such, the ongoing effort to expand and refine the field of modernist studies, pursued so well recently, is a discussion to which Faulkner and his critics, as we see here, have much to offer.

University of Richmond

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Duck, Leigh Ann. The Nation's Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2006.

Evans, David. William Faulkner, William James, and the American Pragmatic Tradition. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2008.

Friedman, Susan Stanford. "Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/ Modernism" Disciplining Modernism. Ed. Pamela Caughie. New York: Palgrave, 2009. 11-32.

--. "Planetarity: Musing Modernist Studies." Modernism/modernity 17.3 (2010): 471-99.

Godden, Richard. Fictions of Labor: William Faulkner and the South's Long Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.

Hagood, Taylor. Faulkner's Imperialism: Space, Place, and the Materiality of Myth. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2008.

Harrington, Evans, and Ann J. Abadie. Faulkner, Modernism, and Film: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1978. Oxford: UP of Mississippi, 1979.

Kawin, Bruce. Faulkner and Film. New York: Ungar, 1979.

--. "Faulkner's Film Career: The Years with Hawks." Harrington and Abadie 163-81.

--. "The Montage Element in Faulkner's Fiction" Harrington and Abadie 103-26.

Lehan, Richard. The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998.

Lurie, Peter. Vision's Immanence: Faulkner, Film, and the Popular Imagination. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2004.

MacLean, Gerald, Donna Landry, and Joseph Ward, eds. The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550-1850. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.

Mao, Douglas, and Rebecca Walkowitz. Bad Modernisms. Durham: Duke UP, 2006.

--. "The New Modernist Studies." PMLA 123.3 (2008): 737-48.

Matthews, John T. "The Autograph of Violence in Faulkner's Pylon" Southern Literature and Literary Theory. Ed. Jefferson Humphries. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1990. 247-69.

Mumford, Lewis. The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. New York: Harcourt, 1961.

O'Donnell, Patrick. "Between the Family and the State: Nomadism and Authority in As I Lay Dying" The Faulkner Journal 7.1-2 (1991/1992): 83-94.

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(1) I would like to thank the contributors for their work on this special issue, which has extended over a considerable period. I would also like to say a sincere thank you to Kyle Kretzer, assistant editor, for his steady patience and helpful insight throughout the process of editing the following articles, including the issue's Introduction. He has contributed much to the special issue appearing as it does and to its successful completion.

(2) O'Donnell's essay offers a version of what Susan Stanford Friedman called for in a recent essay on a "planetary" approach to modernism ("Planetarity" 473). Although Faulkner clearly operates on a far smaller scale in this novel, O'Donnell's emphasis on the Bundrens' movement functions as an example of what Friedman calls "Circulation": "the archive of mobility, calling for the act of seeing linkages, networks, conjunctures, creolizations, intertexualities, travels, and transplantations.... Unlike a center/periphery model, circulation stresses the interactive and dynamic, assuming multiple agencies, centers, and conjunctures" ("Planetarity" 493).

(3) As Matthews and others have shown, the novel's events and their organization around an airport dedication are based on the actual opening of Shushan airport in New Orleans--and the role of the city's oligarch, Abraham Shushan (on whom Faulkner bases Col. Feinman). See Karl F. Zender's The Crossing of the Ways: William Faulkner, the South, and the Modern World and also Michael Zeitlin's article in this issue, "Pylon and the Rise of European Fascism." Both Zender and, particularly, Zeitlin detail ways in which Faulkner's descriptions resemble events that took place in New Orleans during Mardi Gras in 1934.

(4) See Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz's Bad Modernisms and "The New Modernist Studies" as well as Friedman's "Definitional Excursions" and "Planetarity" Each of these pieces reorient definitions of modernism in ways that allow considerations of works, authors, or periods beyond an earlier and more narrow focus on cosmopolitan, Western, and/or exile or "high art" figures.

(5) Although Alan Trachtenberg's well known study, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age, treats not only urban centers but an historical period before Faulkner's, his account of the major shifts in American social reality and cultural experience bear considering in light of the impact on Frenchmen's Bend by influences like Snopesism. See also David Evans and his account of the mystification surrounding Flem Snopes and the introduction of the managerial class and function in The Hamlet (131-40).

(6) This kind of dynamic is quite close to what Friedman calls for in "Definitional Excursions."

(7) As the editors of a reassessment of Williams's seminal book put it, and in a manner that captures the approach of authors like Moffitt, "While country and city may continue to describe concrete and specific geographical places, they do so as relational constructs within the social production of space, with its movements of capital, labor, and commodities. What Williams figured as an analytical dichotomy can be more satisfactorily grasped as a series of permeable boundaries" (Maclean, Landry, and Ward 4).

(8) See James Donald's "The City, The Cinema: Modern Spaces." As Donald puts it in remarks about modernity that recall Simmel and Walter Benjamin, as well as anticipate changes in how we will understand the metropolis in the future,

   'The city' is better understood as a historically specific mode of
   seeing, a structure of visibility.... A sensitivity to this
   ambivalence of the city may prefigure a new urban imagination, a
   new structure of visibility, a new pragmatic aesthetic.... Whatever
   emerges, it is already clear that both 'the city' and 'cinema' are
   in any case slipping into history. Spatial organization is
   increasingly determined by global information flows; the analytics
   and oneirics of cinema are becoming less powerful than the
   apparatus of visibility inscribed in and by television, video, and
   multimedia [or digital media and imagery]. (92-93)

(9) Bruce Kawin's Faulkner and Film, "Faulkner's Film Career," and "The Montage Element in Faulkner's Fiction"; Richard Godden's Fictions of Labor: William Faulkner and the South's Long Revolution, especially chapter 5, "Forget Jerusalem, Go to Hollywood"; and my book, Vision's Immanence: Faulkner, Film, and the Popular Imagination. See also the essays in the special issue of The Faulkner Journal, Faulkner and Film (16.12), as well as the forthcoming volume from the 2010 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference on Faulkner and film.

(10) See Mao and Wolkowitz's "The New Modernist Studies" for an account of the ways New Modernist approaches seek to expand the field temporally and beyond an earlier confine of roughly 1880-1940. In "Planetarity" Friedman goes even further, advocating for a sense of modernity that encompasses "deep time" in a recognition of the ways in which transformations of tradition and history are met by modernizing forces at points across centuries and epoques (481).

(11) Zeitlin, "Faulkner in Nighttown: Mosquitoes and the 'Circe' Episode."