Introduction: Faulkner, memory, history.

Donaldson, Susan V.

To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it "the way it really was." It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.

--Walter Benjamin

Faulkner once told a college student audience, "As far as I know I have never done one page of research." He added, though, that he doubted if he had "ever forgotten anything I ever read" (FU 251). It is a curious and even cryptic disclaimer for a writer who has been linked with historical consciousness, memory, and the past since George Marion O'Donnell wrote his pioneering 1939 essay on the shaping forces of traditionalism versus anti-traditionalism in the world of Yoknapatawpha. But then again, Faulkner's engagement with history and memory has always been contradictory and elusive, and commentators have been able to extricate from his texts historical perspectives ranging from Nietzschean monumentalism to modernist repudiation. Like that most enigmatic of "historical" characters Thomas Sutpen, commanding the attention and conflicting archaeological efforts of contending narrators in Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Faulkner's fiction, with its obsessive and puzzling representations of the past and its impact upon the present, has attracted commentators and critics who have in their own writings replicated many of those contradictions while seeking to articulate their own historical agendas.

For many of his first generation of readers, drawn from the ranks of New Critics and Southern Agrarians, his accounts of the regional past and its heavy burdens offered a ready alternative to the weightlessness of modern American life, and for those in search of a usable past, like historian C. Vann Woodward, Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha saga posed a historical consciousness countering American exceptionalism and indifference to the lessons of history. More recently, though, a growing number of literary critics with heavy investments in poststructuralist theory and multiculturalism have resorted to psychoanalysis, trauma theory, and the postmodern turn to capture something of Faulkner's more sleight-of-hand representations of memory and the past--like his evolving mistrust of "official" histories, experimentation with alternative stories of the past, and self-reflexive meditations on the elusiveness of both memory and history. Whatever the theoretical vocabulary invoked, though, Yoknapatawpha's histories continue to generate additional histories and metahistories, from Don H. Doyle's welcome examination of the local history underlying Faulkner's fiction in Faulkner's County to John Duvall and Ann J. Abadie's edited collection of revisionist essays, Faulkner and Postmodernism. It would seem, then, that like Quentin Compson in the iron New England dark, compulsively retracing the histories of the Sutpens, we will never be done listening to and telling histories about Faulkner's own retracings and rewritings of histories--and nor should we expect to if we take into account the many twists and turns that Faulkner's history of telling histories continues to reveal to us as we turn each new critical/ theoretical/historiographical lens upon it.

Even as conventional a narrative as Flags in the Dust (1929; 1973), Faulkner's third novel preceding the great period of narrative experimentation to come, suggests something of both the wariness and obsessiveness with which Faulkner (and by implication we as his readers) approached a past alternately overbearing and elusive--and nowhere more so than in the novel's opening, where old man Falls and old Bayard Sartoris are introduced as figures diminished by the monumentality of the past despite their own implication in making the past larger than themselves. The story they tell--of the near-capture of John Sartoris, old Bayard's father, by Union soldiers during the Civil War--is one that old man Falls has told Bayard so many times that the telling has taken on the ritualistic qualities of a seance, and indeed, the storytelling evokes the presence of John Sartoris himself in the room with his storytellers: "Freed as he was of time, he was a far more definite presence in the room than the two of them cemented by deafness to a dead time and drawn thin by the slow attenuation of days. He seemed to stand above them, all around them, with his bearded, hawklike face and the bold glamor of his dream" (FD 5). Anticipating the Yoknapatawpha saga to come in Faulkner's career, with its endlessly recycled tales of Sartorises, Compsons, Sutpens, Beauchamps, McCaslins, and Snopeses, that opening scenario of storytelling looms over the rest of the characters in the unfolding narrative of Flags in the Dust, and they in turn reenact its patterns of vainglory and self-destructiveness--as though even acts of hearing old stories again and again were both compromising and imprisoning.

By the end of the novel it seems all too fitting that one of the final glimpses we have of the Sartorises is of old John Sartoris's monument, perched on a pedestal and overlooking the railroad he had once built. Ultimately, his is a history, it would seem, that has been reified by the constant retelling of past stories. For the world of the Sartorises, and for Faulkner at this stage of his life and career, the statute bears testimony to the power and tenacity of the cult of the Lost Cause in the early twentieth-century South--to that endless commemoration of the Confederacy finding articulation in Confederate soldier monuments dominating town squares across the region, in massive Confederate reunions at the turn of the century, and above all in highly partisan narratives of the Civil War and Reconstruction that came to dominate American history until well into the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Casting a long shadow over the narrative and family stories of the past, the statue of John Sartoris evokes all too well the dangers of monumental history that Friedrich Nietzsche explores in The Use and Abuse of History and that Richard King marshals to good effect in A Southern Awakening, his path-breaking 1980 analysis of monumentalism and oedipal struggles in modern Southern literature in general and Faulkner in particular.

"Monumental history," from Nietzsche's perspective--and it is one well worth exploring in examining Faulkner's own multiple, evolving, and contradictory engagements with history--"is the cloak under which ... hatred of present power and greatness masquerade as an extreme admiration of the past" (17). To take the monumental view of history, Nietzsche notes, was to bow endlessly to the authority of the past without fully grasping its meaning and impact, or for that matter, making use of the opportunities offered by the present. For Nietzsche this view amounts to little more than an "idolatrous--and conscientious--dance around the half-understood monument of a great past" (16). Worse yet, monumental history requires by his lights a certain consistency and abstractness, much like mythic romance, that ruled out anomalies and contradictions and thereby necessitates forgetfulness in the interest of wholeness and compatibility (15). The result of such a dominating and highly selective picture of the past, he warns, is to make life itself, as well as history, "maimed and degenerate" (12).

For Faulkner himself, even at this early stage of his career, the consequences of monumentalism, however alluring it could be, nevertheless pointed ultimately toward death--to the cemetery holding the graves of nearly all the Sartoris men. The body count at the end of Flags in the Dust is high indeed--old Bayard, his grandsons Bayard and John, and the white family's black man servant Simon Strother. Still, the novel's narrator is never quite able to relinquish the glamor of Sartoris physical heroism and recklessness that old man Falls and old Bayard Sartoris commemorate in that opening scene of bringing the past back to life. The story of the Sartorises and their self-destructive past, the narrator says, might have been "a game outmoded and played with pawns shaped too late and to an old dead pattern, and of which the Player Himself is a little wearied." But still, he adds, "... there is death in the sound of it, and a glamorous fatality, like silver pennons downrushing at sunset, or a dying fall of horns along the road to Roncevaux" (FD 433).

That last passage suggests something of Faulkner's own "idolatrous--and conscientious--dance around the half-understood monument of a great past," and perhaps more to the point, his own early transferential engagement with stories of the past sometimes resulting in his reenactment and repetition of the regional past and its carefully fabricated memories. Dominick LaCapra tells us something of those dangers implicit in any sort of transferential engagement with the past in his 1985 volume History and Criticism, which examines the transferential nature of reading and writing history as a relationship akin to the exchange between analysand and analyst reenacting, recalling, and working through patterns of the past. LaCapra offers a useful assessment of some of the consequences emerging from the unsettling encounter between past texts and artifacts and a writer of histories. "Transference causes fear of possession by the past and loss of control over both it and oneself," LaCapra observes. "It simultaneously brings the temptation to assert full control over the 'object' of study through ideologically suspect procedures that may be related to the phenomenon Freud discussed as 'narcissism'" (72). For Freud, as LaCapra points out, "... the desirable but elusive objective of an exchange with an 'other' is to work through transferential displacement in a manner that does not blindly replicate debilitating aspects of the past" (72). But for readers of past texts, histories, and artifacts, from this perspective, there is always the danger of doing precisely that--replicating those "debilitating aspects" "besetting their 'objects' of study in their own disciplinary protocols and procedures" (74).

Those dangers of replicating or reenacting the past run the length and breadth of Faulkner's work and become a compelling (and compulsive) recurring thematic concern, as a host of commentators have insisted since the publication in 1975 of John Irwin's illuminating study Doubling and Incest, Repetition and Revenge. In many respects, Flags in the Dust as the opening chapter of the Yoknapatawpha saga offers a revealing glimpse of some of those dangers. Faulkner's saga of the Sartoris family, redolent with the mythology of the Lost Cause, replete with reckless cavaliers, stalwart women, and faithful servants, is a work that resonates with those white stories of the southern past that Faulkner heard throughout his childhood and youth--in his family, his community, and in school--and that he undoubtedly read in his school history books (Doyle 13-14). We're reminded, after all, that his first grade teacher bestowed upon him a gift of Thomas Dixon's The Clansman, the film version of which, The Birth of a Nation, offered a distilled version of the Cult of the Lost Cause, with its sentimentalization of the plantation South and glorification of the Confederacy, and celebrated the triumph of the Ku Klux Klan over black Reconstruction (Blotner 20). And if his portrayal of the Sartoris family and its past owes a good deal to what David Minter refers to as the Cavalier, Plantation, and Redeemers legends and their hierarchical assumptions of race, so too are his characterizations of the Sartoris black retainers, "creations suggestive," in Thadious Davis's words, "of plantation fiction" (Minter 4; Davis 66). To an unsettling degree, an early work like Flags in the Dust replicates the racial hierarchies structuring popular white histories and myths of the region--as though the monumentalism of John Sartoris and his whole Civil War generation can leave no room at all for alternative memories and histories of African Americans existing apart from the white families they serve.

It is worth pondering, then, that as a work of historic preservation Flags in the Dust bears a striking resemblance to two contemporary preservation projects undertaken by white southerners made anxious by African American restlessness and assertiveness and their own rapidly depleting reservoirs of memory. In Charleston, South Carolina, white elite groups banded together in the late teens and twenties to "rescue" decaying eighteenth-century mansions from African American slum dwellers and "restore" them to their original preeminence--and in doing so transformed the Battery of the old seaport into a showcase of pristine colonial white culture virtually denuded of its once racially heterogeneous neighborhoods. (1) Just a few years later local residents of the sleepy backwater town of Williamsburg, Virginia, managed to persuade John D. Rockefeller to finance the community's restoration/reconstruction as colonial capital and tourist site, and in doing so, produced an open-air museum that would offer a decidedly white elite representation of eighteenth-century life until well into the 1980s. (2) Both ventures into historic preservation would take on the configurations of monumentalism, glorifying a smoothed-out facade of the regional past and ruling out alternative histories, voices, anomalies, and contradictions--and would do so until nearly the close of the twentieth century.

Perhaps because such monumental facades were so imposing and intimidating--whether in the streets of Historic Charleston or in Faulkner's own early venture into historic preservation in the pages of Flags in the Dust--the works that immediately followed fairly resounded with a cacophony of voices yearning to flee history's long shadow. Texts like The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), and even Light in August (1932) are marked by that quintessentially modernist desire to escape history, tradition, and the repetitions they require. In these novels refuge seems to be offered in a realm of the imagination utterly apart, like the Presbyterian hell for which Quentin Compson yearns in The Sound and the Fury to shelter himself and his sister Caddie from the ravages of time "amid the pointing and the horror beyond the clean flame" (116). As Herbert Schneidau observes in his study of modernist writers and history, no other writer "has been more haunted by the dilemma of the meaning of the past; but his most Southern trait is his evasion of real history in favor of a quest for an imaginary world" (179). For Schneidau, Quentin and so many other Faulknerian characters "tend to be Supergatsbys: they want not simply to repeat the past with a new ending, but to repeal or change time altogether, to create and worship an ideal unchanging world, safe from falling into real history" (181).

Ironically enough, the weight of tradition and memory that Quentin and his fellows seek so desperately to escape was already quickly disappearing--both in Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha and in the world of the fast-modernizing twentieth-century South. Those changes could be detected in the steady decline of the Compson fortunes, the diminishing authority of the Sartorises, and the increasing restiveness of their black retainers, as well as in the disappearance of wilderness traced in Go Down, Moses (1942) and the emergence of Snopesian men on the make in The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959). Change was also fast-sweeping Faulkner's hometown of Oxford, Mississippi, which became something of a boomtown in the 1920s, as Don Doyle vividly demonstrates in Faulkner's County (291-72). In Requiem for a Nun Faulkner himself would write that his own fictional version of Oxford "overnight ... would become a town without having been a village; ... it would wake frantically from its communal slumber into a rash of Rotary and Lion clubs and Chambers of Commerce and City Beautifuls ..." (476).

Above all, though, change could be detected in the ever-mounting numbers of African Americans leaving Mississippi from the 1910s to the 1940s--148,500 in that first decade, 83,000 the next, then 68,100, and finally 314,200 in the 1940s, the decade that mechanical cotton pickers were introduced in the Mississippi Delta (McMillen 259). Historian James Cobb estimates that in that last decade alone the Mississippi Delta lost ten percent of its African American population--a proportion large enough to be perceived as a serious labor shortage by white planters in the area (198). This was a historical development that would have profound consequences for the socio-economic status quo in Mississippi and the rest of the American South as well. The Great Migration as it played out on Faulkner's own home ground helped lay the foundation for the Civil Rights Movement to come and for the redefinition of white subjectivity in the region, as Cheryl Lester has argued in her essays on Faulkner and the Great Migration. (3)

That vast movement of African Americans away from the South also arguably played a role in Faulkner's own imagination akin to that of decolonization for Western Europeans in the 1950s and 1960s, a process that finally ushered in, Robert Young declares in White Mythologies, a new cultural relativism with the dethroning of "history, with a capital H" that insists upon the "appropriation of the other as form of knowledge with a totalizing system" (4). For Faulkner, the flight of African Americans away from the rigidly hierarchical economic, political, racial, and historical relations of the American South ultimately meant a similar disruption of hegemonic assumptions of self, otherness, race, and history. Significantly enough, Quentin Compson in The Sound and the Fury, stranded in New England at the very beginning of the Great Migration in 1910, anticipates something of that impending dissolution and its implications for his own sense of self and memory when he ponders the blurring of blackness and its meanings in the North, away from the certainties and traditions of the South: "That was when I realised that a nigger is not a person so much as a form of behavior; a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives among" (86). In the South, in contrast, merely the glimpse of a black man on a mule, seen from the train that takes him between New England and Mississippi, is enough to tell Quentin who and what he is, "like a sign put there saying You are home again" (87).

But in the Depression South these were certainties, Richard Godden has ably argued, that would began to disintegrate under the pressures exerted by the New Deal on the region's feudal economic arrangements. Between 1933 and 1938 the Agricultural Adjustment Administration would infuse federal funds into the rural South and gradually dismantle the system of tenant farming and sharecropping that had bound African Americans to a "premodern culture of dependency" and would help propel the last great surge of the Great Migration in the 1940s ("A Fable" 74). What was also dismantled in this process, Godden argues, was the unacknowledged foundational role of African Americans in the economic system, in the racialization of whiteness, and in the white regional imagination as well--and no more so than in Faulkner's own wellsprings of creativity. With the break-up of that "culture of dependency" and subsequent migration, Godden maintains, Faulkner lost "the problem" that had propelled much of his fiction of the 1930s, and especially Absalom, Absalom!--the unacknowledged centrality of African Americans in the world of Yoknapatawpha as producers of labor, as signifiers of white subjectivity, and as emblems to a great extent of white memory ("A Fable" 74). (4)

One could argue as well that this loss simply foregrounded the underlying crisis in memory that propelled a good deal of Faulkner's work, a crisis that he had inherited from Western modernity's encounter with change and accompanying disruptions of a historical perspective that could no longer take its centrality or givenness for granted. As commentators ranging from literary critic Richard Terdiman to historian Pierre Nora have argued, that Western crisis in memory, rooted in nineteenth-century industrialization and urbanization, was defined by an inevitable and irreversible shrinkage of "traditional" collective memory and by the expansion of discourses about memory. "We speak so much of memory," Nora observes in his influential essay, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire," because there is so little of it left" (7). For Nora, globalization and mass culture have all but erased the traditional repositories of collective memory, like the oral traditions of peasant culture. Under the impact of modernization, he maintains, collective memory has shrunk from whole environments or "milieux de memoire" to mere fragments or sites, "lieux de memoire--moments of history torn away from the movement of history" (12). Memory from his perspective has been reduced to discontinuous instances and pieces in the form of monuments, commemorations, archives, celebrations, and eulogies selected by the critical self-consciousness of history as a discipline (12). No longer an unspoken given, modern memory, he declares, is neither spontaneous nor unself-conscious; it requires some visible, even material articulation. "The less memory is experienced from the inside the more it exists only through its exterior scaffolding and outward signs--," Nora declares; "hence the obsession with the archive that marks our age, attempting at once the contemplated conservation of the present as well as the total preservation of the past" (13). To acknowledge that obsession, he warns, is also to recognize the radical discontinuity between past and present. For him, as for David Lowenthal, who scrutinizes the politics underlying nostalgia, preservation, history, and memory, "the past is another country" for anyone dwelling in modernity (Nora 17). (5)

Much the same conclusion, strangely enough, begins to emerge in Faulkner's putatively history-drenched fiction as it becomes increasingly self-conscious and self-reflexive--and increasingly forthright about the difficulties of recovering or even understanding a past more and more distant. His narratives after Flags in the Dust are not so much saturated with the presence of the past in the present as they are pockmarked with puzzling archives and fragmented mementoes of the past that seemingly defy comprehension or narrative assimilation--the heirloom watch that Quentin Compson methodically breaks to hold back time, the ruined slipper that Quentin's brother Benjy holds in lieu of his sister Caddie's presence, the embezzled money that Caddie's daughter steals from her uncle Jason, the photograph of Little Belle that Horace Benbow contemplates, the Sutpen tombstones that Quentin and his father visit, the love letter that Judith Sutpen gives away, the photograph that Charles Bon leaves behind, even the signature of a long-dead girl on a glass pane. These are all fragments that Faulkner's characters and narrators try to decipher and to insert into larger narratives--but more often with frustrating results. As Mr. Compson observes in Faulkner's most self-conscious meditation upon history and its limitations, Absalom, Absalom!,

 It's just incredible. It just does not explain. Or perhaps that's
 it: they don't explain and we are not supposed to know. We have a
 few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from old trunks and boxes
 and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men
 and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or
 nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to
 us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw; we see dimly people, the people in
 whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting,
 in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic
 proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple
 violence, impervious to time and inexplicable.... (80)

These efforts to reconstruct and understand the past, so often frustrated and often emphasized more and more, but nowhere more so than in Absalom, Absalom!, suggest, as Susan Willis has argued, an evolving, growing sense of distance in Faulkner's fiction between the present and the past, between the writer and history itself--as well as an intense self-awareness about the difficulties of constructing a dialogue with the past (182). Willis herself sees that distance as the product of the immense historical changes marking Faulkner's fiction and his own world as tradition and agrarianism in the American South gave way to industrial capitalism in the first half of the twentieth century (182-83). Her argument is important because it reminds us, as Richard Brodhead pointed out twenty years ago, that we still have a good deal of contextualizing to do when it comes to Faulkner's representations of history; and that we still, even in this postmodernist age, tend to assume that his fiction merely reflects the Mississippi past whereas we would do well to ponder the way his fiction has helped construct that past with all its nearly impenetrable remoteness ("Introduction" 17-18).

Other critics see that distance and difficulty--in Absalom, Absalom! in particular--as constituting a "postmodern moment" for Faulkner--a move away from an "evasion" of the past marking a modernist text like The Sound and the Fury, for instance, to an interrogation of the past and its "official" history in Absalom, Absalom! In the past fifteen years or so critics like Linda Hutcheon and Brian McHale have taken issue with Fredric Jameson's notorious dismissal of postmodern fiction as ahistorical and have pointed to the slew of 1970s and 1980s postmodern "historiographies," as Hutcheon calls them, from E. L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel to Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, that combine the self-reflexivity of metafiction with revisitings of the past--but "with irony," as Eco says, "not innocently" (Eco 67). Faulknerians like Patrick O'Donnell, John Duvall, and Richard Moreland in particular have followed Hutcheon's and McHale's lead by excavating "postmodern moments" in Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses. These are moments of "authorial self-critique," in O'Donnell's words, that question both the writer's own history of Yoknapatawpha and the "official" or master narrative of southern history and pose the possibility of alternative histories and alternative voices allying themselves with the local and the particular (O'Donnell 47; Moreland, "Faulkner and Modernism" 26). For John Duvall in his introduction to Faulkner and Postmodernism, such moments make Absalom, Absalom! "postmodern avant le lettre" (x). O'Donnell in turn offers a vigorous argument for Go Down, Moses, a much vexed work attracting equally vexed commentary, as a postmodern revision of Absalom, Absalom! and "arguably, Faulkner's most transitional work, as it oscillates between tragic nostalgia for a lost past of certain, integral origins and the parodic embracing of an indeterminate future in which identity is aggregate, mixed" (32).

Certainly one can read the famously obscure fourth section of "The Bear" in Go Down, Moses, in which Ike McCaslin attempts to explain to his cousin McCaslin Edmonds just why he is relinquishing a patrimony he sees cursed by slavery, brutality, and exploitation, as something very like a postmodern revision/parody of the South's master narrative. To be sure, it is a broken, murky, confused retelling, without a proper beginning or ending, that opens with a curse upon the land anticipating the institution of slavery; accelerates with the brutal empire-building of Ike's grandfather, who defines possession and self through the dispossession of others; slows down with the cautious emancipation scheme implemented by Ike's father and uncle; and culminates with Ike's own efforts to renounce his legacy and rewrite his family history by distributing at least some of that patrimony to black relatives. The very confusion of the narrative--fragmented, multi-voiced, often unpunctuated, sometimes disoriented in its chronology--suggests something of its postmodern character as a history that has eschewed the old rules, as Jean Francois Lyotard would say, and is in the very process of narration looking for new "rules and categories" (Lyotard 81). It is a narrative that recounts and critiques the making of sameness and otherness in the master narrative of southern history. In that respect, nothing could be farther from the opening pages of Flags in the Dust, where the sameness of Sartoris history dominates and the otherness upon which its edifice is erected is rendered mute and very nearly invisible. If the fourth section of "The Bear" accomplishes nothing else--and it can in many respects be read as a postmodern history that finally, in that time and place, cannot be written, cannot be told--it does succeed in exposing the brutalization and appropriation of otherness masked in the making of Western History with a capital H.

It is such postmodern moments that are sought out by the nine essays making up this special issue on Faulkner, Memory, History, in homage to Foucault's critique of "official" history in "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History." These are essays that are themselves grounded in the postmodern, that acknowledge the necessity of engaging in ongoing, never-completed dialogues with and interrogations of the past, memory, and history as represented in Faulkner's texts--and as represented by Faulkner's readers. In a manner of speaking, the essays in this issue approach history as Foucauldian genealogists, directing their attention not to origins and continuity but to descent and discontinuities, not to totalizing pictures of the past but to the local and the anomalous. Like Thadious Davis in her new book, Games of Property: Law, Race, Gender, and Faulkner's Go Down, Moses, the writers of these essays tend to read "from the margins" of Faulkner's novels and to concentrate their attention on "instability, permutations, uncertainties, and fissures" in narrative moments pondering memory and the past, in history-telling encounters, and in intertextual relationships with precursor texts (7).

Indeed, many of those fissures suggest the kinds of tears and wounds that scholars like Dominick LaCapra, Cathy Caruth, Kaja Silverman, and Shoshana Felman might categorize as examples of writing trauma, experiences of disruption and pain so overwhelming that they defy the best efforts of history and narrative to assimilate and make sense of them. For if Faulkner's texts reverberate with obsessive engagements with the past and memory, they also underscore the resistance of specific cultural traumas--of slavery and racism--to the narrative incorporation of history. It is that resistance--and the voices to which it gives rise--that Minrose Gwin explores in the opening essay, "Racial Wounding and the Aesthetics of the Middle Voice in Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses." Both texts, Gwin argues, reverberate with cries of endlessly reenacted racial woundings that fail to "dissolve into history or advance to the future" and that blur lines between subjects, objects, and action. The ever-shifting voice emerging from those wounds is one that underscores the limits of history, its inability to articulate, comprehend, or assimilate the catastrophies of racism and slavery, and that raises many of the questions of agency, responsibility, and witnessing that so bother Faulkner's most history-haunted protagonists, like Quentin Compson and Ike McCaslin.

Cynthia Dobbs in turn examines the elusive and compromised nature of white Southern memories in "'Ruin or Landmark': Black Bodies as Lieux de Memoire in The Sound and the Fury," which explores the novel's memorialization of African Americans providing white figures like Quentin Compson, ironically enough, with distorted signifiers of a rapidly fragmenting past. If Caddy Compson's absence propels the novel's narratives, Dobbs argues, it is the presence of black bodies that fuels white nostalgia and anxieties about both gender and race. Dilsey Gibson's body in particular emerges in the last section of the novel a monument both "decaying and enduring," yet it is her voice in the end, not Quentin's, that survives and even resists her body's memorialization, thereby offering the possibility of counter-memories and counter-narratives.

In a like vein Erin Campbell surveys the eerily intertextual relationship of The Sound and the Fury's Quentin Compson with Hamlet's Ophelia in her essay "'Sad Generations Seeking Water': The Social Construction of Madness in O(p)helia and Q(uentin Compson)." Ophelia and Quentin, Campbell argues, "share" madness pressed down upon them by their respective histories and the demands of femininity and masculinity as prescribed by those histories. Both of them ultimately seek escape from history and time in suicide by drowning, as though to underscore their final resistance to the limitations of each version of patriarchal history. Just as Ophelia resists the containment of sexuality imposed upon her, so too does Quentin yearn to repudiate the masculine codes of honor he has inherited and to embrace the possibilities of the feminine. In doing so, Campbell concludes, he becomes something like a "twentieth-century, peculiarly Southern rewriting of Ophelia in a resented masculine body." But only in death can they escape the histories that have defined them.

In contrast, Evelyn Schreiber sees Light in August as posing the possibility of escaping the blind repetitions of the communal past through the reconfiguring of individual desire in Lacanian terms. In "'Memory Believes Before Knowing Remembers': The Insistence of the Past and Lacan's Unconscious Desire in Light in August," Schreiber argues that Lacan's theory of desire and subjectivity offers a vocabulary for understanding why some characters in the novel, like Joe Christmas, are caught up in communal repetitions of the past--repetitions that provide them with a curious pleasure in their efforts to erase a sense of lack--and why others, like Gail Hightower, Lena Grove, and Byron Bunch, are able to emerge as subjects by letting the past go, as it were. What distinguishes that second group of characters, Schreiber suggests, are the choices they make to break away from the demands of their world's symbolic culture, demands that require the repetition of certain historical patterns. Such escapes are made possible for these characters, she adds, by their telling stories that "repeat the past with a difference" and thereby reconfigure their own desires to create new versions of themselves.

The young Bayard Sartoris is represented as taking a similar critical turn toward family history and the weight of tradition in Peter Sharpe's "Bonds that Shackle: Memory, Violence, and Freedom in The Unvanquished." In what has often been termed one of Faulkner's more conventional narratives, Sharpe sees a slow but unmistakable move toward epistemological uncertainty and an eventual interrogation of history as the world Bayard Sartoris lives in contends with the upheavals of war and the consequences for rigidly defined categories of race, class, and gender. In the midst of a traditional world's radical dissolution, the young Bayard "becomes newly unshackled from the obduracy of Southern memory" and from the imperatives of male honor inherited from his father and begins to move toward "a new and uncertain horizon of moral relativism" and "pragmatism." Above all, his liberation from the weight of memory is affected by his final repudiation of his father's code of honor, shaped by the hierarchies of tradition and driven by the imperatives of domination. Refusing to avenge his father's death according to the dictates of that code, Bayard also repudiates the emerging cult of the Lost Cause and all the monumentalization it requires.

In "The Poetics of Ruptured Mnemosis: Telling Encounters in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!" Clifford E. Wulfman argues that Faulkner's ongoing interrogation and ironic revisitings of the past emerge in his most famous historical novel as a critique of memory-making itself, no longer a grounding for integrating self-identity but a process of disruption, self-division, and ultimately trauma. Examining the structure of the novel as shaped by transference, one telling encounter after another, Wulfman sees the novel as molded by "the dynamic of psychic trauma," one suggesting "a new kind of writing and consequently a new kind of reading based on a poetics of ruptured mnemosis, a means of representing--and involving--disrupted memory processes." In those telling encounters between two people, first between Quentin Compson and Rosa Coldfield, the past erupts not as a story to be told by one to another but as unclaimed experience abruptly transferred between them--an experience that "has not yet become past" and becomes subject to endless repetitions with "no diminution in force." Hence those encounters always seem to fail--as the novel itself fails to put the past to rest--and the encounters themselves become traumatic events, unclaimed and endlessly repeated. "The text of Absalom, Absalom!," Wulfman concludes, "is thus called into being by the trauma it attempts to tell--it is not a novel, or even a narrrative, but a testimony, a telling encounter with the untellable that is the trace of its inscrutable meaning." Faulkner's most "historical" novel in this reading becomes, ironically enough, a telling about its own failures--to make the past, to tell a history, to even become a novel.

Philip Goldstein for his part is concerned with what happens to our histories of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! when it is read in conjunction with a novel with which it has been often compared--Toni Morrison's Beloved. In "Black Feminism and the Canon: Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Morrison's Beloved as Gothic Romances," Goldstein suggests that reading the two texts together offers an opportunity to focus on "the changing conditions of modern literary study." Absalom, Absalom! was first hailed as a masterpiece by New Critics allied with Southern Agrarianism and shaped by the pessimism and defeatism of literary modernism, Goldstein reminds us, whereas Beloved owes its canonical status in large part to critical values of emancipation and communal restoration articulated by African American feminists in direct opposition to the disillusionment associated with high modernism and New Criticism. Goldstein concludes that reading Morrison in the context of cultural politics leads us as readers "to revise or revalue Faulkner and her other precursors" and to reassess Absalom, Absalom! to the critical gain of Beloved.

Peter Lurie offers a similar comparative study of critical receptions in his essay, "Querying the Modernist Canon: Historical Consciousness and the Sexuality of Suffering in Faulkner and Hart Crane." Both novelist and poet, Lurie argues, explore "the way that historical consciousness, on the part of either characters or readers (and often, both) is activated by and necessitates a textual effect of suffering." To access the past requires "an erotics of pain" in the work of both writers, Lurie suggests, but Crane's historical vision, he adds, evokes a "homosexual valence," one both "masochistic and identificatory," as well as antithetical to the traditional, heterosexual, and exclusionary values associated with New Criticism. To encounter the past in Crane's most famous poem "The Bridge" is to confront painful moments in American history "in their unmediated directness." Faulkner's prose can be as violent as Crane's, Lurie notes, but in sharp contrast his scenes of historical awakening and suffering in Absalom, Absalom! are marked by something like "linguistic sadism," providing readers with a sense of distance from the textual violence inflicted upon both Rosa Coldfield and Quentin Compson--the kind of distance implicitly required by the formalistic values of the New Critics, who found Faulkner's work much more to their liking than they did Crane's painful accounts of the tortures of history.

The final essay, "The Radiance of the Fake: Pylon's Postmodern Narrative of Disease," by Joshua Gaylord, examines the novel that Faulkner used to "get away" from the history-obsessed writing of Absalom, Absalom! Unlike the latter novel, Pylon is remarkably lacking in historical context or even any sense of the claustrophobic Southern culture that so oppresses Quentin Compson in Absalom, Absalom! But the figure of the reporter, Gaylord argues, is very like "a Quentin Compson without a past of his own," a narrator as obsessed with the flyers he pursues as Quentin is with Thomas Sutpen, and the novel itself "illustrates the anxiety of storytelling-history-telling-while the narrator is embroiled in the very history he is (mis)appropriating," even if that history is "the current moment" and not the past per se. Like Quentin and Shreve in Absalom, Absalom! the reporter lives only to narrate, in fact feeds upon the story he tells, like nothing so much as a vampire feeding on his victims. In this respect, then, Gaylord sees Pylon as distinctly postmodern, a text that acknowledges the "failure of the real" and resorts to "the potential radiance of the fake." It is, Gaylord concludes, "the first novel to inscribe in a large way the desperate anxiety of storytelling as a clear palimpsest just beneath the surface of the primary narrative"--and as such it offers a telling and highly disturbing self-reflexive commentary on the project of telling and making history.

Together these essays suggest that like Quentin Compson himself we are not quite done after all with telling histories and probing memories in Faulkner's work, especially from the perspective of a postmodern world "haunted by memory," Peter Middleton and Tim Woods tell us, "memories of disaster, genocide, war, the Holocaust and the persistent destruction of human possibility by economic and political means; by the unrepresentable excess of these memories; and by the memory of memory itself " (81). But these are memories that are themselves destabilizing, as are, for that matter, the memories and fragmented histories that Quentin forges together with Shreve's help, so much so that those ever-changing fragments prompt reading after reading, telling after telling, until what emerge are ever-multiplying stories of difference far more heterogeneous and contested than those early twentieth-century projects in historic preservation that Flags in the Dust uncannily mirrors. Like Quentin confronted with the elusive shadow of Jim Bond bellowing at the end of his long quest into the past, we as readers discover in Faulkner's postmodern-inflected historiographies not the reassuring configurations of our own identities or even pictures of the past "as it really was" but fragmentary memories to be seized, as Walter Benjamin would say and as Quentin himself would unhappily acknowledge, "in a moment of danger" (255).

(1) See in general Donaldson; Bland, ix, 48, 49, and 52; and Hosmer, I:234.

(2) See in general Hosmer I and Handler and Gable 31-34, 85-92; see also in general Lindgren.

(3) See in particular "Racial Awareness and Arrested Development" 135-39.

(4) See also in general Fictions of Labor and especially 233-34.

(5) See in general Lowenthal, The Past Is Another Country.

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Susan Donaldson

The College of William and Mary