Ted Atkinson. Faulkner and the Great Depression: Aesthetics, Ideology, and Cultural Politics. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. 288 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8203-2750-1.
Reviewed by David A. Davis (Mercer University)
Published on H-Southern-Lit (July, 2009)
Commissioned by Lisa Hinrichsen (University of Arkansas)
Faulkner's Depression
Since the publication of Malcolm Cowley’s career-salvaging collection The Portable Faulkner (1946) and the subsequent 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature, William Faulkner has occupied a privileged position in the canon of southern writers, but how he came to occupy that position presents a bit of controversy. Lawrence Schwartz argued in Creating Faulkner’s Reputation (1988) that New Critics deliberately promoted Faulkner as a distinctively American writer during the Cold War.[1] Conspiracy theories aside, an interesting dynamic has developed in Faulkner criticism. The majority of book-length studies employ critical theory to analyze Faulkner’s linguistic form, psychological characterization, or literary influences. Critics who have explored his portrayal of historical context, such as Eric Sundquist in Faulkner: The House Divided (1985) and Joel Williamson in William Faulkner and Southern History (1993), have been more the exception than the rule.
In Faulkner and the Great Depression: Aesthetics, Ideology, and Cultural Politics (2006), Ted Atkinson addresses what he sees as an early misperception that has determined the course of Faulkner criticism. “Interpretations of Faulkner from both social realist and New Critical perspectives,” he argues, “reached the same conclusion: Faulkner’s fiction was disengaged from the issues and concerns of the politically inflected literature in the thirties” (p. 3). Because of this precedent, according to Atkinson, critics have not noticed the connections between Faulkner’s novels and the circumstances of the time and place of their composition. The period of Faulkner’s greatest literary production coincides with the Great Depression, 1929-41, and Atkinson contends that Faulkner’s novels are politically and socially engaged with the instability and poverty of the time. He writes that “Faulkner offers us remarkable insight into Depression history and culture on the basis of his expansive social vision as well as his forays into both ‘highbrow’ literary style and the popular culture industry” (p. 8). While he does not brand Faulkner as a Popular Front ideologue, he claims that Faulkner’s representations of social ideology inform the aesthetic qualities of his most popular works.
The key reason why critics have overlooked the ideological aspects of Faulkner’s novels, Atkinson explains, is that his positions were fairly mainstream. During the Depression, when the idea of liberalism evolved into a form of social radicalism, Faulkner remained moderate. Economic collapse, rampant unemployment, and widespread poverty led to a shift in American political discourse that included the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the passage of New Deal social development programs. According to Terry Eagleton’s theory of the ideology of the aesthetic, Atkinson notes, works of literature are “inseparable from the construction of the dominant ideological forms of modern class-society” (p. 43). At the beginning of the Depression, Faulkner identified more closely with the middle class than with the working class: his books were modestly selling, he got married, and he bought a home. He did not oppose economic development as the Southern Agrarians did, but he did not entirely support the New Deal either. Faulkner, Atkinson explains, was a conservative-leaning Democrat in an era when the Democratic Party veered toward socialism.
The Depression divided many writers into a literary class war, pitting formalists against social realists. Critics have usually grouped Faulkner with the formalists because of his experimental technique, but Atkinson sees important aspects of social realism in Faulkner’s novels. In Mosquitoes (1927), for example, Faulkner critiques the 1920s decadence that spilled into the Depression through his portrayal the self-absorbed idleness of effete artists. Although much criticism of The Sound and the Fury (1929) has concerned the novel’s form, Faulkner addresses an appropriately worldly topic in the book. Atkinson makes a compelling argument that the novel is an assessment of modern capitalism that portrays Benjy as dispossessed, Quentin as obsessed with his sister as an exchange commodity, and Jason as money-hungry and morally bankrupt. The novel’s content, thus, is realistic even though the structure is experimental, so Faulkner’s novels play both sides of the literary class war.
The deepening worldwide Depression that led to increased liberalism in America led to the rise of fascism in some European nations, and the growing specter of fascism became of topic of concern for many southern writers, as Bob Brinkmeyer has recently explained in The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascism, 1930-1950 (2009). Brinkmeyer has already discussed Faulkner’s engagement with fascism in an essay in the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha series, and Atkinson, who reviewed The Fourth Ghost on H-Net, picks up the conversation from Brinkmeyer’s earlier essay by examining the fascist overtones in Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), and Absalom, Absalom! (1937).[2] The consistent theme in Atkinson’s analysis is that Faulkner muted his social engagement, yet he sees in Faulkner’s representation of gangster culture in Sanctuary the same will to power that propelled fascist ideology. He compares the portrayal of gangsters in the novel to the popular films The Public Enemy (1931), Little Caesar (1931), and Scarface (1932) that glamorized the violent gangster lifestyle. Popeye, in Atkinson’s analysis, is consistent with the cinematic antihero. The popularity of this character indicates that, even though most people feared being subject to unchecked power, they admired the ruthless acquisition of power in others, at least in fictional characters. Atkinson could have taken his analysis a bit father on this point to discuss the cult of personality that made actual gangsters and criminals, such as Al Capone and John Dillinger, celebrities in Depression-era America. Faulkner modeled Popeye after an actual Memphis gangster, Popeye Kearns, who was both violent and impotent, and we might speculate that the public’s fascination with real gangsters likewise represents a powerless rage at enormous economic forces.
Atkinson’s discussion of Light in August focuses on mob rule and Percy Grimm, the proverbial face in the crowd. Members of the Popular Front insisted that racism and fascism were virtually synonymous, and the prevalence of lynching in the South seems to bear out this line of thinking. Like fascism, the ideology that promoted lynching was based on fear and power, and Percy Grimm appears to embody the racist/fascist mindset. His paramilitary outfit, his lack of respect for decorum, and his discomforting charisma all qualify him as a fascist stormtrooper. Faulkner even commented that, although he had never heard of Nazis when he wrote the book, that Grimm was one (p. 155). Atkinson takes this comment and considers it in context with Faulkner’s other portrayals of mob violence, specifically “Dry September,” to suggest that Faulkner regarded lynching as a social pathology.
Reading Sanctuary and Light in August in conjunction with Absalom, Absalom! suggests that Faulkner was uncomfortable with the personal accumulation of power. Looking beyond the book’s complicated narrative structure, Atkinson explains that Sutpen plays the role of a “great dictator” whose ascent to power proves to be fatal for himself and others, a prophetic pattern that will eventually be copied by Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane (1941). By the time he wrote Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner had become as openly political as he would ever become. He even offered to donate the manuscript of Absalom, Absalom! to raise funds to supports Spanish Loyalists, and he publicly denounced Franco and fascism.
Faulkner, however, was more reluctant to directly engage domestic political issues. As the Depression began, the Southern Agrarians rhetorically opposed the emergence of industrialization in the southern economy. Faulkner never took a stand publicly, but Atkinson describes him as an “ambivalent agrarian” because he expresses “noticeable sympathy for the dispossessed and disenfranchised small farmers and sharecroppers” (p. 175). Although many readers see his portrayal of the Bundren family in As I Lay Dying (1930) as insulting to poor whites, his portrayal is significantly less unsettling than Erskine Caldwell’s portrayal of the Jeeters in Tobacco Road (1932). Faulkner’s depictions of barn burning both in the novel and in the short story “Barn Burning” appear to make a case for redistributive justice. Atkinson explains that Darl’s arson in As I Lay Dying transforms him “from an alienated misfit into a disturbing symbol of social upheaval” (p. 191) and Ab Snopes in “Barn Burning” “emerges as a representative of the dispossessed” (p. 196). By the end of the Depression, Faulkner’s advocacy for the downtrodden appears to have waned. Atkinson points out that Faulkner adopts a tone more consistent with Southwestern humor to describe acts of redistributive justice as petty vandalism. And in “The Tall Men” Faulkner implies that the New Deal is a threat to small farmers, which suggests that his attitudes toward liberalism have come full circle.
The final chapter of Atkinson’s study examines The Unvanquished (1938) as part of a larger wave of Civil War remembrance in American popular culture of the 1930s and 1940s that involved dozens of books and movies, including Gone with the Wind (1936). Many artists and intellectuals saw in the Civil War a precedent for recovery from national crisis. Faulkner’s version of the war picks up the theme of dispossession, a prevalent concern during the Depression, and he portrays Granny Rosa Millard as a model of “acquisitive individualism” (p. 231). Her scheme to steal horses from the Union Army and then sell them back using her reputation as a southern matriarch as a cover for the operation makes a case for personal agency and ethical expediency in the face of overwhelming economic forces, the ideal Depression-era heroine.
Faulkner, like Eudora Welty, did not feel a need to crusade in his writing, and, according to Atkinson, he felt relatively ambivalent about many important social issues of his time, but that does not mean that the circumstances of his time and place did not influence his writing. “Foregrounding this dimension of Faulkner,” Atkinson explains, “shows how his literary production reads as both timely and timeless--immediately responsive to forces unleashed by a period of national crisis, but far-ranging enough to endure and prevail in the annals of literary history” (p. 236). The tent of Faulkner criticism is big enough, hopefully, to accommodate both theoretical, linguistic criticism and social, historical criticism--plus every approach in between. I entirely agree with Atkinson on this point. In fact, I taught a course on literary criticism last semester that used Absalom, Absalom! as a test case for every established critical method from New Criticism to New Historicism. By establishing the discourse between Faulkner and the Great Depression, Atkinson has made an important contribution to New Historicist criticism that complements Charles Hannon’s Faulkner and the Discourses of Culture (2005). In Faulkner and the Great Depression Atkinson focuses sustained attention on the direct relationship between the author and the social circumstances to reveal nuances in the writing that might have otherwise been overlooked.
Notes
[1.] Lawrence Schwartz, Creating Faulkner’s Reputation: The Politics of Modern Literary Criticism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988).
[2]. Robert Brinkmeyer, “Faulkner and Democratic Crisis,” in Faulkner and Ideology: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1992, ed. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995), 70-94.
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Citation:
David A. Davis. Review of Atkinson, Ted, Faulkner and the Great Depression: Aesthetics, Ideology, and Cultural Politics.
H-Southern-Lit, H-Net Reviews.
July, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=25044
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