Faulkner

My reading of Faulkner’s work is not extensive or very informed. It consists solely of As I Lay Dying and a couple of short stories from the anthology Collected Stories. I picked this latter book up at a hostel while backpacking through Asia at one of those book swap bookshelves where you take one and you leave another. In my experience they are usually filled with terrible crime fiction, travel guides that are 15 years out of date or fantasy novels that hold absolutely no appeal to me whatsoever. So being aware of the impact and importance of Faulkner’s work even if not acquainted with it I considered it a bit of a find and left behind the novel I had just finished reading which happened to be Chandler’s The Big Sleep. Making for a neat segue, Faulkner worked on the screenplay of The Big Sleep. The class discussion was focussed this week primarily on the way in which a screenplay should be treated and received and the ensuing value of it.

The way in which you approach, conceive of and interpret a novel is different to that of a poem, a television program or an opera. The quality and worth of Faulkner’s screenplays should be judged according to other screenplays written rather than his novels and stories. They serve different functions, use different techniques to create different aesthetics and exist within separate genres. The process of reading is and should be completely different, so then also the process of evaluation.

The romantic image of the author pursuing the heights of artistic genius gets in the way of recognising the impacts on the novel of audience, editor, publisher, past works and context of the author. Coleridge’s Kubla Khan stands as the seminal metaphor of this compromise between artistic genius and the demands of reality. Writing does not exist within a void of artistic genius but within contexts of vested interest. Personally I found reading the screenplay compared to the short story an interesting insight into the way in which Faulkner dealt with the different writing contexts. It was also interesting to look at the screenplay as part of a process. Perception of literature and film are so ingrained at the telos that we overlook the process, we value progress over process. Value is laden upon the whole, not the part. I don’t see why it should be that the screenplay is less valued because it is not the version that is decided as definitive. Any work of art is involved in a long series of processes. Even the finished product is not the definitive version with the agency involved in interpretation. The idea of a hermeneutically sealed and finished text is compromised by changing contexts and information; it is always immersed in processes of re-reading, re-evaluation and re-interpretation.

Viewing Faulkner as both literary author and screenplay writer involves the merging of many opposing values around art such as high and low culture and elitism and massification. Novels have long been a source of inspiration and adaptation for films. The literary world has long been imbricated in the film world, so why then such issue with viewing an author as a part of both?

Critical/Uncritical?

The way in which we read and interpret the text is a construct of our context. Warner points this out in his article “Uncritical Reading” and for me it was a bit of a lightbulb moment. The way in which I understand a text, I read it, respond to it and analyse it are all socially conditioned processes which I have wholly taken for granted. And it seems that these processes are on the decline.

I read The Secret History a couple of years ago and really enjoyed it. I am not one to remember the details of novels. I find it difficult to sustain a conversation with someone about a book I read in the couple of months previous, let alone years before. When recalling a novel I am left with a sort of feeling about it, whether I liked it or not, but also it conjures up other emotions a result of maybe the novel itself and the time in which I read it. It’s probably why Felski’s promotion of the identification and importance of affect in reading was so resonant for me.  She says that ‘affect cannot be separated from interpretation’ (32); the way a novel works on you, the immersion you experience when you’re on a crowded bus laughing at something you’ve just read (if you’ve never done this, you need to pick up a copy of A Confederacy of Dunces) and wholly blind to your surroundings is so integral to the way in which you perceive that novel.  So recalling Tartt’s The Secret History I felt a mix of anticipation and unease. I really enjoyed the novel but it left me anxious. Julian repetition of ‘beauty is terror’ typifies the way in which The Secret History worked on me. It’s so beautifully constructed, it is mesmerising and enchanting but at the same time the characters are superficial, the world is amoral and there is no sense of prevailing order or justice, just life.

Warner’s contemporaries would class me as an uncritical reader. I read for pleasure, even within the context of university study and I choose to write my essays on the texts that I have enjoyed the most. For Warner the taught reading habits presuppose certain types of subjects in society, uncritical and critical reading should be viewed as ‘contrasting ways in which various techniques and forms can be embedded in an ethical problematic of subject formation’ (19).

The domination of the written and published word as the mass cultural form of entertainment and information is coming to a close. Perhaps the novel’s domination in the 18^th and 19^th centuries was the serendipitous result of a lack of other forms of media and information technology. There is currently a transformation with the way in which we receive and consume information instigated by the internet and other visual media. As Stallybrass suggests ‘the novel has only been a brilliantly perverse interlude in the long history of discontinuous reading’ (quoted in Warner, 28). Just as the days of oral history and folk tales gave way to the written word, the novel now moves over for the screen. Nicholas Mirzoeff describes the process by which ‘human experience is now more visual and visualised than ever before’ but that ‘these forms of visualisation [television and film] are now being challenged by interactive visual media like the internet and virtual reality applications’ (1).  He describes the visual culture as ‘contested, debated and transformed as a constantly challenging place of social interaction and definition in terms of class gender and racialised identities’ (4). Hypertext has reinstated discontinuous reading as a common practice, a practice described by Warner involving agency ‘everywhere manifested in movement between passages’ (30). So how to apply the work of Felski and Warner to the texts of the internet? I suppose the choice of clicking on a link, jumping from site to site involves affect, agency and freedom. Mirzoeff describes visual culture as ‘fractal’ precluding any grand narrative and allowing for the infinite possibilities, extensions  and interactions of different race, gender, class etc. (25). Warner asks us to look critically at what kind of subjects the habits of reading produces. We should look now at what kind of ethical subjectivities are being propagated in this network of supposedly democratised media.

Felski, R. “After Suspicion” in Profession, vol. 8, 2009, 28-35.

Warner, M. “Uncritical Reading” in Gallop, J. (ed.) Polemic: Critical or Uncritical, London and New York, Routledge, 2004, 13-38.

Mirzoeff, N., “Introduction: What is Visual Culture?” An Introduction to Visual Culture, New York and London, Routledge, 1999, pp. 1-33.

The Author

Barthes’ argument to kill the author in favour of the reader involves overlooking or, in the least, downplaying the context and reasons behind the text. Sure, it expands the possibilities of interpretation and opens texts up to new meaning but the context of production must always be present in the means of reception. To overlook the author harbours the possibility of passive consumption of dominant ideas and perspectives.

Questions of authority and authorship always bring to mind Gayatri Spivak’s work on the subaltern. For Spivak the subaltern is a gendered subject position deprived of ‘lines of social mobility’ (Spivak, 28). They are the othered Other of colonial texts and histories, rendered silent by authority, discourse and history. Barthes suggests ‘writing is that neutral, composite oblique space where out subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of writing’ (221). This positioning of writing as neutral fails to take into account the politics implicit within language (following Irigarian/Derridian phallogocentrism) and historical narrative. Writing is never neutral. It is always the product of a certain time and place. Yet, as Barthes goes on to suggest, not wholly defined by it. Barthes’ destabilisation of the universal subject position of “author” and ensuing workings of authority within texts opens up the possibilities of language and interpretation. As he suggests, ‘to give a text an author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing’ (223). This, I think, is where the work of Spivak becomes pertinent in our reception of texts. The fracturing of a text and looking toward the spaces of omission and silence in the process of interpretation is necessary to overcome the hegemonic perspective implicit within the literary tradition, because ‘the discourse of the universal historically has failed to include the testimony of its others’ (Miller, 24)

The reader is freed to construct meaning within the text but must also be wary of the politics inherent in the text. The death of the author brings with it the possibility of dismantling and fracturing the universal, the text as a totality.  Spivak writes about what cannot and may not be narrated. By understanding language as the origin and generative of meaning, interpretation becomes infinite and opens up the space of the text but the conditions of construction should be considered in the processes of reception and interpretation. Perhaps this is where Foucault’s call to look at the function the author plays comes in handy; to ask not who the author is but of the power and discourse inherent in the text, the way in which texts function upon us and to what function he serves and how does that affect subjectivity and the reception of the text (245).

In the case of Wild Cat Falling I read it in the belief that Johnson was Indigenous and it was the first novel published in Australia by an Indigenous author. The foreward by Stephen Muecke placed the novel within the context of Australian Indigenous culture, the history of colonialism and the importance and impact of the novel at the time of publication. Upon realisation of the fraudulent (or suspect) nature of Johnson’s purported cultural heritage my interpretation of the novel was completely different. As well as feeling sorry for the duped Muecke, I felt like it was another affront to the already disrespected and exploited Indigenous community. I am not saying that either reading was better, both were different and valuable experiences. And perhaps if I had known nothing about the author the politics of the novel would not have mattered – but I doubt I would have picked up the book in that instance. Perhaps a happy compromise to reach is to say that the author functions as a paratext, he’s not dead just resting.

Barthes, R., “The Death of the Author” in Finkelstein, D. and McCleery, A. (eds.), The Book History Reader, London and New York, Routledge, 2002, 221-224.

Foucault, M.  “What is an Author?” in Burke, S. (ed.) Authorship, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1995, 233-246.

Miller, N. “Changing the Subject: Authorship, Writing and the Reader” in Birotti, M. and Miller, N. (eds.) What is an Author?, Machester and New York, Manchester University Press, 1993, 19-41.

Spivak, G. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Towards a History of the Vanishing Point, Cambridge, Harvard UP, 1999.

Geography and Season Matter?

According to Foster geography and season matter in literature. He urges us, the reader, to look critically at the way in which both are mobilised in order to create or convey meaning; to what purpose does a winter set in, say Vermont hold? Foster’s fondness of rhetorical questions seems to have rubbed off on me.

So yes, Foster is correct in observing that space and place are rich in metaphor and meaning in fiction in ‘Geography Matters’. They provide a backdrop for the action as well as another vehicle for creating depth and dimension to the novel, as he states ‘It’s place and space and shape that bring us to ideas and psychology and history and dynamism’ (174). However this is not new. I read Foster and found myself asking, “Yes, and...?” He seems to be pointing out what personally seems obvious about geography by offering obvious examples and ignoring those that do not fit his mould. He makes little more than the observation that geography matters. I could have gotten that from reading the title but instead read the following twelve pages. I blame that ellipsis in the title, it seemed to suggest something more was to follow.

Perhaps it was only an issue for me because I enjoy a sense of originality or at least an element of perspicacity in the treatment of something that is rather obvious. So maybe engaging in Foster’s push for heightened critique and awareness of the way geography does matter to the novel might help me out with my trouble with him.  Two novels came to mind when I began thinking about the role geography plays, Ice Station by Matthew Reilly and Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. Geography plays a major role in each of these books but in starkly different ways.

Matthew Reilly’s Ice Station would be nothing without the context of Antarctica in which the protagonist is trapped, attacked by killer whales, discovers a bomber that can become invisible hidden under the ice, blows a whole bunch of stuff up, uncovers an international conspiracy and is involved hovercraft chases. The ice provides a sense of mystery and majesty. There is a sense of otherworldly alienation in which the preposterousness of the story is somehow negated – or at the least able to be overlooked to an extent. Although others have not been enchanted in the same way that I was http://www.booklore.co.uk/PastReviews/ReillyMatthew/IceStation/IceStationReview.htm. And my enchantment may have been the result of being on holiday in an exotic location. So perhaps Foster is right, geography does matter, for the writer but also for the reader.

Yates’ novel Revolutionary Road is set in Conneticut in the family home on Revolutionary Road. It is typical suburbia of the 1950’s. The reader takes for granted how little is said about the surroundings in Revolutionary Road precisely because it is a known space incorporating the values and ideology of the home, the nuclear family and safety. For Frank and April conformity and stability are counterpoised against unhappiness and imprisonment within 1950’s suburbia. And escape is offered in a change of scenery, the couple deciding to move to Paris. The setting of Revolutionary Road underpins all the themes, tensions and contradictions of the novel and its characters.

So, Foster continues, season also matters, he says. And again I encounter the same kinds of issues with this second chapter. His acknowledgement that ‘for about as long as anyone has been writing anything, the seasons have stood for the same set of meanings... This pattern is so deeply engrained in our cultural experience that we don’t even stop to think about it’ (178) is just offensive. I have, in fact, stopped to think about it.  And his acknowledgement that the dominant ways in which seasons are metaphorised may not always be so is tokenistic at best. Foster seems to be scrambling to cover all possible territory in his argument when he says that seasons exist as ‘a set of patterns that can be employed in a host of different ways, some of the straight forward, others ironic or subversive’ (181).

My main problem with Foster is that he is writing solely from a Eurocentric perspective on the Western literary tradition and weather patterns. The closest Foster seems to come to recognising this is when he states that ‘nearly every early mythology, at least those originating in temperate zones where seasons change, had a story to explain that seasonal change’ (181). It strikes me as another tokenistic acknowledgement that fails to deal with this problem within his argument.

Perhaps, though, my heightened critique of Foster’s seasonal and geographic descriptive stems from living in Australia and being an Australian Literature student. The incongruence between our received cultural traditions and the geographical and seasonal realities has been a dominant feature of Australian culture since first contact, and most certainly, colonisation. This juxtaposition between culture and context has come I think, to define a certain formation of the Antipodean mindset. Many aspects of our way of life, from the fashions, agriculture and industry and cooking, to the books and histories we consume, stand in contrast to the lived experience of the place of Australia. This division between lived and taught experience and the tensions between environment and practice have contributed to a distinctly Australian mindset. There exists a heightened awareness of the constructed and received nature of our cultural traditions. This has in part resulted in the attribution of a kind of larrikinism and rebelliousness within the Australian character but also within the perception of the Australian landscape. We too have been shaped by place. As Foster rightly says, ‘geography can... define or even develop character’ (167) but also ‘geography can be character’ (168). Writers and artists have struggled for years to conceive of the environment as anything but harsh, stubborn and unforgiving relative to the lush rolling plains of the Mother Country. Put it down to globalisation, multiculturalism, technoscapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes, whatever you choose, there is a movement recently to reconfigure this displacement of place in favour of culture in Australian literature. Malouf’s Remembering Babylon and Murray’s ‘The Meaning of Existence’ are two examples that spring to mind that move towards a reconceptualisation of the Australian landscape.

Foster, T.C., “Geography Matters...” and “...So Does Season” in How to Read Literature Like a Professor, New York, Quill, 2003, 163-184.