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 In my experience they are usually filled with terrible crime fiction, travel guides that are 15 years out of date or fantasy novels that hold absolutely no appeal to me whatsoever.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?