Watson's Faulkner: A Most Splendid Contribution

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• Watson’s Faulkner: A Most Splendid Contribution
• Ahmed Honeini

Jay Watson, Howry Professor of Faulkner Studies at the University of Mississippi, is widely considered one of the leading authorities on Faulkner working today. His latest offerings, William Faulkner and the Faces of Modernity (2019) and its companion volume Fossil Fuel Faulkner: Energy, Modernity, and the US South (2022) are insightful, well-argued, and welcome contributions to the field. Throughout both books, Watson displays a confident command of his topic, evincing an intimate, acute knowledge of Faulkner’s centrality within the modernist canon and, indeed, the key scholarly debates surrounding modernism more broadly. Watson’s “hope” for both books is that “by returning to the utterly uncontroversial fact of Faulkner’s modernism with a critical sensibility sharpened by new modernism studies,” his scholarship “will spark further reappraisal of [Faulkner’s] distinguished and quite dazzling” oeuvre (Faces of Modernity 37). Watson deftly achieves his aim with systematic rigor across both volumes, engaging his readers with fluency, cogency, and lyricism.

In William Faulkner and the Faces of Modernity, Watson divides his scholarly attention across five distinct yet interconnected concepts: rural modernization, technology and media, racial modernities, and biopolitical modernity. The book opens with an examination of modernity’s impact on rural Mississippi in As I Lay Dying and three short stories: “Mules in the Yard,” “Shingles for the Lord,” and “Barn Burning.” In these works, the rural South of the early twentieth century may outwardly appear to be diametrically opposed to—and, indeed, fundamentally incapable of embracing—modernity. Watson argues, however, that these texts in fact demonstrate that families like the Bundrens and the Snopeses take an active role in modernization:

for a select group of Faulkner’s rural subjects, modernization isn’t something that the novelist, from his privileged regional vantage point, can see happening to them, [End Page 453] radiating outward from town and more distant centers of capitalist development, so much as something he watches them do, something they bring with them into the hamlets, towns, and cities they subsequently shock, energize, and estrange.

(44)

As such, the opening chapter of Faces of Modernity offer a riposte to any reader or scholar of Faulkner and southern fiction tempted to assert that passivity or resistance to the processes of modernization is a key theme which dominates these works, As I Lay Dying in particular. Such readings, Watson observes, disproportionately focus on modernity’s “impact on rural people [as] a form of victimization. . . . disempowerment, disorientation, [and] even disarticulation” (65). By challenging this well-entrenched characterization of modernity in Faulkner’s works as enforced upon rather than embraced by his rural denizens, Watson urges all future Faulkner scholars to reorient their perspective on the pastoral South as a whole and across time.

Watson then offers a fascinating materialist reading of Light in August that links Jefferson’s “material economy involving the industrial production and distribution of timber, lumber, and other wood products” (75) with the corporeal experiences of the novel’s central characters, specifically the ill-fated and marginalized Joe Christmas. Watson’s reading culminates in an ingenuous and haunting connection between the violence Joe experiences at the hands of a lynch mob led by the white supremacist Percy Grimm and the planing machine he utilizes during his brief stint at Doane’s Mill at the beginning of the novel. The savagery Grimm inflicts upon Joe strips him of his humanity, rendering him an inanimate, mechanical object by forcing him “through the planer, in a hideous ‘surfacing’ operation that exposes the brutal logic of small-town social norms” (81). While Watson does not explicitly link this moment to works such as Sister Carrie or Lady Chatterley’s Lover, his observation here could potentially provide fruitful new insights and comparisons of Faulkner’s work with Dreiser’s and Lawrence’s (to name only two of several possible authors), namely the ways in which modernist novels depict the dehumanization of mechanical modernity, beyond both the South and the borders of the United States itself.

Following on from the technologically-minded reading of Light in August, Watson offers fresh perspectives on the central role of the automobile and the airplane...