Last spring, after the world saw the video of the murder of George Floyd, few Americans could turn an oblivious eye to the racism and violence that are part of the brutal, inhuman legacy of slavery. Coincidentally, as protesters demanding justice packed the streets, William Faulkner rode into town, the subject of two major studies: Carl Rollyson’s massive, well-researched two-volume biography and Michael Gorra’s eloquent analysis of how the Civil War ricochets throughout his best-known novels.
Of course, Faulkner hasn’t been neglected: there are at least a dozen major biographies and countless scholarly studies, essays, and dissertations. He’s a veritable cottage industry. But these new books remind us that we seem always to be trying to solve Faulkner, as if he were a riddle. For there are competing and not always compatible Faulkners: the modernist Faulkner is an experimentalist respected internationally by filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard and writers like Gabriel García Márquez and Edouard Glissant who admire his lush, long sentences, accumulating modifiers and self-correcting syntax—all the ways he conveys consciousness in dialogue with itself. In 1945 Jean-Paul Sartre said that for young people in France, “Faulkner c’est un dieu.”
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