William Faulkner as anti-globalization prophet

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, August 4, 2002

EDITORIAL OBSERVER
What the Bard of Oxford Can Teach Critics of the New World Order
By ADAM COHEN


XFORD, Miss. -- Ernest Hemingway drove an ambulance in wartime Italy,
safaried in Africa and lived for years in a finca outside Havana. F.
Scott Fitzgerald cut a wild swath across Europe, touching down in places
like Paris and Cap d'Antibes. But William Faulkner, who came of age in
the same Lost Generation era, was content to live most of his life in
the sleepy town of Oxford, Miss. -- the "postage stamp" of land he
famously transformed, in 15 novels and numerous short stories, into
Yoknapatawpha County, "William Faulkner, Sole Owner & Proprietor."

Faulkner aficionados descended on Oxford in late July for the University
of Mississippi's annual Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha Conference, to listen
to scholarly papers and examine the postage stamp up close. Most writers
can be studied in any available ivory tower, but Faulkner's work is so
rooted in place -- in this specific place -- that hard as the academics
tried, much of the insight gleaned over the week came from inspecting
the Oxford buildings and locales that figure so prominently in his
writing and rubbing up against the locals, who still talk in the
singular North Mississippi cadences he captured so brilliantly on paper.

Faulkner's devotion to Oxford set him apart from his globe-trotting
literary contemporaries. But his intense localism is even more unusual
today, as distances shrink, borders fade, and McDonald's, Wal-Mart and
Coca-Cola build their brave new McWorld. There is much to say about
globalism's excesses, but the anti-globalist movement has done a poor
job of saying it. Globalism's critics would do well to contemplate
Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha writings. Underlying his distinctly Southern
tales of lost innocence and declining fortunes is a universal, and
remarkably timely, theme: how important it is for localities to stand up
to the disruptive force of progress.

Faulkner hardly feels like a novelist of the moment. In these
multicultural times, he is the ultimate "pale male," a writer obsessed
with the fate of his own out-of-fashion demographic, the well-born
Southern white man. His work is populated by antiquated types who belong
to not just an earlier time, but a different America: tragic mulattoes,
embittered small-town spinsters and Confederate colonels clattering
around decaying antebellum homes.

And Faulkner's writing style, as many high school students can attest,
seems not just difficult, but willfully obscurantist. In an age of
ever-shrinking attention spans, it is unnerving to encounter sentences
that go on for pages, and syntax that at times seems to belong to a
foreign language.

If Faulkner's style and characters can feel creaky, his appreciation of
the darkness of the human heart is up-to-the-minute. "A Rose for Emily,"
one of his most read short stories, tells of a prim old Southern lady
who murders her lover and continues to sleep with his corpse. And long
before Frantz Fanon or Edward Said held forth on racism's corrosive
effects, Faulkner explained, in novels like "Absalom, Absalom!," that
slavery is America's original sin.

But it is Faulkner's views on modernity, and its relentless attack on
traditional communities, that particularly resonate today. In Faulkner's
highly localized world, it is the town that defines individuals and
gives them their sense of identity. People who turn their back on their
neighbors -- like Goodhue Coldfield, who protests Mississippi's seceding
from the Union by nailing himself in his attic -- meet disastrous ends.

Faulkner was writing at a time when his home region was experiencing
rapid change, with traditional folkways squaring off against
automobiles, air-conditioning and real estate developers. As Faulkner
saw it, modern society is soul-crushing, cutting people off from their
communities, from nature and from the past. In the early novels, one
conference presenter noted, cars are almost always linked to criminality.

And development is a curse. The moral threat posed by the bulldozer is
poignantly rendered in "The Sound and the Fury." The mentally retarded
Benjy Compson, unloved by his mother, finds his only emotional support
in his sister Caddy. But after the land near their home is sold to
developers for a golf course, the hapless Benjy hears golfers shouting
for their caddies and mistakenly believes his beloved sister is nearby.

The infringements of modernity that Faulkner observed in his time are
writ large today. Multinational corporations, air travel and the
Internet are all posing unprecedented threats to local societies and
traditions. But so far, anti-globalism protesters have done a better job
of stopping traffic and smashing windows than articulating a coherent
critique. Faulkner's writings are a powerful reminder of the role place
and community play in our lives, and of the violence done -- in his day
and ours -- when they are destroyed.

Faulkner leaves another timely legacy: a stubborn optimism. He won the
Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949, not long after the bombing of
Hiroshima. In the atomic age, the technological innovations he had long
viewed with dismay reached a new and terrifying stage. Faulkner did not
underestimate the threat, but he believed man was more than equal to it.
After "the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last
worthless rock," he said in his Nobel acceptance speech, there will
"still be one more sound: that of his puny, inexhaustible voice, still
talking." Because of his faith in humanity Faulkner made his famous
prediction -- that "man will not merely endure: he will prevail."

--

Louis Proyect
www.marxmail.org



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