Faulkner, Writer of Dis-Ability by Taylor Hagood

Abstract

Reviewed by: Faulkner, Writer of Dis-Ability by Taylor Hagood Sara Hosey Hagood, Taylor. 2014. Faulkner, Writer of Dis-Ability. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. $45.00 hc. 232pp. Taylor Hagood’s provocative text is a book-length reconsideration of William Faulkner’s life and work from a literary disability studies perspective. Outlining a Faulkner family history intimately connected to disability and arguing that Faulkner experienced various infirmities and injuries that rendered him acutely sensitive to the possibilities and complications of physical impairment, Hagood’s analysis makes visible the significant role that disability and impairment play in Faulkner’s work. Hagood’s study at once challenges generic conventions, contributes nuanced readings to our understanding of Faulkner’s work, and suggests exciting possibilities for continued work within literary disability studies. Contending that he aims to “deform and disable” literary critical style, Hagood incorporates several generic departures meant to draw attention to the norm or the ideology of ability that, Hagood suggests, permeates scholarly writing. As a result, Hagood’s chapters, none of which are numbered, take the form of various non-scholarly genre writing; for example, one chapter appears as the text of a screenplay and another as a message to an Internet community. While the move against the boundaries of convention emphasizes the constructedness of writing and is particularly apt in discussions of Faulkner’s work, the departures are at times distracting, as in the chapter “from: disfaulkstudies@listserv.net,” in which Hagood intermittently uses emojis to punctuate points. Despite the occasional irritation, challenging stylistic conventions is a laudable approach for a scholar of literary disability studies, especially as Hagood is interested in reconsidering that which may have been disregarded in earlier studies, such as the character of Pap in Sanctuary. Articulating how disability studies informs his approach, Hagood writes, “Just as a change in environment can transform a disabled person into a more- or most-abled person. . . . so changing the critical ‘environment’ can show how a minor character [End Page 753] can take on great significance just as I assert that many less-valued works emerge as integral to Faulkner’s oeuvre” (195). In keeping with his attention to that which is often overlooked, Hagood turns to Faulkner’s biography, family history and nonfiction writing in order to develop new, disability studies-inflected perspectives on Faulkner’s fiction. Thus, the first chapter, “Citizen Faulkner: A Fable, Disability, and the Public/Private Laureate” traces Faulkner’s experiences of disability alongside his development of his famous failure of a novel, A Fable. In this most compelling chapter, Hagood offers the radical claim that Faulkner’s relationship with alcohol was at once enabling and disabling. That is, on the one hand, drinking buoyed Faulkner and enabled him to overcome his stage fright; further, Faulkner himself understood the capacity to drink heavily and still function as a marker of ability. On the other hand, Faulkner’s drinking, in addition to having the usual debilitating effects, contributed to his ill health and led to several injuries. Using this background as context for his examination of depictions of the disabled general and the disabled racehorse in A Fable, as well as in Faulkner’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, Hagood thus argues that Faulkner may be considered a “disabled writer of disability.” Hagood’s second chapter is also quite successful in presenting new approaches to understanding how Faulkner’s familial history and biography may have influenced his work. Thus “Fa(u)lkner’s Wounded, Being a Diserent Biographical Approach” begins with an overview of the narratives of ability and disability which accrued to Faulkner’s great-grandfather, William Clark Falkner. This biographical context enriches Hagood’s close readings of “Mirrors of Chartres Streets,” Flags in the Dust, “The Leg,” and later in the chapter Soldier’s Pay, “Barn Burning,” and the Snopes Trilogy. Hagood’s readings result in the insight that, just as the Faulkner family’s economic rise is built upon Faulkner’s great-grandfather’s wounding, the Snopes family’s rise and ultimate domination of their community is instantiated by a wounding. Here Hagood considers how disability might be empowering, leading him to conclude that Faulkner’s creation of Linda Snopes is “one...