Hollywood and Gaming, Simulation and Secrecy: The Postsouthern in Knight’s Gambit

Abstract

.Taylor Hagood Hollywood and Gaming, Simulation and Secrecy: The Postsouthern in Knight’s Gambit O ne of the earliest treatments of William Faulkners novella Knight’s Gambit is Jerome F. Klinkowitz’s 1969 article “The Thematic Unity of Knight’s Gambit” Klinkowitz well observes that throughout the stories collected in the volume Knight’s Gambit Gavin Stevens, about whom reviewers and other early critics were writing almost exclusively, “is a constant, but so is the community ofwhich he is a part. The real theme ofthese stories is carried by the various outsiders to that community and the commu­ nity’s reaction to them” (81). Outsiders, Klinkowitz goes on, are complicated figures in these stories: As outsiders they are by no means monolithic: here Faulkner enriches his theme by presenting not just the traditional and all too expectable Yankee intruder, but outsid­ ers from other regional, national, and international areas, and in some stories “out­ siders” from within the very heart of the community itself, figures who express by symbol or hyperbole some of that community’s most central ideas, and who allow Faulkner the scope for statements on man more characteristic of his greater work. (81-82) Homing in on the long titular story, Klinkowitz observes that it offers “the richest presentation ofthe community-outlander themes” (94). Klinkowitz has his thumb on an important vein in this novella, and although provocative work has been done on other aspects of Knight’s Gambit, especially in recent vol­ umes by Michael Wainwright and Lorie Watkins Fulton, I want to revert back to and build on Klinkowitz’s observations on “foreignness.”1 Specifically, I want to consider this topic in light of more recent theorizations of postsouthernness , and in a broader view, ofFaulkner’s Hollywood experiences and the ways film promulgates hyperreality that enables a critique ofthe distance-proximity spatial model that particularly encodes the “foreign” in the story. Written against the backdrop of World War II and Faulkner’s time in Hollywood, Knight’s Gambit works out an essential secret, the U.S. South’s ‘Despite recent attention to this novella, and the book of which it is a part, critical comment remains scarce. Some of these treatments are mentioned in text, but I would add also Hans Skeis essay that builds on Klinkowitz’s movement away from reading Stevens as the sole interesting figure in the story to focus on detection in the novella; Michael Millgate’s discussion of the stories in Knight’s Gambit as an example of the ways they were long derided; Jay Watson’s provocative observations on Gavin Stevens’s functions as a lawyer figure; John T. Irwin’s provocative exploration of the story in the context of the detective genre; and Nicole Kenley’s examination ofthe story in the larger context ofscreenwriting and the hardboiled genre. 29 30 Taylor Hagood Hollywood: The Postsouthern in Knight’s Gambit being-in-the-world. While Faulkner may not have been quite ready to make the postmodern move of seeing the South as purely an item of Benjaminian mechanical reproduction, as Scott Romine has shown it to be at present, Faulkner’s experiences with simulation seem to have brought him to an aware­ ness of the South’s constructedness and commodification, something akin to Jean Baudrillard’s concepts of simulation and hyperreality. Baudrillard argues that simulations can not only usurp but even replace the real places or things they replicate; in a reversal of what might be thought of as natural order, the simulation can “precede” the real, creating what Baudrillard calls a “preces­ sion ofsimulacra’’ Ihe ultimate effect of this precession is that simulation can become, as he writes, “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal” (1). This “hyperreal” exists as a plane of simulation that flattens space and time into a constructed present moment so that the era ofsimulation is inaugurated by a liquidation ofall referentials,... A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence ofmodels and for the simulated generation of differences. (2-3) Games operate within such logic of simulation, and the film industry, both...