JOHN T. MATTHEWS, William Faulkner: Seeing Through the South.

Abstract

AS John T. Matthews notes in this new introductory book, the prevailing view of Faulkner has largely been that of a writer best understood through his preoccupation with the past. Yet as his interpreters have too-often failed to remark, this portrait of Faulkner—which depicts him as a descendant of the Old South’s owning classes, a nostalgic, and a sceptic of modernity—is not easily reconciled with the other Faulkner we encounter in the complex experience of reading him: the artist J. M. Coetzee describes as ‘the most radical innovator in the annals of American fiction, a writer to whom the avant-garde of Europe and Latin America would go to school’. In this learned and wide-ranging study by a leading Faulkner critic, Matthews does not seek to reject the prevalent view of Faulkner as much as correct its distorting one-sidedness. He argues that the originality and power of Faulkner’s fiction is inseparable from its contradictions—which arose from Faulkner’s deeply-felt preoccupations with ‘the grotesque ambivalence[s] of modernity’ and the ‘seismic upheavals that formed modern life’ (1).