Natural Aristocracy: History, Ideology, and the Production of William Faulkner (review)

Abstract

In William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (1963), Cleanth Brooks suggests that Faulkner reconciles contradictory historical forces by transporting them to his fictional county where the unifying power of art maintains an established order. In this Yoknapatawpha, while the shifty Flem Snopeses prevail, the stoic Gavin Stevenses endure--and so, vicariously, can knowing readers who are able to gain a certain amount of superior comfort from recognizing an honorable victory in defeat. Where Brooks finds unity and order, Myra Jehlen, in Class and Character in Faulkner's South (1976), identifies conflict and discord rooted primarily in class antagonisms that link Yoknapatawpha to its sociohistorical context. Jehlen's study paves the way for inquiry into the complex relationship between material history and the fiction of an artist who reminds us that the past is never really past. With Kevin Railey's Natural Aristocracy: History, Ideology, and the Production of William Faulkner, this debate comes full-circle. Like Brooks, Railey argues that Faulkner uses fiction to impose a certain order on the chaos of history. The difference is that Brooks's account, rooted in the New Criticism, sees this tendency as a merit of Faulkner's fiction, while Railey's Marxist critique views it as a limitation forged through Faulkner's dialectical struggle to achieve historical subjectivity.