Pylon and the Rise of European Fascism

Abstract

Pylon and the Rise of European Fascism One pair of eyes is not enough. —Franz Kafka, “The Aeroplanes at Brescia” (308) P ylon is based on events Faulkner witnessed at the opening of the ([>4,000,000 Shushan Airport in New Orleans during Mardi Gras week, February 1934 (“Big Airport for South” XX8).1 That he was shocked (electrified) by what he saw (in his sudden emergence from the histor­ ical nightmare of his stalled novel, A Dark House, into the harsh metallic light of the imminent future) we can tell as we follow the language.2 The sensibility that produces it is traceable to the consciousness of the reporter who is sent out by the editor of a mass circulation newspaper to cover the air races at the new airport. As he wanders around the airport or through the city streets at night—New Valois, Franciana, an uncanny metropolitan labyrinth akin in so many respects to the surrealists’ Paris—the novel’s narrative language is com­ mandeered by his “excited impressionism,” his obsessive notation of the vis­ ible, an essential effect of which is to make visible what is being seen for the first time by anybody (Benjamin, “Return of the Flaneur” 262).3 Though he is employed by the newspaper, he operates essentially as a subject without any official identity, an anonymous integer immersed in “the one hundred percent image space” of the metropolis (whether its old quarter or suburban airport extension [Benjamin, “Surrealism” 217]). Below I will explore the extent to which “the strength ofhis precise reaction” (Adorno 70) to an unfolding reali­ ty—its relation to a given consciousness—contributes to the novel’s antifascist, analytical power, a power flowing from the embodied consciousness of “the inner man, the psyche, the individual” (Benjamin, “Surrealism” 217). Reading Pylon in this way depends on seeing New Valois as not only a real Southern re­ gional space, but also as an imaginary world space, a site in which the essential ‘I presented an early version of this paper at the American Literature Association (Boston, May 2007) on a panel, “The Space(s) of Faulkners Pylon: Politics, Economics, Culture,” organized by Peter Lurie. My thanks to Peter Lurie and fellow panellists Taylor Hagood and David M. Earle. I also thank Randall Wilhelm for his comments on that earlier draft and Marlene Briggs for getting me to read Robert Wohl. 2This is at least my third kick at this particular can. I discuss Pylons language in “Faulkner’s Pylon: The City in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and "Pylon, Joyce, and Faulkner’s Imagination.” 3“The Surrealists’ Paris, too, is a ‘little universe.’ That is to say, in the larger one, the cosmos, things look no different. There, too, are crossroads where ghostly signals flash from the traffic, and inconceivable analogies and connections between events are the order of the day” (Benjamin, “Surrealism” 211). 97 98 Michael Zeitlin Pylon and the Rise ofEuropean Fascism patterns of an emerging global logic can be isolated and explored in miniature. Kristin Kyoko Fujie captures the sense in which I conceive of Faulkners imagi­ nary geography here: “Faulkner’s ‘true ground’ or ‘native soil’ resides neither wholly within nor wholly without.... [I]t exists in between personal, regional, and national history, private fantasy and social reality, psychic projection and historical record” (123). Given his location as an incomparable witness to the rise ofEuropean fas­ cism in the 1920s and 30s, Walter Benjamin presides over what follows: “As a German he [Benjamin, speaking of himself] has long been acquainted with the crisis of the intelligentsia, or, more precisely, with that of the humanistic concept of freedom” (“Surrealism” 207). Benjamin characterizes the emerging global political crisis in 1929 in the following terms: Mistrust in the fate of literature, mistrust in the fate of freedom, mistrust in the fate of European humanity, but three times mistrust in all reconciliation: between classes, between nations, between individuals. And unlimited trust only in IG Farben and the peaceful perfecting ofthe air force. But what now? What next? (“Surrealism” 216-17)4 The answer begins with the solitary person who walks around the metropolitan landscape and observes it closely, delving beneath its...