Telling Truths in Faulkner's Fiction

Abstract

In the recent historical contexts of a new American president looking to the first Great Depression for ways to head off a second, and the 2008 MLA meeting rife with angst over the teaching of literature and the humanities amidst the worst academic job outlook since the troughs of the mid-1990s, two new books of Faulkner criticism seem especially timely. William Faulkner: An Economy of Complex Words extends Richard Godden's earlier work on subjectivity in Faulkner (Fictions of Capital, Cambridge UP, 1990) to show us more ways that economic relations can define both our own identities and how we perceive those of others. David Evans' William Faulkner, William fames, and the American Pragmatic Tradition reminds us of the rich literary and philosophical heritage that runs through Faulkner's work and keeps us reading and teaching his texts for lessons in who we are and what we might become. Godden's book reveals the complex dynamic by which Faulkner's characters tell (and believe) stories about themselves and their pasts that encrypt competing, possibly truer accounts that might damage their preferred narratives. Why they do this is as elusive as the preferred identities to which they cling, but each case is reducible to a fundamental