The poetics of peripheralization: Faulkner and the question of the postcolonial

American Literature

Volumn 77, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 482-509

  Aboul Ela, Hosam ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 67650114782     PISSN: 00029831     EISSN: 15272117     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00029831-77-3-483     Document Type: Article

References (65)

1. Mariátegui describes these discontiguous stages of Peruvian history in detail; see "Outline of the Economic Evolution," in José Carlos Mariátegui, Seven Essays on Peruvian Reality, trans. Marjory Urquidi (1928; reprint, Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1971).
2. Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001), 186.
3. Although this argument for a relationship between postcoloniality and political economy deserves much more attention, it is beyond the scope of this essay on Faulkner. An important component of such an argument, however, would be that most formations of mainstream postcolonial studies emphasize questions of identity (especially as so-called hybrid identities), textuality, language, and representation; consequently, they employ tools of psychoanalysis, linguistics, and poststructuralist thought instead of emphasizing the colonial economy. Among the many well-known essays that provide definitional arguments in postcolonial studies, see Ann McClintock, "The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term 'Post-colonialism,'" Social Text 10, nos. 2-3 (1992): 84-98;
4. Benita Parry, "Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse," Oxford Literary Review 9, nos. 1-2 (1987): 27-58;
5. and Aref Dirlik, "The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism," Critical Inquiry 20 (winter 1994): 328-56.
6. For other arguments for a postcolonialism grounded in political economy, see Timothy Brennan, "Postcolonial Studies between the European Wars: An Intellectual History," in Marxism, Modernity, and Postcolonial Studies, ed. Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002): 185-203;
7. Masao Miyoshi, "Sites of Resistance in the Global Economy," in Cultural Readings of History: Edward Said and the Gravity of History, ed. Benita Parry (New York: St. Martins, 1997), 49-66;
8. Mary Louise Pratt, "Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism," Social Text 40 (fall 1994): 2-10;
9. and Subramanian Shankar, Textual Traffic: Colonialism, Modernity, and the Economy of the Text (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 2001).
10. My own position on these issues is explained more fully in my essay, "Comparative Hybridities: Latin American Intellectuals and Postcolonialists," Rethinking Marxism 16 (summer 2004): 261-79.
11. José Carlos Mariátegui, The Heroic and Creative Meaning of Socialism, ed. and trans. Michael Pearlman (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1996), 36.
12. For important studies of the race dynamic in Faulkner, see Thadious Davis, Faulkner's "Negro": Art and the Southern Context (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1983);
13. and James Snead, Figures of Division: William Faulkner's Major Novels (New York: Methuen, 1986).
14. For recent studies that focus on the race dynamic by taking up Absalom, Absalom! and reading it with special attention to its scenes set in the Caribbean and their racial ramifications for the Sutpen story, see George B. Handley, Postslavery Literatures in the Americas: Family Portraits in Black and White (Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2000);
15. Vera Kutzinski, "Borders and Bodies: The United States, America, and the Caribbean," New Centennial Review 1 (fall 2001): 55-88;
16. Barbara Ladd, Nationalism and the Color Line in George W. Cable, Mark Twain, and William Faulkner (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1996);
17. John T. Matthews, "Recalling the West Indies: From Yoknapatawpha to Haiti and Back," American Literary History 16 (summer 2004): 238-62;
18. and Ramon Saldívar, "Looking for a Master Plan: Faulkner, Paredes, and the Colonial and Postcolonial Subject," in The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner, ed. Philip Weinstein (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995), 96-120.
19. Of this group, Matthews and Saldívar are more invested in political economy than the others, but as I will argue presently, even critics like Saldívar, Richard Godden, and Carolyn Porter who do pay attention to the economic dynamic in the novel focus on the Sutpen story's relationship to the linear historical narrative of U.S. capitalism rather than the colonial economy with its more synchronic form of exploitation of spatial inequalities (see Richard Godden, Fictions of Labor [New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997];
20. and Carolyn Porter, Seeing and Being: The Plight of the Participant Observer in Emerson, James, Adams, and Faulkner [Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1981]).
21. See Porter, Seeing and Being, 238-40.
22. For more extensive overviews of dependency theory, see Ronald Chilcote, "A Critical Synthesis of Dependency Literature," Latin American Perspectives 1 (spring 1974): 4-29;
23. Jorgé Larrain, Theories of Development: Capitalism, Colonialism, and Dependency (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989);
24. Naomi Lindstrom, "Dependency and Autonomy: The Evolution of Concepts in the Study of Latin American Literature," in The Social Conscience of Latin American Writing (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press), 13-42;
25. and Gabriel Palma, "Dependency: A Formal Theory of Underdevelopment or a Methodology for the Analysis of Concrete Situations of Underdevelopment? " World Development 6 (July-August 1978): 881-924.
26. Fernando Henrique Cardoso was president of Brazil from 1994-2002, but with his entry into politics, he had become (ironically) an advocate of economic development based on the Interational Monetary Fund's model of structural adjustment.
27. W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1960), 12-13.
28. It can be argued that dependency theorists, especially the Marxists and developmentalists among them, had their own problems with teleologies. Thinking in terms of utopian endings is so ingrained in Western metaphysics that it is difficult, to say the least, to circumvent such an approach. Still, I find it useful to read the dependency model as a critical stance focusing on spatial inequalities rather than temporal teleologies.
29. Wallace Martin, Recent Theories of Narrative (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986), 61.
30. Doris Sommer, "Irresistible Romance: The Foundational Fictions of Latin America," in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1980), 73.
31. See Larrain, Theories of Development, 139-46.
32. Edward W. Said, "Arabic Prose and Prose Fiction after 1948," "Reflections on Exile" and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 2000), 55.
33. See Ghassan Kanafani, "Men in the Sun" and Other Palestinian Stories, trans. Hilary Kilpatrick (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1999);
34. see also Kanafani, What Is Left for You?, trans. from the Arabic by May Jayyussi and Jeremy Reed (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1990).
35. Widely considered to be influenced by and even a disciple of Faulkner, Kanafani is an interesting test case in the discussion of Faulkner's relationship to the global South; see Sabry Hafez,: ("Theory of Cultural Experience and Praxis of Creative Vision: A Study of the Influence of The Sound and the Fury on the Arabic Novel"), Fusul 4 (October-December 1983): 219-24.
36. Kanafani's reputation as a follower of Faulkner comes exclusively from his second novel, What Is Left for You? (1996).
37. There is no evidence that he was familiar with Faulkner when he wrote Men in the Sun (1962).
38. The Sound and the Fury was translated into Arabic by Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, a fellow Palestinian, between the publication of Kanafani's first and second novels. This chronology suggests that the correlation between a writer's national and international geohistorical context and the resultant narrative structure of his or her novel is fundamental to and operates in conjunction with actual direct influence, even when writers openly acknowledge their debt to Faulkner. On the debate between readings based on literary influence and those based on the influence of context, see Deborah Cohn, History and Memory in the Two Souths: Recent Southern and Spanish American Fiction (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt Univ. Press), 8-22.
39. Said, "Arabic Prose," 53.
40. It is not my intention to overlook these and other anomalies of the U.S. South. Much of the criticism I attend to in this essay analyzes the global economy with attention to region rather than nation; see, for example, Susan Willis, "Aesthetics of the Rural Slum: Contradictions and Dependency in 'The Bear,'" Social Text 1 (summer 1979): 82-103;
41. and C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1951). Woodward's followers are speaking of what is essentially a subnational formation. While some critics, especially those involved with dependency theory, do address the subnation as a unit, their analyses leave unresolved questions. For example, if the U.S. South's post-New Deal history is any indication, the subnational unit would seem to have greater economic possibilities growing out of integration through economic dependency, but this development occurred after Faulkner's major fiction. Such unresolved issues call attention to the need to read models like dependency theory diachronically, examining approaches found in the work of Mariátegui and other early Marxists of the global South in order to consider dependency theory comparatively with contemporary approaches and historical change.
42. William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Vintage, 1990), 5; further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text as A.
43. Woodward, Origins of the New South, 292;
44. see also Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 1986);
45. and Edward Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992).
46. Consider also Faulkner's saga of the Snopes clan, which dramatizes this same phenomenon. In The Hamlet, Faulkner compares Flem Snopes and his father-in-law to "the white trader and his native parrot-taught headman in an African outpost" ([New York: Vintage, 1991], 67).
47. Godden, Fictions of Labor, 129.
48. See Willis, "Aesthetics of the Rural Slum," 97.
49. See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Capitalist World Economy (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), especially 66-94.
50. Edouard Glissant, Faulkner, Mississippi, trans. Barbara Lewis and Thomas Spear (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 73.
51. See, for example, James East Irby, La influencia de William Faulkner en cuatro narradores hispano-americanos (Mexico City: Universidad National Autónoma de México, 1956);
52. Mary Davis, "The Haunted Voice: Echoes of William Faulkner in García Márquez, Fuentes, and Vargas Llosa," World Literature Today 59 (autumn 1985): 531-35;
53. Lois Parkinson-Zamora, "The End of Innocence: Myth and Narrative Structure in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and García Márquez's Cien años de soledad, " Hispanic Journal 4, no. 1: 23-40;
54. and Tanya T. Fayen, In Search of the Latin American Faulkner (Lanham, Md.: Univ. Press of America, 1995). The new interest in the Haiti sequence of Absalom, Absalom! concerns itself with connections between Faulkner and the global South beyond direct literary influence.
55. Louise B. Williams, Modernism and the Ideology of History: Literature, Politics, and the Past (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002), 14.
56. Williams focuses on five modernists: Ford Maddox Ford, T. E. Hulme, D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, and W. B. Yeats. Her list shows a distinct bias toward an English, male, and pre-World War I version of the movement that might be complicated by the incorporation of feminist, Jewish, North American, and late modernist perspectives. My intention is not to center Williams's narrative of modernism but to show that the categorization of Faulkner as a fellow traveler with many of the postcolonial novelists to which his name has been connected is even more valid than his traditional categorization as a modernist.
57. Generations of Faulkner critics have been confused by Faulkner's sending of Sutpen to Haiti two decades after it had gained its independence and abolished slavery. Kutzinski's explanation is that Faulkner actually means Cuba ("Borders and Bodies," 65-66). Nonetheless, the substantial amount of discussion of this historical "error" has distracted critics from such subtle historical verities in the passage as the role white privilege played in facilitating material gain in Haiti's colonial economy.
58. Note that Ladd argues convincingly that Sutpen is lying about Charles Bon's African blood (Nationalism and the Color Line, 144), but this intriguing possibility has not been picked up by Faulkner critics, who continue to take Bon's Afro-Caribbean descent as a given.
59. Kutzinski, "Borders and Bodies," 61.
60. Gabriel García Márquez, "La novella en América Latina," interview, in Imagen y literatura, ed. Carlos Milla Batres (Ediciones Universidad National de Ingeniería, 1968); quoted in Willis, "Aesthetics of the Rural Slum," 100.
61. See Larrain, introduction to Theories of Development, viii.
62. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2003), 31.
63. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1963), 33.
64. Angel Rama, "Processes of Transculturation in Latin American Narrative," Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 6 (November 1997): 166.
65. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs, 186.