Carl Van Vechten, Creative Commons via Wikimedia
“Good God! William Faulkner. What can I say? Certain books and certain writers knock you to your knees and lead you to wonder why you even bother to get up in the morning and think, much less write. I said to Eudora [Welty] one night that I thought of Faulkner as the biggest, boldest mountain, and I’m scared to even stand at the foot of it, so vast and frightening it is. And she lowered her head and her voice and said, ‘I won’t even visit the country in which that mountain stands.’ So that’s my response to your question about Faulkner. He’ll change your life for sure, but he’ll scare you when the topic of your own writing arises. Go with God, baby.“
Tennessee Williams, interview with James Grissom, New Orleans, 1982
This Salon series – a first in its focus on the works of a single author over a sustained period of time; his influence upon several generations of writers following him in the American South and abroad in Europe and Latin America; and the voluminous critical heritage generated in his wake – explores the enduring legacy of William Faulkner, tracing how his radical experiments with voice, time and memory reshaped American literature, and how subsequent writers wrestled with, revised and resisted his influence. We hope that the ‘hybridity’ and experimental nature of this programme will introduce to some of our readers the works of great writers to whom they have not yet been exposed.
Over a number of months, we will engage in close, sustained readings of some of Faulkner’s major novels, including As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom! and Light in August, works that fracture linear narrative, multiply perspectives and probe the moral and historical wounds of the American South. Together, we will attend closely to stylistic and thematic threads which we have come to consider quintessentially ‘Faulknerian’: his syntactic daring; experiments with stream of consciousness and shifts in time; refinement of the Gothic; mythic sense of history; and a relentless engagement with race, violence, inheritance and guilt.
From there, we will trace Faulkner’s influence upon a remarkable group of writers, some of whom were his contemporaries, others who came of age in the second half of the 20th century, most of whom were living in and writing about the American South but also in Europe and Latin America.
We will examine how Ralph Ellison transforms Faulkner’s techniques to explore modern Black identity and invisibility; how Toni Morrison’s own use of the Gothic genre both inherits and overturns Faulkner’s treatment of history, memory and race; how Flannery O’Connor adapts Faulknerian grotesque and violence to theological ends; and how figures such as Tennessee Williams, William Styron and Walker Percy engage his legacy across drama, historical fiction and existential inquiry. Other authors under consideration for 2027 include Eudora Welty, Javier Marias, Jean Paul Sartre, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Cormac McCarthy.
We will ask pressing questions: What does it mean to write ‘after’ Faulkner? Which of his innovations proved generative, and which demanded refusal or revision? How do later writers reckon with the ethical and aesthetic burden of his vision of the South? This study will be attentive to form, style and cultural context, inviting participants to experience the profound influence of Faulkner’s oeuvre across generations and continents.
Our Faulkner series will commence with a three-day intensive study of As I Lay Dying, led by John Allemand and Toby Brothers, live on Zoom, on Friday 17, Saturday 18 July and Sunday 19 July from 5.00-7.30 pm (UK time).
.jpg){kind=link}