Postcolonial Palimpsests: Entwined Colonialisms and the Conflicted Representation of Charles Bon in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!

This article argues that Charles Bon in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936) is the embodiment of a fluidity that confronts the efforts to preserve the hierarchies of race, gender, class, and sexuality on which colonialism and neocolonialism depend for coherence and meaning. The biracial, sexually fluid figure of Charles Bon and his contradictory depiction by competing narrators of his tale reveal entwined colonialisms in the US South that complicate the divide between the colonial and neocolonial periods employed in linear surface narratives: Bon is portrayed as living multiple stories of colonialism simultaneously in the novel. With an awareness of the narrators’ divergent colonial mindsets, we can begin to see the ways in which Faulkner uses Bon’s métissage, or blending of cultural, racial, and sexual categories, to confront the resilient colonial mentalities that persist in the twentieth-century American South through imagining an alternative: the acceptance of this fluidity

Digital Yoknapatawpha Update

Box lunch available upon request. Faulkner’s Familial Places: Kinship and Demography in the Digital Yoknapatawpha Database / Johannes Bergers, Ashoka UniversityThe topography of Faulkner’s county is etched with the names of the men and women who made it, from “the proud fading white plantation names” to the “cradle of Varners and ant-heap of the northeast crawl of Snopes.” Using advanced GIS visualizations made with data from the Digital Yoknapatawpha Database, this presentation showcases the spatio-temporal relationships between kinship and demography across Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha Fictions. Compressing all his fictions onto one map reveals just how consistently Faulkner mapped the spaces of Jefferson county. In particular, it underscores the extent to which kinship patterns are co-extensive with other changing demographic relations. Indeed, kinship appears to function as a synecdoche for larger demographic patterns, and is therefore a crucial intermediary for understanding the relationship between Faulkner’s individuals and their community.Abandoning the Desire for ‘Wholeness’: Digital Yoknapatawpha and the ‘Compson Appendix’ / Erin Penner, Asbury UniversityIf Malcolm Cowley curated Yoknapatawpha for readers of The Portable Faulkner, how do current scholars shape the way Faulkner’s work is presented in Digital Yoknapatawpha? Cowley hoped to use The Portable Faulkner to represent Faulkner’s work “as a whole,” but Cowley’s vision is not that of the editors of Digital Yoknapatawpha, even if they echo his desire to gather the stories of Faulkner’s fictional county in one place. Unlike Cowley, DY makes it difficult to create a view of Yoknapatawpha that comes at the cost of individual Faulkner works. Faulkner stages that very battle in the “Compson Appendix”; although Jason Compson IV claims a central role in both The Sound and the Fury and the “Appendix,” it is Melissa Meek, a character outside the family, who best captures Faulkner’s “growing, changing” Compson family narrative in the later text. Faulkner’s Families: Digital Yoknapatawpha in the Classroom / Jenna Grace Sciuto, Massachusetts College of Liberal ArtsThis presentation will share practical approaches to engaging with Digital Yoknapatawpha in the classroom to enrich students’ experiences with William Faulkner’s novels. I will demonstrate the ways in which my students’ understandings of family dynamics across The Sound and the Fury and Go Down, Moses were directly enhanced through work with the character-character graphs of Digital Yoknapatawpha. I consider what is added to students’ understandings of the novels through a hybrid assignment—a short comparative analysis paper requiring students to put two texts in conversation with each other, a novel by Faulkner and a graph or chart from the site. The character graphs can help clarify the reality of relationships or crystalize aspects of family dynamics in the novels, which can then be expanded and developed by students through close textual work

Panel. Comparatively Queer: Sexuality, Identity, and Experimentation in Faulkner and Beyond

Ugly Spirits, Ugly Desires, and the “Routine”: Queerness, the Unsightly, and Visibility in Faulkner’s Sanctuary and Burroughs’ Queer / Bernard T. Joy Containing Subversive Gender Identities in Halldor Laxness’s Salka Valk and Faulkner’s Sanctuary / Jenna Grace Sciuto, Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts Gender and Sexuality in William Faulkner’s Light in August and Louise Erdrich’s The Last Report on The Miracles at Little No Horse / Rebecca Nisetich, University of Southern Main

Welcome and Award Presentations

Noel Wilkin, Provost, University of Mississippi and Robyn Tannehill, Mayor of OxfordJohn W. Hunt Scholar presented by Jenna Grace Sciuto, Secretary-Treasurer, William Faulkner SocietyPresentation of Eudora Welty Awards in Creative Writing by Kathryn McKee, UM Center for the Study of Southern Cultur

Welcome, Award Presentations

Ivo Kamps, Chair, UM Department of English, and Jason Bailey, Mayor Pro Tem, City of OxfordJohn W. Hunt Scholar presented by Jenna Grace Sciuto, Secretary-Treasurer, William Faulkner SocietyPresentation of Eudora Welty Awards in Creative Writing by Rebecca Lauck Cleary, UM Center for the Study of Southern Cultur

Panel. Sexual Properties

Percival Brownlee and the McCaslin Ledgers / James B. Carothers, University of Kansas“[The] anomaly calling itself Percival Brownlee” first appears in the McCaslin ledgers of Go Down, Moses in March, 1856 when Buck McCaslin notes his purchase of the slave “26yr Old.Cleark @ Bookepper. Bought from N.B. Forest at Cold Water 3 Mar 1856 $265. Dolars” This begins the cryptic account of Buck and Buddy McCaslin’s argument about what to do with “the anomaly.” Brownlee, hired as clerk and bookkeeper, can write his own name, but he cannot read, cannot plough, and cannot lead livestock to the creek to drink except one at a time. Buddy McCaslin immediately judges Brownlee worthless as a slave and urges his twin brother to “get shut of him” but Buck persists in seeking to get his money’s worth out of Brownlee until the latter figures in a livestock disaster: “1 Oct 56 Mule Josephine Broke Leg @ shot Wrong stall wrong niger wrong everything$100 dolars.” The next day Buck frees Brownlee and debits himself the $265, and the following day Buddy adds the$100 value of the mule Josephine to his brother’s debit. This part of the Brownlee narrative ends with Buddy explaining to Buck that their father L. Q.C. McCaslin would have renamed Brownlee “Spintrius.”The “Spintrius” identification of Brownlee and both early and later descriptions of him support the Digital Yoknapatawpha analysis that Brownlee is “repeatedly figured as effeminate.” This aspect of Brownlee’s role in Go Down, Moses has been interpreted in a number of ways. This paper considers the possible interpretations of both Buddy’s consistent disparagement of Percival Brownlee’s profound lack of masculine skills, as well as Buck’s stubborn resistance to his brother’s homophobic disdain for Brownlee, until Josephine’s “Broke Leg” convinces him that Buddy is right. Here and elsewhere in the novlel, Ike McCaslin meditates on both the ostensibly-comic matter of Percival Brownlee and the contrasting matter of his grandfather’s miscegenation and incest, with their tragic consequences for both free McCaslins and their slaves, of whatever myriad ancestry.“Something akin to freedom”: Patterns of Subjection and Resistance in Harriet Jacobs and William Faulkner / Jenna Grace Sciuto, Massachusetts College of Liberal ArtsHarriet Jacobs, a black woman born a slave, inhabits an oppositional social position to William Faulkner, a male descendant of the plantocracy. Jacobs’s nineteenth-century narrative is based on her own life in the antebellum South, while Faulkner’s novels are fictional reconstructions from the early twentieth century. Nevertheless, both writers depict the sexual subjections institutionalized by slavery, as well as challenges to these common dynamics. The textual subversions of Jacobs’s narrative operate simultaneously on the level of form and content, as is revealed through an analysis of her representations of plantation sexuality and her own experiences challenging her master’s control over her body. Reading Faulkner’s work alongside Jacobs’s brings to the fore the southern modernist’s own depictions of resistance. Using examples from his novels, such as defiant individuals and consensual interracial relationships, I argue that Faulkner’s work confronts, rather than passively reinscribes, the patterns of subjection and abuse ubiquitous in earlier eras.The Expropriated Voice: Absalom, Absalom!, Sound Recording, and Enslavement / Julie Napolin, The New SchoolIn Western traditions descended from Plato, the voice is taken to be a form of “property.” The voice cannot be taken from me and is defined as my inmost, intimate self. Faulkner understood that, like the flesh, the voice is a “citadel of the central I-Am\u27s private own.” If, for Faulkner, touch cuts across these fleshly boundaries and privacies, there is already something transgressive and paradoxical about the voice\u27s movement: it must leave me, “touch” the ear of the other, and yet retain its quality as “mine.” This paper argues that, written in the age of voice’s technological reproducibility, Absalom’s mode of narrative voice is premised upon this fragile paradox, expanding it and exerting pressure upon it to near shattering. But what were the limits of Faulkner’s critique of personhood and ownership? Is there something of the novel, as a form, that is premised upon liberal property, personhood, and the voice as belonging?The Slave Cabin as a Liminal Space in Light in August / Rebecca Starr NisetichThis paper explores the imaginative uses of the structure of the slave cabin in Light in August. As I will demonstrate, the Burden plantation’s decrepit slave cabin is both a liminal and a queer space. In Requiem for a Nun, Faulkner famously proclaimed that “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” In this paper, I show how the build environment of slavery provides fruitful grounds for identity formation and contestation in Faulkner’s oeuvre. In Light in August, the slave cabin is a space where nonconformity can be concealed from the curious eyes of Jeffersonians: it is where Joe Christmas lives as “husbands” with Joe Brown, and it is where the unmarried Lena Grove delivers her baby. A close reading of slavery’s built environment enables us to better understand its peculiar history and legacy in the U.S., as well as its continued ramifications and narrative utility.Response / Erich Nunn, Auburn Universit