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Afterword

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 December 2009

Richard Godden
Affiliation:
Keele University
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Summary

What follows concerns the end and is less a conclusion than an allusion to work undone. I have contended that during the '30s, or more properly between 1929 and 1939, Faulkner uses the Compson material to mount a sustained exploration of how owners owned so much, for so long, by such “peculiar” means, and in the teeth of partial self-knowledge and sustained opposition. Faulkner's recognition that in the South black passes into white by way of a typical and persistent pattern of labor generates a style of speech that adds up to his key class inheritance. However, by deploying that speech to anatomize the labor impasse of the southern owning class, Faulkner risks taking himself, perceptually and stylistically, apart. On which self-defeating grounds it is perhaps understandable that the vocalist most adept at the doubling, division, reflexivity, and extension that characterizes Faulkner's turn to labor in the '30s should die, rise again, almost die, and partially recover (though in debilitated form). Quentin's last manifestation, as Harry, is little more than a figment of an intertext, a figure glimpsed occasionally among the implicit structures of an under-announced relationship between novels. With Quentin falling finally silent, white will never be quite so black again, and, arguably, the voices through which Faulkner returns to issues of labor and mastery will lack the tensile extension, the taut self-splitting, the driven and occlusive virtuosity of the work that has been studied here.

Type
Chapter
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Fictions of Labor
William Faulkner and the South's Long Revolution
, pp. 233 - 234
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1997

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  • Afterword
  • Richard Godden, Keele University
  • Book: Fictions of Labor
  • Online publication: 04 December 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511585432.007
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  • Afterword
  • Richard Godden, Keele University
  • Book: Fictions of Labor
  • Online publication: 04 December 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511585432.007
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Afterword
  • Richard Godden, Keele University
  • Book: Fictions of Labor
  • Online publication: 04 December 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511585432.007
Available formats
×