Faulkner and Film

By Peter Lurie and Ann J. Abadie

Considering that he worked a stint as a screenwriter, it will come as little surprise that Faulkner has often been called the most cinematic of novelists. Faulkner's novels were produced in the same high period as the films of classic Hollywood, a reason itself for considering his work alongside this dominant form. Beyond their era, though, Faulkner's novels—or the ways in which they ask readers to see as well as feel his world—have much in common with film. That Faulkner was aware of film and that his novels’ own “thinking” betrays his profound sense of the medium and its effects broadens the contexts in which he can be considered.

In a range of approaches, the contributors consider Faulkner’s career as a scenarist and collaborator in Hollywood, the ways his screenplay work and the adaptations of his fiction informed his literary writing, and how Faulkner’s craft anticipates, intersects with, or reflects upon changes in cultural history across the lifespan of cinema.

Drawing on film history, critical theory, archival studies of Faulkner's screenplays and scholarship about his work in Hollywood, the nine essays show a keen awareness of literary modernism and its relation to film.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Sep 18, 2014
• ISBN: 9781626743366

Book preview

Faulkner and Film

FAULKNER AND YOKNAPATAWPHA

2010

Faulkner and Film

FAULKNER AND YOKNAPATAWPHA, 2010

EDITED BY

PETER LURIE

AND

ANN J. ABADIE

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member

of the Association of American University Presses.

Copyright © 2014 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2014

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference (37th : 2010 : University of Mississippi)

Faulkner and film / [compiled by] Peter Lurie and Ann J. Abadie.

pages cm. — (Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-62846-101-5 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-62846-102-2 (ebook) 1. Faulkner, William, 1897–1962—Film and video adaptations—Congresses. 2. American fiction—20th century—History and criticism—Congresses. 3. Motion pictures and literature—Congresses. 4. American fiction—Film adaptations—Congresses. 5. Modernism (Literature)—United States—Congresses. I. Lurie, Peter, 1965– editor of compilation. II. Abadie, Ann J., editor of compilation. III. Title.

PS3511.A86Z7832113 2014

813’.52—DC23                                         2014008805

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

In Memoriam,

Betty Zachry Harrington

June 20, 1928–October 22, 2011

Albert Murray

May 12, 1916–August 18, 2013

Stephen M. Ross

November 28, 1943–August 21, 2013

Louis D. Rubin

November 19, 1923–November 16, 2013

Dr. Chester Andrew McLarty Jr.

December 9, 1916–November 23, 2013

Contents

Introduction

PETER LURIE

Note on the Conference

Faulkner and Hollywood: A Call for Reassessment

ROBERT W. HAMBLIN

Images of Collaboration: William Faulkner’s Motion Picture Communities

ROBERT JACKSON

Immemorial Cinema: Film, Travel, and Faulkner’s Poetics of Space

AARON NYERGES

Demystifying the Modern Mammy in Requiem for a Nun

DEBORAH BARKER

Faulkner and the Masses: A Hollywood Fable

STEFAN SOLOMON

Oprah’s Faulkner

RICHE RICHARDSON

In Phantom Pain: The 1991 Russian Film Adaptation of William Faulkner’s The Leg

IVAN DELAZARI

Faulkner and The Man with the Megaphone: The Redemption of Genre and the Transfiguration of Trash in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem

PHIL SMITH

Faulkner in the Histories of Film: Where Memory Is the Slave

JULIAN MURPHET

Contributors

Index

Introduction

The most arresting moment in Absalom, Absalom!, literally and figuratively, is when Clytie blocks Rosa Coldfield on the Sutpen’s Hundred stairs. The moment is unique in the novel for several reasons, standing as it does as one of its few instances of actual physical contact, but also for the significance to Rosa of its interracial aspect. Moreover it encompasses a broad thematic concern at the heart of the novel—indeed, in all of Faulkner’s South. Such a touching as Clytie’s is clearly an affront, and Rosa’s outraged response—"Take your hand off me, nigger!"—states openly thoughts that characters like Sutpen, Henry, and even Quentin harbor toward black-white somatic relations, but never utter.1

The moment on the stairs is significant for what it points up about the meanings of touch to the novel and its characters, as well as in experience generally. In terms that are apposite to Rosa and Clytie’s encounter, Jennifer M. Barker states, Tactility is a mode of perception and expression wherein all parts of the body commit themselves to, or are drawn into, a relationship with the world that is at once a mutual and intimate relation of contact. The . . . contact between touching and touched and the relationship of mutual, reciprocal significance that exists between them, she continues, are universal structures.2 We should immediately ask that Barker’s insistence on the universal quality of touching and structures of intimacy yield to the highly charged historical and racial character of Rosa’s and Clytie’s encounter. For, as we know, Clytie’s touch and Rosa’s reply occur within the double register of their antebellum, plantation history and Quentin’s Jim Crow context of 1910, in which the incident is recalled. Nevertheless, Barker’s account of the importance of touch, its unique power to unsettle or discomfit, has particular relevance to this scene.

Barker offers her observations, not in the context of Faulkner scholarship, nor even literary studies generally, but in her book The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience. Yet her approach to film is of interest to the passage describing Clytie and Rosa, both for the ways their encounter may be seen to resemble cinema and for its resonance with film aesthetics and history. For it is also the case that this noteworthy intimacy recalls a signal moment in film history that bespoke a similar feeling vis-à-vis interracial contact: D. W. Griffith’s refusal to cast an African American actor in the role of Silas Lynch in Birth of a Nation. While Griffith cast black actors in minor roles, the prospect of an African American man touching a white actress, as the actor playing the mulatto Lynch would do in a particular scene, was, to the director, simply abhorrent. In a well-known anecdote from the movie’s filming, Lillian Gish described how closely Griffith tended to the shooting of this scene and its casting, lest it even suggest that an actual African American performer came so close to an embodiment of Southern womanhood as Gish represented.3 As in Griffith’s film, the black and white moment of Rosa and Clytie on the stairs stands out, rising into relief against the book’s recollected action in a moment that ruptures the surface of the novel’s rich but obfuscating prose. Viewed such, this passage may be said to possess its own haptic, if not also cinematic quality within our reading that follows the felt description of black on white skin.

Other events in the novel figure similarly. We might think of Henry and Judith exchanging words like slaps, as if they stood breast to breast striking one another in turn after Henry kills Bon (143), or of the staccato effect of what Bon shows Henry in New Orleans and its indexical, physical mark on the innocent and negative photographic plate of Henry’s provincial soul (91, 92), or of Quentin striving to read the lettering on Sutpen’s tombstone with his fingers in the half-light of the cedar grove (158), or of the rectangular shape of his father’s letter resolving itself physically on the surface, first, of Quentin’s eyes, then, and only slowly, on his understanding: he would be able to decipher the words soon, in a moment; even almost now, now, now (309). If we consider the writing in the novel—as well as of the novel—to operate as an example of proprioceptive stimuli to the body and the nerves as well as to cognition, we might see how Rosa’s demand to Clytie expresses a fact that is notable within both the book’s workings and its events.

Such writerly touching may be unique to Faulkner. It is, however, a quality that is readily attributed to film, as Barker and others suggest.4 We might make a too-ready connection to Faulkner’s well-known synesthesia as an example of the way in which, like film, his writing seeks to engage readers with more than one sense as well as verbally. Film of course also relies on sound, an important point to which I turn below. We know that Faulkner began his career in a pictorial mode with his sketches for Marionettes, and that he frequently used iconic and extraverbal devices in his early fiction. As such, and in his modernism’s several strainings against the limits of language, we also recognize his efforts to combine the literary, especially the temporal demands of narrative, with the visual, including its temporal arrest and seeming fixity. Rosa and Clytie’s touch on the stairs is only one example of the arresting quality of Faulkner’s writing more generally, manifest in its idiosyncratic syntax, diction, and punctuation throughout Absalom, as elsewhere.

It will thus come as little surprise that Faulkner has often been called the most cinematic of novelists—a statement that may mean many things, but which also begs several questions. Among other interests is the matter of whether all modern—if not also Modernist—literature is to some extent mediated or shaped by motion pictures and whether there is any sense to asserting which writers are any more or less in league with the visual technology of film. The assumption that any early twentieth-century writer, Faulkner included, was influenced by film is far from new; nor is it a novel insight that such influence may bear on our understanding of modernism generally, which has seen its purview opened to the realms of popular art and discourse, perhaps above all that of the cinema. The matter of what cinematic itself means is deceptive, despite common assumptions about what the term conveys generally or in this context. The significance of film to Faulkner himself as well as to understanding his fiction is a question on which the essays in this volume dilate variously, and to which they respond to penetrating effect.

Critical discourse has long been fascinated with these questions, and for a number of reasons. Beginning with Bruce Kawin’s genuinely orienting work on Faulkner and film, both for the 1979 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha volume and in his book of the same title, Faulkner’s connections to mass and visual culture have been deepened considerably. This move began in earnest with Joseph Urgo’s 1990 "Absalom, Absalom!: The Movie, followed by M. J. Burgess’s 1991 ‘Watching Jefferson Watching’: Light in August and the Aestheticization of Gender, which also reads Dry September" closely through movies and moviegoing (each of these followed Gene Phillips’s 1988 The Art of Adaptation: Fiction, Faulkner, and Film); the Fall 2000–Spring 2001 special issue of the Faulkner Journal devoted to the topic Faulkner and Film; my own 2004 Vision’s Immanence: Faulkner, Film, and the Popular Imagination; Catherine Gunther Kodat’s "‘C’est vraiment deguelasse’: Meaning and Ending in A bout de souffle and If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem" in the Blackwell Companion to William Faulkner (2007); John T. Matthews’s discussions of film in sections of William Faulkner: Seeing through the South (2009); Deborah Barker’s 2011 essay in Faulkner and Whiteness, "Moonshine and Magnolias: The Story of Temple Drake and The Birth of the Nation"; the essays in the forthcoming William Faulkner in the Media Ecology collection (edited by Julian Murphet and Stefan Solomon); and, notably, the first PMLA article devoted to Faulkner to appear in that journal in close to thirty years, Sarah Gleeson-White’s January 2013 Auditory Exposures: Faulkner, Eisenstein, and Film Sound. Doug Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz’s article The New Modernist Studies responded to work such as this on Faulkner and other writers that put literary modernism in a more proximate relation to popular culture such as film than had been assumed in critical models like Andreas Huyssen’s Great Divide.5 That exploration continues in the essays in this volume, each of which demonstrates that the stakes for reading Faulkner with film are quite high. In the range of approaches the authors take, they also put the lie to any singular or presumed definition of what cinematic means.

Faulkner, Modernism(s), and Film

When Donald Kartiganer opened the 2010 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, he noted that this year marked the first time that the event had repeated a theme. People who had attended prior conferences or consulted the series of essay collections that followed them knew that the 1978 conference addressed the topic Faulkner, Modernism, and Film, which became the title for the 1979 volume, edited by Evans Harrington and Ann J. Abadie.

Yet a glance at the earlier volume reveals that its claims on the cinematic aspects of Faulkner’s fiction, or his writing’s various relations to film history and contemporary practice, might have been overstated. Only three of the eleven published essays in fact treat film, with the others addressing, variously, Faulkner’s relation to other modernist writers or to the avant-garde tradition (in two essays by Hugh Kenner); his affinities with modern painting or poetic drama (Ilse Dusoir Lind); the role in his imagination of myth and a universal unconscious (Malcolm Cowley); or the dismantling of an earlier social order in the South (in two pieces by Thomas Daniel Young).

The role of film in connection with Faulkner, in other words, had to wait several years before it could be seen to inform scholarship of the sort that appears here, a delay we can attribute to a number of reasons. While Faulkner studies was galvanizing in the late 1970s and was poised to see a flourishing of major scholarly treatments in the early 1980s and after, film studies as a discipline was itself relatively young. Contemporary film practice, moreover, was entering a period of retrenchment following the short flourishing of the so-called New Hollywood or American Renaissance of independent production in the late ’60s and early ’70s. Little, in other words, was in place in 1978 to animate a discussion of Faulkner and film.

The period between these publications has of course seen major, if not epochal, changes in literary studies generally as well as in the role of interdisciplinary thought. Author fields are increasingly uncommon, are indeed put upon in some quarters; pure or text-oriented literary studies have been prodded toward extratextual, historical contexts—and back, more recently, in developments such as the New Formalism.6 The relation of Faulkner to modernism, much the concern of the first Faulkner and film volume, has also seen a change, as the term modernism can no longer be seen as a singular or unifying notion thanks to developments of the New Modernist Studies.7 The humanities themselves feel besieged or in need of soul-searching if not defending.8

Most notable perhaps is the quickly vanishing presence and function within contemporary cultural life of the 1979 book’s key reference: film. While film studies as a discipline today is flourishing, and the work of directors considered obscure or inaccessible enjoys ever-increasing visibility through Internet delivery platforms, the film industry faces an absolute and irreversible change in how motion pictures are seen. As the Hollywood studios have mandated the switch to digital projection in all mainstream cinemas, by the point of this collection’s publishing it will be nearly impossible to see a movie projected in a commercial theater on celluloid.

Film’s quiet disappearance from the cultural field is a singular moment in the history of the medium—as would be a pending obsolescence for any technology or art form. In a manner of speaking, though, this singularity may be seen to have a link with the historical processes Faulkner’s fiction traces. His novels were produced in the same high period as the films of classical Hollywood, a fact that itself suggests a compelling reason for reading his work alongside this dominant form. Beyond their shared contemporaneousness, though, Faulkner’s novels— or the ways in which they ask readers to see as well as feel his world— have much in common with film, including if not especially its all too evident vanishing.9

Prior to this volume, the most pervasive efforts to understand Faulkner through and with cinema have shown his works’ influence by the medium, both its ubiquitous Hollywood model and examples of so-called art film. Faulkner of course invites this account in his remarks about the movies, which are consistently, if not always ingenuously, negative. His flip comments about Hollywood being that damned west coast place full of very rich middle class people who have not yet discovered the cerebrum, for example,10 or the metaphors of contagion and disease that run through the fiction hardly suggest his in fact serious engagement with film and the motion picture industry. Kawin was the first and most influential reader to show the effects on Faulkner of filmic montage—a perhaps overdetermined technique and formal model for a cinematic modernism, but nevertheless one that serves Kawin’s foray into Faulkner and film well.11 Kawin was also the first scholar to take seriously Faulkner’s time and work in Hollywood, including the important partnership he enjoyed with Howard Hawks—a background for understanding Faulkner’s encounters with the film industry that Robert Hamblin details amply in this volume and one on which Robert Jackson speculates fruitfully here. Such examples as Kawin traces continue to inform cinematic readings of Faulkner, including the most recent, Gleeson-White’s account of Faulkner’s use in his fiction and his screenplay work of cinematic sound. That Faulkner was aware of film, and that his novels’ own thinking betrays his profound sense of the medium and its effects, is a central part of an increased broadening of the contexts for considering him.

Cinema/Media/Modernity

This awareness of cinema is one we presume because questions of influence or response—the ways in which Faulkner’s relation to film has until now been considered—have become less urgent, or even quite sufficient. What critics reading Faulkner with an eye toward film pursue now is a more fully interdisciplinary or intertextual approach, one that makes comprehensive efforts to situate modernist authorship in the media ecology: historical and material circumstances in which Faulkner and other modernists wrote and that saw the concurrent rise of technologies of communication and representation such as the phonograph, the radio, newsprint, illustrated magazines, advertising, and film, followed in Faulkner’s lifetime by television and, beyond it, of digital media in the afterlife of modern visual culture. Film influenced Faulkner, surely; just as certain though is the impact of his modernism on a putatively mass art like motion pictures. And this was true not just in the U.S., as the essays by Ivan Delazari and Julian Murphet here attest. Colin McCabe sums up this reciprocal relationship concisely when he states, The dialectic between film and literature leaves its most elegant trace in the modernism of a film form which has assimilated the lessons of a literary movement that has in turn internalised the lessons of film.12 As an example, McCabe cites the understanding of Citizen Kane offered by André Bazin that, with the changes in film appearing after 1940 such as Kane’s (and cinematographer Gregg Toland’s) deep-focus photography, the cinema advanced the practice of ambiguity and openness that had been among the hallmarks of literary modernism (26).

For Michael North, this dynamic is taxonomic: That there should be some significant relation between aesthetic modernism and new media seems true almost by definition.13 While he admits to skepticism toward notions of wholesale changes in human experience or the sensorium occurring in particular eras, influenced by speed, industrialization, or the mechanization of the senses, North hedges, allowing that mechanized sense impressions could hardly have presented the challenge they did if they had not conflicted so obviously with what had come to be accepted as unmediated experience (vii, italics added). Like Hayden White and his extensive work with modernity and the event, Leo Charney traces the ways that film unites aspects of modernity and a new understanding of the moment, namely the fact that with the advent of increased stimuli and sensory impressions, grasping even one moment fully or in its immediacy proved increasingly difficult. Like Barker’s The Tactile Eye, and in terms that echo Rosa and Clytie’s confrontation on the stairs, Charney stresses the fact that the moment exists to the extent that the individual experiences immediate, tangible sensation, and he sees film offering one such opportunity.14 For Charney and his coeditor, Vanessa Schwartz, all of urban modernity was like a movie, as they assert that modern culture was ‘cinematic’ before the fact.15 This is a view advanced early in the century by the sociologist Georg Simmel, whose seminal essay The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903) posited that urban experience was characterized by, among other qualities, a constantly changing visual field, which many have described in terms comparable to film viewing.

Such views have been promulgated by a number of philosophers who were contemporary with cinema’s advent (and with Faulkner), among them Simmel, Walter Benjamin, and even Henri Bergson, who unfavorably compared the false spatializing of time in modernity to the workings of the film apparatus. More recent scholars have continued this line of thinking. Informed by Benjamin and other Frankfurt School thinkers, Mary Ann Doane finds in preclassical film (the sort on which Faulkner was reared) a temporality that is commensurate with both the standardized schedules of modernity’s work routine and, in its capture of ephemeral, chance happenings, an antidote to such temporal deadening.16 In their introduction to Literature and Visual Technologies, Julian Murphet and Lydia Rainford point to the cinema’s shapings of modern literature in its postcinematic evacuating of subjectivity and the critical discourse attending it. Thus, the very terms in which we have come to think of literature and the literary have been ineluctably shaped by the fact, the experience, and the language of film and film criticism.17 This influence may be overt, as in the plethora of studies that reveal their visual prepossessions: Fiction and the Camera Eye: Visual Consciousness in Film and the Modern Novel (Alan Spiegel), The Mind’s Eye: Literary Modernism and Visual Culture (Karen Jacobs), A Familiar Strangeness: American Literature and the Language of Photography, 1839–1945 (Stuart Burrows), Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film (Susan McCabe), or North’s Camera Works.18 Such shaping of literature by film, though, also suggests itself in its spectral capacity. Murphet and Rainford refer to the "always-already ‘adaptedness’ of all literature (even poetry . . .) to the medium of film [that] haunts literary criticism in any number of ways; perhaps most symptomatically when it defensively insists on literature’s textual purity(7).19 As evidence of their embrace of a literary impurity, Rainford and Murphet state, What seems undeniable is that, after cinema, literature has been opened up to a process of ceaseless ‘secondary revision’ in the light of the visual media" (7).

Sound and Vision

Recently, critics have begun to question the visual imperative that others have stressed in connecting Faulkner and literary modernism to film. Most notable is Gleeson-White’s work with Faulkner’s Universal Studios film treatment for the unfinished movie Sutter’s Gold. In this innovative piece, Gleeson-White finds strong evidence of the influence on Faulkner by Sergei Eisenstein’s own screenplay for the same narrative, in particular the ways Faulkner appears to have become newly attuned to the possibilities of film sound in the wake of his consulting Eisenstein’s script. For Gleeson-White, such effects inform the auditory properties of the novel that in 1936 followed this particular Hollywood foray. Absalom, Absalom! is both Faulkner’s most accomplished modernist meditation on the South’s historicity and, in the views of many, his most cinematic work, for reasons ranging from his embedding of the screenplay format at points within the novel, to the collaborative approach to narrative that it thematizes, to the suggestion of the film theoretical model for viewers’ ideological and spatial involvement dubbed suture.20 The uses to which Gleeson-White puts the auditory by way of the novel are, pace Eisenstein’s theoretical and practical approaches to cinema, disruptive of realism, both filmic and literary, and its visual conceits.

Her work with the Sutter’s Gold treatment is laudable, and Gleeson-White is correct in urging us to expand our sense of the various ways in which film influenced Faulkner’s writing. (Another significant area of her discussion, and one that Stefan Solomon’s essay here as well as forthcoming work by Ben Robbins pursues, is a fuller engagement with the archive of Faulkner’s unproduced film scripts and treatments.) Moreover, Gleeson-White’s work with certain scenes and characters in Absalom adds striking new ways to consider their affective power. Rosa’s narration, for example, once again becomes a marvel of estranging, otherworldly invention, in which, amazingly, Rosa becomes a kind of sound-recording machine,21 echoing the novel’s collective voice of Jefferson and emulating the era’s proliferating of disembodied voices (in the phonograph, the radio, and, as Phil Smith argues in his essay below, the megaphone). Stressing the emphasis in Absalom on sound, speech, and voices, Gleeson-White concludes, Listening closely to the sounds of Yoknapatawpha within their specific moment of technical production dislodges the visual from its dominant position in the project of rethinking literary modernism (97).22

While Gleeson-White joins a growing and important field of sound studies within Faulkner scholarship, there remain compelling reasons to maintain our own eye, as it were, on Faulkner’s visual inclinations in this period.23 A little-noted but, I think, salient fact about the most productive and important period of Faulkner’s career, 1929–1942, which is bracketed by the publishing of The Sound and the Fury and Go Down, Moses, is that it is itself framed by two of the most singular years in cinema history. The year 1927 saw the release of the first of the studios’ major sound features, The Jazz Singer, an event that only added to the popularity and cultural centrality of film in the U.S. and abroad. This pervasiveness increased steadily throughout the decade of the ’30s and early ’40s, culminating in 1946, the zenith year for per capita movie attendance in the United States. Additionally, and in a development that critics have also recently noted, the fact of the documentary movement of the same period saw the federal government’s underwriting of WPA photographers’ efforts to confront, and demonstrate visually, the plight of rural suffering in the Dust Bowl and Southern sharecropping.24 As a variation on the documentary tradition, but flourishing in the very middle of the same documentary decade, were the hugely popular picture magazines Look and Life, along with the rise in amateur photography in this period and coincident with advances in film stock and camera technology. Film, photography, and the attendant emphasis on the visual, simply put, dominated the thirties.25

There also remain important questions to ask about any approach to film that does not move significantly beyond asserting that Faulkner’s or others’ modernism was influenced, even productively, by new technologies. It is important to note the shared emphases on various representational and reproductive technologies, visual or auditory, in film and writing of the modern period. Yet I think it is still incumbent on us to show what more such a convergence might allow us to say about Faulkner, literary modernism, or the visual and technical culture to which they responded—not to mention the racial and class conflicts that are at the heart of his fiction. Film is notable for the role it played in social as well as cultural history, in other words, in particular the ways it served to advance or perpetuate the marginalizing of individuals or groups within Faulkner’s South and nationally. To suggest that Faulkner was disappointed in the industrial and commercial uses to which the vast majority of film production was put, such as its ways of exploiting racial stereotypes or encouraging a false view of history, as some have done, is not to adopt a tone of elitism. Faulkner clearly admired the film medium, as Gleeson-White and others suggest, and what it could effect aesthetically. As Julian Murphet argues in Multimedia Modernism, such a matter is not really arguable; like other writers, Faulkner was influenced by film whether he wanted to be or not.26 The fact of the cinema’s overwhelming presence in Faulkner’s era and beyond means that no writer working after 1930 can be read without our awareness of this concurrent production.

The particular question of influence or mimicry is thus not one that I think we pursue fruitfully, nor even one we are really asking. It is certainly not a query we could answer positively or through a version of empiricism—with some notable and fruitful exceptions, such as Stefan Solomon’s essay included here, which argues that a screenplay on which Faulkner worked for Warner Bros. in 1943 retains a presence in the narrative and workings of A Fable, published more than a decade later. The seeming convergences I describe above and that others in this volume and elsewhere detail, such as the haptic and visual-racial arrest of Clytie and Rosa on the stairs, or revisions of the Southern rape complex Faulkner observed in early silent film (described by Deborah Barker in Faulkner and Whiteness), or the emphasis on acts of looking within and across events that structure narrative cinematically in Light in August (that Burgess describes in Watching Jefferson Watching)— these are admittedly and only impressions; there is little way to prove their facticity. Such a nonempirical reading of effects, however, arises from impressions that one may have upon reading Faulkner originally but that aspects of film history, practice, or theory help to articulate, and they suggest more than simply an affinity between Faulkner’s writing and other discourse or aesthetic forms. Reading him thus allows us to suggest how such a pairing has value for considering Faulkner and film together—as well as independently of one another. Faulkner and film properly considered, that is, allows us to say something about both terms. At the very least we may see that the pairing provides a way to add to the increasingly involved understandings we are gaining of Faulkner and his engagement with the profound cultural, social, and aesthetic developments of his period.

William Faulkner’s Time Machine

Concurrent with both early cinema and Faulkner’s most important writing period was the philosophy of Henri Bergson, which made a huge impact when it appeared. While Faulkner’s Bergsonianism has been much discussed, his work’s affinity with Gilles Deleuze via Deleuze’s own reworking of Bergson and his thinking on cinema, as well as with Deleuze’s writings about literature, has received scant notice. Elaborating those lines of connection is not essential for an introduction to this volume. Yet the emphasis in all three writers’ thinking about motion, memory, perception, and the image finds a striking nexus in the ways that cinematographic form and the apparatus occasion a way of conceiving reality common to all three, one that helps deepen the case for considering Faulkner and film. Faulkner’s famous quip The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life seems a perhaps facile way to link him to two philosophers who also defined reality, and above all temporality, in terms of movement and the ongoing process of becoming. Yet the fuller implications for a genuine apprehension of the cinema’s profound importance to Deleuze and, by way of his Bergsonian philosophy of cinema, to Faulkner’s cinematic writing and thought are compelling. Delueze’s ideas about language and his notion of the schizo, in its emphasis on the fragmentary self along with a paratactic, stuttering syntax or style, obtain clearly in examples like Quentin’s riven utterance—and psyche— at the close of Absalom.27 Deleuze’s efforts to restore time to the cinema in The Time-Image via revisiting Bergson’s view of film also offer ways to consider Faulkner’s fluxive, lengthy sentences, often in the service of memory or states of mind, as literary versions of Bergson’s durée or verbal equivalents of how Deleuze sees film’s capacity to image time.28 Moreover, Faulkner’s efforts across his oeuvre to show a lived past connecting to and constantly informing the present, as well as his concern in particular works like Light in August to fashion a narrative apparatus that, like film, operates in the continuous present, link him to the temporal intimations Deleuze finds in film.29

As a way to sketch this broader argument we might consider, not Deleuze’s well-known model of the time-image and its appositeness to moments such as Lena Grove waiting on the hilltop for Armstid’s wagon, which seems to hang suspended in the middle distance forever and forever,30 or the congregation and Dilsey conjoining in a vision of time future and time past (‘I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin’),31 or Jason Compson witnessing his own personal and family history converge (He could see the opposed forces of his destiny and his will drawing swiftly together now [191]), nor even Deleuze’s notion of temporality and being defined by the unending process of becoming echoed in Gavin Stevens’s oft-cited The past is never dead. It’s not even past,32 but with a later concept of Deleuze’s: the body without organs. In it, Deleuze stressed the need to break out of the highly personalized and therefore limited and tendentious perceptions associated with subjectivity. That this perspectivism is an insistent theme of The Sound and the Fury, especially in its visual dimension, is clear from the novel’s opening statement, and indeed through its final line. Evident in the book’s repeated and profoundly limited first-person narrations, and implicit in the move out of and beyond them to a newly defamiliarized omniscience, is the sense Deleuze articulated of the hindrances of an habitual, personalized response to perception and the world.33 Yet the novel in which this concept and its filmic aspect become the most clear is Absalom, Absalom! Above all, the ultimately and highly impersonal narrative voice, which both asserts itself and takes on qualities of various characters (Shreve sounds to Quentin just like Father, who sounds, to us, curiously like the authorial narrator), offers the kind of disembodied presence or perceiving apparatus Deleuze championed and that he found epitomized in film. Cinema occasioned this impression, as did Faulkner’s own hints at a machinelike, automated vision in chapters like Rosa’s and in Absalom’s voicing of an automated, nonsubjective perspective.34

Such a way of conceiving Faulkner’s fiction as Deleuze suggests informs certain of these essays and posits an area for continued work. Additionally, and since the advent of Kawin’s and others’ thinking about the many ways Faulkner’s fiction worked alongside the film industry, other angles of vision have emerged. Among the more important of those is what I call the extrafilmic perspective evidenced in several of the essays collected here. That movement beyond the text(s), whether Faulkner’s own novels and screenplays or even beyond the intertextual dynamic of Faulkner’s responses to/influences on the cinema of his period, is evident in work that links Faulkner’s