Author Archives: Jeff Allred

final thoughts and thanks

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I hope everyone has a healthy, happy summer. It’s been great working with you: I really enjoyed our weekly chats and learned a lot from them.

As promised, I wanted to share some thoughts on the end of GDM, since we didn’t get to discuss the last 1/3 of the text, more or less. It’s 30 mins or so and of course no obligation to watch:

GDMlecture

30 minute lecture on the last 1/3, roughly of Faulkner"s GO DOWN, MOSES.

I also wanted to address an interesting question that came up over drinks after our last meeting. For those who are not utterly sick of Yoknapatawpha Co., where to go from here? Here are some thoughts:

  1. First and foremost, for those who have not read As I Lay Dying, that’s the text from the generally-acknowledged skinny canon of masterpieces that we didn’t cover. The narrative covers the poor-white subsistence farming Bundren family, it is organized around 59 chapters narrated by 15 different characters in the first person, and the reading experience is sort of like tuning an old AM radio across a bandwidth containing the inner though processes of folks who live lives far removed from the homogenizing forces of modernity. It’s a trip. In many ways the most Joycean of Faulkner’s works, the plot carries us on a harrowing mock-Ulysses-esque journey from the hill country to Jefferson, ostensibly to honor the dead matriarch’s wish to be buried there, with family. But, in a manner by turns repellent and hilarious, we gradually realize that each of the Bundrens has secret, selfish motives to undergo the journey…
  2. After having explored the whiter and poorer hill country topos of the Bundren family, you might take on the “Snopes Trilogy” (The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion), the postwar chronicle of the Snopes family, who allegorically point to the eclipse of plantocratic hegemony in the county and the rise of the kind of modern, capitalist ruthlessness that Faulkner began to explore with Jason but which reaches its final form in the figure of Flem Snopes. These novels are much less experimental in form than the material we read, and they occasionally devolve into unintentional self-parody, like a lot of Faulkner’s later work, but a) we see the remarkable gift for emplotment and deferral that one also finds in the best films of the era; and b) we find harbingers of our own moment, rife as it is with confidence schemes and the poisoning of all manner of public wells.
  3. Alternatively, you might survey the Collected Fiction volume to read some short fiction that adds more detail to the prehistory of Ikkemotubbe and the Native presence in the county: “Red Leaves” is a good place to start. While you’re at it, “Barn Burning” is a good port of entry to the Snopes saga.
  4. Other pathways include: a) a look at Faulkner’s fascination with modernity via Pylon, which concerns early aviation, among other topics, and Sanctuary, which plays with the genre of noir fiction (while exceeding it in typical Faulkner fashion); b) a deeper dive into the Sartoris saga via Sartoris (or the “director’s cut” of sorts, Flags in the Dust, a longer volume that was edited into Sartoris at the publisher’s demand); c) a return to the character of Lucas Beauchamp in Intruder in the Dust, a late novel within Faulkner’s career.

Ok: the class isn’t over. It isn’t even class. Have a great summer!

McCaslin genealogy

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Here’s a schematic of the genealogy that flows from Quintus Lucius Carrothers McCaslin, the site of the violent and destructive “boundless conceiving” whose aftermath consumes Go Down, Moses.

No disrespect to Leo’s awesome map! This one is useful for its representation of race, but I do have some questions about it reifies, in effect the text’s own account of the pure blackness of any characters who are not discovered to be mixed. One might assume that many of the characters would have been mixed to some degree, given what we know about the sexual economy of this society, and the diagram papers over that sociological fact. It comes from Edmond Volpe’s A Reader’s Guide to Faulkner :

volpe-McCaslintree

Lost Cause in the news

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Check out Brent Staples’s piece on the long aftermath of Lost Cause ideology, the idea that all Americans can get behind the noble intent and courage of Southerners who waged civil war even if the slavery system they defended was an abomination.

As a native of Jackson, MS and a child of very right-wing parents and extended family, I’m all-too-familiar with the revisionist ideas that were still dominant among Southern whites in my childhood in the 70s and 80s and have emerged with horrific force in the past ten years or so, predominantly under the sign of Trumpism but in no way limited to Trump’s personal appeal or whatever passes for his policy agenda. Just as I grew up with the idea that the Civil War was the “War Between the States” or even “The War of Northern Aggression” (the latter usually delivered with tongue in cheek a bit, but hardly disavowed); that the War was “not over slavery” but was about tariff policy (!) the abstractions of federalism (!!) or even more outlandish pseudo-causes; the attempts to enforce, at the state level, watered-down courses on “Mississippi history” that white-washed the bloody history of the state, so much so that the pretty corny and white-centered film Mississippi Burning shocked so many of us into reading up on SNCC, the Summer of 2963, and the killings of Schwerner, Cheney, and Goodman. And to ask our parents … uhh … what they were up to at that particular moment. Their answers were instructive. They were comfortably enmeshed in a Jim Crow fantasy world enabled by the fracturing, isolating force of residential segregation, segregated school (de jure) and workplaces (de facto), and assured the segregation represented the Best of All Possible Worlds.

I’ll pause the confessional mode now: confessions have a way of generating value that slips into the pocket of the teller, and I don’t mean to let myself, my old friends and family, or anyone else off the hook. More important is to read Staples, which narrates the peak of Lost Cause ideology in the 1910s (symptomatically the year of the “frame story” of Absalom and of Quentin’s suicide) and a sense of the stakes as we undergo furious battles on the local/state/federal levels, especially in libraries and classrooms, as we wage war over what we might have thought were settled liberal-democratic principles of teaching the work of the best, most informed and imaginative historians (and critics and sociologists and philosophers…) and allowing the widest possible access to the widest possible range of materials.

While I’m shilling for great work of others, Jamelle Bouie of the NYT is a freedom-fighter who has somehow figured out how to let the rather stodgy and latte-liberal NYT let him drop so much knowledge on the legal and civil rights history of the US, grounded in Du Bois’s later work, especially Black Reconstruction in the US, which is itself a must-read to hear the echoes of the “nadir” phase of the history of civil rights for African Americans in our own moment.

I’ll also mention the brand-new book of my dear friend Jeff Sharlet, a journalist and professor at Dartmouth whose The Undertow: Scenes from a Civil War weaves together a wide range of pieces that tell the “inner story” of our moment, the kind of stuff that the who/what/where/when mode of normal journalism often leaves out. He’s a white dude like myself (don’t know whether you’ve noticed), but he leverages that “unmarked” aspect to attend Trump marches, talk to militia members, slip into megachurches, and, in a spy/counterspy mode pioneered by the great James Agee and Walker Evans, reads the symptoms of what he experiences richly and broadly, in analyses firmly grounded in a leftist reading of culture, history, and economics but open to the affective tug of aspects of right-wing culture (guns, the Prosperity Gospel, border politics, Trump’s “charisma,” etc.) in ways that allow us to understand it more deeply and hence, perhaps, how to combat its violence and forge differently affect-rich cultural forms that speak to parts of the body beneath the frontal cortex. Here’s an interview as well, from the Guardian.

Finally, if you don’t know already, as CUNY folk you can get free digital access to the NYT (including via iOS or Android app) via the Library. So do it and avoid having your news quite as algorithmically tailored as it is on most social media platforms.

research help

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By popular request, I declined to schedule a formal research session with the Library staff. Reading your proposals, I do think many of you have lots of research chops, which is great. But some seem a bit tentative about where to look for appropriate scholarly sources and expressed anxieties (understandable ones!) about the challenge of quickly assimiliating dense scholarly books, the messiness of Google Scholar, and the “too-muchness” of modern search-based research methods.

I thus wanted to share a very helpful doc that Library faculty member Jennifer Newman put together for my undergrads. You can ignore the one or two references to ENGL 252 but should attend to the list of resources. Perhaps the most useful, because the most targeted to literature research, is Gale, which many students may not know about.

AA!, Walter Benjamin, and the Angel of History

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I kept thinking about this famous bit from Weimar-era cultural critic Walter Benjamin while reading Faulkner reading Quentin reading Jason reading Rosa reading Sutpen this time around:

There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair [verweilen: a reference to Goethe’s Faust], to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.

The quote comes from Benjamin’s Theses on History, available here via the invaluable Marxists Archive, and it reflects on the dilemma that faces anyone who would, like Quentin and Shreve in the frame or Faulkner (and us readers) outside of it. The past isn’t over. It isn’t even past. But it comes to us mortals in the reified form of a “chain of events,” with a bogus causality and biased POV, whereas the truer state of things (as seen by the Angel here) is more like a hurricane whirling about pieces of “rubble” that can only be ordered in a contingent and evanescent way. Faulkner’s brief in this novel is to reveal the contingencies in this process and, along the way, have us think more capaciously about historiography and fiction as mutually constituting literary modes.

Here’s the picture that Benjamin references, by Paul Klee:

.Coll IMJ,. photo (c) IMJ

Unvanquished article

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I can’t remember who asked about the piece I mentioned linking Faulkner’s work with Du Bois’s *Black Reconstruction*, but I’ve put it in the Library: >OPTIONAL/INTERESTING > UNVANQUISHED. The author is Graham.

Great work tonight, all!

Plan for Tuesday

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I look forward to seeing/meeting you all soon. In the meantime, remember to:

1. Enroll in the Commons and this site + our “group” via the link you were sent by the Commons team. Email me if you can’t find it or didn’t get it: it would have come to your CUNY email.

2. Introduce yourself via this whimsical prompt on Padlet. It will help us to get to know each other; we’ll also do some kind of ice-breaking activity on Tuesday.

3. You may order books from wherever, but note that the links are on the syllabus document on this site. Be sure to use the ISBNs provided if you shop around (you’ll want the cheap Vintage editions) and note that we’re reading THE UNVANQUISHED first.

welcome

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I look forward to meeting/seeing you all in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, feel free to acquaint yourself with the syllabus and the schedule of readings. Note that I’ve changed the original book order, so make sure you get the right books and the right editions: ordering info and ISBNs are on the syllabus.

We’ll not do anything very substantive for our first meeting beyond learning a bit about the course as a whole. By way of getting to know each other, at least in the aggregate, here are the results of the little survey I shared via email earlier this month:

survey