Debating Faulkner

As an educator, I find myself in sharp (though certainly respectful) disagreement with Jesse Kornbluth, who argued in an earlier post that Oprah Winfrey erred in selecting three exceedingly difficult novels by William Faulkner – As I Lay Dying; The Sound and the Fury; and Light in August – for her summer reading list.

By Kornbluth’s estimation, Winfrey’s summer picks are simply a notch above the general reading public’s attention span and skill level. Specifically, As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury employ multiple-perspective and stream-of-consciousness recitation, and Light in August, while written in a more conventional, narrative style, is a whopping 528 pages.

Kornbluth concludes that Winfrey should have opted for The Town, The Mansion and The Hamlet, three shorter novels that “read like pulp fiction.”

First off, I hope we can all agree that it’s a great credit to Oprah Winfrey that we’re debating which Faulkner novels she should include in her summer reading list.

More to the point, I think Kornbluth is underselling the American reading public. Winfrey’s picks are challenging, to be sure, but why dumb down adult reading standards? Literature should stretch our minds and cause us to think. It should entertain us, too. But these two goals need not be at cross purposes.

Surely a nation that delights in Quentin Tarantino’s split narratives (e.g., Kill Bill, Jackie Brown) can absorb Faulkner’s more advanced use of the same literary convention.

A country that continues to grapple with the meaning of race can surely relate to Joe Christmas’s discovery that blackness and whiteness are, after all, social constructions (constructions freighted with very real meaning, but nevertheless variable between different times and places).

Some of William Faulkner’s best works are simply hard-going (and I think Kornbluth would agree; he’s not arguing that Oprah Winfrey chose bad books – only that she chose difficult ones).

If we dismiss Faulkner’s most innovative novels – those which are replete with modernist literary devices – as too difficult, we’re pretty much conceding that Americans are too distracted or too stupid to appreciate Virginia Woolf, John Dos Passos, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer and Ralph Ellison. I’m not prepared to draw that conclusion.