Morrison - Faulkner

"William Faulkner reprised: isolation in Toni Morrison's 'Song of Solomon'"
Lorie Watkins Fulton
daqui, onde se pode ler todo o artigo. e também neste livro.


A CRITICAL DISCUSSION OF ALMOST ANY AUTHOR IN CONJUNCTION WITH modernist giant William Faulkner risks treating Faulkner's work as a master text. This potential for privilege perhaps accounts for Toni Morrison's sensitivity to such comparisons early in her writing career. One can practically hear the irritation in her voice when she stated in a 1983 interview with Nellie McKay, "I am not like James Joyce; I am not like Thomas Hardy; I am not like Faulkner. I am not like in that sense" (152). Morrison has elsewhere said, "I'm not sure that he [Faulkner] had any effect on my work" and "I don't really find strong connections between my work and Faulkner's" ("Faulkner and Women" 296-97). However, Morrison has also expressed praise and admiration for Faulkner's work, particularly for his unique style. (1) She once described teaching a class in which she traced for her students the way that Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! forces readers "to hunt for a drop of black blood [by trying to ascertain Charles Bon's lineage] that means everything and nothing." Morrison elaborated, "No one has done anything quite like that ever. So, when I critique, what I am saying is, I don't care if Faulkner is a racist or not; I don't personally care, but I am fascinated by what it means to write like this" ("Art of Fiction" 101). She developed that fascination early on; as she told the audience at the 1985 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, "in 1956 I spent a great deal of time thinking about Mr. Faulkner because he was the subject of a thesis that I wrote at Cornell." Morrison added, "there was for me not only an academic interest in Faulkner, but in a very, very personal way, in a very personal way as a reader, William Faulkner had an enormous effect on me, an enormous effect" ("Faulkner and Women" 295-96).

Critics have already identified several facets of Morrison's Faulknerian influence. Typical comparisons point out structural similarities such as syntax and cadence, and thematic similarities centering in historical concerns and social codes. Two pairings repeatedly emerge as scholars generally read Beloved with Absalom, Absalom! and Song of Solomon with Go Down, Moses. (2) However, Morrison's thesis, "Virginia Woolf's and William Faulkner's Treatment of the Alienated," also provides the basis for drawing thematic comparisons between Quentin Compson's story in the two Faulkner novels that it considers, Absalom, Absalom / and The Sound and the Fury, and Morrison's own bildungsroman, Song of Solomon. (3) Only Alessandra Vendrame has made a concerted effort to connect Morrison's interpretation of Faulkner in the thesis to her own body of work and I would argue that doing so affords valuable insight into her fiction, and into Faulkner's as well. (4) Morrison begins her thesis by defining "alienation," which she seems to use interchangeably with "isolation," as the predominant literary theme of the twentieth century ("Treatment" 1). After establishing this working definition, she analyzes Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and the Faulkner novels in light of their differing approaches to isolation. Essentially, Morrison determines that Woolf's characters can only become self-aware and honest with themselves in isolation, and that Faulkner's characters can never attain this sort of self-knowledge when isolated (2-3). That her thesis privileges Faulkner's insistence on the need for communal connection becomes apparent when she reads Faulkner's stance as the "antithesis" to Woolf's position, rather than vice-versa (4). Her chapter on Faulkner also seems more fully developed than the one on Woolf, and, after all, Morrison's later writings reveal where her sympathies lie. In her thesis introduction she writes, "Alienation is not Faulkner's answer" to the problems of modernity (3). Nor is it Morrison's.

- - -