Faulkner, Mississippi [Hardcover]

Edouard Glissant (Author), Barbara Lewis (Translator), Thomas C. Spear (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1999

A great caribbean writer's confrontation with the legacy of William Faulkner.

In 1989, while teaching literature in Louisiana, the Caribbean writer Edouard Glissant visited Rowan Oak, William Faulkner's home in Oxford, Mississippi. His visit spurred him to an original and powerful reappraisal of Faulkner's work.

Like Faulkner's literary descendants in the United States, Glissant is fascinated by the stories of Yoknapatawpha County and disturbed by the author's equivocations about the racism there. Glissant, however, stands in a distinctive relation to Faulkner and his county: as a black Martinican, he is descended from slaves; as a native French speaker, he first encountered the great novelist's work in translation.

Faulkner, Mississippi is a distinctive look at an American icon by a writer deeply involved in the issues of Faulkner's work. Glissant sees the racial complexities of Faulkner as the key to his influence in the next century, and presents Faulkner as the progenitor of Flannery O'Connor, Gabriel Garca Mrquez, Alejo Carpentier, and Toni Morrison, who all write fiction in which the characters are implicated in a single multiracial calamity. He exhorts the reader to "look him straight in the eyes, the son of the slave and the son of the slave owner"-and Glissant's own clear-eyed gaze makes this book a revelation about the work of one of our greatest but still least-understood writers.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Setting out to perform a "fresh reading" of Faulkner, Glissant, a Martinican novelist and poet (Black Salt), admirably avoids the verbal thickets of academic prose. His nonlinear, impressionistic critique, nevertheless, seems ready-made for the academy. Glissant's vantage as a Caribbean francophone lends him a perspective on Faulkner, race and region that is especially enlightening. The book opens with Glissant's account of traveling in Louisiana and Mississippi, gracefully sketching the landscape while evoking how alien he feels in the American South. After a brief overview of Faulkner's life and work (including all the novels, but concentrating on the Yoknapatawpha saga), the author plunges into the question of Faulkner and race, and here the book grows wildly diffuse. He exposes an ambivalence in Faulkner's workAa disturbing tendency to portray black people as irrational and bestial coupled with a conviction that the South's poverty and despair spring from its mistreatment of African-Americans. Also intriguing are the links he finds between Faulkner and French colonial writers such as Camus and Saint-John Perse. Glissant's careful detective work never leads to a significant larger point, however. As his focus widens, his reflections on contemporary life and theoretical mattersAtime and space, written vs. spoken language, the epic and the nature of communityAform a sometimes bewildering collage. This may be the point, however. "The unbound openness of the work is such that anyone can find a suitable path among those Faulkner proposes without betraying or losing oneself," he writes of Faulkner's oeuvre. The same may be said of Glissant's book, though that doesn't make it any easier to follow.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

In this brief, densely written, but unfortunately somewhat turgid volume, Glissant surveys the entirety of Faulkner's fiction to explore not only the relatively familiar themes of violence, the fall of the Old South (Compsons) and rise of the New (Snopeses), territorial conquest and ownership, community, and ancestry but also the manifestations of the Nobel prize winner's seldom-noted equivocations over racism in the South. Glissant does not organize his discussion around the various works but rather around the main themes he finds in Faulkner's fiction. A well-known black writer from Martinique for whom English is a second language, he demonstrates both an astonishing familiarity with the most minute particulars of the whole range of Faulkner's work on the American South and a remarkable ear for the different styles Faulkner usedAdifferences that may be more noticeable to a nonnative speaker. Touted by its publisher as a "highly original new book," Faulkner, Mississippi is just that. Highly recommended for academic libraries with extensive Faulkner collections.ACharles Crawford Nash, Cottey Coll., Nevada, MO
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 273 pages
• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (T); 1st Farrar, Straus and Giroux ed edition (April 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374153922
• ISBN-13: 978-0374153922
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,275,409 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)