2003 Faulknner and Yoknapatawpha Conference Report

The basic principle of ecology, one commentator has written, is “everything connected to everything else.” We might add to that description: “and everything is of commensurate value.” The strong implication is that, to speak properly of ecology, we must relax the centrality of ourselves and recognize that we are “connected to everything else.” This is the major difference between an environmental approach and an ecological approach. The environmental is about surroundings, the surroundings of us at the center; the importance of those surroundings is the importance that we, at the center, confer on them. The ecological is a more even-handed relationship: it is about connection, the connection of equals.

Given that broad understanding of ecology, it was no surprise that “Faulkner and the Ecology of the South,” the 30th annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, inspired in 15 scholars and panelists an unusually wide range of approaches. We discovered that “relationship” in Faulkner’s fiction–however confined to his “postage stamp of native soil”–is a rich and multilayered affair: a network of races, cultural traditions, classes, and communities, each of them standing to a green and brown landscape that is both the vehicle of and the limit to their expression.

The breadth of ecology became immediately evident in the first two presentations at the conference. Scott Slovic, of the University of Nevada, Reno, emphasized the human body and the “tug of the organic world,” the need to achieve a sensibility “attuned to the self’s embeddedness within the physical world,” while Philip Weinstein, of Swarthmore College, focused on the concept of “habitus” developed by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the range of assumptions and behaviors peculiar to individual cultural groups, and how differing habituses engage each other until the land itself, “wounded beyond repair,” “turns” on all cultural codes.

François Pitavy, emeritus at the University of Burgundy in Dijon, France, situated Faulkner’s treatment of the relationship between the human and the wilderness within the frame of the “imperial stance,” establishing dominion over nature, and the Arcadian stance, stressing an idea of reciprocity. Michael Wainwright, of Royal Holloway (University of London), incorporated the Darwinian categories of foreigner, outlander, and extrinsic stranger as a way of analyzing the place of the Snopes family and its proliferation in Yoknapatawpha, while Cecelia Tichi, of Vanderbilt University, found in the “Old Man” section of Faulkner’s The Wild Palms, not only a powerful linking of the female and the river, but a scathing critique of the American criminal justice system.

In addition to the formal presentations, Tom Franklin, of Oxford, read from his recent novel Hell at the Breech; Seth Berner, a book dealer from Portland, Maine, conducted a session on “collecting Faulkner”; Michael Egan read the winning entry in the Faux Faulkner competition, “The Sound and the Furry”; and Colby Kullman moderated “Faulkner on the Fringe” at Southside Gallery. A highlight of the conference continued to be the “Teaching Faulkner” sessions conducted by James B. Carothers, Robert W. Hamblin, Charles A. Peek, and this summer, subbing for Arlie Herron, Theresa Towner.

Other events included presentations by members of Faulkner’s family and friends; dramatic readings from Faulkner’s fiction, coordinated by George Kehoe; two art exhibitions, one by illustrator Tom Allen, and another by photographer Todd Bertolaet; guided tours of North Mississippi; an opening buffet supper at historic Isom Place and a closing party at the home of Dr. and Mrs. Beckett Howorth, Jr.

Donald M. Kartiganer

photos by Beverly Carothers