Written by Jessica Mehr
Published by Modern Fiction Studies, 2014
I was asked to review this text for MFS by the Editor, Professor John Duvall,
due to my scholarly interest in both Faulkner and Disability Studies.
Taylor Haygood. Faulkner, Writer of Dis-Ability. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State U P, 2014. xv + 214 pp.
As Taylor Haygood notes in his compelling new book, one of the primary goals of Disability Studies is to expose “ability as a construct against which disabled bodies and minds are juxtaposed and judged” (ix). In literary criticism, this often means revealing the ways that disabled bodies and minds are leveraged for symbolic and stylistic purposes, or introducing alternative ways of perceiving abnormality. Faulkner, Writer of Dis-ability deftly weaves biographical detail, close textual analysis, and theory from field pioneers such as Rosemary Garland-Thomson, Lennard Davis, Tobin Siebers, David Mitchell, Sharon Snyder, David Wills, and Leslie Fielder to offer a provocative depiction of William Faulkner as an “increasingly disabled” writer whose personal life, career, characters, and even fictional structures were “shaped in contexts and dynamics of disability” (184, 35).
Beginning with the great-grandfather after whom William Faulkner was named, the book’s first two chapters trace the thread of disability throughout Faulkner’s life, boldly characterizing the Nobel Laureate as “a man at times overwhelmingly abled and at others heartbreakingly disabled” (35). By focusing on the decade Faulkner spent writing A Fable, the book offers a vivid biographical account of Faulkner’s alcoholism, which included collapses, unconsciousness, a stay in the Fieldstone Sanitarium, seizures, and cognitive deterioration (16-19). Faulkner, Writer of Dis-ability convincingly establishes this period as potentially marking Faulkner’s “transition into a physically and even cognitively disabled writer of disability” (16). Haygood argues that in his self-mythologizing Faulkner often walked “a line between normalcy and stigma,” and that he employs this tension in his early fiction by creating wounded characters in works such as “Mirrors of Chartres Street,” “The Leg,” Soldier’s Pay and Flags in the Dust (55). These early textual explorations of bodily inferiority/superiority are connected to Faulkner’s own sense of self and the legacy of his great-grandfather, and later reach their culmination in The Mansion’s Linda Snopes, the deaf, war-wounded woman with quacking speech who shows “the way that a disability can be turned into an empowering thing” (86). Haygood’s biographical criticism is insightful and restrained; he does not make sweeping claims about life influencing art, and when an interpretation is a stretch, he acknowledges as much, seeing these connections not as easy correlations but as opportunities to tease out new implications for Faulkner’s disabled characters.
The remaining chapters use Disability Studies theory as a jumping off point for fresh considerations of Faulkner’s fiction. While many Disability Studies scholars use textual analysis to support their theoretical interventions, there are currently a dearth of book-length studies that use Disability Studies theory to reassess the work of a single author through close biographical and textual examination. As Disability Studies strives to shed its label as an “emerging” field, Faulkner, Writer of Dis-ability demonstrates that a single-author study is not only sustainable; it raises enough questions to open up entire new veins of research. In some striking passages of close analysis, Haygood thrusts seemingly minor characters center stage. The visually impaired Pap moves from marginal to essential in the voyeuristic world of Sanctuary; his eyes, “yellowish clay marbles” that lack glass prosthetics, render him “more frightening and even powerful,” as he makes “the eye itself visible,” forging a metaphorical connection to Temple’s trauma and Popeye’s impotence (135). In A Fable, a German general with a missing eye and a disabled racehorse function not only as symbolic textual vehicles, but also signal a “submerged fear intimately connected with Faulkner himself” as he was increasingly forced to engage with the public (15).
Faulkner, Writer of Dis-ability also proves the capacity of Disability Studies to breathe new life into characters who have been so thoroughly criticized that they could sustain their own libraries. In a particularly original chapter titled, “Smart Idiots in Faulkner,” Haygood daringly asks us to reassess our assumptions regarding the relationship between skilled narration and cognitive disability in Faulkner’s writing. Going against long-held interpretations of The Sound and the Fury, this chapter positions Benjy’s section as a complex associative narrative “masquerading as a mess” (93), one that reveals a more intelligent, “prescient, conscious, and skillful” narrator than typically believed (91). Likewise, Ike Snopes in The Hamlet is more than a functional plot device, possessing “agency” and possibly even “intelligence” in evading detection and thieving with great accomplishment to protect his much-loved cow (113). The linguistically-gifted Darl Bundren in As I Lay Dying is depicted as almost subversive; he displays “certain cognitive abnormalities” that allow “him to see things that other characters don’t,” which leaves “the reader questioning where the line between normal and abnormal is drawn” (120).
While scholars will find the biographical and textual explorations in Faulkner, Writer of Dis-ability absorbing and imaginative, they will likely have mixed feelings about the book’s experimental aesthetics. In an effort to “foreground the fact of normality as incarnated in literary critical conventions,” Haygood attempts to “forge a style that engages as it both deforms and disables” (x). The first chapter, for example, is written in a screenplay-esque style to mirror its biographical backdrop: Faulkner receiving an advance to write a screenplay in 1943. Formal decisions include screenplay transitions (CUT TO:), scene-setting details (IMAGE OF FAULKNER SILVER-HAIRED IN SUIT…), famous Faulkner quotes, and a typewriter-inspired font. His chapter on cognitive disability is framed as an email, including a header (TO, FROM, etc.), email addresses for major characters (Benjy33@jefferson.com) and occasionally even emoticons such as a :(, :), and LOL. While these aesthetic choices are a fresh experience for the reader, some will likely question if they are as impactful as Haygood claims in his preface. For some, this slight experimentation may effectively challenge the power structures undergirding literary criticism; for other readers, it may not. This proves to be largely a moot point, since the aesthetics neither distract nor detract from the text itself, and Haygood’s arguments never hinge on “sophomoric tricks” (xiv).
Faulkner, Writer of Dis-ability highlights the pervasiveness of abnormality in Faulkner’s fiction so effectively that one may start to wonder if all of his characters are disabled in some way. This is not a methodological fault, but precisely the question that Haygood wants us to ask. A central point in Disability Studies is that “the concept of normality is not possible for any body to conform to”—that disability can be considered a universal condition, one of degree, not kind (186). Haygood emphasizes the universality of disability in his concluding chapter on Pylon, which he considers Faulkner’s “grandest vision” for “positive abnormality in the form of freakishness-alienness” (173). Having created an unconventional work environment and an unconventional family that relies on interdependence, the fliers present a “model of disrupting and escaping normate space that can be a good one” (173). Whether or not one agrees with Haygood’s conclusion that Faulkner was able to turn “deformity and disablement into positive agents of change” (183), his study certainly provides enough substance for rigorous debate. In less than 200 pages, Faulkner, Writer of Dis-ability builds the scaffolding for future scholars to probe a Faulknerian world in which disability is not a symbolic gesture or stylistic technique, but a universal condition that provides endless opportunities for interrogation.