This Life Our Life: Faulkner Conferencing in a Time of Pandemic

2020 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference Virtual Reading

(The link above is to a reading from Gay Faulkner for the virtual F&Y Conference in 2020, the year of our pandemic)

I was supposed to spend this last week in Oxford, Mississippi. Mind you, nearly everyone who has lived in Oxford—and a lot of folks who have just been there—probably have random moments wherein they pause, get that faraway look in their eyes, and tell themselves, "I was supposed to be in Oxford today." It is a lamentation, an absence—instead, we get off at Cemeteries and find our way to Elysian Fields. In a world of strangers, Oxford will always be an old friend we can trust (even when we need to fight about its legacies and symbols).

In this instance, however, I had cause to let my mind wander. I was scheduled to present at this year's Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference. The theme was scheduled to be Faulkner and Modernity, or some variant thereof. I submitted a paper for inclusion on a panel. The day I got my acceptance email was also my beginning of our current pandemic (early March), and the director of the conference—a friend and former mentor—warned me not to make hotel reservations just yet. His warning was my first encounter with the nature of what was, at the time, still mostly an inconceivable upheaval in one's daily life. Less than two weeks later, my own university had shut down. My book tour, planned for the second half of March and into early April was "postponed" (though some events probably won’t ever be rescheduled, most venues seem eager to think positively about future opportunities).

My events for that book tour ranged from sitting at a table at Starkville Pride to being a panelist in Oxford for the first annual Glitterary Festival. I also had scheduled readings in Water Valley, Jackson, and Pass Christian, as well as a lecture scheduled for the Mississippi Museums as part of their History Is Lunch series. Only one of these events finally arrived, in early July, when I traveled to Jackson to live-record the History Is Lunch event. I was able to reschedule that event in the seeming doldrum of June, when the number of new cases was obscured by the state of conservative political rhetoric and hopes for a summer reprieve. Even as I arrived in Mississippi, however, the numbers were climbing again. Now, in late July, we are back in the throes of the pandemic. The other events are beyond the horizon we are all looking towards right now, somewhere over the rainbow, with shooting stars and melting lemon drops. One day, I tell myself, I’ll dream them one day.

Notably, in the midst of these altered plans, I did get to present at a conference, the 3^rd Annual Faulkner Colloquium in the UK in late May. That opportunity opened up as a result of the pandemic—the colloquium was forced online. I zoomed in from Wisconsin. I spoke to people scattered across the UK, Europe, and throughout the United States. I had not originally been able to attend, but our new circumstances allowed my participation. This was a nice silver lining in otherwise gray skies, sans those lemon drops.

But the big Faulkner conference—the yearly one in Oxford—was postponed early on; all the evidence clearly supports that this postponement was the right decision. I believe this year's conference theme (and schedule) have been moved to 2022, so I'll still get to present my paper. . . one day!

For those unfamiliar with it, the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference is the OG of single-author focused conferences. It is a staple of the American conference cycle and a staple of mid-Summer Mississippi. As some small evidence of how enormously influential this conference has been, back in the 1980s, Toni Morrison spoke at the conference and read draft from a novel she was working on. That novel, Beloved, would be published a year or so later. Its connections to Faulkner's work run deep.

I was scheduled this year to read a 20-minute paper on the place of Jackson, Tennessee in Faulkner's fictional universe. I consider this J-town, not the Mississippi one, my hometown, even though I was born in Memphis and lived in Milan in the wee stages of my life. I was still a toddler when we moved to Jackson, the northeast side of which and up to Medina, Milan and Gibson forms the specific postage stamp of my native soil. It also shows up in relation to Faulkner's life and so-called apocryphal postage stamp. I've been tinkering with the idea of this paper for a while now, but since I finished my book, I finally have time to devote to it as a "new" project, part of the "next book" all scholars are trained to speak about at job interviews and in professional settings—never what you are doing or just did; always what you'll do next, down the road, to prove you are planning ahead, engaged, never deterred by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Never side-tracked by a global pandemic.

Also, attending the OG Faulkner Conference this summer would have had that one, additional and significant perk of being a fantastic space to talk about, celebrate, and maybe even be feted for the book I just finished, Gay Faulkner, a year's-long project of revision that, as the author of said book, I have high hopes for. Maybe it will even matter a bit.

My self-indulgent fantasies, however, have always been tempered by a reality I learned from attending past Faulkner Conferences. This reality has long worried me, and having the book in hand for this year's conference did not assuage my anxieties. Quite the opposite.  I have seen too often how a gathering of Faulkner scholars can go terribly wrong, especially when the topics turn to queer identities, queer representation, and queer implications latent in Faulkner's work.

I arrived in Oxford all the way back in 2006. I graduated from UT-Martin in December 2005, worked on campus in the Writing Center for a semester, and moved to Oxford in July. My first full day in my apartment on my own—post move-in—I walked the mile up Lamar Avenue to Square Books and bought The Yoknapatawpha Country by Cleanth Brooks. At the time, basic New Criticism was all I knew, and Brooks seemed like the right place to start reading beyond just the novels, the texts themselves. I read a chapter a day for the next couple of weeks. My heavily annotated copy is still on my shelf here in these wilds of Wisconsin. It is one of the more bluntly racist and unabashedly misogynist books I own.

That July, the conference theme was Global Faulkner, but as I wasn't a student yet and was new to town, I didn't attend. I took a Faulkner seminar my first semester on campus. I did not get along with the professor, whose approach to Faulkner was of the Brooks school. There was a day in class when said professor proposed to us, in all seriousness, that it is likely Faulkner was a virgin when he married Estelle Oldham (formerly Estelle Franklin from her first marriage). I have never been able to verify the accuracy of this assessment, but the evidence on offer was primarily Faulkner's virgin/whore dichotomies for women in fiction from near his marriage. This period of his writing, when viewed for evidence of heterosexuality, includes an image of young boys staring at their sister's ass while she climbs a tree to spy on a funeral; Temple Drake being assaulted by a corn cob; and an eccentric woman murdering her beau so she can sleep with his rotting corpse for thirty years in her somewhat grotesque bridal chamber. But apparently, there was only limited room for queer themes in Faulkner's work, and he was assuredly a virgin until his one right woman came along.

The conference in 2007, however, is where I encountered the most overt anti-gay animus in Faulkner Studies. The theme that year was Faulkner's Sexualities. Yes, plural: Sexualities. At least through the grapevine of local chatter, the reason for phrasing the theme this way had several origins. First, most previous versions of the conference had themes expressed in the "Faulkner and _____" structure. Thus, Faulkner and Sexuality felt a little dull (and might have confused folks who remembered Faulkner and Women, the theme-party at which Morrison read from draft of Beloved, and Faulkner and Gender, at which one scholar had read a paper arguing in favor of a gay panic defense in Faulkner's anxious presentation of male same-sex desire. Admittedly, Faulkner and Gender occurred a few years prior to the murder of Matthew Shepard, so I suppose the oversight in tact is understandable alongside the historical context of DOMA and DADT, also contemporary to the theme). Of course, Faulkner and Sexuality would only seem like a repeat of "Women" and "Gender" if one collapses meanings to equate these all under some broad portmanteau feminism (and I do not mean that feminists make this mistake, only non-feminists and scholars who see feminism as a single school of thought about "those people of the radical burning bras").

Second, Faulkner's Sexuality—remove the "and," add a possessive—just hit entirely too close to home. Such a theme would all but demand interrogations of his sexuality, and apparently it was difficult to imagine discussions that would find it lacking in whatever version of virility and heterosexuality to which some ascribe.

Third, Queer Faulkner was a non-starter. Nope. Nope. And nope.

The settled-upon solution was "Faulkner's Sexualities," no doubt a nod to post-modern performative theories but also a dilution—a way to say, "If we don't like your answer, we'll just pretend like it was a pick-your-own-adventure attempt to understand Faulkner's works, from the position of reader-response theory."

(Okay, before anyone reading this blows a gasket about the story I'm telling, full disclosure: I was not privy to any of the listserv conversations about the theme. I had to piecemeal the story together from overheard conversations and good listening skills. It is a reconstructed history, and you are welcome to dismiss it as my own reader-response version. It is, much like all scholarly readings, an inference and deduction backed up by things we don’t put in archives if we can help it).

Any good chemist will tell you: Dilution is a powerful agent to stifle change. Pure hydrochloric acid will burn a hole in damn-near anything. Dilute it enough and it might not even sting (avoid your eyes, though; never play games with vision). Most presentations at the 2007 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha conference steered clear of queer readings of Faulkner's life or works. A few dabbled in what the authors probably thought was "Queer Theory,” which is basically the premise that "everything is queer so nothing is." To this day, I don't consider myself a Queer Theorist because of this particular conference experience. In my work, I try to argue for meaning, not against it. Most papers that got even a little explicit denounced what they perceived as politically inflected readings. Two papers delved into actual LGBTQ+ readings, and both were brilliant. Both were reviled and rebuked.

To understand how this brood of scholars (or murder? like crows) treated queer themes in Faulkner, I can highlight three examples. The first was from a Queer Theorist. Her paper was, well, confusing. It was introduced by the conference emcee with an excited preamble about how awesome her scholarship was and how excited the conference director was for her paper. It took the presenter about 30 minutes even to mention the short story by Faulkner she had traveled down to talk about. Before reaching that point of her paper, she spent considerable time explaining the lack of imagination of the average queer reading, based in political identities instead of textual objectivity and all. She hedged her bets with a thought experiment: she asked us aloud what we thought where the two most important works of Queer Theory. The first she conceded was Judith Butler's Gender Trouble. The second she teased us with, offering that it was by Eve Sedgwick. Only, when the audience began mouthing the seemingly obvious title Epistemology of the . . . she cut us off to say, "No, not Epistemology of the Closet, which is too political, but Tendencies." I think people read that latter book in the late 1990s in grad school, but I'm not sure. No one really talks about it anymore. I believe its premise is that queer desire is just a tendency we all have; so nothing is really queer.

Later that afternoon, I ended up sitting next to this presenter at the fish fry at Rowan Oak. I did the polite thing a southern boy learns to do. I said, simply, "I enjoyed your paper." I left it at that. Meanwhile, unprompted, she began telling me about traveling to Oxford and missing her family. She had three kids, all just hitting their teenage years when they are just so interesting. She missed them; they were home with her husband.

This was 2007. I thought to myself about the nature of "politics" and privilege. If you need a primary on the political realities faced by LGBTQ+ people at that moment in our social history, you either weren’t old enough so need a good history lesson; or, possibly, aren’t actually queer. I didn’t eat my dinner. My appetite was stifled by my quiet anger at her obliviousness, but maybe I was just too involved with the actual world, political queer that I was becoming (. . . non fui, sum, still sum political queen!).  

Two other presentations were way cooler. One was by Gary Richards. His paper on Faulkner's time in New Orleans would be an important influence for my own work. Unfortunately, in his book Lovers and Beloveds, Richard argues for readings of same-sex desire that are "lavender" more than "shockingly pink." His book is great—I had just read it the semester before the conference. When he took me out to lunch and a generous conversation about my nascent ideas, I asked him to sign my copy of his book, which he did. Only as he started flipping through it did I realize how many nasty notes I'd written in the margins about his lavender approach. I knew already that I wanted to embrace an LGBTQ+ perspective with more edge. Gary never noticed (or never mentioned) the notes in my cramped handwriting. He did, however, joke with me about how often he'd heard critiques of his lavender approach. At the conference, he delivered a paper with the basic thesis that Faulkner knew a lot of gay men in New Orleans and many of his early sketches written during that period of his life demonstrate anxious heterosexuality.

That's it. That's all he said. It was a revolutionary paper at the Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference—lavender though it may seem. It was, also, about as plain and obvious as a queer paper could be (and, btw, great). He delivered his paper early in the week. Afterwards, during the Q&A, one man in the audience took the mic to declare for Gary’s sake, "I knew Faulkner in Virginia in the 1950s; he wasn't gay." More people affirmed the comment than embraced the paper. It was a queer thing to observe.

The other queer presentation, as it so happens, is also probably the best work of LGBTQ+ criticism ever done on Faulkner—which I don't say only because my eventual dissertation director gave the presentation. I say that because when she gave the presentation is when I knew that, no matter what, she was going to be the central figure in helping me get to where I wanted to go with Faulkner. Jaime Harker presented on the lesbian space in Absalom, Absalom! Her paper engaged in a simple close reading mixed with discussion of queer historical context for Mississippi from Faulkner's time to our own. Unlike literally every queer-themed study of Faulkner published prior to 2007, Jaime argued that this emanation of queer space and desire was not angsty nor fraught. It was productive and nurturing, if generally ignored by scholars and readers who most prefer to write about the sad homoerotics of the menfolks in the novel, if they are inclined to explore queerness at all.

Afterwards, the Q&A escalated quickly. At one point, unsatisfied with Jaime's calm answers to a myriad of awkward questions, one participant seized the mic and yelled into it, "What do you mean by lesbian?" I was sitting next to Gary for all this (gay people always seek community). He looked up, caught Jaime's eye, and made a hand gesture to say "don't. Let it go." Jaime’s partner at the time was also sitting with us. She just rolled her eyes.

At a cocktail party in the (at that point still-not-remodeled) campus inn, grumbles about Jaime's and Gary's papers pervaded. These readings had gone too far. What was the scholarly world coming to!

The theme for the 2008 conference was later decided as "Faulkner and Formalism: Returns of the Text." I have only intermittently attended Faulkner conferences since 2007, even though I was a grad student in Oxford until 2013 and lived there until August 2014. I actually packed the U-Haul for Wisconsin the week of the 2014 conference. Starting with the 2008 edition, it just felt like it wasn’t the best space to explore the vicissitudes of Faulkneriana.

I am recalling events from thirteen years ago. The world has certainly changed since then, as has Faulkner studies, though the proclivity for traditional modes of discussion can still dominate. Earlier this year, about a month after the publication of my book, Carl Rollyson published the first of his planned two-volume biography of Faulkner. Billed as the first biography of Faulkner in ten years or so (it is not), it uses the same archives on which I relied for my study, also a biography. In a review of Rollyson's work in the Washington Independent Review of Books, Colin Asher offers general praise for the effort but questions the thinking that there will always be room for another Faulkner biography, especially one that makes some tepid but not full-throated attempts to counter his legacies of racism and misogyny.

Asher's most damning line, however, is his conclusion:

Of course, Faulkner’s work will always be read and taught — there is no way to write the story of 20th-century letters without him — but it’s hard to imagine a more diverse generation of academics devoting themselves to Faulkner’s legacy by perpetuating the conferences and lectures whose participants this book is geared toward.

I die inside when I think of someone writing something like that about me or my work! AAAGGHH!!!

Of course, as of 2019, scholars were still working overtime to explain all the pitfalls of gay-themed readings of "A Rose for Emily." Historically, a lot of ink has been spilled to refute the question of Homer's sexuality in that text, rarely to do more than give teachers fodder to deny it. Other famous essays devoted to gay themes in Faulkner include equating a black character whom the authors of the study assume is engaged in bestiality with possible homosexuality as well (yes, you read that right). Another central essay to gay-themed Faulkner studies argues that Will Varner in The Hamlet is a homosexual because one day he has trouble sitting on a wagon because—yes, you know where this is going—his ass hurts from anal sex. More personally, at one point in my own work, I was told that my reading of the story "A Courtship" for homoerotic themes needed to include a section on what this commentator considered a much more obvious gay element: there is a character in the story named "Log-in-the-creek." For what it’s worth, less than ten years before I published my book, Judith Sensibar declared in the introduction to her book Faulkner and Love that we need not consider additional gay and lesbian studies of his fiction—they had all been done.

Alas, the anecdotes. They pile up after a while. They resonate around a fixed point, too. There is only one Faulkner, in his eternal sunshine, and attempts to offer alternative perspectives will be allowed only in a few ways: as an anxious joke, as a nod to ephemeral moments of forced progressivism, as marginalized readings too far removed from the text to be warranted. Faulkner remains—we will just come back to him after some token untoward readings. We will shuffle away these trifling assertions of queerness. He is ours. He is mine. He is a squirrel trapped in one tree left in the clearing. Better to use the bullets to scare off those who would come near the tree than shoot the squirrel and see if he's more than one animal or maybe even capable of surviving the blast.

For these reasons, I was nervous to stand among other Faulkner scholars at the OG yearly conference with my book in hand. Of course, the pandemic postponed that (imagined) confrontation. At least when signing books at the first annual Glitterary Festival (a queer-themed book fest planned for Oxford this last April that was postponed due to COVID-19), I could have expected a friendly audience, if not the most dedicatedly Faulknerian. Among a die-hard Faulkner audience, one always has a suspicion that it's Faulkner mad but friendly less, unless one says just so much as is acceptable.

The fantasies one entertains about a book don't often meet the reality. Indeed, I haven't won the Pulitzer yet (one always dreams) or the National Book Award (I'd be eligible this coming winter). The president hasn't called me to ask my opinion about Faulkner, but c'mon. Let's state that better: THIS president hasn't called me, but maybe the next one will (I met Joe Biden in Oxford, shortly after that conference on Faulkner's Sexualities, when he came through on a book tour just before launching his 2008 campaign). I shall hold out hope for my wildest dreams to come true until the very end of days, I tell you! A world without ridiculous fantasies is too adult and frumpy for me.

Simultaneously, I've so far received no push back at all over Gay Faulkner, now nearly eight months into its young published life—minus one alt-right internet troll more comical than engaging. It appears my delicious fantasies of righteous persecution might have been a bit overblown. In fact, so far, it's been all congratulations. It's been a warm, if often virtual, embrace.

Still, here is some Faulkner history for why I'd be concerned, and if this history feels past, we all know what any Faulkner scholar would immediately say to that. Which is why the anecdote that matters the most to me—the one that put into perspective for me what I've spent all these years doing, crafting that shockingly pink approach to literature, building on models of queer possibilities I saw first hand in two papers at a conference thirteen years ago—is one that happened in the final stages of the book’s production, after I signed my contract, as I did final revisions, the acknowledgement, and, most notably, my dedication.

A high school student emailed me one day. His class had been reading "A Rose for Emily." He thought there might be some queer (gay) themes in it. His teacher told him to prove it. He got online and started searching around. A bio that he found about me included for an essay on Faulkner but unrelated to sexuality did mention I was working on a study of homosexuality in the great author's works. So, this (rather intrepid) high schooler emailed me. He asked me for some support.

It was, at that point, that I deleted what was my dedication (to my parents and brother—to whom belongs much credit and much love). I thought on it. I considered: what am I doing? For what audience? For what goal? Who even cares about William Faulkner, one might ask as one prepares to wade into the conversations about his significance? What I landed on as the right dedication I offer here:

For the "quair" kids—and the queer kids—for all the kids who have known how certain labels are meant to exclude us. Never forget that this world is our world, this life our life. This book is for you.

This, in a bridge across these water, I place as my stone.