Professor Baggage

As any of you who've taken my Theories of Comp class know, designing a writing prompt is tricky business. I said "baggage," and as I've seen some of the other posts appearing in the last two days, it's been a good starter term for you. I hesitate--despite my own sometimes cynical nature--to start us off with a slightly negative connotation, and I may have done so, but what's done is done. I like a class where we can be honest in evaluating the authors while still appreciating the poetic and rhetoric of their work. Hero worship has its place (Steinbeck FTW--Faulkner FTW too, for that matter), but it's okay if it's not a fifteen week love-fest, too. So in my opening prompt, I encouraged a bit of negativity--that may not be fair to Faulkner on the first day, but what's done is done. He's difficult. But he's GOOD difficult.

So, I can't approach Faulkner clean like many of you are this semester; thus, I can't really write about baggage in the same way. I would, however, like to reflect a little, and talk about my experiences with Faulkner as an undergrad (that was here at McMurry, by the way, for those of you who don't know) and a little later.

If I read WF in high school, I certainly don't remember it. Dosoyevsky, Dante, and Dickens, I remember. But not Faulkner. It wasn't until 1320, Comp & Lit, that I would really encoutner Faulkner. This would be, of course, "A Rose for Emily"--one of the most popularly anthologized short stories in WF's catalog. I vividly remember thinking the story was a little confusing, but cool; rich in ambiguity, which I appreciated especially because we could pick at our instructor's assertions about the story. One of my fellow students, I remember, was CONVINCED that Homer Barron was homosexual--the phrase "Homer himself had remarked – he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks' Club – that he was not a marrying man" is rich with small-town gossipy significance, and a small cohort of us were quite happy to bring that in and raise our instructor's hackles with our certainty in the matter. Of course we were wrong--in that his sexuality is indeterminate and in the end unimportant, not in that he's clearly heterosexual in the story. He's not. He could be, but he's not. But that's not the point. What this episode introduces (without meaning to) is a larger issue of narrative point of view. This kind of ambiguity is something Faulkner does with his narrators--they're not perfectly trustworthy, they're not perfectly reliable. They're just people. (More or less messed up in the head, sure; but still just people.)

I'm sure, in sophomore surveys and that sort of thing, that "Barn Burning" came up--I don't remember, but then, I was interested in other things in my sophomore year of college, and hadn't quite decided to be an English geek yet. Later, however, I took a Modern Novels course, and another important moment would intrude--sort of. Dr. E. had us read As I Lay Dying--and though I was much more impressed by Steinbeck's In Dubious Battle and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio at the time, this initial reading of AILD would introduce me to his experimental novels, his technique, his idea of the world--important for when I'd study for my comprehensive exams as a Master's student later. Reading The Sound and the Fury entirely self-directed as a graduate student was something I wouldn't have been ready for if I hadn't been through AILD first. It's also helped inspire a deep interest and appreciation in high modernism in poetry, as well. Go read The Waste Land, and you'll understand. AILD was, you might say, a gateway drug.

Having taught AILD and sundry other Faulkner materials a few times by this point, and even though my scholarly specialization lies outside of mid-20th century literature these days, I'm excited to be teaching a fully-fledged Faulkner course. Not without trepidation, sure, but plenty of excitement otherwise. I mean, I *did* name my firstborn after one of the characters in As I Lay Dying, and made a strong (but ultimately failed) case for the third child being named out of The Sound and the Fury.

So, yeah. I've got bags to carry. But I'm carrying them happily. You can put lots of books in a good-sized bag.