Introduction

Summary

“It must relate to property; because nothing else survives in this world. Love grows cold and dies; hatred is pacified by annihilation.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne, The American Claimant

“History is what hurts.”

Fredric Jameson

At the risk of being defensive, I shall start by ghosting three objections that could reasonably result from a cursory drift down the index and across the pages of Fictions of Labor. Why so much about so little? Why still more on someone of whom so much has been written? Why so much that stays so close? Mine is a study of just three novels, spanning a decade and linked by the death, revival, partial demise, and semi-resurrection of one character. Quentin Compson has his ups and downs, which are focal because they reflect and are reflections upon the formation, resilience, and failure of a southern owning class. The years from The Sound and the Fury (1929) to If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem (1939) contain the New Deal–induced labor revolution that southern planters had been deferring since Radical Reconstruction (1867–77). Consequently, they contain the dramatic transformation of those planters from lords of bound labor to payers of a wage. But they also contain As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), and Light in August (1932), arguably major fictions about which I appear to have nothing to say. My silence reflects the narrowness of my chosen focus, which focus stems in turn from a conviction that, in the last instance, the long decade of Faulkner's greatest work is best understood through a generative social trauma constituting its formal core.