Chapter 18 - Faulkner’s Untimely Fiction

Summary

This essay explores ideas of the untimely in connection with a queer politics in Faulkner: queer a commitment to imagining novel forms of dissident desire, pleasure, and affiliation; untimeliness an effect of the non-coincidence of chronological and political temporalities.Faulkner’s fiction is staggered temporally not only as a result of his well-known determination to recollect the traumatic past of nation, region, and individual, but also by less noticed efforts to grasp, in that past, alternative futures, some now foreclosed, others still biding their time. In Faulkner’s historical fiction like Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses, we find materializations in the past of futures that may not come to pass; in novels set in the present such as Light in August, we encounter dissident ways of life that resist modern normative constraints; in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem another dimension of the untimely appears, in forms of futurity that beckon with unprecedented gratifications of desire while threatening the resurgence of past forms of bondage.