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Figures of Division

James Snead

At my birthday celebration last month, my sister gave me a book about the works of William Faulkner, FIGURES OF DIVISION (1986) by James A. Snead.

This gift led me to google Snead's name, and discover a fascinating story. Snead was a promising scholar who died young -- at 35 years old (well, I'm old enough to consider that young). He died in 1989 -- apparently an AIDS related death.

FIGURE OF DIVISION , an analysis of race in Faulkner's use of language, began its own life as Snead's doctoral dissertation. That earlier version got him his PhD in English from Cambridge, St John's College, under the direction of Colin McCabe.

Here's a nice, I think representative, passage in the book: an appreciation of the character of Thomas Sutpen,

"If one must read Sutpen as 'a version of the American dream,' a myth of rags-to-riches elevation, then clearly the American Dream of advancement deconstructs its own performance. Something is wrong if, even after the white outsider learns the text of segregation, something bars his acceptance into white society...When such a society systematically excludes, the overall notion of 'community' becomes degenerate and impracticable, even for the most persistent strivers."

Thomas Sutpen is an adventurer, whose life takes him from a dirt-poor family in the west of Virginia (before it was West Virginia), to tidewater Virginia, where he charmed his way into the midst of the plantation elite, to the West Indies, where he starts a family, and then to Mississippi, specifically to Yoknapatawpha County. His story is part of Faulkner's most epic book, Absalom, Absalom!

If i understand Snead, he is saying that Faulkner reads an important truth about American society right here -- we like to romanticize the Sutpens, but they never really become part of the elite, they are always outsiders even when they are, or seem to be, mingling happily with the most inside of insiders. Sutpen was always restless because rags-to-riches success demands but society never offers acceptance to the climber.

The verb "deconstructs" in the above quoted passage wasn't really necessary, but it does mark this book as a product of its time, just as Sutpen and Faulkner were products of theirs.

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