Oral traditions as the intersection of postmodern and southern: Faulkner, Hurston, and Welty
Description
William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty experiment with depicting oral storytelling in written narratives in Absalom, Absalom!, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Losing Battles. Although Faulkner and Welty were writing about primarily white oral storytelling and Hurston's interest was in African-American storytelling, their narratives reveal telling similarities between the two oral traditions that in the South were already racially mixed. The writers differ in their attempts to translate oral storytelling into written prose and in their depictions of the tension between the oral and the written modes. All three, however, find in oral tradition a distinct approach to language in that the 'how' in storytelling is more important than the 'what,' the listener/reader is included in the construction, and the focus is on the play of the narrative rather than the plot. This distinct approach to language and narrative separates these texts from other modern works, providing a connection instead to the concerns of postmodern texts. While Faulkner's depiction of Quentin reaches back to the nostalgia Jean-Francois Lyotard identifies as 'modern,' his depiction of Shreve's willingness to play with history reaches toward the postmodern absence of nostalgia found in Hurston and Welty's work. By placing these three texts in conversation with each other and with the discourse of postmodernism, I demonstrate that Faulkner, Hurston, and Welty were not on a nostalgic excursion into the roots of Southern folklore but were discovering the radical potential in oral tradition's different approach to language. They did not just borrow from the past but reworked oral tradition to explore questions about the relationship between language and reality that are the central focus of postmodern writers