Abstract

This study examines the work of William Faulkner in the context of American Pragmatism, particularly as developed by William James. Most Faulkner criticism has been hermeneutic in orientation, focussing on the discovery and representation of hidden truths. I argue that Faulkner's conception of truth is really pragmatic, and that he is less concerned with the urgency and difficulty of uncovering the truth than with how various "truths" are actively fabricated and circulated in an imagined community of narrators. Developing the consequences of this interpretation for the usual image of Faulkner as a writer haunted by the burden of the past, I suggest that, on the contrary, his novels actually present history as something highly malleable to individual desire. ;I begin by proposing a genealogy of pragmatism which connects it with the figure of the confidence man, as he appears in the works of a number of antebellum American writers, arguing that he is a proto-pragmatic maker of truths who creates the confidence that is necessary to the existence of any imagined community. The next chapter looks at the development of William James's notion of "verification," i.e. the idea that truth is something made by active confidence, and argues that James's essays themselves need to be read not simply as theoretical arguments, but as narratives which enact a rhetorical process of creating truth, or in other words, as philosophical confidence games. I then proceed to a reconsideration of some of Faulkner's major works from a pragmatic perspective. Beginning with a reading of The Hamlet, I propose that it is Faulkner's most complete picture of a foundationless world constantly constituted and reconstituted by transactions of confidence. Next, I examine Absalom, Absalom! in the context of a pragmatic American historiography, whose ultimate origins lie in Emerson's essay "History." Finally, I look at Go Down, Moses as a work whose theme is the impossibility of maintaining undeviating and unconfused "lines"--genealogical, racial, and narratival--in order to argue that it strikingly parallels James's pluralist vision of a world dominated by "the fatally continuous infiltration of otherness."