just asking questions

Jessa Crispin:

Is it important to read Faulkner? Probably not, but I think you should do it anyway. (I don’t like Faulkner, just fyi.) Because it’s good to do difficult things. Because hating something can be as interesting, sometimes more, as loving something. Is reading Faulkner going to make you a better person? Absolutely not, but the whole universe wants you to be optimized, productive, monetized. And sitting around and reading a work of art when it is not your job to do so is a rebellious act that insists I am a human being, actually, and not a cog, not a good little worker, not a cozy girl eating the slop that is fed to me. And developing the parts of myself that are unproductive, ugly, and a drain on resources is a beautiful act of rebellion.

But — and I think Crispin would agree with this — we should be clear that the value of rebellious self-development is not a reason to read Faulkner. That’s a reason to “do difficult things,” or perform “a rebellious act that insists I am a human being, actually, and not a cog.” There are ten thousand ways to achieve that other than reading Faulkner — other than reading literature — other than reading.

Crispin’s post confuses several different things, I believe. In the passage I’ve quoted she asks whether it’s important to read Faulkner; but the prompt for the post is a controversy about whether a white teacher should have read aloud to his class a passage from a Faulkner story that uses the n-word. If you read the report in the NYT, you’ll see that the black student who complained to the teacher did not argue that her teacher shouldn’t have assigned the story. “I don’t take issue with reading stories with the N-word in them. I understand the time period and that it’s a work of fiction. I do take offense when non-Black people say the N-word.” (The professor replied that he didn’t get the difference between reading the word and hearing a white person say it aloud, which strikes me as … obtuse.)

If you look at the entire context for this debate, you might ask the following questions:

Should white professors avoid uttering racial slurs in class, even when they’re quoting someone else?

Should professors assign fiction that uses racial slurs?

In what kinds of classes should professors assign fiction that uses racial slurs? For instance, might it be something to avoid in compulsory general-education courses, but permissible in courses for a major, or pure electives?

Does it matter whether the writer who employs the racial slur is a member, or not, of the group insulted by the word? That is, should we evaluate the use of the n-word by Faulkner differently than we evaluate its use by James Baldwin or Richard Wright?

Is the racist language employed by characters in Faulkner’s fiction one of the reasons to read his fiction — because he is the faithful portrayer of a particular social world — or are we reading him for other reasons, the power of his prose for instance, or his grasp of the tragic character of human life?

How important is it for professors to assign Faulkner, and in what kinds of courses?

If Faulkner should be assigned in at least some courses, which students really need to read him?

If you’re not a university student but want to be well-read, is Faulkner an important writer to encounter?

Is Faulkner worth reading?

You will, I trust, notice that each of those questions leads to further questions, but we need to figure out which one is our starting point, because the issues involved in these various cases can be radically different. So many of our arguments are fruitless because we’re not clear on what we’re arguing about.