Chapter 4 - Circuits of Media: Airplanes, Newspapers, and the Afterlife of Novels

Summary

Chapter 4 examines Faulkner’s 1935 novel Pylon within the context of the publication history of his novels and stories themselves. Pylon deals with a celebration to mark the opening of an airport in a fictionalized New Orleans. Daredevil pilots race around a course, and the media hype surrounding the event leads to faster, deadly speeds, a circle of media from which Faulkner offers no way out. Although he could not have predicted it in 1935, Faulkner’s own novels, after he won the Nobel Prize in 1950, escaped the unproductive cycles of poor sales that had plagued many of his earlier efforts, coming out in numerous editions with millions of books sold. The chapter considers multiple editions of Faulkner’s novels, including the Franklin Library edition of The Sound and the Fury published as part of their collection of books heavily advertised on television in the 1980s. Marketed as both texts and objects of display, one might dismiss the Franklin books as so much literary kitsch, but the kind of prestige effect these books rely upon – and to some extent create – produces the necessary authority to enlist Faulkner today as a spokesperson for political issues.