Faulkner and the masses: a Hollywood fable

Stefan Solomon shows Faulkner’s late novel as heavily influenced by cinematic representations of that particularly urban phenomenon: the crowd. Offering a variation on adaptation studies, Solomon sees A Fable’s depiction of a purposeful, politically motivated group (distinct from the more unruly nineteenth-century mob) as having origins in an unfilmed treatment Faulkner wrote in Hollywood in 1943 entitled “Who?” He shows the specular nature of movie audiences (or crowds) watching early film treatments of the same presence in various films as constitutive of a collective identity that went on to inform the twentieth century’s mass politics. Ultimately, Solomon avers, such progressive elements of both cinema and Faulkner’s novel are constrained by their opposite: an entrenched conservatism in both the film industry and the author.