Malcolm Cowley’s Mixed Blessings

An unfortunate danger of the journalistic mission to
make radical art accessible through simplification is the possible removal of what makes it radical. Malcolm Cowley probably did more for William Faulkner’s reputation (with The Portable Faulkner in 1946) than anyone else did, but the occasional distortions this entailed also had some lasting and lamentable effects.

I haven’t yet read Gerald Howard’s The Insider: Malcolm Cowley and the Triumph of American Literature, which just arrived in the mail, but I’m astonished to discover that the novel I regard as Faulkner’s greatest, Light in August (1932 ) — in

part because it has the most to say about Southern racism — doesn’t appear even once in The Insider’s index. Back in my graduate school days in the mid-1960s, I discovered that Cowley’s excerpting of the murder and castration of Joe Christmas in The Portable Faulkner entailed identifying Christmas as a “negro” [sic], which Faulkner never does, because a central aspect of Christmas’s tragedy is that neither he nor the reader could ever know his racial identity, even though his murder and castration is motivated by a supposition that Cowley opted to share for the sake of journalistic “clarity” (i.e. simplification). This is one among many changes and editorial decisions Cowley submitted for Faulkner’s approval in a single letter, and Faulkner’s tacit acceptance was clearly an oversight, as evidenced by his subsequent statements about Joe Christmas to college students in Virginia. Read more

A.I. Artificial Intelligence

From the Summer 2024 Sight and Sound.

What’s the difference between being dead and being alive? The answer may seem obvious, but if one regards A.I. Artifcial Intelligence as a living work by a dead flmmaker – a revamping of Pinocchio to recount the heartbreaking fate of a boy robot programmed to love his human surrogate mother — the many paradoxes arising from this become far too significant to ignore. Even the fact that the credited director is Steven Spielberg, working from a Stanley Kubrick treatment, can be traced back to Kubrick’s own proposal, motivated by Spielberg’s capacity to direct a child actor more quickly than he could have done (specifcally, before the child could visibly age) and by Spielberg’s ability to handle certain kinds of emotion. And given the flm’s postulate that anyone’s life can become a living death, whether one happens to be a human being in a coma (Jake Thomas as Martin Swinton, whose infrmity and absence provoke his parents into buying a robot to replace him) or a robot who can outlive and outlast humanity (the remarkable Haley Joel Osment as David), the task of separating people from robots may turn out to be as diffcult as distinguishing life from death, ‘natural’ love from being programmed, or even the happiest Kubrick ending (the hero is granted, after centuries of waiting, his ultimate wish) from the bleakest and most absurdist of all (humanity’s fnal gasp takes the form of a programmed robot’s Oedipal wet dream). Read more