To read Julian Murphet's new work is to encounter illuminating monsters. In The Sound and the Fury, Jason Compson, pursuing his niece, being thought by the car in which he pursues (136) – the very odor of petrol, containing an Oedipal narrative. In As I Lay Dying, Addie Bundren, dead but talking, electrically voiced as a “radio corpse” (184). In Absalom, Absalom!, Charles Bon, tangled both in photographic technology and in Hegel, emerging, as though from a darkroom in the Dark House, as a negative plate (259). Or, more generally, the “network of [Faulkner's] textual signs,” precisely transubstantiated and hybridized, as exposing a “mediatic unconscious” (271): semantic matter made from electricity, radio signals or photomechanical print technology.

The structuralist anthropologist Edmund Leach notes that all variants of theology struggle with persistent binaries, as between immortal/mortal, eternal/temporal or superhuman/human, binaries that breed bridging monsters: witness a Virgin who conceives, often in Renaissance representations inseminated through the ear by God's gilded breath. To simplify, Murphet's binaries lie between romance and modernity: romance, read not as a transhistorical mode, but as a persistent inclination in “Faulkner's intrinsically dualistic textual world” (9), an inclination “to dissemble [the] continuity” of his region with archaic modes of production (those associated first with slavery and then with sharecropping), dissemblance achieved by way of backward glancing tropes (“cavalier ethos,” “agrarian gentility,” “courtly gender roles,” and “categorical racism,” albeit mediated through mass-produced melodrama and sensationalism). Modernity, read not strictly as “technology” (though there is much concerning the machinic here, plus a touch of technological determinism), but as a perceptual consequence of lives increasingly lived, even in Faulkner's Mississippi, among radio networks, nascent airways, and products of the automobile and recording industries. As Faulkner notes in Sanctuary (1931), tenants are liable, even at the height of the growing season, to quit the land in order to listen: “the sunny air was filled with competitive radios and phonographs in the doors of drug- and music-stores. Before these doors a throng stood all day listening.” Such listening modifies hearing, since, after Marx, borrowing from Hegel, “sense certainty” is but “the history of its process.” Murphet's work evidences, in Faulkner's work, how acutely textual sounds and sights (and sometimes smells) are recast as expressions of a bifurcated historical process, a region's uneven and combined development, caught between his preferred polarities (romance/modernity). Hence split signs and bridging monsters proliferate.

The problem with monsters, no matter how emphatically they catch the mind's ear and eye (and these do), is that they tend to lack a dialectical dimension, since to have as much might take them apart. An instance: Faulkner's Media Romance makes us newly and intensely aware of how “voice,” telepathy and recessive authorial “voicing,” in As I Lay Dying (1930), might function as symptoms of “electromagnetic pulses penetrating every last recess of social space,” care of Memphis transmitters, issuing transmissions that “alter … the very meaning of ‘voice’ itself” (143). To reconceive Addie's coffin as a “spiritual telephone booth” (195) and the Bundren farm as a “radio” (185) gives us the novel as we have never had it before (and I would stress that, for me, it will never be the same again). Nonetheless, the coffin remains conspicuously a product of labor (albeit a labor of love), like the house, set carefully, by Faulkner, within a system of semi-subsistence production whose archaism should not, to fit a paradigm, be consigned too swiftly to a function of “romance.” Similarly, confronted with “the greatest narrative hole” (255) in Absalom, Absalom! (1934), or more particularly with the anachronistic nature of that “hole” – an 1827 slave revolt on a French plantation in Haiti, where in 1827 there were neither slaves nor French plantations – Murphet reaches for what I would call a “monster”: Modernity through “photogenetic ontology,” or Bon (all but literally the child of those impossible musket flashes in the Haitian dark) as “negative plate” (265), plus romance hallucination, “gunshots … a Caribbean escapade, bastards … a hopelessly miscegenated dynastic plot” (234). The conjunction allows Murphet, fascinatingly, to track Bon's fragile facial and narrative existence, by way of the novel's sustained photographic tropes. For Murphet, the technology associated with the negative plate models Faulkner's “glimpse” into “the extraordinary social logic of photography as a process of ‘positive’ racial figuration” (260) whereby a negative image (black) yields a positive image (white), plus multiple replications (the very many “off-prints” of Sutpen's face). Through the “photogenetic figure of the negative plate” (278), handled for its formal and aesthetic consequences with a theoretical suppleness and textual acuity (that here I can only reduce), Murphet bids to access “this great novel's mediatic unconscious” (271).

As with his As I Lay Dying so with his Absalom,Absalom!, given the cogency of his readings, the novel should never be the same again. My objection is only that it might have been “never the same again,” but better. In his pursuit of the “negative plate,” he risks reducing the function of the other half of his monstrously generative binary, the romance in the modernity–romance coupling, primarily to the role of mere antithesis – an “exhausted media paradigm (that of literature's monopoly in romance)” (268). Yet what he brackets under “romance,” arising from the ellipsis (or “hole”) that is Faulkner's Haiti, speaks to levels of the unthinkable and under-thought (constitutive of a regional “unconscious”), that emerge not from weary, sensational or melodramatic versions of dynastic narratives, care of Hollywood, but from a racialized system of plantation labor which, by the mid-1930s, was coming apart. By granting his “romance” a more historically specific content, Murphet might have released from it, and onto his “negative plate,” white disavowals, labor fears and dark specters, from which his finally over-machinic model of the novel's “unconscious” might have benefited, thickened by gains in contested or ambiguated signs, apt to the term “unconscious.”

Yet I have no grounds to grumble: Julian Murphet has written a rare book, rare in a sense that accords with Adorno's insight that history does not just touch language, but takes place in language. Murphet offers a new language through which to read how half a history, the history of the passage of emergent technologies into perceptual mechanisms, takes place within Faulkner's language.