Rereading Faulkner through parody

Abstract

Parody should therefore be seen in this context of innocence and memory, two modes of consciousness which William Faulkner, whom we shall consider as the bard, both thematized and - even more importantly - demanded of his reader. My thesis is that because of his concern for innocence and memory Faulkner's texts resist parody or, better, that he saves his parodist's fictions from becoming mere excrescences in the petrified City of the lmmortals as long as the parodist pays homage to this Faulknerian concern. I shall try to illustrate this thesis mainly by comparing Thomas Sutpen to Uncle Jake, the protagonist of John Hawkes' 1985 novel "Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade".