Hellhound on His Trail: Faulknerian Blood-guilt and the Traumatized Form of Lewis Nordan's "Wolf Whistle"
MSU Affiliation
College of Arts and Sciences; Department of English
Creation Date
2025-12-15
Abstract
For writers who hail from the U.S. South, especially from Mississippi, confronting the legacy of William Faulkner can be daunting. Lewis Nordan, a writer born and reared in the Mississippi Delta, describes his version of the dilemma: "The first thing I did as a writer was to imitate Faulkner without having any strong idea of what he was really doing." Nordan adds that, "as I didn't have a grasp on what he was doing, it prevented me from getting to what I really wanted to do." For Nordan, Faulkner's influence functioned as a potentially debilitating force that severely compromised the development of his artistic identity. Not surprisingly, then, Nordan declares with emphatic frustration that "when I'm compared with Faulkner...it drives me nuts" (qtd in Arbeit 633). In spite of Nordan's consternation, examining his work in the context of Faulkner's legacy is a worthy endeavor, though not merely for the purpose of demonstrating the anxiety of influence by casting Nordan as ephebe opposite Faulkner as grand literary Master, a tendency that Michael Kreyling defines as pervasive in southern studies (128). Indeed, the practice of comparing southern writers to Faulkner in purely qualitative terms is by now a well-worn critical path with predictable turns that lead to a seemingly foregone conclusion: Faulkner, like his envisioned mankind, endures and prevails.
Publication Date
2011
Publication Title
The Southern Literary Journal
Publisher
University of North Carolina Press
First Page
19
Last Page
36
Recommended Citation
Atkinson, Ted. Hellhound on His Trail: Faulknerian Blood-Guilt and the Traumatized Form of Lewis Nordan's Wolf Whistle. The Southern Literary Journal, vol. 44, no. 1, 2011, pp. 19-36. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23208767.
