The Old Meat After All

Body parts litter William Faulkner’s work—the icon of an eye suddenly breaks apart in The Sound and the Fury, and numerous pieces are starkly titled by the body, such as "The Leg" or "Hair." Yet, it is a common conception that Faulkner’s fiction is intensely cerebral and emphasizes detachment from the bodily and sensory aspects of experience. Solveig Dunkel’s The Old Meat After All: William Faulkner’s Poetics of the Body corrects readers and scholars alike of that notion, arguing that in Faulkner’s fiction, flesh takes precedence over the mind and soul. Drawing inspiration from anatomy books, the three main chapters of this book follow an almost surgical progression, focusing first on silhouettes and then delving into the physical and literary flesh, guts, and fluids of Faulknerian bodies. In Faulkner’s prose, the body emerges as a site of aesthetic and stylistic experimentation, suspended between its material (and scriptural) embodiment and its symbolic abstraction. The Old Meat After All centers primarily on four novels from the 1930s but also engages with writings from both earlier and later periods. Dunkel advances the hypothesis that Faulkner’s literary bodies function simultaneously as inscriptive surfaces and as generative writing machines—constituting a vital source of his stylistic innovation and verve.