Faulkner, Mississippi

Setting out to perform a ""fresh reading"" of Faulkner, Glissant, a Martinican novelist and poet (Black Salt), admirably avoids the verbal thickets of academic prose. His nonlinear, impressionistic critique, nevertheless, seems ready-made for the academy. Glissant's vantage as a Caribbean francophone lends him a perspective on Faulkner, race and region that is especially enlightening. The book opens with Glissant's account of traveling in Louisiana and Mississippi, gracefully sketching the landscape while evoking how alien he feels in the American South. After a brief overview of Faulkner's life and work (including all the novels, but concentrating on the Yoknapatawpha saga), the author plunges into the question of Faulkner and race, and here the book grows wildly diffuse. He exposes an ambivalence in Faulkner's work--a disturbing tendency to portray black people as irrational and bestial coupled with a conviction that the South's poverty and despair spring from its mistreatment of African-Americans. Also intriguing are the links he finds between Faulkner and French colonial writers such as Camus and Saint-John Perse. Glissant's careful detective work never leads to a significant larger point, however. As his focus widens, his reflections on contemporary life and theoretical matters--time and space, written vs. spoken language, the epic and the nature of community--form a sometimes bewildering collage. This may be the point, however. ""The unbound openness of the work is such that anyone can find a suitable path among those Faulkner proposes without betraying or losing oneself,"" he writes of Faulkner's oeuvre. The same may be said of Glissant's book, though that doesn't make it any easier to follow. (Apr.)