Towards the end of the book, Lefebvre mentions a difference between American and French writers at the time that he wrote the book.

While our own literature remains academic, abstract, psychological, outside of everyday life (to such a point that our most intelligent critics and novelists only noticed Faulkner and Dos Passos for their technical innovations!), American writers were accomplishing something we had not even been able to begin: the trial of so-called ‘modern’ life, the analysis of its contradictory aspects, poverty and wealth, weakness and power, blindness and lucidity, individuality and massiveness… (235).

This validation comes as somewhat of a surprise as he has critiqued literature throughout much of the book as a mainly bourgeois formation and, as such, something that distracts and alienates people from the reality of their everyday lives. However, as he notes here, literary work does have the capacity to analyze the alienating effects of everyday life. What’s interesting is that he indicates the technical innovations of the two writers’ work as something that is valued in favor of other aspects of their writing – the social awareness of it, perhaps. This critique made me think of a conversation I had with my mother (a literature teacher at a local Montessori school, and a non-fiction writer) a week or so ago about Faulkner. Somehow we got onto his narrative structure as a topic and she said that she didn’t really like his writing, since it can be so confusing and difficult to read. This was due to the fact that he writes sentences so long that “they’re not really sentences, just a bunch of words strung together without a period.”

I suppose this is the kind of meaningless technical innovation that Lefebvre notes in the quotation above. My response was that the method of his narration in books like Absalom! Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury, (in which an easily comprehensible narrative structure is replaced by techniques like disjointed stream-of-consciousness, as with the opening chapter of Fury, or the dialogue between Shreve and Quentin in Absalom in which they reconstruct/create the story of Thomas Sutpen) marries an exploration of modern life or consciousness with these “technical innovations.” In Absalom, Sutpen, a man who attempts to create his own genealogical aristocracy out of nothingness or wildnerness, has the story of his family’s destruction from within told in a way that complements the thematic critique of everyday life by offering an alternative to the individualistic, bourgeois notion of subjectivity and identity that drives his actions in the first place. The recreation of the family history through a series of letters, re-told stories, and the speculation between Shreve and Quentin makes story-telling, which parallels the ability to create a world, something more communal in nature. Thus, Faulkner’s writing serves as an example of how literature can help to imagine new possibilities in everyday life, giving us a reason (or enough awareness) to enter into critique of the alienated world in which we live.

On a somewhat related note, in "Notes Written One Sunday", Lefebvre gives us a searing critique of the Church. One of his key points of criticism seems to be the idea that the ritualism of the practice of faith alienates people from authentic relationship with each other and with their world, since they can go on something like autopilot, relying on the formalism of religious practice to guide their daily actions. On the last page of the chapter he writes that "the end, the aim [of Marxism, or material dialectic] is to make thought - the power of man, the participation in and the consciousness of that power - intervene in life in its humblest detail" (227). Such deliberate thought about the actions we take in everyday life would seem to be a means of not only critiquing the empty forms or customs that have been passed to us by tradition emptied out by progress (as I think he sees it), but would also prod us to reconsider/re-cognize our relationships to self and others, as well as to our material world. The irony of this, for me anyway, is that I have a friend who, I think, lives his life like this in many respects, but that his deliberateness is inextricably intertwined with strong sense of religious faith. Not as an attempt to rescue religion conceptually or in practice, but this coincidence makes me wonder if there is a way to separate the deliberateness of such forms of consciousness or living from their mystification of the practice itself. His (Lefebvre's) metaphor of analysis as the separation of water and wine (as opposed to oil and water, because everyday life and alienation are mixed to the point of indistinction) seems doubly appropriate here. It gives us a way of imagining the kind of process that would be necessary, but also ironically resonates with the Christian (specifically Catholic) mythos surrounding the combination of water and wine in the ritual of communion.

--Andy DuMont