Abstract
AbstractThe conclusion discusses one of the strangest pieces of writing Faulkner ever produced as a speculative energy fiction that allegorizes a world after oil while dramatizing the imaginative challenges of representing that alternative energy reality. In the romance between Isaac Snopes and a rural milk cow in The Hamlet, Faulkner created a turn-of-the-century tale that augurs a postsustainable future. This over-the-top love story is at once Faulkner’s most radiant hymn to the sun and a paean to the profligate energies of the human animal, complementary resources we must reaffirm if we are to wean ourselves from our planet-wrecking dependence on fossil carbon. In the tale’s joyous, “unnatural” congress between cognitively disabled man and bovine beast, we witness an affront to, but also an implicit indictment of, an oil-drunk system for organizing nature now running aground on its own ecological contradictions.
Publisher
Oxford University PressOxford