“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
On the American tragedies of William Faulkner, whose time is still here.
1: Dead Men and the American Novel
When it comes to the modern American novel, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner too long occupied the top rungs of the required reading list, their work prescribed to high school students and clutched by critics and common readers alike. And while their individual reputations have had their ups and downs — Fitzgerald’s own saga of youthful glamour declining into dissipation, giving his work an afterglow that has left the other two somewhat in the shade; Hemingway’s suicide muddying the clarity of his stylistic certainty — their position as a towering literary triumvirate remains secure, whatever erosion has been underway. Nonetheless, they have few similarities as writers, and observing the differences in style and substance they display is especially instructive in understanding the achievements of the most ambitious of them, William Faulkner.
While Hemingway and Fitzgerald are readily graspable from page one, so to speak, their prose and plots providing no obstacle to comprehension (if more alive with nuance than may be readily apparent), Faulkner, frankly, is more than a little weird. It’s hard to be sure, the first time through one of his major novels, who is speaking and what exactly is happening. Shifting voices, distinctive but not lucid, tell overlapping stories, relating the same events from different perspectives and across different timescales. We move forward through Faulkner’s novels gathering pieces of a puzzle whose complete picture is never quite revealed as much as intuited. Add to this the eccentricity and turpitude of the characters, and the Gothic trappings and often blackly comic tenor of the author’s imagination, and it’s safe to conclude that reading Faulkner is anything but easy.
Hemingway’s creative sphere is a declarative one: physical, factual, precisely rendered, as if to keep — however unsuccessfully — some large and dangerous romanticism at bay. One might even say that his idea of bravery was this simple: that writing meet reality on its own terms. So he weighed the world one small word at a time. (Maybe because he had to. “I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down,” Virginia Woolf wrote in the penultimate entry in her diary, inscribed three weeks before her own suicide.)
As Hemingway attended to the physical world, stripping experience of past and future, so Fitzgerald assessed the social whirl, where position and relations, rather than mere presence, supply significance — a significance that, by definition, is always ephemeral, no matter how sweet. For youth and beauty are always fleeting, desire never outruns its longing, and any good party is always over too soon. Fitzgerald’s prose is reflective — of surfaces, social graces, morning-after regrets — and reflecting. While he shares with Hemingway a fundamental romanticism, its demeanor is quite different. Hemingway’s idea of the individual — the brave man conquering fear through grace under pressure — and Fitzgerald’s pursuit of a different kind of grace, of poise in the midst of the high life’s choreography (in Tender is the Night, Dick Diver thinks “no American men had any repose, except himself”) — both end badly, in breakdown or despair. Hemingway’s code of skill, of hands-on grasping of actuality, comes up empty-handed, as in the bleakly horrifying vision of The Old Man and the Sea (no matter how noble the aged fisherman Santiago may appear to be — or actually be). Fitzgerald’s final literary legacy, assembled by Edmund Wilson, a friend of his youth, is aptly called The Crack-Up. “In a true dark night of the soul,” the creator of Gatsby tells us, “it is always three o’clock in the morning.”
Then there’s Faulkner. Reading him, compared to reading Hemingway and Fitzgerald, is like hiking into a lost world where, as he famously wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The past as a presence is palpable in his sentences, which weave back and forth in time and space, especially the time and space of the American South’s failing history, which has dimensions all its own — it is in fact a history that isn’t history, but some human form of atmosphere. Faulkner’s language — framed in formal experiments, filigreed with a variety of voices, of dictions and dialects and syntactical idiosyncrasies — creates a world less visual, less graspable than Hemingway’s, and certainly less social (even if more communal) than Fitzgerald’s. The reality Faulkner demands that we engage in his fiction is not so much described by the words on the page as invoked by them.
Sound difficult? Reading Faulkner is. For in his best novels (not in his short fiction, which is often wonderful, but in a conventional way), the stories being told have no fixed coordinates; rather, they emerge organically from the voices that tell them. In The Sound and the Fury, for example, the tale of the Compson family’s general decline, and the particular misfortunes of a single generation of Compson siblings, must be pieced together from four separate narratives, told in four different voices (one of which belongs to a mentally deficient scion of the disgraced family, another to the stream of consciousness of his despondent, suicidal brother). As I Lay Dying, which recounts the death of Addie Bundren and the transportation of her body for burial in her hometown, is narrated by more than a dozen different characters. In each case, the entanglements of time, sex, blood, race, resentment, fear, and survival that are woven from the independent voices into a single tapestry are mystifying and almost mystically powerful, as if the tragic sense of life ancient Greek drama articulated had been weathered by its journey across the centuries into a new kind of ruined eloquence.
While much more innovative in formal and stylistic terms than Hemingway or Fitzgerald, Faulkner is in a peculiar way less literary than either. A Farewell to Arms and The Great Gatsby are powerful because they are bound — in scope, shape, and aesthetic control — by the covers they were conceived and exquisitely crafted to fit; for all the intensity of their composition, the sentences of The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and the dozen other novels set by Faulkner in Yoknapatawpha, the fictional avatar of his native Lafayette County in Mississippi, spill out of their covers and blend with one another to form a rich delta of fertile invention. In that soil he found a way to grow stories that weren’t about individuals, or about society, but about enduring nature — human and other — and the culture it engenders. By doing so, he expanded the possibilities of the novel in ways that inspired writers beyond the borders of the United States, most notably in Latin America, where, following the lead of Jorge Luis Borges, who made the first Spanish translation of Faulkner’s The Wild Palms, Gabriel García Márquez, Maria Vargas Llosa, and Carlos Fuentes would claim Faulkner as an empowering influence.
Faulkner’s vision of life is less dreadful than Hemingway’s, less wistful than Fitzgerald’s, and more melodramatic and mythic than both. He writes as if he were luring some wild life form out of a dense fog and unpacking the meaning carried on its back. Or not: sometimes it’s just fog. But for all the difficulty, there is a sense of noble sufferance in Faulkner — “They endured” are the last words of his masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury — that is akin to beauty, and often awful in both the modern and the archaic senses. What he conjures out of the morbid historical tensions of the South are fictions that proffer a human counterweight to time, imbuing humanity with the same unfathomable capacity as the weather. Hemingway said of him, “How beautifully he can write and as simple and as complicated as autumn or as spring.” And, somehow, as inscrutable as both.
2: A Modernist Milestone
The Sound and the Fury was Faulkner’s fourth novel. In it, he bravely indulged the experimental impulse that, under the guidance of his editors, he had kept in check in his previously published work, creating one of the landmarks of modern — and modernist — fiction. The book comprises four sections, three set on the days of Easter weekend in 1928, and one (the second as ordered in the novel) set eighteen years earlier. Together, they brood on thirty years of sorrow in the life of the Compson family, aristocratic Southerners whose fortunes have fallen far and messily, and whose members cannot come to grips with their loss of financial stature, local prestige, moral compass, and meaningful relation to their land, their history, and each other.
The novel is not easy reading, for the four parts have distinct styles, none of which is straightforward. The first, second, and third are each narrated by a different Compson brother, often through a stream of consciousness that makes for a vivid but disjointed parsing of events; the final segment assumes a third-person perspective, although, on first reading, this does little to make its pages more lucid than what’s come before.
At the start, The Sound and the Fury takes literally the tale-telling metaphor from Macbeth that gives the novel its name: “Life’s but a walking shadow, / . . . a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.” The idiot doing the telling is Benjy Compson, the youngest sibling, a thirty-three-year-old of deficient mental capacity who can express himself to others only through grunts and moans. Yet he has a preternatural intuition of things gone wrong, and Faulkner’s ingenious portrayal of his ominous apprehensions offers a cryptic but telling portrayal of the family’s decline and fall. All that the reader comes to piece together by the end of the novel — the family’s financial dissipation; the promiscuous disgrace of their sister, Caddy; the suicide of Quentin, the gifted oldest child, during his freshman year at Harvard; the stress of current degradations on the embittered middle brother, Jason, who is left as head of the family — is portended in Benjy’s uncanny monologue, a disturbed mix of memories and real-time impressions that is disorienting, puzzling, maddening, and gripping.
The novel’s three subsequent sections flesh out Benjy’s impressionistic ramblings with exposition, character, and various flavors of desperation. They’re told in turn by Quentin, as he plunges toward self-destruction in Cambridge; by Jason, as he schemes through his bitterness to wring some payoff from the vexations of his inheritance; and by an omniscience assuming, to some degree, the point of view of the black domestic help that both sustains the family and acts as a kind of Greek chorus for the Compson tragedy.
Remarkably, our disorientation coalesces into a rich reality as we progress through the book. Reading it is like being lost in a wood, our anxiety and growing fear making us close observers of every leaf, tree, and shaft of sunlight, our acute perception not clarifying, but threatening. We come to feel the nature of the forest in a way we never would if we were following a clearly marked path. The brilliance of the novel’s final section is the way it makes us feel that we’ve emerged from danger through the grace of some guiding hand, albeit one that is extended without any assurance or explanation. In the end, the author imbues the experience of this clan of afflicted, misguided, depressive, impetuous, cruel, and shortsighted people with a tragic sense of life that transcends their sad circumstances, and is beyond their ken as well.
3: More Than Words Can Say
“My mother is a fish,” says Vardaman, the youngest child of Addie Bundren, the dying matriarch of Faulkner’s bold novel of 1930. Addie’s health is deteriorating rapidly, and her eldest son, Cash, is hewing the most beautiful coffin he can manage right outside her bedroom window. Wretchedly poor, the Bundrens watch Addie die, then make their way with her corpse, its coffin in a mule-drawn wagon, across the fictional Yoknapatawpha County to fulfill her wish to be buried in her hometown of Jefferson. Along the way, they curse and fight and scream and hallucinate over the loss of the woman who held their lives together, enduring flood, fire, and all sorts of other calamities. It’s so blackly comic that laughter is eclipsed by a state of fretful, threatened animation that is part Gothic grotesquerie, part ramshackle picaresque, and part Old Testament. There’s no other book quite like it.
In fact, in the estimation of the critic Harold Bloom, As I Lay Dying “may be the most original novel ever written by an American.” But originality has its price. It can be tough going for the reader, even if, in comparison to his earlier novel The Sound and the Fury — which Faulkner himself described to his agent as “a real son of a bitch” — As I Lay Dying is a slightly easier read. You’ll need some time to get used to the novel’s polyvocal structure (a radical and influential literary innovation), which features fifteen different narrators in the course of its 250-odd pages. For instead of offering different perspectives on a common reality, Faulkner’s multivoiced construction fractures the very idea of a single, perceptible truth (the section that details Addie’s death, for example, is narrated by a character who isn’t even there at the time ofher demise).
Addie herself, from beyond the grave, narrates her own chapter, a tour de force of stream-of-consciousness prose in which she laments that her life had been circumscribed by the very language she used to describe it (an intuition that many feminist thinkers would echo and elaborate in scholarly works half a century later):
That was when I learned that words are no good; that words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at. When he was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn’t care whether there was a word for it or not. . . .
And so when Cora Tull would tell me I was not a true mother, I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other . . .
Faulkner’s intent as a writer was to bridge the gap between words and life that Addie so astutely senses — to set down lines of words that would somehow connect us to the terrible doing that human lives are entangled in. He wanted to make “sin” and “love” and “fear” more than just sounds, more than what Addie called them: “a shape to fill a lack.” No wonder his novels are so abstruse, yet so worth the effort to fathom.
4: Life Without Parole
Two strangers come to town; only one will leave alive. Lena Grove is a pregnant, unmarried young woman looking for the father of her child; Joe Christmas, who arrived three years earlier, is a drifter whose orphanhood haunts his every relation and whose appetites are mired in flesh and blood. The pair heads a dramatis personae that reads like the character checklist handed out on the first day of a Southern Gothic writing course: There’s a disgraced former minister, a bootlegger, a vindictive orphanage employee, a zealous suitor of the sullied heroine, a righteous adoptive father, and a grandmother whose maternal instincts override circumstantial evidence. All are caught in the violence of a present so remote from any alternative future that their inner lives have no direction. Their identities are in thrall to poverty, racism, ignorance, and intolerance, and the sociopathy all four engender when there is no way to escape their grip.
If the present is violent, the past is oppressive, exerting its force by a strange sort of osmosis. Fevers of the blood course invisibly and unabated until they break in fear, sex, rage, murder, castration — one might even say that the catalog of stock plot points matches the character list in brutal predictability. Yet even though all these familiar pieces are laid out on the page, they are put together in a way so inventive and unexpected that melodrama is turned into something not only meaningful, but almost majestic, transcending its material to create an imaginative space more like a film than a conventional novel. Faulkner’s prose resembles a camera that shapes our experience of character and incident by controlling the pace and angle of our discovery. He’s not telling a preexisting story, but revealing it in sentence after sentence — as a movie is revealed shot by shot — until the emergent reality bears witness to higher truths than verisimilitude can ever approach. It’s remarkable, unsettling, and unforgettable.
5: The Best-Laid Plans
Faulkner’s polyphonic narratives make his novels more than the sum of their parts, and their plots more reverberant than the events they describe. His best works create worlds that are pulled out of hurtling time only by the telling, as if they must be lured from history and memory by the author’s spell to take any shape at all before our eyes. How else could he do justice to his abiding apprehensions of both Southern culture and human nature? There is no truer way, as novelist Richard Ford would write in reference to Absalom, Absalom! some seven decades after its publication, “to register and imagine life” in all its “swarming, confusing, simultaneous, mistake-ridden, obsessive, occasionally hilarious, pathetic, violent” gravity.
Absalam, Absalom! forms, disperses, then coalesces again and again around the story of Thomas Sutpen, who arrives in Yoknapatawpha County in 1833 with slaves, a French architect, and a “design”: to work his will on a large parcel of land, planting cotton and erecting an extravagant estate house, to establish himself as a pillar of the precinct’s aristocracy. He summons his own grandeur out of thin air and polishes it with the sweat of slaves.
The decline and fall of the Sutpen design over the next century are like the degeneration of the Compson family in The Sound and the Fury imagined on a larger stage (Quentin Compson also has a central role in Absalom, Absalom!). Indeed, if Light in August is something like film noir, Absalom, Absalom! is a grand opera. Again, several narrators rehearse the same story, one whose melodramatic outlines are sketched for us in early chapters. The repetitions and amplifications of characters and events are passed from one voice to another like musical themes being passed from soloist to chorus to ensemble to orchestra, as Faulkner’s language swirls and swells and subsides, only to swell again, culminating in Quentin’s closing aria in response to a questioning of his feelings for the South: “I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!”
The saga of Thomas Sutpen and his heirs is a story of people who, as one character puts it, outlive themselves by years and years and years, just as Sutpen’s design will dissipate across the decades. The same fate will be met by the specter of Southern “nobility” — the ideals of honor, chivalry, and purity that drive Quentin mad and Sutpen’s heirs into a strange penury of circumstance and spirit. No matter the certainties of the present, Faulkner tells us again and again, the past always in large part determines the future, just as the untamed grace of the natural order outlasts the will of any human one, for the violence necessary to impose the latter will eventually consume it. That, of course, is the lesson of all tragedy, from the Greeks to the Elizabethans and beyond, a line of literary wisdom in which Absalom, Absalom! takes a place as a wild yet worthy American descendant.
