Faulkner from Within: Destructive and Generative Being in the Novels of William Faulkner

By William H. Rueckert

Faulkner from Within: Destructive and Generative Being in the Novels of William Faulkner is the culmination of William H. Rueckert’s lifetime of study of this great American novelist. Rueckert tracks Faulkner’s development as a novelist through eighteen novels—ranging from Flags in the Dust to The Reivers—to show the turn in Faulkner from destructive to generative being, from tragedy to comedy, from pollution to purification and redemption. At the heart of Faulkner from Within is Rueckert’s sustained treatment of Go Down, Moses, a turning point in Faulkner’s career away from the destructive selves of the earlier novels and—as first manifest in Ike McCaslin—toward the generative selves of his later work. Faulkner from Within is a wide-ranging, beautifully written appreciation and analysis of the imaginative life of a great American author and his complex work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Parlor Press, LLC
• Release date: Nov 14, 2003
• ISBN: 9781602357358

William H. Rueckert

Kenneth Burke (1897-1993) has been hailed by many as one of the most original thinkers of the twentieth century. In The Dictionary of Literary Biography, Paul Jay refers to him as “the most theoretically challenging, unorthodox, and sophisticated of twentieth-century speculators on literature and culture.” Geoffrey Hartman praised him as “the wild man of American criticism.” We see him (finally) represented in the influential Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. The Chronicle of Higher Education suggested in 2001 that Burke may have “accidentally create[d] cultural studies.” William H. Rueckert, the “Dean of Burke Studies,” authored or edited numerous groundbreaking books and articles on Kenneth Burke. They include the landmark study, Kenneth Burke and the Drama of Human Relations (1963, 1982), Critical Responses to Kenneth Burke, 1924-1966 (1969), and Encounters with Kenneth Burke (1994). With Angelo Bonadonna, he is the editor of Burke’s On Human Nature, A Gathering While Everything Flows: Essays, 1967-1984 (2005). He is also the author of Glenway Wescott (1965) and the Parlor Press book, Faulkner From Within—Destructive and Generative Being in the Novels of William Faulkner (2005). His essays include the often-cited “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism.” Shortly before his death in late 2006, Rueckert published the long-awaited edition of Burke's Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives, 1950-1955.

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Faulkner from Within

Destructive and Generative Being in the Novels of William Faulkner

William H. Rueckert

Parlor Press

Anderson, South Carolina

www.parlorpress.com

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the University of Virginia Library for permission to use the cover image from the William Faulkner Papers (#6074) in The Albert and Shirley Special Collections Library, University of Virginia Library.

Parlor Press LLC, Anderson, South Carolina 29621

© 2004 by Parlor Press

All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America

S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2003115229

Rueckert, William H. 1926–

Faulkner from within : destructive and generative being in the novels of William Faulkner / William H. Rueckert.

Includes notes, bibliographical references, and index.

1. Faulkner, William, 1897–1962—Criticism and interpretation.

I. Title. II. Series.

ISBN 1-932559-02-7 (Paper)

ISBN 1-932559-03-5 (Cloth)

ISBN 1-932559-04-3 (Adobe eBook)

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Printed on acid-free paper.

Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is also available in cloth, as well as in Adobe eBook and Night Kitchen (TK3) formats, from Parlor Press on the WWW at http://www.parlorpress.com. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 3015 Brackenberry Drive, Anderson, South Carolina, 29621, or e-mail [e-mail].

For My Sons

Theron, Quentin, Jordan, Morgan

And our Faulknerian life together

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Abbreviations

I 1927–1932

1 Faulkner Discovers His Native Territory

Flags in the Dust (1926-1927; published 1973)

2 Faulkner’s First Great Novel: Anguish in the Genes

The Sound and the Fury (1929)

3 Destructive and Destroyed Being

The Coffin of Being

As I Lay Dying (1930)

A Grammar of Negative Being

Sanctuary (1931)

Demonic Incarnation and the Pestilential Word

Light in August (1932)

II 1935–1940

4 Verticality and Flight Passions

Pylon (1935)

5 Faulkner and the Civil War

Sutpen’s Vortex of Destruction

Absalom, Absalom! (1936)

Bayard’s Last Stand

The Unvanquished (1938)

6 Faulkner’s Dialectical Novel

The Wild Palms (1939)

7 Economic, Moral, and Sexual Passions in The Hamlet

The Hamlet (1940)

III 1942

8 Curing the Work of Time

Go Down, Moses (1942)

IV 1948–1962

9 Beginning the Work of Redemption

The Education of Chick Mallison

Intruder in the Dust (1948)

Redeeming the Earlier Works

Faulkner’s Paladin

Knight’s Gambit (1949)

10 December 1950

10 Cleansing the Temple

—Requiem for a Nun

Requiem for a Nun (1951)

11 War, Power, and The Book: Faulkner’s Fable for Tomorrow

A Fable (1944-1953; published 1954)

12 Social Comedy in Yoknapatawpha County

—The Town

The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959)

13 Serene and Comic: The Joyful Act of Closure

The Reivers (1962)

Notes

Bibliography

Index for Print Edition

Acknowledgments

This book has been a long time in the making and like any book this long, which has gone through so many revisions, it owes a lot to its many devoted typists. I acknowledge them all with gratitude. Two of these recent typists have been heroic in their devotion to this manuscript: Gail English (with some help from Marie Henry), one of our secretaries in the English Department at SUNY/Geneseo, put the whole text on disks for me the year that I retired so that I would be sure to finish it after I retired; and my wife, Barbara, has reformatted it, printed it all out for me, proofread the printout against the original typescript, made all the corrections and revisions, typed the new parts and retyped some of the old ones, checked all of the quotations against the originals, and, in general like a good copy editor, has made sure that we had a manuscript that was as error-free as possible. She also printed the final copy that went to the press. Had it not been for these two and the miracle of the Mac Plus (I still work on a Hermes 3000 manual typewriter), this study of Faulkner would have died in its dusty box on the shelf in my study where I put it some years ago—in anger, frustration, disgust, and uncharacteristic critical apathy. My wife, in particular, became as obsessed with finishing this manuscript as I was. She learned everything she needed to learn in order to do what was necessary on the word processor; in addition, she gave me excellent advice about revisions, especially the best kind, deletions. I would never have finished without her help.

Many other people have also been a great help with this study. Chief among these are all the wonderful students who studied Faulkner with me at the University of Illinois, the University of Rochester, and the State University of New York at Geneseo. I have also discussed Faulkner with many of my colleagues and some have also been kind enough to read the manuscript. I wish to thank, especially, Frank Hodgins, who first taught me something about the greatness of The Bear; Milton Stern, a Faulkner enthusiast, along with Frank Hodgins, and later, a careful, thoughtful, incisive reader of an earlier version of this study; Sherman Paul, another careful and encouraging reader of an earlier version of this study; Howard Horsford, whose brilliant formalist reading of The Sound and the Fury provoked me to go beyond it in ways he could not have anticipated; Leroy Searle, with whom I team-taught modern American literature at Rochester and whose teaching of Absalom, Absalom! was a marvel to behold; Jay Martin, who read an early version of this manuscript and assured me that, though I did not yet, I might someday have here a great book on Faulkner; Clay Lewis, a great reader of Faulkner, a wonderful dialectician of a colleague; and John Michael, who kept assuring me that there was a lot of good stuff in there (in the dusty box) and that if I was not going to finish my Faulkner, would I please give it to him.

Numerous institutions, departments and friends have also helped in different ways. The University of Rochester and the English department there supported my work in many different and valuable ways during the nine years that I was there; while I was a Visiting University Fellow at Empire State College in Saratoga Springs, helping to get that college conceived and underway, I did a pilot study of Faulkner as one of their self-teaching modules that was really the genesis of the present book. The staff at Furness House, where we were housed, especially those responsible for putting the modules into finished form, was extremely helpful, as were my colleagues there. The State University of New York at Geneseo, especially the staff of the English department, helped me with this work in many ways too numerous to enumerate during my years there. Darla Penta, my secretary when I was chair, was especially helpful, as were Marie Henry and Gail English. Important parts of this study were written one summer in Maine when Stan and Judy Kahrl kindly loaned us their wonderful house on Kennebec Point. I want to thank them here for their hospitality and generosity, and for teaching me something about what friendship means. Finally, Theron Francis was a wonderful copy editor who improved the text in many important ways; and David Blakesley, who runs Parlor Press, is largely responsible for making sure this study of Faulkner became a book.

Introduction

I have been compelled by Faulkner since I first read Light in August in 1949 when I was an undergraduate at Williams College. Since that time, I have read and reread Faulkner more often, taught him more often, and read more about him than any other author I have encountered during my career—with the possible exception of Kenneth Burke, another career-long passion and, by an odd coincidence, born the same year as Faulkner. You could say, very accurately, that Faulkner was—or, rather, that his fictions were—one of the great passions of my adult and professional life. No amount of reading or rereading or reading about him has ever diminished this passion. I have known other passions: for D. H. Lawrence, for Conrad, for Melville, for Fitzgerald and Hemingway, for John Hawkes and Wright Morris, for W. S. Merwin and Whitman, for William Carlos Williams, for Thoreau and E. B. White, for Vonnegut and Gary Snyder—but no passion has been as strong nor lasted as long as this passion for Faulkner. It was inevitable that I would eventually write something long and substantial about him, which I have done in this book, and even the long ordeal of writing and rewriting this book has not diminished the force of my passion for Faulkner; in fact, it has only increased it.

Let me be accurate and exact here: it is Faulkner’s fictions, especially his novels, which have been my passion. The original title of this book was Faulkner, From Within—a title stolen from the French, who have always had a genius for getting inside the imaginative creations of an author and charting that territory for us. I had very little interest in Faulkner’s life until Joseph Blotner’s monumental two-volume biography came out in 1974.¹ I finally read this wonderful work in 1978; but by then I had finished a whole first draft of this book and when I read Blotner’s Faulkner, A Biography, I was chiefly interested in trying to relate the inner imaginative life I had spent so much time studying and writing about to the outer life Blotner—and, later, others—chronicled in such minute detail (all 1,846 pages of it). It is still the inner imaginative life rather than the outer life that I find most compelling, though I admit to the usual fascination with the many mundane facts about the life of this genius that are now available to us. However, only a genius could have lived Faulkner’s amazing and unique inner imaginative life and created the novels and stories that he did. His genius, in other words, was not in the kind of life he led, as is sometimes the case, but in the fictions he created. If it were not for Faulkner’s genius, no one would have been much interested in his life anyway. Writing the life, as Blotner so lovingly did, is but one way of trying to understand and acknowledge the nature of this genius. Another way, is to go directly to the works of the genius; still a third way—as in the work of David Minter and Judith Wittenberg—is, to borrow Wittenberg’s subtitle—to try to discover how the life was transfigured into the fictions.² My way was to go directly to the works, the novels, and to study them, in terms of themselves (the laws of the imagination and of fiction) more or less to the exclusion of everything else. I do not mean by this that my primary emphasis is aesthetic because it isn’t; only that, with very few exceptions, I found all of my evidence, all of the facts that I worked with, in the novels themselves and worked on the assumption, as I always have when dealing with literary works, that the work will reveal its intention to me from internal evidence if I study it hard enough.

I have used what Faulkner said about his novels somewhat sparingly because, once created, novels have a life of their own which even the creator of them does not, in retrospect, necessarily fully understand and maybe did not ever fully understand. History, though it does not change the text, changes the way in which we may read that text, and the huge accrual of readings of the novels adds dimensions to them not even Faulkner could possibly have anticipated. Faulkner certainly knew he was a genius; in fact, he was sometimes amazed at his own genius: but his word is not necessarily the definitive word on any novel or character—though what he says is certainly always worth paying attention to. Novels have intentions of their own which clearly transcend an author’s intentions. An author can tell us exactly what he intended, which does not mean that is what was achieved, or that there wasn’t more there than was intended or even consciously recognized. It is here that the whole theory of archetypes and symbolism becomes so important. The texts of all great writers soon transcend the intentions, and maybe even the understanding, of their creators. And it is perfectly clear from the record, that authors are great liars about their texts and that there are some things about any great text so private and secret no author will ever talk about them or divulge them. We may document the external life of an author from the record, but the only reliable record for the interior imaginative life is the record provided by the text itself. The author may lie, but the text can’t—not even so cryptographic a text as Absalom, Absalom!.

I do not mean to argue here that the life of the author and his fictions are not related and connected in interesting and complex ways—if we can but figure them out—and that pursuing this line of investigation often yields surprising, often very startling results. Minter and Wittenberg have clearly shown this to be true.³ What I want to argue is that the fictions have a life of their own; it is the fictions that will survive and remain important, not the life of the author; and even if we knew nothing at all about the author or about anything he might have said about his own work, that would not in any way diminish the power of these great fictions. Their power is intrinsic to them, and can be gotten at directly, by taking a reasonably well-trained critical mind to the texts themselves. Anyone who has taught Faulkner knows this to be true: a whole class learns to live within the imaginative world of the novels, to talk about the characters as if they were really real and as if what happened to them really mattered. It soon learns that this imaginative world, from novel to novel, has a coherence of its own, that certain kinds of characters keep reappearing, certain themes and conflicts are returned to again and again, that, no matter what, the great comic voice speaks out over and over again. These things are all in the novels and no external evidence—from the life, or anywhere else—is needed to explain or justify any of them.

If this seems like an extremely puristic (perhaps critically naive) view of the relationship between the reader and the text, a view that seems to argue that neither scholarship nor criticism is really necessary, that the text can stand alone as a set of internally coherent signs which a reader can work his way into and back out of again—well, yes, it is somewhat puristic, but certainly not critically naive. It argues for the autonomy of the text over and above all else, and for the value of as direct an experience of the text as possible. It is a position, not a dictum or a hard line doctrine. It says, I do not want to approach the texts through the life, or through the vast archeo-critical deposits that have now accumulated over and around every Faulkner novel; it says I do not want to take a psycho-critical approach, trying to explain the texts in terms of the psychology of the author: it says I want to approach the texts directly, as acts of the imagination, realizing that between reality and fiction mysterious transformations take place which are largely the work of the imagination, and that only the fiction, the finished work of the imagination, can tell its own story.

This study of Faulkner’s novels is anything but critically naive. Very high powered and extremely sophisticated critical and interpretive ideas and methods have been used to read the novels and enable me to accomplish what I set out to do when I decided I would write a book on Faulkner and the novel. Anyone familiar with modern critical theory will immediately recognize the pervasive influence of some of the great voices that have spoken to us about literature in our time. Among the most prominent are Kenneth Burke, who is ubiquitous, in this book as in my mind. My passion for Burke is certainly equal to my passion for Faulkner.⁴ Northrop Frye, especially his Anatomy of Criticism, certainly one of the most powerful and coherent theories of literature developed by anyone in our time, is also everywhere at work in my reading of the novels because his theory of the imagination and the nature and function of its creations, certainly had much to do with my view of these matters. Two of Gaston Bachelard’s many wonderful books, The Psychoanalysis of Fire and The Poetics of Space taught me more than I can acknowledge about the ways of the imagination and the effects of what we read on our own imaginations—a central concern of this study of Faulkner’s novels. René Girard, especially in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure revolutionized the way in which I read novels. His book—still—is certainly one of the most stimulating on the novel that I ever read, and I simply transferred much of what he said about the great European novelists to my study of Faulkner and his major characters—especially what he said about models for the self and mediators, and destructive and generative being. From my own generation, J. Hillis Miller showed me the way better than anyone else, especially in his Poets of Reality, through all the wonderful work he did on the novel and through the different ways he showed us for reading the works of poets and novelists as whole, coherent visions. Finally, I took much Roland Barthes with me to my reading of Faulkner’s novels, especially what I learned from Critique et Vérité and Sur Racine. Both of these books tell us much about the coherence of the imaginative life and the interconnectedness of what it creates—whether in poetry, drama, or fiction.

Had I not read the books of these critics (and many others, of course, including the pioneering critics of Faulkner like Olga Vickery), I could not have written this one on Faulkner; so that, contrary to what I seem to suggest above in my remarks on puristic approaches, I certainly did not come to Faulkner and his novels empty headed. Single-mindedly, yes! You might say that I came loaded for bear or, more exactly, that I came loaded for The Bear (as Chapter 7 will show). A book should be read in the spirit in which it was written and should not be asked to do, or be faulted for not doing, what it never intended to do. There are many things that I have not done because they did not—or did not seem to—have anything to do with what I wanted to do. I have not dealt with any of Faulkner’s early work, though at one time I tried to, but abandoned it when it seemed clearly irrelevant to my purpose. I have not discussed Faulkner’s first two novels because I wanted to begin at that point in his career where his true genius as a novelist first discovered and expressed itself. At one point that seemed to be in Sartoris. But when Douglas Day edited the complete text of Flags in the Dust in 1973, it was obvious to any student of Faulkner that Flags in the Dust, not the heavily cut and edited Ben Wasson Sartoris, was the text with which one should begin. So, though I had written part of a chapter on Sartoris, I took it out and wrote a new one on Flags in the Dust when—somewhat embarrassed—I finally got around to reading it. I have not discussed any of Faulkner’s short stories, though I recently reread all of them because none seemed to add anything to what I was able to say in discussing the novels. Perhaps somewhat perversely, I have not used much of the life or the letters or the many interviews or the many interesting things Faulkner said about his own work because I wanted to approach the texts directly and let them, as much as possible, speak for themselves. Though I have read huge amounts of Faulkner criticism, I have used very little of it directly because I did not want to write a book in which I had to disprove one critic or another or in which I carried on long contentious arguments with them. They have had their say. I will have mine here. The world is large enough for all of us—especially the world of Faulknerian criticism.

So let me say here exactly what I was interested in and what I wanted to accomplish in following Faulkner’s development as a novelist from Flags in the Dust (1927) to The Reivers (1962), treating also as novels his three coherent gatherings of stories: The Unvanquished (1938), Go Down, Moses (1942), and Knight’s Gambit (1949), each of which, as was Faulkner’s practice, is organized around a family or a central self, or both. I began with the perception—the sure sense—that in Go Down, Moses and Ike McCaslin we had the turning point in Faulkner’s career and development, and that there was a clear before and after Go Down, Moses, with everything after being essentially different in some way from everything before. So I set out to write a book which would itself turn, as this one does, upon a long, detailed analysis of Go Down, Moses and Ike McCaslin as a special or privileged Faulknerian self. In general terms, I saw this turn in Faulkner as one that went from destructive to generative being, from tragedy to comedy, from pollution to purification and redemption (with many of the later works purifying and redeeming the earlier works, as in the case of Requiem for a Nun and Sanctuary).

My approach to Faulkner from the very beginning was an ontological one: I wanted to find out why there were so many destructive and destroyed beings—selves—in the novels before Go Down, Moses; what was different about Ike McCaslin that saved him from destruction and made him non-destructive (though not generative for others), and what the sources of generative being were in the selves with which Faulkner peopled his later novels (and sometimes inserted into the earlier, highly destructive novels—such as Dilsey, Lena Grove, Byron Bunch, Bayard Sartoris, Ratliff). My analyses of the novels were always organized around an analysis of the selves, usually to the exclusion of almost everything else. The most obvious example of this, and the clearest early model of how I proceed, is found in the analysis of Light in August in Chapter 3. I tried to develop a mode of analysis that would enable me to translate every major self into a set of values and then, using this as my basic approach, I tried to develop a condensed way of working out a basic reading of each novel. Since my critical mind is and has always been totally text centered, I go forward, from Flags in the Dust on, novel by novel, discrete whole unit by discrete whole unit, right on through to The Reivers. Not all the novels are treated equally, but all are analyzed and every major self in Faulkner’s novels is taken up and discussed in some way. It is through the analysis of all these selves that I arrive at the issues Faulkner took up and dealt with in his imaginative life. Some issues, such as nature and role of the family, he returned to again and again in his many great family novels: Flags in the Dust, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom!, The Hamlet, Go Down, Moses, The Town/Mansion pair, even A Fable. Some issues, such as the black-white one, and later, the extended black-white-red one, he returned to periodically until his imagination was done with them. His first serious novel on this subject or issue was Light in August (1932). He returned to it in Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Go Down, Moses (1942), Intruder in the Dust (1948), and Requiem for a Nun (1951).

So, though my focus throughout is upon the selves that Faulkner created, and the extent to which they are destructive or generative, destroyed or victimized, redemptive or redeemed, I have not proceeded from self to self, or thematically, by groups of novels, but novel by novel; invariably, as a result of this, I have much to say about the ways in which Faulkner constructed novels—about how he tended to center every novel around a major character, such as Joe Christmas or Sutpen or Ike McCaslin, how novel after novel conducted a searching action, a movement inward toward knowledge about that character and why each was the way he or she was (best exemplified in Absalom, Absalom!); how every novel used comedy as one of its voices in a kind of dialectic or dialogue Faulkner always conducted with himself in his imaginative life—and more, of course. Going novel by novel, I have tried to chart Faulkner’s imaginative development, to the almost total exclusion of any references to what was happening to him in his real everyday life, or, for the most part, to what was happening in history. To have attempted to correlate the fictional, personal, and historical, as others have done, would have required that I write a completely different kind of book. Faulkner was well aware of what was going on in his own time, not only in his own region, but also in his own country and the world at large. He refers to historical events constantly, even in a book apparently so remote from the present as Go Down, Moses. I do not question the importance and relevance of these correlations, but I was not the one to work them out, and it would be a mistake to go searching for them in a book that is so exclusively devoted to the internal evidence of Faulkner’s novels, treated, for the most part, as a total closed and unchanging set of verbal facts, beginning with Flags in the Dust and ending with The Reivers.

Except for the extended analysis and interpretation of Go Down, Moses in Chapter 8—my demonstration chapter, as it were, of what might be done with any major Faulkner novel—my treatment of many of the other novels is somewhat limited by a need to pursue my thesis. I feel this limitation most strongly and regrettably in the analysis of Absalom, Absalom!—surely Faulkner’s greatest, most complex, and most intricately narrated novel. There, I have clearly subordinated a full and adequate treatment of the novel—which would have to be a long and delicate operation—to my need to get said what I think needs to be said about Sutpen as one of the most heroic yet destructive selves in Faulkner. In doing this, I have squandered Quentin Compson and Rosa Coldfield, two of Faulkner’s great contradicted virgin selves. But in a book this long, as every writer on Faulkner knows, one must make choices, and I chose to center my book in the analysis of Go Down, Moses rather than Absalom, Absalom!. I feel this limitation, also, in my treatment of Faulkner’s late, great, and much misunderstood A Fable. Every new reading of that novel confirms its complexity and greatness and the hermeneutic difficulties confronting anyone trying to understand this novel and its place in Faulkner’s overall development. The fable of A Fable is not easy to come by, nor is an understanding of the enormous narrative and stylistic complexity of the novel and Faulkner’s decision, for the first and only time in his novelistic life, to use foreign material.

And finally, I suppose, I can be faulted for my somewhat oversimplified and abbreviated treatment of The Town and The Mansion, Faulkner’s two great works of social comedy where, near the end of his career, he returns to its beginnings, and gets rid of the monster he introduced into Yoknapatawpha County even as he was conceiving it in the late 1920s. Of course, he does considerably more than that in these two novels through some of his most generative (and generous) selves: Gavin Stevens, Ratliff, Chick Mallison, Eula Snopes and Linda Snopes. Again, I plead the need to make the overall thesis of the book clear in a concise way, and to indicate, if rather briefly, how far away Faulkner was in his imaginative life in those novels from where he was when he conceived and wrote The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August and Absalom, Absalom!. It is probably less a diminishment of power than a change in perspective from tragic to comic that we would need to deal with here. I have identified the change without trying to deal with it in a detailed way. Perhaps, like many critics, I was more compelled by what destroys individuals than by what might help us purge and redeem our community.

There is not much point, really, in apologizing for these limitations too profusely. I might have done what Cleanth Brooks did, realizing, as he surely did, that one book on Faulkner would never do it: he wrote two more. I am not sure I would have the strength or will power or even the desire to do that. This one has taken me long enough and I have probably managed to say in it most of what I have to say about Faulkner that is of any value. At least I am certain that I have accomplished what I set out to, and it is, after all, the whole book and the overall view that one is really interested in; and it is primarily this, rather than the reading of any single novel, that one wants to add to the now huge corpus of Faulkner criticism and interpretation. Faulknerians reading this book will immediately recognize what it adds to their knowledge of individual novels and to their reading of Faulkner as a whole. Take Warwick Wadlington’s Reading Faulknerian Tragedy, for example. Once you get past his somewhat cumbersome terminology about voice and performance and get used to his rather tough prose style and get to his early demonstration readings of The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, you realize immediately, with a rush of gratitude, that he has seen something in, or brought something to the reading of Faulkner that you have not encountered before, and that his book will enable you to rethink, not just the novels he discusses so brilliantly in detail, in terms of his thesis, but all the novels, even minor ones like The Unvanquished.

That is always what one hopes for in writing a long book like this one. Beyond this, as in the work of J. Hillis Miller, one would, ideally, like to add not just a reading of—say Dickens or the novels Miller takes up in Fiction and Repetition—but a way of reading novels. In my case, I would like to add an ontological approach to one’s way of reading novels, and in my long demonstration chapter on Go Down, Moses, I would like to confirm my belief that great novels should be read as carefully and as seriously as possible so that we might explore, through them, the imaginative realities only genius makes available to us. These are always extra-aesthetic realities and to explore them in the detailed way I have in Chapter 8 is not a matter of self indulgence—though I certainly did enjoy myself while writing that chapter—but of admiration. I have sometimes been accused of indulging in hagiography in my writing about different writers, but I do not see anything wrong with that. It seems like an appropriate response when you are awestruck by what you read—as I am when I read Faulkner, or Whitman, or Merwin. We must love the way words are used by such writers before we can understand and appreciate them.

This book has been a work of love from beginning to end. I make no apologies for its length. In fact, I wish it were longer so that I could have done some things more adequately. But everything has its limits, including the patience of readers, even that of the most devoted Faulknerian. Of all the writing that I have done, this is the one from which I learned the most and the one that most completely confirmed me in my belief that one is never done with a great writer—or text—until one has written about him, her, or it. This means, of course, that we are never done with most of the great writers we read even if we are teachers. I taught Faulkner for years and worked out much of this book in embryonic form in the classroom with my students. The difference between where I was in my head and in my knowledge of Faulkner before I began the book and after I finished it can hardly be calculated. Writing the book was one long, exciting act of discovery. I can never have such an experience of Faulkner again, which is kind of sad, but then, that is the paradoxical pleasure of writing any book like this one. We lay the author to rest, not in a coffin or graveyard, but on our study shelf. We lay the way in which his works (words) have compelled us to rest in the sense that, having been compelled, we are coerced into writing about these works in what really amounts to an act of devotion. It is a pleasant-painful coercion; passion fuels it and, like Faulkner searching out the meaning of Joe Christmas or Thomas Sutpen or Ike McCaslin, we are driven forward, novel by novel, until we have searched out each novel and its characters and are satisfied that we understand more than we did when we began. We have laid the turbulence with which we began to rest (and can’t rest until we have done this) and at the end of the long hermeneutic journey, from Flags in the Dust to The Reivers, all passion spent, we can look back with pleasure upon the almost unbearable intensity and excitement of the journey itself.

But we know it is over. Faulkner is all back on the shelves, in his proper order, your thousands of pages of notes are all put away; you know that there is always more you could have done with Faulkner’s novels but you also know that you are finished with Faulkner, that you will never have to do him again, that you never will do him again. His novels are as alive and magical as ever. You could pick any one of them off the shelf and read it again with great pleasure—some for the tenth, the fifteenth time, the umpteenth time—and you might even wish that you had done it differently or more adequately in the book. But you never will. You might do it differently in your head, but the book is finished, set; how could it ever be other than it is. It is just the way you wanted it to be, even though perfection is not possible in this world, or any other, for that matter. It is what you could do with what you had in your head, at that point in time, in those places. It is how you saw Faulkner. It is how you will always see Faulkner. Had you wanted Faulkner to stay fluid in your mind, you should never have written this long book about him.

But you did. And here it is, for worse or better, one long systematic celebration of this great American genius and the truly wondrous creations of his imagination.

Take heart from the following:

A basic contention of this [book] is that great writers apprehend intuitively and concretely, through the medium of their art, if not formally, the system in which they were first imprisoned together with their contemporaries. Literary interpretation must be systematic because it is the continuation of literature. It should formalize implicit or already half explicit systems. To maintain that criticism will never be systematic is to maintain that it will never be real knowledge. The value of critical thought depends not on how cleverly it manages to disguise its own systematic nature or how many fundamental issues it manages to shirk or to dissolve but on how much literary substance it really embraces, comprehends, and makes articulate. The goal may be too ambitious but it is not outside the scope of literary criticism. Failure to reach it should be condemned but not the attempt. (René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel , 3)

Abbreviations

AA Absalom, Absalom!

ALD As I Lay Dying

F A Fable

FD Flags in the Dust

GDM Go Down, Moses

H The Hamlet

ID Intruder in the Dust

KG Knight’s Gambit

LA Light in August

MA The Mansion

MO Mosquitoes

P Pylon

R The Reivers

RN Requiem for a Nun

SA Sartoris

SF The Sound and the Fury

SN Sanctuary

SP Soldier’s Pay

T The Town

UV The Unvanquished

WP The Wild Palms

I 1927–1932

1 Faulkner Discovers His Native Territory

Flags in the Dust (1926-1927; published 1973)

Faulkner was certainly much more correct in his response to Flags in the Dust than were the many editors who rejected his third novel. He knew what he had discovered, even if they had not, and, retrospectively, we now realize just how right he was. What he had discovered was what he was destined to create: Yoknapatawpha and its people; or, as he so nicely labeled it, his own little postage stamp of native soil—the territory his imagination would create, create in, and be nourished by all the rest of his life. In addition, he also discovered the narrative mode and novelistic structure that were to characterize all the rest of his novels. Flags in the Dust, for example, develops (unfolds) by shifting from one character to another throughout the novel until the story Faulkner wishes to tell about all those characters is finished. The principal characters whose stories Faulkner tells here are old Bayard, Simon, Aunt Jenny, Narcissa, Belle, young Bayard, Byron Snopes, and Horace Benbow. Along the way, and usually through these or other characters, other stories are told, chiefly those of Colonel John Sartoris (old Bayard’s father, Aunt Jenny’s brother), young John Sartoris (young Bayard’s twin), the Snopes, the MacCallums, young Bayard’s first wife and child, the Negro couple young Bayard stays with after old Bayard dies of a heart attack during the last of his car accidents, old Will Falls, and Dr. Peabody. In telling these multiple individual stories by means of the technical device of interweaving (so common to Romances), Faulkner tells an overall story.

This is the way, for example, that The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom! are narrated. The overall story is full of violent contrasts between characters (here, for example, Horace Benbow and young Bayard, the old and the young, Narcissa and Belle) and similarities that are not always immediately obvious—here for example, all those who may be described, at the end, by applying the title to them. Flags in the dust is an image of defeat, of the flags carried into battle that have fallen into the dust because those who carried them were killed or wounded, or because the flags were taken down and thrown in the dust and others raised in victory in their place. Those who are defeated in this novel are Colonel John Sartoris, his brother Bayard, old Bayard’s son (John), young Bayard’s twin (John), young Bayard himself, old Bayard, Simon, Byron Snopes, and, in a very different way, poor futile helpless Horace Benbow and Harry Mitchell. Only the women survive and triumph in this novel, and there are only a few of them: Aunt Jenny, who survives all of the Sartoris males except Benbow Sartoris, the last; Narcissa, who manages to survive her doomed, guilt-ridden, destructive husband; and Belle, who survives in her narcotic sensuality.

When Ben Wasson cut this novel and made it into Sartoris, he really destroyed Faulkner’s original intent and masked the true nature of Faulkner’s genius, which, among other things, was for great narrative originality (as we see in The Sound and the Fury, which Faulkner was writing even as Wasson was cutting Flags in the Dust) and plenitude. It was often Faulkner’s habit to let his characters tell their own stories (or, as he said, to listen to what they were telling him and write it down as fast as he could) or, in a variation of this, to let his characters tell someone else’s story (as in Absalom, Absalom!) or, in still another variation, to let his characters tell their own story as well as someone else’s (as in The Sound and the Fury where the brothers tell Caddy’s story; or, as in As I Lay Dying, where the Bundrens and others tell their own and Addie’s story). Every telling, then, is biased by the nature of the character telling the story (his/her own, or someone else’s) or by the limited third-person point of view Faulkner often uses, and there is always more than one narrative going on at a time.

Reading Flags in the Dust long after one has read all the rest of Faulkner, which is what I did, provides one with a real revelation into how suddenly Faulkner discovered what he was to be about the rest of his life as a novelist. As Douglas Day points out, almost everything that was to concern Faulkner later is in Flags in the Dust—except the Indians. (FD x) Though it is not yet named here, Yoknapatawpha County as Faulkner was to draw it for us in 1936 is all here, as are the different kinds of characters he was to people it with. There are the Snopes, the country folk, such as the MacCallums and Suratt (later, Ratliff); there are the blacks, both comical, semi-comical, and serious (as in the Negro family Bayard stays with over Christmas); there are the old Folks (Aunt Jenny, old Bayard, old Will Falls, Dr. Peabody), treated both comically and seriously; there is the great southern family (the Sartorises); there is the Civil War, there are the obsessed (Byron Snopes and young Bayard); the doomed and destructive (the Sartoris twins); the tormented (young Bayard); there are the finely drawn women, who survive; there are the educated and useless (Horace Benbow, Faulkner’s first lawyer, later made more useful and somewhat less foolish in Gavin Stevens); there is the grand conception of the place (both Jefferson and the surrounding country); there is the land and the hunting; there are the new machines (the cars here, and later the planes) that destroy; there is Dr. Peabody; there is the obsession with the past, especially the Civil War; there is the family that tends to run out in the male line (we never do hear much of Benbow Sartoris later on); there is Frenchman’s Bend and Will Varner and the abjectness of both the poor whites and blacks; there is Flem Snopes, who was to preoccupy Faulkner for many years after he first conceived him; there is the interest in incest (Narcissa and Horace); the corruption of sensuality (Belle and Horace); the self lost in words and futile idealism (Horace); the violation of ontological virginity (the intrusion of young Bayard into Narcissa’s life); and of course there was the interest in violence and victimization, present in Faulkner’s novels from his very first one on; and more, much more. A definitive catalogue is neither necessary nor useful.

But also of equal importance with the discovery of this native territory and its inhabitants (with many more to be added in the novels that followed) was Faulkner’s discovery of how to deal with, how to present, this material and the rich teaming life that his extraordinary imagination was creating. Writing Flags in the Dust certainly made the writing of The Sound and the Fury possible. I mean by this that Faulkner discovered in Flags in the Dust how to put a whole complex and diverse novel together by locating his narrative centers in a series of characters. Carried to an extreme, this produces the inside narrations (the tours de force) of The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Absalom, Absalom!; and the multi-stranded narrative structure of Light in August where we go from Lena to Byron to Hightower to Joe Christmas to Joanna Burden to Hines (and others), over and over again, as the novel progresses, carrying each strand of the overall narrative up to a certain point, dropping it, switching to another, carrying it forward (or backward, as in Joe Christmas’s and Hightower’s case), and so forth on through to the end of the novel where Lena and Byron join up in the conjunction of strands that completes the story, ending this tragic tale of violence and destruction, as it began, with gentle comedy.

In Flags in the Dust these narrative centers are, in the order in which we first encounter them:

1. Old Bayard and old man Falls, and through the two of them, Colonel John Sartoris. Old Bayard is returned to and followed through the events that occur in the present, from the return of young Bayard from the war, to his death in Bayard’s car in 1919. Old Man Falls returns occasionally during the course of the novel, usually for comic scenes, but is never a major narrative center.

2. Simon, and through Simon, other blacks such as Elnora, Isom, and Caspey. Simon is always treated comically when he is returned to, and is followed to his death near the end of the novel when he is killed for his foolish old man’s philandering. Like his white counterpart, old Bayard, Simon is seen in a variety of relationships to other Sartorises and other blacks.

3. Aunt Jenny, who is the oldest Sartoris in the novel, and is one of only three significant women in the novel. Like old Bayard, she is returned to often and followed right through to the end of the novel, where she visits the graves of all the dead Sartoris males; to the very last page, in fact, where she comments ironically on the future of the last male Sartoris. She functions as one of the main narrative centers of the novel.

4. Narcissa Benbow, who is the first of the developing characters. Old Bayard and Aunt Jenny are static and are simply portrayed in the course of the novel. Narcissa actually develops and changes and is put into three very complex relationships: with her brother Horace, with Bayard, whom she marries, and with Byron