The Essential Faulkner (3 page)

“Now I want you to tell me just one thing more,” Shreve McCannon says after hearing the story. “Why do you hate the South?”—“I dont hate it,” Quentin says quickly, at once. “I dont hate it,” he repeats, apparently speaking for the author as well as himself.
I dont hate it
, he thinks, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark;
I dont. I dont hate it! I dont hate it!

The reader cannot help wondering why this somber and, at moments, plainly incredible story had so seized upon Quentin’s mind that he trembled with excitement when telling it, and why Shreve McCannon felt that it revealed the essence of the Deep South. It seems to belong in the realm of Gothic romance, with Sutpen’s Hundred taking the place of a haunted castle on the Rhine, with Colonel Sutpen as Faust and Charles Bon as Manfred. Then slowly it dawns on you that most of the characters and incidents have a double meaning; that besides their place in the story they also serve as symbols or metaphors with a general application. Sutpen’s great design, the land he stole from the Indians, the French architect who built his mansion with the help of wild Negroes from the jungle, the woman of mixed blood whom he married and disowned, the unacknowledged son who ruined him, the poor white whom he wronged and who killed him in anger,
and the final destruction of the mansion like the downfall of a social order: all these might belong to a tragic fable of Southern history. With a little cleverness, the whole novel might be explained as a connected and logical allegory, but this, I think, would be going far beyond the author’s intention. First of all he was writing a story, and one that affected him deeply, but he was also brooding over a social situation. More or less unconsciously, the incidents in the story came to represent the forces and elements in the social situation, since the mind naturally works in terms of symbols and parallels. In Faulkner’s case, this form of parallelism is not confined to
Absalom, Absalom!
It can be found in the whole fictional framework that he has been elaborating in novel after novel, until his work has become a myth or legend of the South.

I call it a legend because it is obviously no more intended as a historical account of the country south of the Ohio than
The Scarlet Letter
was intended as a history of Massachusetts or
Paradise Lost
as a factual account of the Fall. Briefly stated, the legend might run something like this: The Deep South was ruled by planters some of whom were aristocrats like the Sartoris clan, while others were new men like Colonel Sutpen. Both types were determined to establish a lasting social order on the land they had seized from the Indians (that is, to leave sons behind them). They had the virtue of living single-mindedly by a fixed code; but there was also an inherent guilt in their “design,” their way of life; it was slavery that put a curse on the land and brought about the Civil War. [I must add one remark in deference to an argument of Cleanth Brooks’, in his very useful work
William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country
(1963). Although Sutpen had more than his share of the guilt, he never pretended to follow the code of conduct that in some measure atoned for it. Temperamentally he was less of a Southerner than a Northern robber baron out of his time and
place; or he might even stand for the blindly ambitious man of all ages. To the other planters, he was always an alien. Quentin Compson, their descendant, regarded him as “trash, originless”—so Faulkner told me in a letter—but Quentin also grieved the fact that a man like Sutpen “could not only have dreamed so high but have had the force and strength to have failed so grandly.” Thus, it was not at all in his character, but rather in his fate, that Sutpen became emblematic of the South.]

After the War was lost, partly as a result of the Southerners’ mad heroism (for who else but men as brave as Jackson and Stuart could have frightened the Yankees into standing together and fighting back?) the planters tried to restore their “design” by other methods. But they no longer had the strength to achieve more than a partial success, even after they had freed their land from the carpetbaggers who followed the Northern armies. As time passed, moreover, the men of the old order found that they had Southern enemies too; they had to fight against a new exploiting class descended from the landless whites of slavery days. In this struggle between the clan of Sartoris and the unscrupulous tribe of Snopes, the Sartorises were defeated in advance by a traditional code that kept them from using the weapons of the enemy. As a price of victory, however, the Snopeses had to serve the mechanized civilization of the North, which was morally impotent in itself, but which, with the aid of its Southern retainers, ended by corrupting the Southern nation.

Faulkner’s novels of contemporary Southern life—especially those written before 1945—continue the legend into a period that he regards as one of moral confusion and social decay. He is continually seeking in them for violent images to convey his sense of outrage.
Sanctuary
is the most violent of all his novels; it has been the most popular and is by no means the least important (in spite of Faulkner’s comment that it was “a cheap idea … deliberately conceived to make money”). The story of Popeye and
Temple Drake has more meaning than appears on a first hasty reading—the only reading that early critics were willing to grant it. Popeye himself is one of several characters in Faulkner’s novels who represent the mechanical civilization that has invaded and conquered the South. He is always described in mechanical terms: his eyes “looked like rubber knobs”; his face “just went awry, like the face of a wax doll set too near a hot fire and forgotten”; his tight suit and stiff hat were “all angles, like a modernistic lampshade”; and in general he had “that vicious depthless quality of stamped tin.” Popeye was the son of a professional strikebreaker, from whom he had inherited syphilis; he was the grandson of a pyromaniac, and he had spent most of his childhood in an institution. He was the man “who made money and had nothing he could do with it, spend it for, since he knew that alcohol would kill him like poison, who had no friends and had never known a woman”—in other words, he was a compendium of all the hateful qualities that Faulkner assigns to finance capitalism.
Sanctuary
is not a connected allegory, as George Marion O’Donnell condemned it for being
⁴
—he was the first critic to approach it seriously—but neither is it a mere accumulation of pointless horrors. It is an example of the Freudian method turned backward, being full of sexual nightmares that are in reality social symbols. It is somehow connected in the author’s mind with what he regards as the rape and corruption of the South.

In his novels dealing with the present—I am speaking of those written before 1945—Faulkner makes it clear that the descendants of the old ruling caste have the wish but not the courage or the strength to prevent this new disaster. They are defeated by Popeye (like Horace Benbow), or they run away from him (like Gowan Stevens,
who had been to college at Virginia and learned how to drink like a gentleman, but not to fight for his principles), or they are robbed and replaced in their positions of influence by the Snopeses (like old Bayard Sartoris, the president of the bank), or they drug themselves with eloquence and alcohol (like Quentin Compson’s father), or they retire into the illusion of being inviolable Southern ladies (like Mrs. Compson, who says, “It can’t be simply to flout and hurt me. Whoever God is, He would not permit that. I’m a lady.”), or they dwell so much on the past that they are incapable of facing the present (like Reverend Hightower of
Light in August
), or they run from danger to danger (like young Bayard Sartoris) frantically seeking their own destruction. Faulkner’s novels are full of well-meaning and even admirable persons, not only the grandsons of the cotton aristocracy, but also pine-hill farmers and storekeepers and sewing-machine agents and Negro cooks and sharecroppers; but they are almost all of them defeated by circumstances and they carry with them a sense of their own doom.

They also carry, whether heroes or villains, a curious sense of submission to their fate. “There is not one of Faulkner’s characters,” says André Gide in his dialogue on “The New American Novelists,” “who properly speaking has a soul”; and I think he means that not one of them, in the early novels, exercises the faculty of conscious choice between good and evil. They are haunted, obsessed, driven forward by some inner necessity. Like Miss Rosa Coldfield in
Absalom, Absalom!
they exist in “that dream state in which you run without moving from a terror in which you cannot believe, toward a safety in which you have no faith.” Or, like the slaves freed by General Sherman’s army, in
The Unvanquished
, they blindly follow the road toward any river, believing that it will be their Jordan:

They were singing, walking along the road singing, not even looking to either side. The dust didn’t even settle for
two days, because all that night they still passed; we sat up listening to them and the next morning every few yards along the road would be the old ones who couldn’t keep up any more, sitting or lying down and even crawling along, calling to the others to help them; and the others—the young ones—not stopping, not even looking at them. “Going to Jordan,” they told me. “Going to cross Jordan.”

Most of Faulkner’s characters, black and white, are a little like that. They dig for gold frenziedly after they have lost their hope of finding it (like Henry Armstid in
The Hamlet
and Lucas Beauchamp in
Go Down, Moses
); or they battle against and survive a Mississippi flood for the one privilege of returning to the state prison farm (like the tall convict in “Old Man”); or, a whole family together, they carry a body through flood and fire and corruption to bury it in the cemetery at Jefferson (like the Bundrens in
As I Lay Dying
); or they tramp the roads week after week in search of men who had promised but never intended to marry them (like Lena Grove, the pregnant woman of
Light in August
); or, pursued by a mob, they turn at the end to meet and accept death (like Joe Christmas in the same novel). Even when they seem to be guided by a conscious purpose, like Colonel Sutpen, it is not something they have chosen by an act of will, but something that has taken possession of them: Sutpen’s great design was “not what he wanted to do but what he just had to do, had to do it whether he wanted to or not, because if he did not do it he knew that he could never live with himself for the rest of his life.” In the same way, Faulkner himself writes, not what he wants to, but what he just has to write whether he wants to or not.

It had better be admitted that almost all his novels have some obvious weakness in structure. Some of them combine two or more themes having little relation to each
other, as
Light in August
does, while others, like
The Hamlet
, tend to resolve themselves into a series of episodes resembling beads on a string. In
The Sound and the Fury
, which is superb as a whole, we can’t be sure that the four sections of the novel are presented in the most effective order; at any rate, we can’t fully understand the first section until we have read the three that follow.
Absalom, Absalom!
though at first it strikes us as being pitched in too high a key, is structurally the soundest of all the novels in the Yoknapatawpha series—and it gains power in retrospect; but even here the author’s attention seems to shift from the principal theme of Colonel Sutpen’s design to the secondary theme of incest and miscegenation.

Faulkner seems best to me, and most nearly himself, either in long stories like “The Bear,” in
Go Down, Moses
, and “Old Man,” which was published as half of
The Wild Palms
, and “Spotted Horses,” which was first printed separately, then greatly expanded and fitted into the loose framework of
The Hamlet
—all three stories are included in this volume; or else in the Yoknapatawpha saga as a whole. That is, he has been most effective in dealing with the total situation always present in his mind as a pattern of the South, or else in shorter units which, though often subject to inspired revision, have still been shaped by a single conception. It is by his best that we should judge him, as every other author; and Faulkner at his best—even sometimes at his worst—has a power, a richness of life, an intensity to be found in no other American writer of our time. He has—once again I am quoting from Henry James’s essay on Hawthorne—“the element of simple genius, the quality of imagination.”

Moreover, he has a brooding love for the land where he was born and reared and where, unlike other writers of his generation, he has chosen to spend his life. It is “… this land, this South, for which God has done so much, with woods for game and streams for fish and deep
rich soil for seed and lush springs to sprout it and long summers to mature it and serene falls to harvest it and short mild winters for men and animals.” So far as Faulkner’s country includes the Delta, it is also (in the words of old Ike McCaslin)

 … this land which man has deswamped and denuded and derivered in two generations so that white men can own plantations and commute every night to Memphis and black men own plantations and ride in jimcrow cars to Chicago and live in millionaires’ mansions on Lake Shore Drive, where white men rent farms and live like niggers and niggers crop on shares and live like animals, where cotton is planted and grows man-tall in the very cracks of the sidewalks, and usury and mortgage and bankruptcy and measureless wealth, Chinese and African and Aryan and Jew, all breed and spawn together.

Here are the two sides of Faulkner’s feeling for the South: on the one side, an admiring and possessive love; on the other, a compulsive fear lest what he loves should be destroyed by the ignorance of its native serfs and the greed of traders and absentee landlords.

No other American writer takes such delight in the weather. He speaks in various novels of “the hot still pine-winey silence of the August afternoon”; of “the moonless September dust, the trees along the road not rising soaring as trees should but squatting like huge fowl”; of “the tranquil sunset of October mazy with windless wood-smoke”; of the “slow drizzle of November rain just above the ice point”; of “those windless Mississippi December days which are a sort of Indian summer’s Indian summer”; of January and February when there is “no movement anywhere save the low constant smoke … and no sound save the chopping of axes and the lonely whistle of the daily trains.” Spring in Faulkner’s country is a hurried season, “all coming at once, pell mell and disordered, fruit and bloom and leaf, pied meadow and blossoming wood and the long fields shearing dark out of winter’s slumber,
to the shearing plow.” Summer is dust-choked and blazing, and it lasts far into what should be autumn. “That’s the one trouble with this country,” he says in
As I Lay Dying
. “Everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.”