(1958)
In his novel L’Adultera, Theodor Fontane introduces young Ebenezer Rubehn, who will go on to destroy the marriage of Melanie van der Straaten, with the remark: “There is an American self-confidence about him.”1 The significant undertone this description carries to the reader of today can hardly have been intended by the author in the year 1882: what we hear is something more than the carefree brazenness and self-assurance of the visitor from the New World; we have a sense of the encroaching inevitability and destiny that “Americanness” has taken on for us. The future that has already begun there confronts us with the presumption of being our future, too. “America lives as we shall live tomorrow” (Thielicke)2—that is the unanimous tenor of our emissaries returning from beyond the Atlantic, that is the formula of the fascination which attracts all those to America who believe they have a part to play in our future. How the New World, terra nova, Europe’s colony, became the “new world,” the real utopia, the model for our future, would make one of the most important chapters in a history of contemporary European consciousness. May the individual, depending on his particular valuations, perceive more enticing or more threatening aspects—this difference only confirms the underlying sense of imminence and necessity that images of America evoke within us. Europe has yet to catch up on the inevitable, it is trailing behind in its politics, economy, technology, science, and way of life, which is to say, in the required course of history as a whole. It is in this mythical Americanism that the Old World’s mixture of love and hatred for the New World is founded. The imaginations tied to the name of America are elements of a destiny [fatum], they are the future [das Kommende], just as Ebenezer Rubehn is the “man of the future” [der kommende Mann] in Fontane’s novel. This mythical immensity stands in the way of our recognizing that America too has a history, whereas a rather more familiar idea is that it is the burden of our history and tradition that has left us “trailing behind” America. In this mythical force field, overcome by the very image of desires both splendid and fearsome, the European gaze is blind to the ethical and religious substratum of American history, indeed to its yet unfulfilled decisions. The manner in which the epic oeuvre of William Faulkner3 is read and understood by us is but a paradigm for such an obscured view of the freedom underlying history. Is his prose not full of descriptions of overwhelming and intractable fates, entangled and impenetrable, which make it all but inevitable to conclude freedom’s meaninglessness from its futility? Is this America of Faulkner not altogether of the mythical kind, of the stuff of fate?
The destinies of Faulkner’s characters are tightly interwoven with the primal stirrings from which the American world emerges, with the cosmogony of the continent. But the national glory of the pioneer generations conceals the guilt inherent in their foundational achievements: taking land and carving out property, establishing legislation and ordering society. As they advanced the frontiers of the human realm with tools and guns, with trains and sawmills, the wilderness—mythically embodied in the ruler figure of the old bear—was condemned to death; the free land was put up for purchase and the native reduced to a walk-on part in a sham trade, which laid a deceptive foundation of legitimacy. To master the oft-invoked “unlimited possibilities,”4 they made everything capable of being put to service, realized, accounted. The reverse of the great founding deeds is the suffering of the innocent. Tragic, irredeemable debts were incurred, and Faulkner’s basic idea is that they inevitably come due. Nobody can disclaim this inheritance to avoid the concomitant liabilities, but only few have the courage to assume the debt, to honor and repay it. Faulkner loves the figure of the boy who is the first to see and take on the burden of his fathers, who goes into the wilderness leaving his shotgun behind and ultimately sheds his watch and compass, too—the symbols of occupation by humans—in order once more to feel pure with regard to enslaved nature (“The Bear,” 1942); the boy who is the first to break the blood-law of the mythic world (The Unvanquished, 1938); the boy who stands up in defense of the wrongly accused black man and fearlessly obtains the proof that saves him (Intruder in the Dust, 1948). As long, however, as the inherited debt is not recognized and assumed, it transforms itself into inexorable fate, the nemesis of immanent human self-destruction. It takes neither the fire from heaven nor the earth to open, only man himself, to fell man. “No wonder the ruined woods I used to know don’t cry for retribution! he thought: The people who have destroyed it will accomplish its revenge” (Go Down, Moses, 1942).5 Thomas Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom! (1936), a Faust of Faulkner’s creation, in a frenzy of force wrests his plantation from nature, raises up a colossal building as a mark of his hubris, confronts nothingness as if to measure himself against the creatio ex nihilo [creation from nothingness]—but at the end, once again stands nothingness, not irrupted from outside, but burst forth from the innermost being of man himself.
It is from this perspective that Faulkner views the history of his country, the tragic rupture between North and South, supposedly mended in 1865, seeing above all the burning relevance of the “Negro problem,” which forms the basso ostinato of all his novels. It is not true, as it is claimed again and again, that Faulkner’s America is only that of the South, only a partial, not to say provincial, aspect of this many-faced continent. On the contrary, the central event of the Civil War, which secured the Union politically, to Faulkner is also the historical act by which moral integration was founded. This was accomplished by the Union of the North forcing upon the Confederacy of the South the political solution to a problem that could be resolved only in the realm of the human and the ethical, and in doing so accepted shared responsibility for its unredeemed continuation. This idea underlies Faulkner’s much misunderstood position on the Negro problem, his objection to the juridical formalism by which the central authority tries to discharge its historically assumed responsibility. In Intruder in the Dust, this is expressed in what is an almost too theoretical clarity in the little lecture that the uncle delivers to the young hero after the rescue of the black man accused of murder:
I’m defending Lucas Beauchamp. I’m defending Sambo from the North and East and West—the outlanders who will fling him decades back not merely into injustice but into grief and agony and violence too by forcing on us the idea that man’s injustice to man can be abolished overnight by police. Sambo will suffer it of course.… [H]e will even beat us there because he has the capacity to endure and survive but he will be thrown back decades and what he survives may not be worth having because by that time divided we may have lost America.… I only say that the injustice is ours, the South’s. We must expiate and abolish it ourselves, alone and without help nor even (with thanks) advice.… Some things you must never stop refusing to bear.… Not for kudos and not for cash; your picture in the paper nor money in the bank either. Just to refuse to bear them. That it?6
There is a story of Faulkner’s that allows the structure of his works to be seen as if in a model. “Dry September” is set in Faulkner’s typical milieu of a small town in the American South. After two rainless months, an unbearable atmosphere weighs on the people. Pent-up rancor and leaden swelter form a fatefully combustible amalgam. An old maid’s sexual jitters provide the spark, and a fatal rumor spreads like a fire in dry grass, “Something about Miss Minnie Cooper and a Negro.” Nobody knows anything specific. Amid the close atmosphere, a suspicion condenses “in the vitiated air”;7 from a barbershop, a silent yet hasty band sets out to deliver justice, without any grounding in reality. “Facts, hell! … Happen? What the hell difference does it make?”8 Ultimately, the death of an innocent man is the only “fact.” The world in which this happens and can happen is a thoroughly deterministic one. Human beings are only the tools of an all-encompassing mechanical operation. It is a mythical event, pure fate, evil without evil men. Humans are particles of a natural process.
Only one man is at hand to say the most improbable thing: “I cant let—.”9 Not an exceptional man, destined to offer resistance, no, “a man of middle age; a thin, sand-colored man with a mild face.”10 (Physiognomic remarks are rare accents in Faulkner.) This slight barber forces his way into the gang of men gone to get the black man and drag him out into the night, and it is him of all people whom the victim, putting up a ferocious fight, strikes in the face—and then he, too, joins in the beating of the bound man. Thus, only the victim remains free of guilt. For a moment, the anonymous frenzy has possessed itself of the barber, too. He too gets into the car that leaves for the execution. But then he comes to his senses. He throws himself out of the speeding car and returns, battered and resigned, to the town. The black man vanishes without a trace in the bottomless pits of an abandoned brick kiln. For a day, aging Minnie Cooper relished being the focus of a macabre curiosity. The men return to their petty bourgeois houses, where nobody can imagine them dealing with anything but realities. The waves of the quotidian wash over a death as if nothing had happened. Nothing has happened. Nothing can have happened.
All of Faulkner is contained in this novella: the implacable density of a sphere of mythic predicament, the way outward aggression cannot be distinguished from an inner ascendancy of fate, the role of the sexual impulse as the motor of catastrophe, and finally, the singularity and solitude of freedom in the tangle of deterministic processes. Faulkner’s black characters stand in the midst of events like silent catalysts; once brought from beyond the seas by their masters for mute service, they have now entirely and in every sense become a “question” that is to be endured and answered, and be it with the futility of a mere “I cant let—.” Thus, without pathos does Faulkner’s America express itself, as the imperiled spark, as the effort, onerous to itself, to stem the tide. Faulkner’s entire epic might, however, seem directed at forestalling the conclusion that the futility of this ethos should spell its senselessness and insignificance.
From the novel The Sound and the Fury, published in 1929, to A Fable, which appeared in 1954, Faulkner’s oeuvre, its formal variety notwithstanding, is remarkably unified in its radical themes. The 1929 novel describes a family falling apart. Three Compson sons bear witness, as it were, on the reader’s behalf. But they do not narrate; instead, the reader, as with James Joyce, whose Ulysses appeared in 1922, enters into the witnesses’ stream of consciousness. This gives the reader access to something akin to a record of their inner experience, the way experience and remembrance are interwoven. It is thus with dismay that the reader perceives, after a few pages, that the “I” which unfolds before him resembles a mirror into which a stone has been thrown: the hundredfold splintering describes the dissolution of epic reality into atoms, admitting only of tentative and conjectural recombinations on the reader’s part. It is as though the warp of time had been torn and the experiences strung upon it jumbled about. Seen through the inner world of a madman as a medium, the Compsons’ son Ben, the disintegration of the family appears disintegrated in turn. The reader has no choice but to leave incomprehensible ciphers of horrific events standing. Any meaningful reading seeking to make sense of it must, upon the book’s conclusion, return to its first part—what then takes place is a true miracle of the recreation of what seemed irreparably shattered, not just through the knowledge of actual events and the meaning of ciphers gained in the meantime, but through a deeper understanding of the figure of poor Ben, which upon first reading seems to present little more than an irritating technical complication in which the author may indeed fashionably have intended to outdo Joyce.
The second part takes us back to 1918, back by eighteen years, to the last day in the life of Quentin Compson, whose suicide in the evening of that day will put an end to all the hopes the family had placed in this heir. Quentin is broken by the fate of his all too beloved sister Caddy who, on account of a child she is expecting, is forced to marry a man to whom she is indifferent and is banished from the family. With cold rigor, the Compsons cleave to their code of honor, which has long lost its foundation in reality. How the Compsons are faring today (1928) emerges from the cynical frankness of the third witness, Jason Compson. Jason is a specimen of the perfect arranger of human affairs; with a speculator’s quick wits he stands in the way of disaster. Again and again, his illusions confront the erratic reality of his mad brother, Ben. But he is dealt the final blow by the fate of the seventeen-year-old girl Quentin, banished Caddy’s now grown-up daughter, raised by the Comptons. This last chance of the family, at least, Jason believes to be “in his hands.” But Quentin, cursed with her mother’s sensuality, throws herself away at an itinerant musician. Grotesquely tilting at the void, Jason chases after the runaway, not to save anything human, but because he knows that this is where his resistance to fate will be determined. On Easter morning, 1928, everything is at an end, as the law of tragedy demands. What is left to happen? Why does Faulkner not conclude the story here?
In the fourth part, Faulkner changes his descriptive technique and returns to the conventional narrative perspective, which sees figures and events “from outside.” Only in demonstrating the significance of this change of style is it possible to comprehend the many-layered meaning of this mighty work of literature. Up to this point, the reader has been given no visual impression of the novel’s characters; after all, he has been seeing with them, through their eyes, as it is were. Now the gaze takes a more distant perspective. From there, all of mad Ben’s pathetic, emasculated bulk becomes visible, the family’s désastre [disaster] made flesh, which perfect Jason wants out of the way. Nobody sees that this whimpering nuisance might just be the question and task that the Compsons have been set, a demand that can be met only with love. Was it not banished Caddy who had known this? When mad Ben stands at the fence of the nearby golf course and the players shout “Here, caddie” before hitting the ball, he whimpers, jolted by the aching memory of his sister. And yet there is someone else to whom all the Compsons’ hollow pride means nothing, a figure who shoulders the misguided pretensions and who, even in the midst of disaster, carries on doing as usual what is needful: the old black woman Dilsey, the Compsons’ housemaid. This Easter morning, she takes mad Ben by the hand and leads the white family’s son to the black church. In the midst of the mythic tragedy, which all the others execute to the finish like puppets on strings, these two battered creatures represent the “leftover elements,” the merest inkling of innocence and freedom. They constitute all the difference there is between the House of Atreus and the House of the Compsons, and it is far from incidental that the author should let this different manifest itself on Easter morning. That is when the mute fool sits in the black people’s church: “In the midst of the voices and the hands Ben sat, rapt in [the preacher’s] sweet blue gaze. Dilsey sat bolt upright beside, crying rigidly in the annealment and the blood of the remembered Lamb.”11 And when on the way home, with the lunatic by her hand, she keeps crying and is admonished by her daughter that people were already staring and they would soon pass by the white people, she replies: “I’ve seed de first en de last.… Never you mind me.”12
Eighteen years earlier, this maid Dilsey had evoked in young Quentin, on the last day of his life, the following reflection: “They come into white people’s lives like that in sudden sharp black trickles that isolate white facts for an instant in unarguable truth like under microscope; the rest of the time just voices that laugh when you see nothing to laugh at, tears when no reason for tears.”13 That is a keenly registering perception, but it is only the outward face of the truth that emerges at the story’s end. Dilsey has seen the first and the last; she has seen more than the reader to whom is denied penetrating this person’s innermost mysteries, becoming a participant in her seeing, as was the case with the other characters. Only now does the change in narrative technique become meaningful: in its resistance to the revealing clasp of description, it lets it be known that this one has remained whole, unharmed by the mythic twilight of the whites. In admitting to being excluded from this figure’s interior, the narrator raises her above the function of a witness and makes her the keeper of the truth of what has happened. Faulkner has thus, seven years after Ulysses, given James Joyce’s stylistic revolution a meaning that reveals and that its originator had barely seen: the epic technique of penetrating an experiencing subject is premised on the condition of that subject itself; it is not the author who breaks it open, but it is open to recording introspection because it is secretly already damaged, because the seal of its sovereignty has already been broken. In realizing his material, the writer comes up against a limit to his subtle analyzing. This limit is objectified in the shift in narrative technique. It is thus that form gives a voice to substance. The old black woman’s “never you mind me” is a reprimand to the author as much as to the reader—a tough demand in the age of the dissecting psychological novel. Faulkner demonstrates that Joyce represents not just the radical culmination of this kind of novel, but also its peripeteia.
Directly after The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner wrote his most harrowing book, Sanctuary, which, however, could be published only in 1932 in a revised version. I shall try to recount what happens. Temple Drake, all but a child, inexperienced and credulous, goes for a drive with a feckless lad. The youth wrecks the car and cowardly abandons the girl in a remote saloon of doubtful repute. Here she falls victim to a man of virtually consummate malice and perversion. That grim night, this man—Popeye—shoots a fellow drinker who gets between him and the girl. The next day, he takes Temple to town, lodging the girl, who is mutely in thrall to him, in a brothel. For the murder in the bootleggers’ house, the police arrest Lee Goodwin, an innocent man who is condemned to death because Temple, the only witness, found after a long search by the defending counsel Horace Benbow, perjures herself to protect her demon, Popeye. That villain, in turn, on the way to see his mother is arrested for a murder he did not commit and is sent to the gallows.
This book offers the most support to those interpreters of Faulkner who seek to prove his commitment to a gnostic dualism and find mysticism at each turn. Indeed, Popeye seems to lack nothing to be evil hypostasized. His macabre origin is revealed to us only in the final chapter. His mother had conceived him at the same time as she contracted an infection. From the beginning, he was deformed and retarded, sickly and impotent, a monster inside and out, the sheer mechanism of perverted compensations. Popeye is not a person; he is merely the product of biological and social circumstances. There is no spark of freedom within him. “His face just went away, like the face of a wax doll set too near a hot fire and forgotten.”14 His misdeeds are as brilliant as his knack for lighting matches with his thumbnail. That he should perish at the gallows not for the crimes he committed but for the one he did not is an irony apt to puzzle the reader. What does it mean? Is it meant to indicate that this spawn of evil is beyond the measure of earthly justice? Or is it not rather the sign of an immanent justice that Popeye should be made to die instead of another, just as Lee Goodwin was executed in his place? If, however, one brings to bear the fact that to Faulkner, innocent suffering contains man’s most unfathomable truth and potential, indeed, signifies a stigma of its relation to the absolute, something like a metaphysical sacrament, then here too another surmise may be added to the interpretation: even this villain is not evil as such, for he proved innocent in one respect and suffered a death that he did not deserve uncomplainingly, in enigmatic silence—the sign of innocent suffering in a final, most distorted analogy, at the outermost fringe of hope, which even a poet would not dare to pronounce, let alone this one, who permits himself no cheap effects at the expense of mercy.
Horace Benbow, the attorney, lacks the stature to serve as Popeye’s adversary. The mythic monster will not stand a figure to enter into play. Faulkner made this quite clear in the novel’s composition: Benbow and Popeye meet just once, right at the beginning, at a spring in the woods close to the bootleggers’ house, where Temple is soon to meet her fate. Benbow, drinking at the spring, catches the reflection of Popeye, who is watching him, and instantly grasps what is so inhuman, mechanical, and lacking in depth about the other: “His face had a queer, bloodless color, as though seen by electric light; against the sunny silence … he had that vicious depthless quality of stamped tin.”15 For two hours, the men abide there, each taking the other’s measure across the spring. It is an afternoon in May, a bird calls. That is when Benbow says something that exposes the other: “And of course you dont know the name of it.… I dont suppose you’d know a bird at all, without it was sitting in a cage in a hotel lounge, or cost four dollars on a plate.”16 When an owl swoops close to the two of them, the unnatural one is grabbed by fear, he clings to Benbow (who now can literally smell him: “He smells black”17). Never again will such insecurity in Popeye be seen. But this scene lays him bare. After their encounter at the spring, the two men never meet again. They are not adversaries, but antipodes. The distance between them is such that no dialectic can emerge, not even physical struggle. To Popeye, the phenomenal shot, the gutless little man at his heels is not worth a bullet. And yet Benbow is the book’s “hero,” standing in for the human; he has no motto under which to place his deeds, he lacks the shine of the ideal. Only this dogged resistance he puts up against the world closest to him in order to do what he thinks to be right, though petty-bourgeois “society” may treat it with disapproval and suspicion, tells of the power of the ethical norm within him. Alas, he is not understood even by those he defends. Lee Goodwin’s wife offers him what everybody has yet accepted if she had no other means of payment. “But cant you see,” Goodwin replies, “that perhaps a man might do something just because he knew it was right …?”18 No, freedom is that which has always been misunderstood, that which is revealed to no experience. Everyone tries to muster commonplace motives to cover up the nuisance that is the exceptional. The free man cannot acquire faith, because one must believe in freedom before experiencing it. Anyone shattering what all believe to be certain is ground down until he returns to the commonplace. In the end, Horace Benbow is once again tired and resigned in his daily life to forget and make forgotten his dreadful excursion into the endeavor of freedom.
Twenty years later, Faulkner returned to the subject matter in his closet drama Requiem for a Nun (1951). The terrible destiny of Sanctuary has not yet been played out. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”19 That is the very formula of myth! Although Stevens, the feckless lad who, years earlier, left Temple Drake to her doom, has meanwhile married the girl, this has only set the scene anew for fate. With grim determination, it sets about repeating itself; nothing and nobody seems able to put a stop to the mythic recurrence of the same—were it not for the black woman Nancy, the Stevens’s nursery maid, who becomes an infanticide in order to make loud enough the scream that is supposed to bring Temple, sleepwalking into the abyss, back to her senses. She goes to scaffold herself, mute and steadfast. I must confess to bristling at this version of the idea of innocent suffering and the role of black people; I find it misguided and unfeasible. But its exaggerated speculativeness is only an overdyed specimen of Faulkner’s central theme. More still than in A Fable, Faulkner here pits mysticism against myth. Also close to being mystical is the subliminal relation that Faulkner establishes between the dramatic episodes about Temple and Nancy, and the interspersed pieces of a history of the courthouse and jail of Jefferson, the (fictitious) capital of (fictitious) Yoknapatawpha County: by making Jefferson’s jail and law court the site of Nancy’s sacrifice, the turbulent prehistory of these buildings, which appear as representative institutions of the American world’s formation, “fulfills itself” in a manner no longer accessible to reason. Only Faulkner’s oeuvre in its entirety renders this communication comprehensible, but at the same time, a possible, indeed looming consequence becomes visible to which Faulkner seems to be drawn: the troubling consequence of an American mysticism as a means of overcoming the antagonism between mythos and ethos, as an attempt to give the “high … destiny of the United States”20 an absolute sanction.
When an America in which our future has already begun is discussed, what is meant is a world whose aspect is determined by technology. It is almost to be expected that Faulkner should have given space in his work to this element of the American myth. The novel Pylon (1935) is set among stunt pilots and journalists. These two worlds interlock most precisely: the barnstormers provide the newspaper with headlines, often at the cost of a life, and the newspaper transforms mechanical data into stimulating matter for the consciousness of the masses who make the pilgrimage to the air shows. This is symbiosis of cold precision, which chills to the bone that which is natural in man. The only reaction a deadly crash evokes in the photographer is: “Jesus.… Why wasn’t I standing right here[?]”21 More than anything else, however, it is a warped Eros that Faulkner identifies as the distinctive phenomenon: it is as though it, too, had become a mechanical function in the sphere of the mechanisms. The barnstormer Roger Shuman and the parachutist Jack share a woman, a being of wordless camaraderie, who like them is in thrall to the machine and anxiously denies any traits of feminine nature like some irritating rudiment. This woman does not know which of the two men is the father of her child, as if this question were just so much ballast to be dropped. To be able to fly, human beings must make themselves “light” in every sense, as empty as their machines, whose streamlined, elegant shells contain only an illusion of “substance”: “Unbonneted [the airplane] appeared more profoundly derelict than the halfeaten [sic] carcass of a deer come suddenly upon in a forest.”22 So too has the human figure become an illusion, its interiority and substance consumed. “They aint human, you see,”23 thinks the reporter who joins the pilot group, he too under pressure to perform functionalized tasks, but with the melancholy of a man who has forgotten something crucial and seeks to find it in himself again.
The reporter helps Shuman to find a new airplane after a crash landing, but the machine is of doubtful reliability. Shuman nonetheless takes part in the race, because everything for him depends on the cash prize. The gamble costs him his life. The reporter finds himself suspected of having procured an unsafe machine for Shuman in order to free the woman for himself. The reporter senses the ambiguity of the situation and retreats. He borrows quite a large sum of money and hides the bills in a toy airplane, which he has someone give the child. The woman takes the child to the dead pilot’s parents; she wants to stay with the parachutist, but the child is in their way. The old Shumans are kindly people, who want only their peace after having given their last for their son’s to them incomprehensible technological passion and having ultimately lost him, too. Now, the unanswerable question breaks into their lives in the form of the child: “If I just knew that he is Roger’s! If I just knew! Cant you give me some sign, some little sign? Any little sign?”24 But the woman gives no answer; she stands dumbfounded by the eruptive force of a question that has become an irrelevance for her.
Now there follows a scene that is among Faulkner’s most powerful. When the woman has left for good, the old man leans over the sleeping child’s bed. He is looking for the sign, for certainty. He shakes the child, rouses him. Now the toy airplane falls to the ground. “Where’s my new job? … Where’s my ship?”25 the child asks blithely in the jargon of the world in which he learned to talk. The old man is filled with blind rage, he grabs the toy, hurls it against the wall, stamps on it in manic fury, tries to tear it into pieces. The boy looks on silent, astonished, almost curious about the old man’s act of impotent revenge, which strikes only at the image, the mere symbol of the world that took everything from him, that he regards as the mythical demonism over his life. Here, at this child’s bedside, is suffered and endured the humanity that the perfect world of mechanisms has pushed aside. Once again, innocent suffering bears the burden that the others have cast off. The old man and the child, together they must—and without understanding each other—deal with the remnant they have been left with, the not yet germinated remnant of a world of progress. But if that were not enough: the destruction of the phantom inadvertently brings to light the money that the reporter sent the child. Might this, as a token of the humane from the zone of the mechanical vampires, not bring the old man to his senses? But it leads only to the hatred being increased; the old Shumans end up persuading themselves that the concealed money was the ultimate proof of the depravity of the woman whose child fell to them: the fruits of her indiscriminate venality, kept secret from both men. When the bills have burned up in the fireplace, the old man cries out once more in despair: “It’s our boy,”26 and collapses.
Such is the futility of the heart’s labors in the mythic sphere. The reporter has spent himself into the void, his aid stands defamed as a whore’s hire. Yet this melancholy reporter in his desolate existence is the character in this novel in which Faulkner invests himself, indeed it is precisely this futility of his inept and secretive attempts at doing good that is the stigma, sought time and again, of a truth denied in the inevitability of reality. The reader feels the author’s regard fixed upon him to see if he can withstand the crashing down of blind futility over the stirrings of the ethical and humane, or if he capitulates to the seamless appearance of senselessness. The works of Faulkner draw the reader into the experiment. They give him nothing, no solution, no decision, no hope. They only instill in him the question, Do you even now, even after all this, hold on to man? Do you still believe in that little spark of majesty that could neither ignite a fire nor shine a light?
Notwithstanding this conception’s undeniable greatness, I have my doubts as to whether this novel’s effect has been able to survive unchallenged the twenty years that have lapsed since it was written. To be sure, the “demonism of technology” is still spoken of in mythical terms. But does this not seem ever more rhetorical set against the experience of increasing familiarity with the mechanical processes and structures? Chaplin’s famous film Modern Times was made around the same time as Faulkner’s novel—now it looks like a historic document of an ill-conceived utopia, for the dreadful vision of the poor robot at the assembly line has not come true (except to such critics of our times who have not yet found the time actually to look at a modern factory). What is seen in Chaplin is not the entelechy of technology, but a caricature of a new formation’s early stage, and this is true also of Faulkner: his mechanical vampires are the larval stages of development. I am not taking the part of technological optimism—the dangers threatening us from the sphere of machines certainly have not diminished, but they are more subtle than the carnivalesque atmosphere of the air shows depicted in Pylon would have us know. Deaths are died more secretly than in poorly built planes breaking up in the air, and deeper conflicts unbound than that between mechanical servitude and volcanic sensuality. The bourgeois is no longer gazing at the tin dinosaurs from the stands, he is at the wheel himself or enjoys the power that bears him along, and all without having to mutate into some kind of callused species. At bottom, Faulkner still treats the problem of technology in a biologistic manner, as a matter of adaptation, a deindividuating symbiosis (as, around the same time here in Germany, Ernst Jünger’s idea of “organic construction” took to a far more rigorous conclusion).27 This is already historic; the problem of technology is just as “human” as man’s problems have always been.
In The Unvanquished (1938), Faulkner leads his American theme to its peak; his powers of depiction and the clarity of his foundational idea converge here to the most felicitous effect. In doing so, Faulkner’s language is at its most lucid, attaining even scherzo and burlesque. Young Bayard is growing up in the midst of the Civil War alongside his black milk-brother Ringo [they were nursed by the same woman], on the indistinct boundary between play and bloody seriousness, adventure and doom. They adopt killing and vengeance as the unquestioned rules of the world into which they grow. When the grandmother, sharp and adept at staying on top of any situation, falls victim to the marauding underworld of the Civil War, the two boys will not rest until they have hunted down the murderer. This—and much else—Faulkner renders into episodes that seem almost to be of a merry, carefree adventurousness; not until the last fifth of the book does the reader notice that Faulkner thus tries to capture the reflection in the boys’ consciousness, in order to show in clearer profile the reevaluation of the past in the man’s decision.
The Civil War is over. Among the defeated Confederates, Bayard’s father, Colonel Sartoris, returns home. The burned-down house is rebuilt. But the old order of things has collapsed. The looming fate of having killed will not be banished; instead it procreates. The women in particular are left hardened by the futility of their sacrifices. Bayard’s cousin Drusilla stands for this mythic relentlessness: although the men may have surrendered, she will not. She lost her father and her betrothed, and dressed as a soldier she sought revenge on the battlefield at the colonel’s side. Now at home, Drusilla will once again wear women’s clothes only under duress, and when her mother arranges for her to be married to the colonel, she simply forgets to attend the wedding because of her political machinations. For the colonel, too, political struggle or building railways are but forms of war: what still counts is to be the first to pull the trigger. If no enemies can be found, he will make himself some. Resistance stirs within the son against these metastases of war that have turned inward. The colonel senses his son’s estrangement, and one evening—another enemy is to be confronted the next day—confesses to him: “I am tired of killing men, no matter what the necessity nor the end. Tomorrow, when I go to town and meet Ben Redmond, I shall be unarmed.”28 Sartoris dies for this decision: this time, the other man pulls the trigger first. This incident brings events to their crisis. Drusilla fails to grasp that this death is unlike the many deaths that have been died before her eyes, that the colonel had to die because he wanted to kill no more. And what she particularly fails to grasp is that this is a legacy to be preserved and executed. In this woman, the spirit of vengeance, the mythical will to the recurrence of the same, grows to entreating power, assuming the form of Eros to bring young Bayard back under the rule of the archaic, primal law. It is an act of ancient initiation by which Drusilla presses the pistols into the hand of the youth who has fallen for her: “her hand lying light on my wrist yet discharging into me with a shock like electricity that dark and passionate voracity.… ‘Take them. I have kept them for you. I give them to you. Oh you will thank me, you will remember me who put into your hands what they say is an attribute only of God’s, who took what belongs to heaven and gave it to you.’ ”29 But these entreaties are dashed against the freedom that young Bayard finds in himself when he hears the news of his father’s death: “At least this will be my chance to find out if I am what I think I am or if I just hope; if I am going to do what I have taught myself is right or if I am just going to wish I were.”30 Now the decision has come: when an enraged Drusilla leans over Bayard’s hand, in which he holds the gun, to seal the compact of vengeance with a kiss, she is suddenly overcome by uncomprehending horror—with an animal immediacy, she feels her failure in the face of the baffling strangeness of the “no” confronting her. “Then her eyes filled with an expression of bitter and passionate betrayal. ‘Why, he’s not—’she said.”31
That day, Bayard goes to see the man who shot his father. He must make public what this death truly means. His father’s old companions are standing outside Redmond’s house. Once more, Bayard refuses a hand proffering a gun, walking past the question, “Who are you? Is your name Sartoris?”32 and enters unarmed into the room where Redmond is expecting him with a pistol in his hand. Not a word is spoken—“It was as if we both knew what the passage of words would be and the futility of it.”33 Twice the other man shoots, twice he misses (improbable that he should have been unable to hit his target!); then he picks up his hat, leaves the room, the house, walks past the colonel’s retinue and toward the station, boards the next train and is never seen again. When Bayard returns home that evening, Drusilla too has gone forever.
With this work, Faulkner has done something unique for his country: he realized the anonymous instant, impossible to pin down in any document or on any historic date, in which after two wars fought for freedom America truly began to be free, when one man made a beginning by casting off the self-perpetuating compulsion of mythical reactions, deciding to forego killing as a last resort. No historical method can ever grasp what yet holds a more elementary sway over human history than facts or records. This is a matter in which poets need fear no competition; it is all theirs. But it is also a matter to which national attributes are no longer essential. Where form is given to those instants in which man is able to justify his creation, the human dimension is included. It was thus only to be expected that Faulkner should seek an expression for the universal validity of his basic theme. He devoted nine years to this highest of tasks.
A Fable (1954) is the sheer culmination of all that preceded it. Therein lie both its greatness and its fault. In the spring of 1918, in the last year of the war, against the backdrop of the French eastern front, where Germans, English, French, and Americans have reached a stalemate, Faulkner unfolds the miraculous episode of a cease-fire forced by a mutiny in the French lines. An illiterate French corporal, aged thirty-three (like Ben Compson!), sets in motion events that spread across the entire front: a company climbs from the trenches, and even the enemy respects this act. Then, the front line suddenly moves: the generals of both sides get together to force, against the front, a continuation of the war; they have the “outbreak” of peace shot down by artillery and put the mutiny’s leaders to the firing squad. It was not this tendentious plot that fed the controversy over this book, but its consistent parallel in form and content to the biblical passion story. The corporal is marked with distinctive signs, he has his twelve apostles, his Peter, and his Judas with his thirty pieces of silver, his two thieves, and, at the end, his empty tomb. So, a “life of Jesus elsewhere”?
It must not be omitted to set this catalog of references against a catalog of points with no such reference. This corporal has no message, no mission, no claim to power. In doing what to him is the most obvious thing to do, he reveals, as it were, to the others what to them was equally obvious: to climb from their trench and call it a day. The figure of the corporal is not a distillation of all that is good, sacred, humane, and superhumane; on the contrary, it is of startling poverty, with neither face nor soul. It is this very inner void, this figure’s stubborn lack of motive, that makes the step out of the trench appear as the nakedly elemental, the radically reduced form in which man becomes aware of what is needful to him: “that all we ever needed to do was just to say, Enough of this.”34 By contrast, the military leaders are those whose gaze ranges far: they are caught up in grand designs whose reach extends in time and space beyond man; they believe themselves to be in charge of the destinies of generations, from which they deduce the right to sacrifice the present one. Faulkner’s allegories, which proliferate and tangle to the point of impenetrability, may tempt to dualistic readings, but wrongly so. In the scene between the general and the mutinying corporal, which exceeds all others, the reference to the temptation of Jesus is unmistakable, yet Faulkner’s art, fearless in dealing in the improbable, will have the general recognize his own son in the corporal, leaving him helplessly facing the decision either to “tempt him” or to sacrifice him for a “higher purpose.” Faulkner has this cleft emerge from the root of one blood, as in his great family epics. The confrontation here is not between good and evil, God and Satan, but at bottom only between different units for measuring the real and necessary, between political and human coordinates. The father-general’s grand phrase, “take the earth”—how else could he speak, thinking as he does in terms of the great and global of armies and generations!—is pitted against the son-corporal’s “little” objection: “There are still that ten.”35 Those are the stakes in this game: the ten who remain faithful against the power over the earth, the little life against the jurisdiction over centuries, the human against the political.
Faulkner does not make it easy for the reader to bring things back to these proportions. The formal aspects of the novel obscure its substance, the means run wild with the ends. The urge to connect this allegorical drama of humanity, for the first time not set in America, by an umbilical cord to its fount, the mysticism of America, has convoluted the novel’s outline to a barely decipherable hieroglyph. Added to this are the analogies with the passion, which tempt the reader to look for relations where all that was intended was, as it were, to stigmatize the plot and its characters: he who ever does the one thing that is needful shares in both the splendor and the scars of the event that came, for humanity, to epitomize the single necessity. But since this comes with a surfeit of grandiloquence and is weighed down by a cargo of encrypted meaning, it seems hard to believe that Faulkner should not have wanted to say more. The book thus leaves us conflicted. Amid unexpected demands on our following, untangling, understanding, it appeals to our approval of the simplicity of the corporal, who reduces the hypertrophied commandment to love thy neighbor [den Nächsten] to the formula that our task was to do the closest thing [das Nächste] at hand—the instrumental effort prevents us from believing that this could really be the simple thing that anyone beside us might also do any moment (for that trench from which one can simply climb with a single step and the words “enough of this” are, of course, to be found everywhere, and we are always already inside it). To dispense with motivation may turn out to be Faulkner’s strongest stylistic device: what use, the reader is supposed to think, are motives when what is at stake is that closest thing that requires no intermediate steps? But it is precisely this effect that falls flat here, whereas it is unforgettable, for instance, in the figure of the convict in “Old Man” (1939), where the empty infinity of the flooding Mississippi really does allow for the ultimate simplicity of situations: any next moment leaves only one option to this man in a tiny boat with a strange woman just now giving birth—and yet everything he does before returning to jail is full of a hidden freedom. In this, it differs from A Fable, in which it seems that ever more screens and props were put up to provide events with a backdrop of the untold, perhaps ineffable. Innocent suffering, Faulkner’s great subject, is untied from its human rootedness and significance and set free as a drama for all humanity. The temptation, which can be resisted only at the cost of grasping suffering and death, is far too “great” for this corporal to understand just what it is that he is overcoming. Overcoming? Is it not rather someone walking blindly past an offer for which he has no organ? “Take the earth”—is there even an addressee for this, or is it not a quotation floating freely in space?
To confront, on this point, Faulkner with Faulkner: in the novel The Wild Palms [If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem] (1939), Harry Wilborne, in the grasp of demonic Eros, is thrown off course and driven into the utmost hopelessness, and when the maelstrom of fate and guilt releases him, he finds himself in a prison cell faced with the decision between using the proffered poison to evade his liabilities or recognizing and suffering for it—and here it really does take the whole book and all of Faulkner to give credible reality to the one last sentence, at the very boundary of what this figure can still attain, that last sentence upon which is laden the burden of the book’s entire meaning: “Yes he thought Between grief and nothing I will take grief.”36
Translated by Joe Paul Kroll
Originally published as “Mythos und Ethos Amerikas im Werk William Faulkners,” Hochland 50 (1957/58): 234–250; from Hans Blumenberg, Schriften zur Literatur 1945–1958, ed. Alexander Schmitz and Bernd Stiegler (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2017), 265–286.
1. [“Er hat etwas amerikanisch Sicheres.” Theodor Fontane, L’Adultera (1882), in Werke in fünf Bänden (Berlin/Weimar: Aufbau, 1986), 2:209. Blumenberg’s emphasis.]
2. [Helmut Thielicke, “Amerika lebt, wie wir morgen leben,” Die Zeit, no. 25, June 21, 1956.]
3. German translations are currently available for the following works: The Sound and the Fury (Schall und Wahn), The Unvanquished (Die Unbesiegten), Go Down, Moses (Das verworfene Erbe), The Wild Palms [If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem] (Wilde Palmen und Der Strom), A Fable (Eine Legende), Requiem for a Nun (Requiem für eine Nonne), all published by Scherz & Goverts, Stuttgart; Pylon (Wendemarke), Absalom, Absalom!, Light in August (Licht im August), published by Rowohlt, Hamburg; Abendsonne (Stories), published by Piper, Munich; Spotted Horses (story taken from The Hamlet), published as part of the Insel Library.
4. [Das Land der unbegrenzten Möglichkeiten—“the land of unlimited possibilities” (in distinction, perhaps, to the more businesslike “unlimited opportunity”)—is a phrase used frequently in German as a synonym for the United States. It was coined by the writer Ludwig Max Goldberger in 1903 in a book of that title.]
5. [William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses, in Novels 1942–1954 (New York: The Library of America, 1994), 269.]
6. [William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust, in Novels 1942–1954 (New York: The Library of America, 1994), 437–439. Omissions by Blumenberg.]
7. [William Faulkner, “Dry September,” in Selected Short Stories of William Faulkner (New York: Modern Library, 1993), 60.]
8. [Faulkner, “Dry September,” 61, 63.]
9. [Faulkner, 64. Original spelling retained.]
10. [Faulkner, 60.]
11. [William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (New York: Vintage, 1990), 297.]
12. [Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, 297.]
13. [Faulkner, 170.]
14. [William Faulkner, Sanctuary, in Novels 1930–1935 (New York: The Library of America, 1985), 182.]
15. [Faulkner, Sanctuary, 181.]
16. [Faulkner, 182. Original spelling retained.]
17. [Faulkner, 184.]
18. [Faulkner, 370.]
19. [William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, in Novels 1942–1954 (New York: The Library of America, 1994), 535.]
20. [William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Vintage, 1990), 94. The omission of “(and impossible)” is not indicated by Blumenberg.]
21. [William Faulkner, Pylon, in Novels 1930–1935 (New York: The Library of America, 1985), 938.]
22. [Faulkner, Pylon, 787.]
23. [Faulkner, 805. Original spelling retained.]
24. [Faulkner, 988.]
25. [Faulkner, 989.]
26. [Faulkner, 990.]
27. [Ernst Jünger, The Worker: Dominion and Form (1932) (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017).]
28. [William Faulkner, The Unvanquished (New York: Vintage, 1991), 232.]
29. [Faulkner, The Unvanquished, 235, 237.]
30. [Faulkner, 215.]
31. [Faulkner, 239.]
32. [Faulkner, 247.]
33. [Faulkner, 248.]
34. [William Faulkner, A Fable, in Novels 1942–1954 (New York: The Library of America, 1994), 727.]
35. [Faulkner, A Fable, 988.]
36. [William Faulkner, The Wild Palms [If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem], in Novels 1936–1940 (New York: The Library of America, 1990), 715. Italicization in the original.]