Let’s begin by acknowledging that Simply Faulkner does not imply a simple Faulkner. The word “simply” runs the gamut of meanings—from “merely” or “only,” to “really” or “completely.” This book aspires to the latter sense of “simply” by attempting to show in plain words why the works of this Nobel Prize-winning American novelist matter.
Why must Simply Faulkner refuse the appeal of a simple Faulkner? Even those who press this question may suspect that a “simple Faulkner” is a contradiction in terms. It is not just that his life was messy—complicated by recurrent pretentions as to who he was and what he did—but also because it was marked by lifelong solitariness, marital problems, family disasters, and abiding alcoholism. But the more important point is that Faulkner’s work is fundamentally unsimple. I found this out when I first attempted to read one of Faulkner’s works while a senior at a decent Southern high school. I tried four times to get through Absalom, Absalom!. But I failed each time to get past the first chapter, and—humiliated and filled with rage—I threw the book on the floor. I did not try to read him again until three years later. Faulkner’s great work is convoluted, and its narrative procedures are unfamiliar. If you are a general reader attempting to make your way through one of his masterpieces, you are likely to think that you don’t know how to read this book. You cannot get its sentences to work for you and cannot grasp the logic of its sequences. You may well think that your inability to comprehend Faulkner’s writing is his fault. After all, how dare he make you feel that you no longer know how to read a novel? But that is precisely the nature of Faulkner’s best work: he refuses to herd his prose through the familiar hoops of syntax and sequence—of grammatically well-bred sentences—that we recognize as the building blocks of novels. Instead, he writes as though most novels are to him a waste of time. Moreover, the trouble he seems to find with these works is foundational; it lodges in the nature of words themselves and in the novelistic conventions that writers draw on for stringing words together—“just a shape to fill a lack,” as one of his memorable characters, Addie Bundren, thinks of words in As I Lay Dying. To her, words are a failed substitute for nonverbal experience: “That was when I learned that words are no good; that words don’t ever fit even what they are trying to say at . . . that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride.” Words, Addie concludes, “go straight up in a thin line” while “doing goes along the earth, clinging to it,” speechlessly.
Before dismissing this conviction as nonsense, try to remember a moment when you had something urgent to say, and you became aware that language was failing you—perhaps when you struggled to tell someone what you actually felt and thought when you lost your job, when your first child was born, when you fell in love, or when your father died. At such intense moments we are nearest to recognizing that the words are . . . just words. The realm they operate in is language; it is not life. The experience you were trying to express was something entirely different—overpowering yet wordless. The words feebly point to what they cannot say.
If you believed that words mainly betray the experience they pretend to convey, you would either not write novels at all or at least not write conventional ones. If you persevered in writing anyway, you would find yourself in an endless struggle with words themselves, trying to keep them from going “straight up in a thin line,” as Addie put it. Instead, you would labor to trick them into saying life as it actually happens: as doings that occur speechlessly, “along the earth.” This is the central reason for Faulkner’s difficulty. Novels that too easily turn the messiness of life into the orderliness of words are—for him—like CliffsNotes substituting for the actual complexity of the real thing: oversimplified, too neat and regulated, their orderliness superficially pleasing but ultimately weightless. The verbal report they give on nonverbal reality is inauthentic.
To this intrinsic reason for Faulkner’s difficulty—lodged in his quarrel with the medium itself—we may add others. All of these are external to the treachery lurking in language as such. Let’s look at Faulkner in the context of his times. Born in Mississippi in 1897, he came of age in the second decade of the 20th century. Like so many writers of that era, he was deeply marked by the Great War of 1914-1918. Faulkner never fought in WWI (though he stoutly pretended otherwise), yet its shadow haunted his life and penetrated his dreams. “The Jerries are after me!” his terrified mistress, Meta Carpenter, remembered a nightmare-ridden Faulkner screaming in his sleep early one morning. This was some 20 years after the war had ended. He who had seen no action over France was somehow a war victim nevertheless.
It was, moreover, a war that did not make sense. Heads of state were never able to explain persuasively why it had to be fought. World War I seemed more like an absurd affair of political jockeying than a cataclysm driven by any country’s existential interest. Nor did it proceed as earlier wars had. There were no decisive battles; a hill or valley taken by the Allies from the Germans (at great human cost) would be re-occupied by the Germans (again, at great human cost) soon after. The waiting was almost as bad as the fighting. Coffin-like trenches were repeatedly soaked with rain, filth, and blood. (“I think we are in rats’ alley/ Where the dead men lost their bones,” so had poet T. S. Eliot alluded to trench realities in The Waste Land [1922]).
Worse, the death-dealing apparatus unleashed in that war—the newly invented machine guns and the insidious mustard gas—outflanked each army’s resources. And there were mental and emotional scars as well; men who came home from the front often suffered from shell shock—as the reaction to the trauma of battle became known. This previously unknown condition demonstrated that the brutality of such a war could register as an unbearable assault on the human mind and senses. Many of the wounded soldiers were incapable of dealing with such trauma, often resulting in a psychological meltdown.
It is therefore no accident that the writers of the 1920s and 1930s—Faulkner and Eliot, but also Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway, to list just a few—saw World War I as a bankrupting of the 19th century values by which they—and others—had made sense of life. For them, it was no longer possible to write literature under the banner of “Civility” and “Significance.” In 1923, Eliot published a widely-read review of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). He saw the book as acknowledging the breakdown of 19th-century norms for reporting on life—and, therefore, also rejecting the social assumptions governing novel-writing itself. After 1918, Eliot believed, those assumptions had lost their bearing. In his view, Joyce had had to turn to Homeric myth as a way “of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.” Many years later, one of Faulkner’s own novels, A Fable [1954], would center on a failed attempt to end World War I early. By mutual consent, Allies and Germans would just refuse to continue fighting. Their effort was doomed; court-martial and execution were the inevitable outcomes. But A Fable lets us see that, for Faulkner no less than for his contemporaries, the war was unforgettable not least because it remained unjustifiable.