WHEN FAULKNER REVIEWED HEMINGWAY’S The Old Man and the Sea several years ago he was very brief and pointed: the novel showed Hemingway at a new peak of achievement because he had at last brought God into the picture.1 The pronouncement was consistent with the religious tone of the Nobel Prize acceptance speech, with the more recent address to the Japanese people in which they were urged not to despair, to have faith, and with one of the most recent observations of Gavin Stevens, who seems clearly to speak with an authority not solely his own. Stevens says in a recent short story, with Ratliff agreeing, that what we need to make America survive is “to trust in God without depending on Him. We need to fix things so He can depend on us.”2
Together with the profuse religious imagery and symbolism in his fictions, and with the fact that (if religion be defined, with Tillich, simply as “ultimate concern”) all of Faulkner’s works are religious, such pronouncements as these have led to a widespread agreement that Faulkner should be aligned with the movement of neo-Christianity among artists and intellectuals of our time, or even with orthodoxy.3 There is undoubtedly considerable justification for seeing him in such terms. But I submit that the problem of attempting to determine what, in general and in the last analysis, Faulkner means, what he has to say to us, is partially clarified but not really solved by this alignment.
There is, in the first place, the difficulty that emerges when we examine all the pronouncements of Faulkner the man, outside his works of fiction, and try to find out precisely what they mean. In the Nobel Prize speech, for instance, despite the clearly religious tone of the whole, despite too the use of terms like prevail that are susceptible of interpretation in Biblical terms, there seems to me to be a crucial ambiguity about the central affirmation. One wonders if the rhetoric is tortured because the conviction is not clear. What will man prevail over, and how? Over the world, himself, his machines, his folly, death? By virtue of the Atonement or by education, science, his own ingenuity? By the efforts of what Faulkner has called elsewhere “the humanitarian in science and the scientist in the humanity of man?”4
When the Bible uses prevail, as it often does, it is clear in general how the word should be interpreted: always the frame of reference is theistic in a fully supernaturalist sense. Man’s hope rests in a transcendent God. In the Old Testament man will prevail because God keeps his promises despite the faithlessness of man; in the New, man will prevail by virtue of Christ’s victory over death on the cross, which is interpreted as precisely God’s way of keeping his promise. But when Faulkner says man will “prevail,” it is not easy to find out exactly what he means.
Or again, when we study the message of faith to the Japanese and look for indications of the object of faith, we find a similar difficulty. In effect the speech says that we are to have faith in hope and in man’s ability to continue to hope. The message is clearly “affirmative,” but what it affirms, apart from the old need for endurance, seems to be the process of affirmation itself: “believing in hope and in . . . [man’s] own toughness and endurance.”5 If we are tempted to interpret this in a clearly and exclusively humanistic sense (“man’s own toughness”), we are given pause by putting it in context, and the context includes the affirmation by Stevens and Ratliff just noted, the terms in which The Old Man and the Sea was praised, and the answer Faulkner gave to a Japanese audience when asked if he believed in Christianity: “Well, I believe in God.”6
There is a problem of interpretation here not easily to be solved in any terms, and not solvable at all I think if we consider only the evidence of Faulkner’s public pronouncements in recent years. We may of course prefer to put the problem aside by saying that he is in a muddle. Or we may more charitably stop short of the desired clarity by reminding ourselves that he is a man of our time, with all the tensions and ambiguities bequeathed us by the rediscovery in a positivistic age of the fundamental truth of the Biblical view of man and his situation. No wonder, we may say, Faulkner’s mind dwells habitually in paradox. In an age at least partially characterized by its interest in Kierkegaard and Kafka, by existentialism and Barthian theology, what else would satisfy a sensitive mind?
Considerations such as these may “explain” the ambiguities in Faulkner’s stated opinions on religious matters, but they do not clarify them. The one thing that seems clear at this point is that Faulkner is torn between attachment and rejection, between what in his frame of reference appears as the conflict of tradition and reason, between heart and head. If this is so, we are unlikely to make much progress in attempting to find out what his works mean by trying to untangle the threads of his personal theology.
BUT WHEN we turn back to the works themselves with the public pronouncements in mind, we are immediately confronted by a further difficulty. Not only are Faulkner’s stated opinions themselves ambiguous and conflicting, but the chief implications of the whole body of his fiction are partially inconsistent with the general drift of implication in the statements. If we may disregard for the moment a whole host of problems of interpretation, we may put the difficulty in this way: the main drift of Faulkner’s statements has been essentially humanistic, and in his fictions and elsewhere he has repeatedly warned us against accepting the “fairytale” as a “crutch”; but the finest works of his imagination have presented the issues of life in traditional religious terms. It would seem that his fiction is more susceptible of traditionally religious interpretation than Faulkner the man, as distinct from the artist, intends it to be. The man who urges us to have faith in hope and in man creates a Dilsey who has faith in neither but in God and then forces us, aesthetically, to identify with her.
The problem we face here, of the partial discontinuity between Faulkner’s art and his opinions, is completely insoluble only if we hold to the romantic notion of art as distinctively and primarily confession. That Faulkner’s fiction is a kind of personal testament springing from his identification with Yoknapatawpha is certainly true in a number of senses, most importantly perhaps in the sense that where we find the greatest evidence of passionate identification with the material, there, in general, the fiction is greatest. But if this were the whole truth we should be brought to a halt in any attempt to understand the problem.
A more fruitful approach is to recall the climate of opinion about the nature of art and the role of the artist when Faulkner first achieved his artistic maturity. Despite his increasing tendency to write and speak as moralist, Faulkner has never abandoned the idea of the artist expressed in Mosquitoes. He may be driven by a sense of the urgency of our problems to speak out and save the Republic, but he still holds to an “impersonal” theory of art. As he has said of his use of Christian allegory in A Fable, “The Christian allegory was the right allegory to use in that particular story.”7 And he added on the same occasion a statement that leaves no doubt at all about what he thinks on this subject, though it raises a number of interesting questions when we think of it in connection with some of his other statements and with some of his later practice: “The writer’s only responsibility is to his art.”
In short, Faulkner says that he makes use of Christian myth in his stories to deepen and enrich them. He uses it, he insists, because it is at hand, available, as something with which he can work, without any implication of personal commitment to it. But I think we may doubt that this is the whole truth, despite Faulkner’s insistence upon it to the interviewer. The very insistence seems defensive; we wonder about the conditions of the interview, the opinions of the interviewer. Faulkner is not simply being true in these statements to his old conception of the impersonality of art; he is also, by implication, picturing himself as “unanguished and immune.” But the finest works of his whole career are sufficient evidence that any such characterization of himself is at least partially false. When he works at his best, he works from the depths of his mind and his experience and creates novels that “believe,” whatever their creator may say, much later, to interviewers. When Faulkner talks off the top of his mind, as he frequently does in public situations, he seems to me often to misrepresent both himself and his work. Nevertheless, the fact that he talks as he does in such situations is in itself revealing. Defensiveness springs from a sense that one is vulnerable.
To this extent a study of Faulkner’s opinions expressed outside his fiction is helpful—though the reminder it offers us, that we must move warily in any identification of the man with his works, hardly comes as a total surprise. But it seems unprofitable to go beyond this in surveying the opinions of the man as a basis for understanding his works. The dangers of the genetic or intentional fallacy in criticism have undoubtedly been exaggerated in some quarters in the recent past, but the element of truth in the notion was never more apparent than when one is dealing with the work of Faulkner. With the notable exception of his comments on his conscious intention in The Wild Palms, his opinions on his work are seldom helpful. Indeed, the matter should be put more strongly than this: a great many of Faulkner’s public statements of meaning and intention lead us not toward but away from an understanding of the achieved meanings of the works themselves.
A single illustration should suffice. In the same Paris Review interview Faulkner has said that “No one is without Christianity, if we agree on what we mean by the word.” Whatever we mean by the word, are we to interpret Jason as not without Christianity? What are we to make of Nancy’s plea in Requiem for a Nun—“Believe. Just believe”—if everyone already is Christian? Is Flem Snopes in The Hamlet also in some sense Christian? Would it help, in deciding these matters, to find out what Faulkner himself says he means by the word? Christianity, he goes on to say in the same place,
is every individual’s individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol—cross or crescent or whatever—that symbol is man’s reminder of his duty inside the human race.7
If we assume that Faulkner was not deliberately pulling the interviewer’s leg with this definition, we shall have to decide that he was talking through his hat. Even if Christianity were to be defined as simply a moral code—a definition both historically and philosophically irresponsible—it would obviously not be any moral code (“every individual’s individual code”). If we were to take such foolishness seriously and use it as a basis for interpreting The Sound and the Fury, we should find it impossible to make any sense at all of that work. What Faulkner has to say, he says well only through the symbolic language of his art. When he uses the abstract language of philosophy and theology, his meanings are usually vague and often apparently confused.
About all we may conclude with any degree of certainty from the statements Faulkner has made in recent years is that he considers himself a theist and an anti-naturalist. The stance is clearly religious, but the meaningful core of religion for Faulkner seems to be morality. Glands and conscience are always in conflict, and our only hope is that conscience may win. Religion, for Faulkner, is summed up in the call to self-transcendence. There is an important strand in Faulkner’s thought that looks at times remarkably like old-fashioned eighteenth century deism. Neo-naturalists might reasonably charge that his attacks on naturalism in the name of religion are “dated”: they have force only if we define naturalism in the reductive and essentially materialistic terms very common a generation ago but much less common now. A good many people, perhaps most, who think of themselves as naturalists today hope for the same kind of self-transcendence Faulkner calls for, though they would insist that this hope does not make them “religious.” But their categories of thought and Faulkner’s do not overlap enough to make a real argument possible.
When we turn our attention back to the fiction, we are likely to realize with renewed force the difficulty of relating art and philosophy in any direct and simple way. For however deistic and humanistic Faulkner’s religious convictions may be, it is abundantly clear that his imagination works effectively only when it works in Biblical terms. In Requiem for a Nun, for instance, it would hardly be possible to argue convincingly that Nancy is not presented as a sympathetic character, perhaps the sympathetic character. She is one of the redeemed, precisely because as “negro, dopefiend, whore” she has suffered and learned her need for someone to save her. So far as Nancy expresses the theme of the work, the meaning of Requiem for a Nun is subsumed under classic Christianity.
But Nancy with her formula of simple faith in Him is not the only clue to the effective, achieved, theme of Requiem for a Nun. When in the end Temple acknowledges that she cannot save herself and Stevens agrees, though he does not share Nancy’s simple faith, we see the coming together of all the lines of implication and are close to the meaning of the work. And when we arrive at this point we find that we have been here before, many times. The conflict of heart and head, of desire and scruple, has not been resolved but only restated.
Requiem for a Nun is a late novel and has sometimes been taken as evidence for the spiritual journey toward orthodoxy that has been posited for Faulkner. But if we turn back to the beginning, we find an anguished response to the falling spire. The religious meaning of Requiem is not essentially different from the meaning of the closing scene of Soldier’s Pay. Again, The Sound and the Fury is finally, in achieved content, Dilsey’s book, not, despite Faulkner’s stated intention, Caddy’s or her daughter’s; and Dilsey knows a time not our time. But Dilsey is one of the ignorant and simple. Between Dilsey’s redemptive but inaccessible faith and Quentin’s intelligent despair the early fiction offers no middle ground except endurance.
The later fiction sometimes offers us the way of Isaac McCaslin, Ratliff, and Gavin Stevens. All three seem to have found some viable faith permitting an escape from the alternatives of credulity or despair. Viewing man in traditional terms, they see his situation as desperate but not hopeless; and the hope, as they see it, lies in his assumption of moral responsibility in community. McCaslin and Stevens are, apparently, theists; all three seem to have taken the categories in which they think from Biblical Christianity.
Beyond this it would seem that the theology they imply cannot be clarified by considering them alone. Any further definition of the meaning they hold for us must come, if at all, from considering their place in the whole body of fiction of which they are a part.
THE THEOLOGY implied in the fiction strikes us as orthodox or heterodox not only according to the novels we have in mind but according to the position from which we view it. If we are thinking primarily of the main currents of thought expressed in American literature in the last hundred and fifty years or so, we shall be likely to see Faulkner as continuing the tradition of Hawthorne, Melville, James: the ironists with a tragic vision, an unwillingness or inability to deny the clear fact of the presence of evil in the world, yet with hope too. In the illuminating categories of R. W. B. Lewis in The American Adam, this is the tradition of the center. Faulkner clearly belongs to this tradition more than to that of Emerson and Whitman or of Horace Bushnell.
But to place Faulkner in this tradition is to begin an inquiry, not to end it. For one thing, Mr. Lewis’s categories fit the nineteenth century better than the twentieth: from a purely contemporary point of view, it would seem that Faulkner does not really belong in the “middle,” despite his kinship with Hawthorne. His sensibility is in many ways closer to Eliot’s than to Hawthorne’s, and Eliot is not a “middle” figure if we derive our categories from American literature. Eliot is certainly an ironist, and orthodox, and he has a very firm hope—but not at all Whitman’s or Emerson’s kind of hope. Or again, in significant respects Faulkner’s point of view is more like that of his contemporary Reinhold Niebuhr, with his combination of neo-orthodoxy and social gospel, than it is like that of any nineteenth century figure; but Niebuhr does not fit neatly into any of Mr. Lewis’s categories.
In similar fashion the revealing concepts of the true Prometheus and the false Prometheus applied by Richard Chase to Melville light up an area of Faulkner’s work, without achieving the kind of definition in which it is possible finally to rest. We have seen Faulkner’s sympathy with the Promethean archetype again and again, and noted too his warning against the false Prometheus’s tendency to rely on machinery, gadgets, anything that will ease the burden of being human and having to face responsibility for our choices. But the Promethean theme appears more often in the early part of Faulkner’s career than in the later. Though the sensibility that created Houston was close to that which created Ahab, the settled convictions expressed in the creation of Ike McCaslin as a redemptive character are not notably Promethean. The archetype behind Ike is not Prometheus but Christ; and though the concept of the suffering servant draws the two together, there are also, clearly, significant differences. Ike is not in rebellion.
Beginning with “The Bear” Faulkner’s work is characterized by its repeated attempts to restate for modern man what Faulkner takes to be the essential meaning of Christian myth. This is just as surely the intention of Intruder in the Dust as it is of A Fable. The fundamental assumption that shapes many of Faulkner’s works of the forties and fifties is that the dogmas of the Christian creeds are at once figurative and profoundly true. This, ultimately, is at the root of that remarkable kinship between Faulkner and Hawthorne that Randall Stewart and William Van O’Connor have correctly emphasized.
In short, if we think of “orthodoxy” in American literature in a sense as extended as the “neo-orthodox” definitions often are, we find that Faulkner belongs in the orthodox camp. However often and heatedly he may condemn the churches, he is closer in his view of man and the nature of the moral life to Jonathan Edwards than to Franklin, to Hawthorne than to Emerson. He belongs with those who, whatever their heterodoxies, have felt and expressed a kinship with the historic Christian view of man and his situation.
FROM SUCH a point of view, the meanings of Faulkner’s fiction are for the most part basically consistent with the broad outlines of the classic Christian view of man and the world as expressed by American writers. Yet, when viewed in relation to a tradition older than American literature, when viewed as a part of the Christian literature of two thousand years, the meanings of Faulkner’s works may come to seem Christian only in a sense. It is not simply that Faulkner is not Dante or Milton or Bunyan: neither is Eliot. It is rather that in Faulkner’s works the crucifixion is central and paradigmatic, but the resurrection might never have occurred. Grant all objections that may reasonably be made at this point, grant the difficulty of defining not only “orthodoxy” but “belief’ of any sort, grant all this and more, and it still remains true that the common core of belief that has united Christians of all persuasions in all ages is acceptance of the miracle of the first Easter. Without it the early church would have had no gospel, no “good news”; without it, there would be no essential distinction between Christianity and other theistic religions.
But within a Christian frame of reference the crucifixion without the resurrection is pure tragedy. Unlike Emersonian optimism, Christianity does not by-pass or deny tragedy, but neither does it rest in the final tragic dilemma: it holds that “in the end,” when all things are made manifest, it will become apparent that perfect power and perfect love are one. Tragedy has been once and will be again transcended. Tragedy is, as it were, an interim condition; perhaps better, the purely human condition.
In Faulkner’s greatest works the tragedy seems final, unrelieved, inescapable in any dimension. This is very nearly the same as saying that when he writes at his best we find all the categories of Christian thought and feeling except faith and hope in the classic, and Pauline, sense. The body of his fiction is built of Christian thought and feeling, shaped by Christian images and symbols, and deepened and enriched by constant Christian and Biblical allusions; but within all this is a core of what we may call religious humanism, or old-fashioned Protestant modernism—or simply deism tinctured with romantic nature mysticism.
The religion implicit in Faulkner’s works is, then, as what seems to be becoming the prevailing opinion would have it, very “orthodox”—but only insofar as that is possible with a “demythologized” Christianity. Bultmann in theology and Faulkner in fiction belong to the same intellectual generation. Clearly, Faulkner’s definition of Christianity as simply a moral code is not an adequate statement of his position. He takes credal Christianity, apparently, as unhistorical myth containing profound and redemptive moral and psychological truth which he has undertaken to reinterpret in modern terms. If this is so, it is really no wonder that his best imaginative works and the statement of his personal credo that he makes on public occasions seem often discrepant.
In a time when the reaction against secular optimism has made it fashionable to rediscover original sin, it is easy to conclude, as a good many today seem to be doing, that Faulkner’s tragic vision is sufficient to make his works Christian. But as Hawthorne told us long ago in “Young Goodman Brown,” it is not enough for a Christian to discover the universality of guilt. If to deny the radical nature of evil is to make Christianity seem irrelevant, as it came to seem to the believers in the “religion of humanity” and the followers of the gospel of Progress in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to affirm evil without also affirming the effectiveness of the Atonement is to stop in the position that St. Paul characterized as pre-Christian and conducive to despair.
Hope can only subsist where faith is, faith in God or in man or in both. Some of Faulkner’s works, like Sanctuary and Pylon, remain close to despair at all times; others, like The Sound and the Fury and “The Bear” and Intruder in the Dust, include a movement toward faith, and consequently a note of hope. But the object of the faith—man or God—is often left unstated, and when God is its object the faith is embodied in simple believers like Dilsey and Lena and Nancy. In the former case we have Christian terms without necessarily Christian meanings; in the latter, Quentin’s problem is still with us, for however strong our sympathy for the Dilseys of the world may be, we cannot by wishing attain to their simple faith. It may be said of many of the earlier works that they hover between present despair and the memory of a lost faith, and of the later ones that they seem to be bidding us to repent and believe in God and man, as we wish, or can, or must.
In short, the view of God and Revelation implicit in the fiction is open to question; the view of man’s nature and his human situation is not, or not in the same way. There is no doubt about what Ike McCaslin thinks about man; what he thinks about God and ultimate reality is not so clear. We know where Stevens’s heart lies, but his opinions seem inchoate when they approach ultimate questions. Ratliff’s shrewdness is insufficient to define the way of redemption. I think we must say of the redemptive characters in the later works that they end by leaving the themes they are intended to carry not very far from where they picked them up.
Faulkner’s fiction is best understood in Biblical categories. It proceeds from piety and is conducive to piety. If we would go beyond some such statements as these, we must be content to leave clarity behind.8
WE ARE FORCED, even in conclusion, to fall back upon paradox: when Faulkner’s work seems most obviously Christian, it is often least so, and when it does not seem Christian at all, or seems even explicitly non-Christian or anti-Christian, as in the excoriation of Baptist and Presbyterian “orthodoxy” in Light in August, then Christian meanings often emerge most powerfully. If that seems too positive a way of putting it, let us say that the terms in which experience is analyzed are such as to make the historic Christian answers to the questions implicitly raised seem pertinent and natural.
I take it, for example, that in As I Lay Dying Addie is the “saved” and saving character, not Cora Tull with her conventional piety. Though the book is replete with Biblical echoes and Christian symbols, an important meaning in it would seem to be that deeds and not words (or doctrines, or faith) save us. It is, of course, possible to point out that this emphasis too is within the Christian tradition, is even Biblical. We need only recall the Epistle of St. James with its warnings against the dangers of a “dead” faith: “Be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only. . . . Pure religion and undefiled . . . is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction.” But Addie seems to want us to be doers instead of hearers. She is not so much reminding believers to practice what they believe as rejecting their belief. Addie is certainly in rebellion against the “prime maniacal risibility”: which is to say that Moby Dick is at least as relevant to her story as the Jamesian Epistle. But if we continue very far in this direction we reach an interpretation like the readings of Moby Dick that resulted from identifying with Ahab and forgetting Ishmael. Absalom, Absalom!, on the other hand, which does not have the problem of belief at its center in the way that As I Lay Dying does, contains nothing that would contradict a Christian interpretation and much that would support it.
Light in August is probably the most striking example of this dualism in Faulkner’s work. With professed Christians in the roles of antagonists and with its reflective character expressing opinions about the failure of the churches that Faulkner has often expressed himself, it yet implies at its deepest level a meaning which is Christian not merely in some broad or figurative sense but precisely and Biblically Christian. “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these, ye have done it unto me.” The characters are finally judged in terms of their response to Joe Christmas, and the professed Christians are convicted of having a faith that is dead because it never issues in works of love. However Faulkner may have “intended” the novel, however he would now interpret it himself, Christians are certainly justified in seeing in it a powerfully expressed Christian theme.
Faulkner’s fiction is existentialist, and to say this is not really to change the subject. It is existentialist as much of modern painting is existentialist, and the fiction of Kafka, and the earlier poetry of Eliot, and the theology of Paul Tillich. And as Tillich himself has recently said, existentialist art rediscovers in a manner appropriate to our time “the basic questions to which the Christian symbols are the answers.”9 Faulkner’s fiction breaks up and reconstitutes the conventional and expected elements and patterns and feelings of experience, imposing on us the burden of painfully fresh perception. From its sometimes violent dislocations of the familiar, the old questions of man’s nature and destiny emerge with fresh relevance and unexpected urgency. The culture of the recent past tended to forget not just the answers but the questions that must be put before the answers can seem meaningful. Faulkner’s Passion Week, in short, may only be “of the heart,” obscurely and ambiguously related to history, but a wholly pragmatic and positivistic frame of reference would produce no Passion Week at all.