FAULKNER’S USE OF THE SOUTHERN PAST, his conception of time, and his search for a living image of man are all connected. Toward the end of The Town there is a passage that will open up the subject. It seems to say “This is what it has been like to be William Faulkner,” though the experience is attributed to Gavin Stevens. A life and a career are epitomized in a single view of Jefferson, embodied in an image and held off at a distance for inspection and appraisal. The first two paragraphs of the passage give us what amounts to Faulkner’s own summary of his career:
There is a ridge; you drive on beyond Seminary Hill and in time you come upon it: a mild unhurried farm road presently mounting to cross the ridge and on to join the main highway leading from Jefferson to the world. And now, looking back and down, you see all Yoknapatawpha in the dying last of day beneath you. There are stars now, just pricking out as you watch them among the others already coldly and softly burning; the end of day is one vast green soundless murmur up the northwest toward the zenith. Yet it is as though light were not being subtracted from earth, drained from earth backward and upward into that cooling green, but rather had gathered, pooling for an unmoving moment yet, among the low places of the ground so that ground, earth itself is luminous and only the dense clumps of trees are dark, standing darkly and immobile out of it.
Then as though at signal, the fireflies—lightning-bugs of the Mississippi child’s vernacular—myriad and frenetic, random and frantic, pulsing; not questing, not quiring, but choiring as if they were tiny incessant appeaseless voices, cries, words. And you stand suzerain and solitary above the whole sum of your life beneath that incessant ephemeral spangling. First is Jefferson, the center, radiating weakly its puny glow into space; beyond it, enclosing it, spreads the County, tied by the diverging roads to that center as is the rim to the hub by its spokes, yourself detached as God Himself for this moment above the cradle of your nativity and of the men and women who made you, the record and chronicle of your native land proffered for your perusal in ring by concentric ring like the ripples on living water above the dreamless slumber of your past; you to preside unanguished and immune above this miniature of man’s passions and hopes and disasters—ambition and fear and lust and courage and abnegation and pity and honor and sin and pride—all bound, precarious and ramshackle, held together by the web, the iron-thin warp and woof of his rapacity but withal yet dedicated to his dreams.
“First is Jefferson”: here the passion week of the heart was discovered and, because it was discovered in depth, was found to be universal. Any claim of greatness for Faulkner must rest primarily on the way he has rendered the local, the particular, and the concrete with amazing vividness while evoking the most far-reaching symbolic implications. The “historian of Yoknapatawpha” has both recorded and created a world; and he could have done neither so well if he had not done the other too. Though several of the works laid outside Yoknapatawpha are very fine, it remains as true for Faulkner as it was for Hawthorne that the past of his region is his best subject, the one in which he is surest of himself and least likely to falter in thought or feeling. And the spokes of the wheel whose hub is Jefferson radiate farthest in those works in which the past is treated with the most passionate attachment and surveyed with the most intense grief. The most significant meanings in Faulkner all start in Jefferson and radiate outward to meanings as various and as inexhaustible as myth.
Beginning with Sartoris, in which both a subject and a way of treating it were effectively discovered, his stories chart and plumb, isolate and define, Faulkner’s situation and our own. Exploiting to the limit the fracturing of the image of man, the destruction of any given, assumed meaning, they carry on a continuous conversation on the possibility of finding or creating another image, new or old, which will affirm and foster life, not deny and defeat it. Absalom, Absalom! may be taken as the key to Faulkner’s career, both formally and thematically. Before it had become commonplace to speak of modern man as “in search of a soul,” Absalom defined not only the necessity but the method and controlling conditions of the search. A commentator on Freud’s letters has said recently, in connection with the shifting problems of psychotherapy, that the task of the contemporary analyst is not so much helping his patient to adjust his personality to a given reality as helping him to discover or create a personality. The problem becomes one of the ego’s survival. “What was once the province of religion now becomes the substance of a personal therapy. . . .”1
The chief value attached to the past in Faulkner’s works is the value of a clear, and clearly human, image of man. In a way very much like that of Hawthorne a century before, Faulkner has searched the past of his family and his region in an effort to understand where it went wrong and where it was right. The Civil War and Reconstruction have been for him what the witch trials were for Hawthorne, not simply available as subjects but demanding to be treated, ghosts to be exorcized, personal wrongs to be expiated. The Sound and the Fury and The Scarlet Letter were both “wrung from the heart,” compulsively, by writers who went on later to create lesser works with more premeditation and detachment.
As Faulkner has Gavin Stevens say in Intruder, the past is not dead, it is not even past. It not only makes us what we are; it is what we have to work with. No opinion about Faulkner’s treatment of the past seems to me more mistaken than the idea that he has sentimentalized or idealized it, holding up for our adoption its specific beliefs, attitudes, or mores. If this opinion were right, then The Unvanquished should document it; but if there is any validity at all in the foregoing analysis of that work, that is precisely what it does not do: father was not large, the heroism not untinctured with heroics, the ethical code of Granny not wholly in keeping with her actions. If there is nostalgia in Faulkner’s treatment of the past, it is nostalgia—though that is perhaps hardly the word—for a definition of man that will not deny or obscure his humanity.
In the works of his deeper imagination, Faulkner’s search for a living image of man has been conditioned always by a feeling for the past and for true community—two things not entirely distinct. Faulkner has always written as though the doctrine of the communion of saints were a part of his operating creed. “The old people,” at their best, had a sense of community, and were a community; and we, Faulkner’s works imply, if we are to find an acceptable definition of ourselves, must come to a sense of community with them as well as with each other.
Much has been written in Faulkner criticism of the nature and function of the code by which the society of the Sartorises and the Compsons once lived. Faulkner himself has not been reticent on the subject, listing for us again and again, in and out of his fiction, the features of the old code that he admires. But more significant than any reiterated catalogue of virtues is the fact that in the past man could conceive of virtue and could therefore create, or hold, a code which he took to be binding no matter how often it was violated. In the world of Faulkner’s fiction men are human because they can sin. What the old people have to teach us, can teach us once we have entered imaginatively into communion with them, is not simply the value of courage, honor, pride, humility, and the rest, but the difficult belief that man is called to self-transcendence. Animals cannot sin, and Faulkner’s thorough naturalists, his Jasons and Sutpens, calculate the probabilities of effectiveness on the assumption that man can’t either. But the old people knew otherwise: they had at once a higher opinion of man’s potential and a lower opinion of his unredeemed nature. This seems to me the chief effective, aesthetically valid, affirmation that Faulkner’s fiction up to now has made.
A feeling for the human community conceived as extended in time as well as in space—a view with a vertical as well as a horizontal dimension—has this gift in its power. It can make us human again, arrest the dispersion, halt the evaporation, and start a process of creative condensation. The affirmation that man will not simply endure but prevail, left obscure in the Stockholm speech, can be interpreted in the light of the fiction: man will prevail, if he continues to believe in man, over all that defeats and dooms him. If he continues to believe in man: full, integral man, man with a conscience as well as glands, a soul as well as “gutful compulsions.” The disappearance of vision and its replacement by fact and technique (the fact “neutral,” “value-free,” and the technique designed for manipulation, for “human engineering,”) must first be halted before hope for man can be affirmed. Both the behaviorist conception of man, as an animal whose behavior can be fully understood without reference to such concepts as mind, soul, or purpose, and man’s own tendency to ease the burden of his existence by relying on anything that will render decision and commitment unnecessary, must be denied and fought, as they have been all through Faulkner’s works, before the hope can have any meaning. Quentin’s father’s definition of man as “the sum of what have you” must be replaced by the view held by “the old people.” Pylon suggests that even in the conditions of a machine-dominated culture, man can retain his essential humanity. A recent letter of Faulkner’s to a newspaper makes the same point, more obscurely. The letter comments on an airplane accident apparently caused by the pilot’s depending solely on his instruments in attempting to land:
[The pilot of the plane that crashed with great loss of life] dared not flout and affront, even with his own life too at stake, our cultural postulate of the infallibility of machines, instruments, gadgets. I grieve for him, for that moment’s victims. We all had better grieve for all people beneath a culture which holds any mechanical gadget superior to any man because the one, being mechanical, is infallible, while the other, being nothing but man, is not just subject to failure but doomed to it.2
The point had been made years before in Pylon: our image of reality, and the object of our trust, is the machine—to our ultimate grief.
Nowhere is Faulkner’s kinship with Melville more apparent than in this aspect of his thought. Though he has used different imagery to express it, his meaning I take it is very close to that of Melville in “The Bell Tower,” or in “The Lightning Rod Man,” in which the protagonist refuses to be frightened into relying on gadgets, either theological or technological. He takes his stand on the hearth, precisely the most dangerous spot according to the purveyor of lightning rods. Man is doomed to “failure,” and gadgetry will hasten, not avert, the doom; nevertheless he will “prevail,” if he dares to be man. It is the distinctive gift to us of “the old people” that at their best they dared.
But it is not simply a sense of the presentness of the past that is created, and drawn upon for guidance, in Faulkner’s works. It is also the complementary sense of the pastness of the present. It is not uninstructive that doom is one of the recurrent words in all the works, as it is in the letter to the editor I have just quoted. If it is the function equally of art and of code and ritual and myth to arrest, if only momentarily, the rush to doom, it is the prerogative of man, if he would take up his burden, to endure it. In a sense all of Faulkner’s works not only end but begin and continue with death, even though, in many of them, there is a strong hint of the possibility of new birth. The stories are written out of, and help to define for us, the inescapable anxiety of modern man.
Faulkner’s themes and situations could very appropriately be studied in Kierkegaardian terms: paradox, the absurd, the concept of dread and the dialectic of despair, man’s contradictory nature and precarious situation—these and other Kierkegaardian themes are central in the fiction and an existential analysis of them would illuminate without distortion if it were never forgotten that Kierkegaard’s central category, faith, is present in Faulkner only in some very un-Kierkegaardian form. For in the end, despite his traditionalism, the existential quality of Faulkner’s work is probably closer to Heidegger than to Kierkegaard. A feeling that life is a one-way street leading to death is the burden felt not only by the young Bayard Sartorises and the Quentins but by the Sutpens and the Joe Christmases.
In Faulkner’s work present experience is seldom realized until it is already past. Life is interpreted in terms of death: as Kierkegaard would have put it, the finite in terms of its relation to the infinite. It is no simple technical device that supplies the basic organizing principle common to The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, and The Unvanquished, or that shapes the rhetoric and syntax of the opening of “Was.” Memory here and elsewhere in Faulkner’s fiction is not adjunctive but central and enabling. It gives the fiction much of its special quality and value, and a significant part of its meaning. By creative remembering man may rise to the level of humanity and community. The remembering will not be easy or always pleasant, no mere escape into sentimental recollection. It will involve embracing all that we have known and suffered and endured, all that we are, all that it means to be alive and conscious in a now that is past before we can identify it. As Faulkner put it to the interviewer for the Paris Review, “There is no such thing as was, only is.”
AS FAULKNER’S meanings have offered a prescription for keeping man alive, so the forms of his work have helped to keep the possibility of serious fiction alive. The elaboration of myth and symbol that led finally to A Fable, which is located somewhere off the main road of fiction as we conceive it today, should not blind us to the formal accomplishment of the great works of the late twenties and thirties. We are far enough from the intellectual climate of that time, to be sure, to be nostalgic for simplicities. We appreciate the virtues of a story straightforwardly told. Having learned fully to appreciate the complexities of the James of “the major phase” and of Conrad, equipped with our guides to Ulysses and a mounting accumulation of close readings which concentrate on fiction’s symbolic effects and ignore its verisimilitude, its “rendering,” we are ready to listen to arguments intended to show that even Howells’s kind of realism was not naive. We think we have had enough, for a while, of fiction which has been assimilated to poetry.
Nevertheless there is a sense, and I think an important one, in which Faulkner’s practice in his greatest novels did keep fiction alive. It may well be that we are now at the end of an era. If so, literary history of the first half of our century will have to be rewritten in the light of the newly discovered possibilities for fiction. But in the second quarter of the century it seemed as though there were only two important alternatives to Faulkner’s way for the writer of serious fiction.
One we may call the way of Hemingway, the way of the artificially limited perspective imposing its vision on us as “fact”; or, superficially different but finally much the same, the way of doctrinaire fiction, the way of the “proletarian” novel. The framework of simple, clear conviction behind both makes for an appearance of clarity and factual objectivity which is at the farthest remove from the contextualism or perspectivism of Absalom or the symbolic density of As I Lay Dying. Yet it would be naive to suppose that these “objective” modes of fiction are less “symbolic” or “subjective” in a philosophic sense than Faulkner’s: they simply do not acknowledge their interpretations to be interpretations, they present their symbols as facts.
Only if we grant the ultimate truth of the presuppositions on which they rest will they seem to us to be presenting reality “as it is in itself,” without exclusion or symbolic distortion. In the very best of Hemingway’s work the enormous exclusions seem not to matter, the creative distortions seem not distortions at all but “the way it was.” Hemingway at his best is a great enough artist to make his experience our experience. But the doctrines are there, and are in control, just as thoroughly as they are in the more obviously doctrinaire proletarian novel.
Faulkner’s way was superfically more personal and subjective, but in a deeper sense it was objective: springing from a hunger for truth and reality, it explored and exploited the baffles and barriers between us and Truth. The forms of Faulkner’s fiction grew out of a creative response to the situation of man revealed by modern knowledge. In an important sense Faulkner’s fiction is characterized by its openness to experience, to all experience, even that which resists interpretation.
The other major alternative to Faulkner’s way was that of Virginia Woolf, in whose work the “public” world becomes completely fluid and subjective and eventually disappears. The stream of consciousness comes finally to have as its object only itself, and fiction becomes lyrical evocation of states of mind and feeling. Though Woolf’s fiction is closer to Absalom, for instance, than Hemingway’s work ever is, there is a crucial difference: even in Absalom, probably the most extreme example of the subjective method in Faulkner, the object of the search that creates the form of the novel is an assumed objective reality. We are searching for something; and what we discover is not just a state of feeling but a meaningful action, an objective fact that can be imaginatively appropriated just because it does have meaning.
Faulkner’s way is a strategy for writing fiction about truth in an age when no one knows any more what truth is. The dissipation of a “known” world of absolute truth signalized by Einstein and, ultimately, though not in his own conception of the matter, by Freud, lies behind the novels. When everything becomes problematical, a matter of perspective or of the health of the unperceived unconscious, when one may choose one’s assumptions for the construction of a geometry or an ego, when even the homeliest matters of status lose their translucence, it becomes impossible for the fully conscious man to write traditional fiction. Manners, character, plot —everything evaporates or loses significance. The novelist begins to write for a limited audience with whom he can share certain enabling assumptions; or he extends his idea of creation to include creation of belief. The drama, which depends even more directly than the novel on shared conventions of attitude and belief, comes to seem hardly possible.
These are critical commonplaces and perhaps only partly true. But their relevance to Faulkner’s achievement seems so direct that they can hardly be avoided. Structure in Faulkner’s works is the product of a created, not an assumed, truth. But the creation is undertaken for the purpose of discovery, and the building blocks used in the created structure are given. That is the chief reason why his relation to a small Southern community has been on the whole advantageous to him. If he had had to create not only his forms and his meanings but his plots and characters and culture too, I cannot imagine that he would have been able to succeed. He has not in fact succeeded when he has tried to do something like this in his stories of Europe, from the early stories of World War I aviators to A Fable. Some things a gifted artist can, perhaps must, create as it were ex nihilo, but not everything he has to work with. Yoknapatawpha has served him well, permitting him to record and create at once.
Faulkner was once commonly claimed for the naturalists, who thought of themselves as “objective recorders.” More recently he has been claimed exclusively for the Gothic writers and the symbolists, the “creators.” His importance is closely connected with the fact that both claims are in some sense true, though the later one, typical of the best writing on Faulkner for the last decade, represents a more sensitive response to his work than the earlier one.
Passages and stories may be cited to illustrate Faulkner’s kinship in aim and method with his naturalistic predecessors. We are perhaps in danger today of forgetting that the stream of consciousness method itself may in one sense be thought of as a late development of the fundamental naturalistic ideal of achieving truth beyond illusion and totally independent of belief. When it became clear, finally, that the artist could not achieve aesthetically valid “truth” by substituting scientific abstractions for felt or intuited reality, that no reliance on even the most up-to-date scientific doctrines would solve his problems as artist, later “naturalists” turned to experience itself as immediately known in their search for “objectivity.” The “poetry” of the new naturalism was intended not as a way of escaping from or denying objective truth but as a means of entry into it, into the only reality the artist could grasp. Faulkner was not being irresponsible, despite his clear kinship with writers of a different tradition, when he told the interviewer for the Paris Review that Sherwood Anderson “was the father of my generation of American writers and the tradition of American writing which our successors will carry on.”3
But as he has also said, on the same occasion, “The two great men in my time were Mann and Joyce.”4 That both Mann and Joyce, in their different ways, transcend the conflict of naturalism and symbolism is the important point here. The relation between philosophic theory and aesthetic development is nowhere clearer than in the parallel between modern philosophy’s refusal to accept either of the alternatives offered in the realist-idealist battle carried on in traditional metaphysics from the time of the Greeks, and modern art’s reluctance to accept, in the form in which they were offered, the inherited alternatives of naturalistic realism and idealistic symbolism.
Randall Stewart has put the case for the interpretation of Faulkner as an anti-naturalist most strongly: “Paradoxically, although Faulkner’s works could hardly be what they are had they not been preceded by the great works of Dreiser and the other naturalists, Faulkner, in a deeper sense, represents a break with naturalism and a return to the older tradition of Hawthorne.”5 It is impossible to quarrel with this if we are thinking of the aesthetic credo of the early naturalists, with its demand that the artist abdicate to make way for the scientist, that he renounce responsibility for his creation and offer a “slice of life.” But if we are thinking of naturalism in more philosophic terms, we may decide that Stewart’s words break and return are a little too strong, that we should speak instead of a something like a synthesis or a transendence.
A more genuine and relevant problem than the question of whether Faulkner is a “naturalist” or a “symbolist” arises when we try to apply the twin terms symbolism and allegory to Faulkner’s work. It would seem true in general to say that Faulkner’s development has been in the direction of a more allegorical method. Despite the broken clock, Benjy’s age, Quentin’s death by water, and the narcissus, The Sound and the Fury is surely less allegorical, more symbolic, than A Fable. Or we may arrive at the same conclusion as to the direction of development if we compare The Hamlet and The Town. Though much of the material in the latter is presumably closer to Faulkner’s personal experience than that in The Hamlet, surely The Town is more allegorical.
Yet it will not do to say that Faulkner started writing realistically and is now writing allegorically. It would be nearer the truth to say that Faulkner wrote his greatest early works compulsively and now writes with more conscious premeditation. What he has told us of the way he composed The Sound and the Fury and what we know of how he worked on A Fable will illustrate. Of The Sound and the Fury Faulkner has said to the Paris Review interviewer that he
wrote it five separate times trying to tell the story, to rid myself of the dream which would continue to anguish me until I did. . . . It began with a mental picture, I didn’t realize at the time it was symbolical.6
With this we may compare the Life magazine illustrated story of Faulkner at work composing A Fable: elaborate diagrams, schemes of cross reference, outlines. The earlier book began with a picture and ended in realistic symbolism; the latter began with a design and a message and ended as a kind of realistic allegory. Both works are “symbolic” and both are “realistic,” but they are very different in their effect. The Sound and the Fury is of course incomparably more “realistic” in the sense of creating for us an illusion of reality, even while it flouts the older realists’ insistence on accurate notation of surface fact. A Fable records more facts and records them more straightforwardly, within any given segment of its complicated time scheme. It is generally closer in texture, despite its allegorical intention, to history conceived as chronicle than The Sound and the Fury ever is. “Realism” in the historic sense of the word and a successfully created “illusion of reality” are not synonymous.
In Sartoris Faulkner found a way of fusing “fact” and “idea.” We may call it the symbolist way, the way of attending to what Joyce called epiphanies, of treating facts as translucent. In A Fable and in parts of The Town facts are not so much translucent as illustrative. Requiem For A Nun was Faulkner’s deliberate experiment in taking fact and meaning apart and treating them separately. A Fable tries to put them together again, starting with the meaning. The result is a paradox: the book is at once much more “realistic,” as realism has traditionally been defined, than Absalom, and much more allegorical. To compare Faulkner with Hawthorne once again, Absalom is to A Fable as The Scarlet Letter is to The Marble Faun.
When he was teaching at the University of Virginia recently Faulkner was asked “whether man’s best hope to prevail and endure lay with the mind or the heart.” Accepting the Hawthornesque terminology, Faulkner is reported to have given a Hawthornesque answer: “I don’t have much confidence in the mind. . . . It lets you down sooner or later. You have to feel.” But despite this declared lack of confidence, the direction of Faulkner’s development in recent years would seem to be toward writing more and more from the mind.
A STUDY OF a living author cannot hope for completeness, still less for definitiveness. Faulkner has said that he will complete his Doomsday book, the Snopes saga, and then break his pencil. The ultimate shape and significance of his career remains not only to be defined but to be achieved.
But some conclusions are already inescapable. That Faulkner’s achievement can be fairly judged only if we think of him as continuing the traditions of the greatest American writers is already clear. His roots are in the past, in more than one sense, and the values of the past that he has kept alive are richly inclusive. The line Eliot once traced “from Poe to Valery” could be extended: from Poe to the French Symbolists to the expatriates of the twenties to Faulkner. Like Hawthorne, Faulkner has dedicated his art to probing deep into “the truths of the human heart.” The phrase is Hawthorne’s, but the idea of the role of the artist it implies is equally Faulkner’s. The symbolic implications of Melville’s images of land and sea are continued in Faulkner’s of town and wilderness. No wonder the Rockwell Kent portrait of Ahab is said to have been at one time the only picture hanging in Faulkner’s study in Oxford. The white whale and the great bear are first cousins.
Had he lacked the courage to experiment, Faulkner could not have renewed and refreshed his heritage. When he broke with the conventions that were dominant at the beginning of his career, he did not break with tradition. Between Hawthorne’s Coverdale and Faulkner’s Horace Benbow there are only two intermediate stages, James’s John Marcher and Eliot’s Prufrock. Ahab and Houston, Pierre and the woman in “Idyll in the Desert”: their common gestures reveal a sensibility and a world. Mark Twain’s Huck Finn and the narrative voice of Anderson as it is heard in “Death in the Woods” establish a precedent for Addie’s determination to penetrate beyond words to the reality of deeds. Faulkner approaches “the real thing” with no less confidence in “the alchemy of art” than James had. The burden of the ironic and tragic vision that Faulkner’s characters must learn to endure is not new in American literature, or in any great literature. When the young poet from Oxford raided “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” to express his sense of the irony of life, he was beginning to discover a relationship between tradition and his talent that would soon help to shape his finest works:
The raven beak and Philomel
Amid the bleeding trees were fixed.
His hoarse cry and hers were mixed
And through the dark their droppings fell.
The bleeding trees, the fact and the dream: only art as fine as Faulkner’s at its best could hold them in perfect tension. Tension, not stasis. There may be more to be endured than to be enjoyed in Faulkner’s world, but there is still another sense in which he joins his voice with the voices of the great writers of the past and present with whom he must be compared: starting from a perception of man’s absurdity, he recalls us to a knowledge of our condition and our hope. With Hawthorne, he warns us against expecting redemption by a celestial railroad. His tragic vision, again like Hawthorne’s, and like Melville’s, does not deny democracy but sustains it. Nor does it suggest that we try to escape the world: rather, that we do what we can to transform it, and be prepared to endure it. His tragic vision does not deny or restrict freedom, it demands and magnifies it, but recognizes the forces that limit it. With the Mark Twain of Huckleberry Finn, he affirms the underlying worth of the common life, even in a situation replete with tragedy and absurdity. With James, Faulkner says in his work that only moral choices freely made are ultimately significant. With Eliot, Faulkner tells us that if we hold to a purely positivistic definition of man we shall misconceive his nature and his situation.
This much is already clear. Faulkner is the inheritor of a great tradition and he has augmented his inheritance to the enrichment of us all.