Again Is the Saddest Word the Sound and the Fury Page

Faulkner and his wife
William Faulkner and his wife, Estelle, stand up outside their abode, in Oxford, Mississippi, in the spring of 1955. (Bettmann / Getty)

Inorth June 2005, Oprah Winfrey appear a surprising choice as the 55th selection for her influential book club. The coming months would exist, she proclaimed, a "Summer of Faulkner," focused on iii of his novels—As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, and Light in August, bachelor in a special i,100-folio box fix weighing in at two pounds. Oprah's website posted short videotaped lectures by three literature professors to assist readers in making sense of the writer'southward notoriously demanding prose. The Faulkner trilogy quickly rose to the No. 2 spot on Amazon'south best-seller list. Some literary critics hailed Winfrey for bringing William Faulkner back into popular consciousness; others challenged any notion of recovery or revival, request whether he had ever really gone away.

In the decade and a half since and then, the issues of race and history so central to Faulkner'due south work accept grown simply more urgent. How should we at present regard this pathbreaking, Nobel Prize–winning author, who grappled with our nation's racial tragedy in ways that at once illuminate and disturb—that reflect both startling human being truths and the limitations of a white southerner born in 1897 into the stifling air of Mississippi's closed and segregated guild? In our current moment of racial reckoning, Faulkner is certainly ripe for rigorous scrutiny.

Michael Gorra, an English professor at Smith, believes Faulkner to be the well-nigh of import novelist of the 20th century. In his rich, complex, and eloquent new volume, The Saddest Words: William Faulkner'south Civil War, he makes the case for how and why to read Faulkner in the 21st past revisiting his fiction through the lens of the Civil War, "the cardinal quarrel of our nation'due south history." Rarely an overt subject field, one "not dramatized so much every bit invoked," the Ceremonious State of war is both "everywhere" and "nowhere" in Faulkner's work. He cannot escape the war, its aftermath, or its meaning, and neither, Gorra insists, tin nosotros. As the formerly enslaved Ringo remarks in The Unvanquished (1938) during Reconstruction-era conflict over voting rights, "This war aint over. Striking just started good." This is why for us, as for Jason and Quentin Compson in The Sound and the Fury (1929), was and again are "the saddest words." As Gorra explains, "What was is never over."

In setting out to explore what Faulkner can tell us about the Ceremonious State of war and what the war can tell us about Faulkner, Gorra engages as both historian and literary critic. But he likewise writes, he confesses, equally an "act of citizenship." His book represents his ain meditation on the meaning of the "forever war" of race, not merely in American history and literature, but in our fraught time. What nosotros think today about the Civil War, he believes, "serves above all to tell us what we remember about ourselves, nearly the nature of our polity and the shape of our history."

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The cadre of Gorra's volume is a Civil State of war narrative, which he has created by untangling the war's appearances throughout Faulkner'due south fiction and rearranging them "into something like linearity." From the layers and circularities and recurrences and reversals of Faulkner'due south xix novels and more than 100 brusk stories, Gorra has constructed a chronological telling of Yoknapatawpha'southward state of war, of the incidents and characters who announced in the author's extended relate of his invented "postage stamp" world. Faulkner took liberties with the historical club of events; what he sought to depict was the "psychological truth of the Confederate domicile front" and the war's aftermath. This is piece of work, Gorra argues, that bodily documents of the catamenia would exist hard-pressed to do. And that psychological truth certainly could non have been derived from report of the racist historiography of Faulkner's era, which he insisted he never even read. Instead, this agreement is the product of what Toni Morrison one time called Faulkner's "refusal-to-look-abroad approach" to the brunt of his region'south cruel past.

Faulkner enacts this refusal through his practice of looking once again, of revisiting the same characters and stories, and through the prequels and sequels and outgrowths of those he has already told, digging deeply into the hidden and ofttimes shocking truths of the Southward he portrays. Gorra endeavors to unknot and clarify Faulkner'south oeuvre by reconstructing information technology himself, simply his act of literary explication is likewise ane of participation—a joining in the Faulknerian process. Gorra renarrates these Civil War stories as he seeks to come to terms both with America's painful racial legacies and with William Faulkner.

Perhaps the most powerful of Faulkner's tellings of the Civil State of war story is Absalom, Absalom! (1936), a novel structured around Quentin Compson'due south own refusal to await away. Although Faulkner insisted that Quentin did not speak for him, Gorra has "never quite believed him." Quentin'south search to understand why Charles Bon was murdered during the very last days of the war unfolds through his elaboration of successive narratives in a manner not unlike Faulkner's own. Unsatisfied with each version of the story he uncovers, Quentin looks again, arriving through always more disturbing revelations at the South's original sin: the distorting and dehumanizing power of race. It is race that pulls the trigger. "So it's the miscegenation, not the incest, which you deceit deport," Bon says just earlier Henry, at once his brother and his fiancée's brother, shoots him.

To call back of this novel appearing in the aforementioned twelvemonth every bit Gone With the Current of air is startling. Information technology was moonlight and magnolias, rather than a searing portrait of the persisting legacies of slavery, that captured the public'south acclamation: Margaret Mitchell, not Faulkner, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937. But Faulkner'due south catamenia of "explosive productivity," beginning in 1929—thirteen books in 13 years—attracted a different sort of attention, because of his formal innovations and literary experimentalism, non just his unvarnished portrayals of race. In a 1939 essay, Jean-Paul Sartre compared him to Proust, and Faulkner became an idol in the optics of immature French intellectuals likewise as literary critics around the world. Faulkner might not have won the Pulitzer, but he was on the path to his 1949 Nobel.

Gorra notes the "ever-increasing importance of race" in Faulkner'southward fiction. Yet society's racial attitudes and practices were evolving fifty-fifty more than speedily than Faulkner's own. As the civil-rights motility gained momentum after the end of World War II, Faulkner engaged in more explicit public commentary about America'south divisions and inequities. Like critics in those years and ever since, Gorra struggles to come to terms with the distressing views Faulkner frequently articulated on questions of racial progress and racial justice. Gorra does not expect abroad from Faulkner's troubling public statements or from some disconcerting stereotypes and assumptions in his literary piece of work that became newly jarring as social attitudes shifted.

A keen bargain is at stake in Gorra's effort. We are in a time when authors' reputations are overturned, their works removed from reading lists, their achievements devalued because of their incomprehension on questions we now see with different eyes. At the outset of his book, Gorra reminds u.s. of persisting debates over Joseph Conrad, initially stimulated by a 1977 Chinua Achebe essay labeling him an apologist for imperialism. Today, Gorra believes, Faulkner "stands to us equally Conrad does," in need of reexamination and an updated understanding that confronts his racist shortcomings.

Faulkner, Gorra concedes, "remained a white human of the Jim Crow South and did not always rise above information technology. At times his words both can and should make usa uncomfortable." His fiction offers an "all-too forgiving depiction of slaveholder paternalism." His novels and stories neglect to render slavery'southward concrete cruelties; they include no depiction of an auction, a family unit separated past auction, or a whipping. Many of his Blackness characters seem incomplete, although they're certainly not the caricatured stereotypes typical of then much white southern writing of his time. Faulkner remarked upon white men who had "the courage and endurance to resist … Reconstruction." The Unvanquished presents John Sartoris equally a leader of the local Klan admirably determined to go along "the carpetbaggers from organizing the negroes into an insurrection," which was Sartoris's view of the Black merits on the franchise. Every bit Gorra observes, Faulkner'southward "motion picture of black voters every bit inevitably ignorant and corruptible simply parrots the view of Reconstruction that was current in Faulkner's babyhood and for some decades thereafter." A 1943 short story Faulkner wrote for The Sabbatum Evening Post presents the slave broker and Confederate full general Nathan Bedford Forrest in a generous manner that Gorra finds particularly "hard to stomach." At the aforementioned time, Gorra points out, the depiction of enslaved people fleeing to freedom and securing their own emancipation transcends the historiography of Faulkner'southward time and anticipates that of our own. He is no apologist for the Old Due south, and resists in any mode glorifying the war, dissimilar about every other white southerner of his era.

The public pronouncements Faulkner made on race every bit the civil-rights movement unfolded are in many ways fifty-fifty more disturbing than the shortcomings Gorra identifies in his fiction. In an appalling drunken interview with the British Sun Times in 1956, Faulkner invoked the specter of race state of war if the South were compelled to integrate, but when his words were widely reviled, he denied ever having uttered them. He regularly spoke out against lynching and deplored the 1955 murder of Emmett Till, maxim that whatever society that murdered children didn't "deserve to survive, and probably won't." But he had once suggested that mobs, "similar our juries … have a way of being right." Gorra underscores the "incoherence" of Faulkner's position as both critic and defender of the white South'south resistance to change.

In many means, he was a quintessential white southern "moderate," an identity much scrutinized every bit the civil-rights movement gathered momentum. He condemned violence and recognized the demand to end segregation, but he rejected what Martin Luther King Jr. subsequently described every bit "the fierce urgency of now." Indeed, it was the moral failures of just such moderates that Male monarch would directly assail in his 1963 "Letter From Birmingham Jail." Faulkner urged patience and delay and spoke out against federal coercion of the white S. His critics thought he should have known better. As James Baldwin explained in a 1956 essay condemning his views on desegregation, Faulkner hoped to requite southern whites the time and opportunity to salvage themselves, to reclaim their moral identity. But their salvation could come, if at all, only at the cost of postponing justice for Black Americans, which Baldwin made clear was no longer conceivable.

Gorra assembles quite a neb of failings, especially if we view Faulkner with the assumptions of our time and place rather than his own. Nevertheless having meticulously acknowledged all of this, Gorra makes his merits for Faulkner the writer by reproving Faulkner the man. "When writing fiction," Faulkner "became ameliorate than he was." He had, Gorra argues, an uncanny ability to "think his style within other people," to inhabit their being then as to erase preconceptions and prejudices in the very deed of portraying their minds and souls. Through fiction, Faulkner could "stand outside his Oxford, his Jefferson, and see the behavior his people accept for granted, the things they don't even question." As Gorra presents it, the act of writing bestowed an virtually mystical clear-sightedness. However that clarity was e'er challenged in the fetid Mississippi air that Faulkner, like all his characters, had to exhale. And it is that very tension, the combination of the flaws and the brilliance, that for Gorra makes his case.

Is this rendering of Faulkner's weaknesses equally the source of his strength just an human action of interpretive jiu‑jitsu? Or perhaps a reversion to a romantic notion of redemptive genius? Or is Gorra influenced by what Faulkner himself urged upon posterity: that his life exist "abolished and voided from history," leaving only "the printed books"? After all, Faulkner once alleged that he wanted his epitaph to read "He fabricated the books and he died."

But Gorra insists on the importance of the teller and the tale, as well as on the creative forcefulness Faulkner derived from the brunt of race, which he could non escape. It is because of, not in spite of, Faulkner's shortcomings that we must continue to engage with his work: These failures are production and emblem of the legacies of racial injustice that shape us all. In his Nobel Prize speech in 1950, Faulkner declared that the only thing worth writing virtually was "the human being centre in conflict with itself." He lived that disharmonize fifty-fifty as he wrote nigh it. His struggles forced him to experiment and to innovate, yielding both his artful and his upstanding insight. These very difficulties—"the drama and … power of his effort to piece of work through our history, to wrestle or rescue it into significant"—are what make Faulkner so worthwhile. We read him because he takes u.s. with him into our national middle of darkness, into the shameful history we have nevertheless failed to face up or understand. Our past, Gorra and Faulkner hold, is "never over." Or certainly not yet.

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Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/09/michael-gorra-william-faulkner/614206/

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