So, though my focus throughout is upon the selves that Faulkner created, and the extent to which they are destructive or generative, destroyed or victimized, redemptive or redeemed, I have not proceeded from self to self, or thematically, by groups of novels, but novel by novel; invariably, as a result of this, I have much to say about the ways in which Faulkner constructed novels—about how he tended to center every novel around a major character, such as Joe Christmas or Sutpen or Ike McCaslin, how novel after novel conducted a searching action, a movement inward toward knowledge about that character and why each was the way he or she was (best exemplified in Absalom, Absalom!); how every novel used comedy as one of its voices in a kind of dialectic or dialogue Faulkner always conducted with himself in his imaginative life—and more, of course. Going novel by novel, I have tried to chart Faulkner’s imaginative development, to the almost total exclusion of any references to what was happening to him in his real everyday life, or, for the most part, to what was happening in history. To have attempted to correlate the fictional, personal, and historical, as others have done, would have required that I write a completely different kind of book. Faulkner was well aware of what was going on in his own time, not only in his own region, but also in his own country and the world at large. He refers to historical events constantly, even in a book apparently so remote from the present as Go Down, Moses. I do not question the importance and relevance of these correlations, but I was not the one to work them out, and it would be a mistake to go searching for them in a book that is so exclusively devoted to the internal evidence of Faulkner’s novels, treated, for the most part, as a total closed and unchanging set of verbal facts, beginning with Flags in the Dust and ending with The Reivers.
Except for the extended analysis and interpretation of Go Down, Moses in Chapter 8—my demonstration chapter, as it were, of what might be done with any major Faulkner novel—my treatment of many of the other novels is somewhat limited by a need to pursue my “thesis.” I feel this limitation most strongly and regrettably in the analysis of Absalom, Absalom!—surely Faulkner’s greatest, most complex, and most intricately narrated novel. There, I have clearly subordinated a full and adequate treatment of the novel—which would have to be a long and delicate operation—to my need to get said what I think needs to be said about Sutpen as one of the most heroic yet destructive selves in Faulkner. In doing this, I have squandered Quentin Compson and Rosa Coldfield, two of Faulkner’s great contradicted virgin selves. But in a book this long, as every writer on Faulkner knows, one must make choices, and I chose to center my book in the analysis of Go Down, Moses rather than Absalom, Absalom!. I feel this limitation, also, in my treatment of Faulkner’s late, great, and much misunderstood A Fable. Every new reading of that novel confirms its complexity and greatness and the hermeneutic difficulties confronting anyone trying to understand this novel and its place in Faulkner’s overall development. The fable of A Fable is not easy to come by, nor is an understanding of the enormous narrative and stylistic complexity of the novel and Faulkner’s decision, for the first and only time in his novelistic life, to use foreign material.
And finally, I suppose, I can be faulted for my somewhat oversimplified and abbreviated treatment of The Town and The Mansion, Faulkner’s two great works of social comedy where, near the end of his career, he returns to its beginnings, and gets rid of the monster he introduced into Yoknapatawpha County even as he was conceiving it in the late 1920s. Of course, he does considerably more than that in these two novels through some of his most generative (and generous) selves: Gavin Stevens, Ratliff, Chick Mallison, Eula Snopes and Linda Snopes. Again, I plead the need to make the overall thesis of the book clear in a concise way, and to indicate, if rather briefly, how far away Faulkner was in his imaginative life in those novels from where he was when he conceived and wrote The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August and Absalom, Absalom!. It is probably less a diminishment of power than a change in perspective from tragic to comic that we would need to deal with here. I have identified the change without trying to deal with it in a detailed way. Perhaps, like many critics, I was more compelled by what destroys individuals than by what might help us purge and redeem our community.
There is not much point, really, in apologizing for these limitations too profusely. I might have done what Cleanth Brooks did, realizing, as he surely did, that one book on Faulkner would never do it: he wrote two more. I am not sure I would have the strength or will power or even the desire to do that. This one has taken me long enough and I have probably managed to say in it most of what I have to say about Faulkner that is of any value. At least I am certain that I have accomplished what I set out to, and it is, after all, the whole book and the overall view that one is really interested in; and it is primarily this, rather than the reading of any single novel, that one wants to add to the now huge corpus of Faulkner criticism and interpretation. Faulknerians reading this book will immediately recognize what it adds to their knowledge of individual novels and to their reading of Faulkner as a whole. Take Warwick Wadlington’s Reading Faulknerian Tragedy, for example. Once you get past his somewhat cumbersome terminology about voice and performance and get used to his rather tough prose style and get to his early demonstration readings of The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, you realize immediately, with a rush of gratitude, that he has seen something in, or brought something to the reading of Faulkner that you have not encountered before, and that his book will enable you to rethink, not just the novels he discusses so brilliantly in detail, in terms of his thesis, but all the novels, even minor ones like The Unvanquished.
That is always what one hopes for in writing a long book like this one. Beyond this, as in the work of J. Hillis Miller, one would, ideally, like to add not just a reading of—say Dickens or the novels Miller takes up in Fiction and Repetition—but a way of reading novels. In my case, I would like to add an ontological approach to one’s way of reading novels, and in my long demonstration chapter on Go Down, Moses, I would like to confirm my belief that great novels should be read as carefully and as seriously as possible so that we might explore, through them, the imaginative realities only genius makes available to us. These are always extra-aesthetic realities and to explore them in the detailed way I have in Chapter 8 is not a matter of self indulgence—though I certainly did enjoy myself while writing that chapter—but of admiration. I have sometimes been accused of indulging in hagiography in my writing about different writers, but I do not see anything wrong with that. It seems like an appropriate response when you are awestruck by what you read—as I am when I read Faulkner, or Whitman, or Merwin. We must love the way words are used by such writers before we can understand and appreciate them.
This book has been a work of love from beginning to end. I make no apologies for its length. In fact, I wish it were longer so that I could have done some things more adequately. But everything has its limits, including the patience