Faulkner from Within. William H. Rueckert

Of all the writing that I have done, this is the one from which I learned the most and the one that most completely confirmed me in my belief that one is never done with a great writer—or text—until one has written about him, her, or it. This means, of course, that we are never done with most of the great writers we read even if we are teachers. I taught Faulkner for years and worked out much of this book in embryonic form in the classroom with my students. The difference between where I was in my head and in my knowledge of Faulkner before I began the book and after I finished it can hardly be calculated. Writing the book was one long, exciting act of discovery. I can never have such an experience of Faulkner again, which is kind of sad, but then, that is the paradoxical pleasure of writing any book like this one. We lay the author to rest, not in a coffin or graveyard, but on our study shelf. We lay the way in which his works (words) have compelled us to rest in the sense that, having been compelled, we are coerced into writing about these works in what really amounts to an act of devotion. It is a pleasant-painful coercion; passion fuels it and, like Faulkner searching out the meaning of Joe Christmas or Thomas Sutpen or Ike McCaslin, we are driven forward, novel by novel, until we have searched out each novel and its characters and are satisfied that we understand more than we did when we began. We have laid the turbulence with which we began to rest (and can’t rest until we have done this) and at the end of the long hermeneutic journey, from Flags in the Dust to The Reivers, all passion spent, we can look back with pleasure upon the almost unbearable intensity and excitement of the journey itself.

      But we know it is over. Faulkner is all back on the shelves, in his proper order, your thousands of pages of notes are all put away; you know that there is always more you could have done with Faulkner’s novels but you also know that you are finished with Faulkner, that you will never have to do him again, that you never will do him again. His novels are as alive and magical as ever. You could pick any one of them off the shelf and read it again with great pleasure—some for the tenth, the fifteenth time, the umpteenth time—and you might even wish that you had done it differently or more adequately in the book. But you never will. You might do it differently in your head, but the book is finished, set; how could it ever be other than it is. It is just the way you wanted it to be, even though perfection is not possible in this world, or any other, for that matter. It is what you could do with what you had in your head, at that point in time, in those places. It is how you saw Faulkner. It is how you will always see Faulkner. Had you wanted Faulkner to stay fluid in your mind, you should never have written this long book about him.

      But you did. And here it is, for worse or better, one long systematic celebration of this great American genius and the truly wondrous creations of his imagination.

      Take heart from the following:

      A basic contention of this [book] is that great writers apprehend intuitively and concretely, through the medium of their art, if not formally, the system in which they were first imprisoned together with their contemporaries. Literary interpretation must be systematic because it is the continuation of literature. It should formalize implicit or already half explicit systems. To maintain that criticism will never be systematic is to maintain that it will never be real knowledge. The value of critical thought depends not on how cleverly it manages to disguise its own systematic nature or how many fundamental issues it manages to shirk or to dissolve but on how much literary substance it really embraces, comprehends, and makes articulate. The goal may be too ambitious but it is not outside the scope of literary criticism. Failure to reach it should be condemned but not the attempt. (René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel , 3)

      Abbreviations

      AA Absalom, Absalom!

      ALD As I Lay Dying

      F A Fable

      FD Flags in the Dust

      GDM Go Down, Moses

      H The Hamlet

      ID Intruder in the Dust

      KG Knight’s Gambit

      LA Light in August

      MA The Mansion

      MO Mosquitoes

      P Pylon

      R The Reivers

      RN Requiem for a Nun

      SA Sartoris

      SF The Sound and the Fury

      SN Sanctuary

      SP Soldier’s Pay

      T The Town

      UV The Unvanquished

      WP The Wild Palms

      I 1927–1932

      1 Faulkner Discovers His Native Territory

      Flags in the Dust (1926-1927; published 1973)

      Faulkner was certainly much more correct in his response to Flags in the Dust than were the many editors who rejected his third novel. He knew what he had discovered, even if they had not, and, retrospectively, we now realize just how right he was. What he had discovered was what he was destined to create: Yoknapatawpha and its people; or, as he so nicely labeled it, his “own little postage stamp of native soil”—the territory his imagination would create, create in, and be nourished by all the rest of his life. In addition, he also discovered the narrative mode and novelistic structure that were to characterize all the rest of his novels. Flags in the Dust, for example, develops (unfolds) by shifting from one character to another throughout the novel until the story Faulkner wishes to tell about all those characters is finished. The principal characters whose stories Faulkner tells here are old Bayard, Simon, Aunt Jenny, Narcissa, Belle, young Bayard, Byron Snopes, and Horace Benbow. Along the way, and usually through these or other characters, other stories are told, chiefly those of Colonel John Sartoris (old Bayard’s father, Aunt Jenny’s brother), young John Sartoris (young Bayard’s twin), the Snopes, the MacCallums, young Bayard’s first wife and child, the Negro couple young Bayard stays with after old Bayard dies of a heart attack during the last of his car accidents, old Will Falls, and Dr. Peabody. In telling these multiple individual stories by means of the technical device of interweaving (so common to Romances), Faulkner tells an overall story.

      This is the way, for example, that The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom! are narrated. The overall story is full of violent contrasts between characters (here, for example, Horace Benbow and young Bayard, the old and the young, Narcissa and Belle) and similarities that are not always immediately obvious—here for example, all those who may be described, at the end, by applying the title to them. Flags in the dust is an image of defeat, of the flags carried into battle that have fallen into the dust because those who carried them were killed or wounded, or because the flags were taken down and thrown in the dust and others raised in victory in their place. Those who are defeated in this novel are Colonel John Sartoris, his brother Bayard, old Bayard’s son (John), young Bayard’s twin (John), young Bayard himself, old Bayard, Simon, Byron Snopes, and, in a very different way, poor futile helpless Horace Benbow and Harry Mitchell. Only the women survive and triumph in this novel, and there are only a few of them: Aunt Jenny, who survives all of the Sartoris males except Benbow Sartoris, the last; Narcissa, who manages to survive her doomed, guilt-ridden, destructive husband; and Belle, who survives in her narcotic sensuality.

      When Ben Wasson cut this novel and made it into Sartoris, he really destroyed Faulkner’s original intent and masked the true nature of Faulkner’s genius, which, among other things, was for great narrative originality (as we see in The Sound and the Fury, which Faulkner was writing even as Wasson was cutting Flags in the Dust) and plenitude. It was often Faulkner’s habit to let his characters tell their own stories (or, as he said, to listen to what they were telling him and write it down as fast as he could) or, in a variation of this, to let his characters tell someone else’s story (as in Absalom, Absalom!) or, in still another variation, to let his characters tell their own story as well as someone else’s (as in The Sound and the Fury where the brothers tell Caddy’s story; or, as in As I Lay Dying, where the Bundrens and others tell their own and Addie’s