Simply Faulkner

Introduction

As I have argued, WWI was a major event affecting an entire generation of modernist writers whose careers were launched or already flourishing in the 1920s. Like Faulkner, they refused to write according to familiar 19th-century conventions of plot and character development. Although he did not fight in it, the Great War would haunt Faulkner for decades.

But there was also another war that influenced Faulkner as much as WWI, albeit indirectly. The Civil War had ended 32 years before his birth, but his native South still suffered widespread devastation—physically, politically, and socially. Its values and aspirations had not survived the ravage and humiliation wrought by Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman. Those values and aspirations did not simply disappear, however. Rather, they lingered as reminders of how things used to be—or better, how (decades later) it seemed that they used to be. Growing up in Oxford, MS, young Faulkner absorbed stories and myths about the fallen glory of the Confederacy and nostalgia for the Old South. 

Even decades after the war ended and the New South emerged with its commitment to commerce and industry, profit and progress, his region remained awash in sentimental war narratives of the Lost Cause. Early on, Faulkner grasped the hollowness of these narratives, even as he found the New South vulgar and repellant. This conflicted situation left him stymied: a useless past saturated in nostalgic fictions and an equally useless future dedicated to soulless materialism. Although the young Faulkner was determined to become a writer, his birthplace bequeathed him less a coherent story to tell than a cluster of shard-like, contradictory realities. When he finally worked this out—after several false starts—the results were not simple.

What added to the complexity of the situation was that people, he realized, did not move through time at the same pace. They did not have the same memories and assumptions and were not headed toward the same goals. If you were a child in such a family, you were immersed in past histories whose repercussions you had no way of understanding. You did not even know about these concealed histories until later—too late to take them into account. And if you were a white child in the American South at the turn of the 20th century, you were (willy-nilly) part of a racial drama that shaped your identity before you ever thought about race. You would have “known” black people long before you encountered them. On this model, real life situations were like icebergs. Most of what actually mattered—what could wreck you if approached without sufficient care—was at first (and often for a long time) out of sight. 

Social arrangements of this New South bristled with long-simmering hostilities. But your childhood innocence, however immersed in these arrangements, was incapable of taking their measure. Most starkly, you were born in the midst of interracial dramas that ranged from intimacy to murderous violence. Faulkner absorbed this unstable mix—he was an integral part of it, yet did not see himself as such. He belonged to a family whose ancestors had years earlier done memorable and vicious things. They unleashed a chain of events that spanned and impacted several generations: the grandfathers emotionally wounded their sons who, in turn, inflicted the same pain on their own sons. Young Faulkner, moreover, had been nurtured and embraced by a Negro substitute-mother, Mammy Callie Barr. His culture would teach him, relentlessly, to recognize her as black and different. Yet, he also knew (in body and mind) that she was warm and the same. The fabric of his daily life was soaked in the scandal of ancient wounds and abiding contradictions. It was filled with acknowledgments that enabled and with disownings that crippled. Above all, it was premised on racial convictions and practices that turned a people no different from him into a people utterly different from him. 

Faulkner would reach his 30s and write his first two novels before he started to see this clearly—clearly enough to recognize that these social structures and arrangements provided usable material for his fiction.

He realized there was a cauldron of race and class tensions percolating beneath the surface of conventions meant to pacify them. Pushing further, approaching the iceberg of Southern realities more closely, he would discover even deeper fissures. His first masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury (1929), reveals the Southern family engaged in its own miniature version of Civil War. Although Faulkner began his career as a poet, with this novel he ceased to define himself as poet. He had found that the prose domain of normal life could give him all he would ever need. If penetrated deeply enough, it contained the lyricism, heartbreak, and scandal that he had earlier sought to express through poetry alone. This is how he would create his Yoknapatawpha County (his “little postage stamp of native soil,” as he would call it later in The Paris Review). There, he would find that the actual and the apocryphal—the prosaic/normal and the poetic/extraordinary—were one and the same.

The tick-tock of clock-time is progressive and ongoing, but if you look harder, you come to a more disturbing model of temporality. Faulkner saw that lives, which were apparently moving forward, might be invisibly arrested or deformed by events from the past because Southerners remained passionately attached to values that had ceased to be viable since 1865—when the South lost the Civil War. All around, a racial divide was hysterically insisted upon yet physiologically groundless. The two races scandalously shared each other’s blood. Yet, one had gone to war—and would continue to erupt into violence—in order to keep the other subordinate and its bloodline separate. Shock—what Faulkner calls “outrage”—would become the bass note of his novelistic canvas. The Sound and the Fury (like his subsequent masterworks) would center on shock. But this shock had little to do with the trenches or the bombs of World War I. Such war wounds—the central premise of his first novel, Soldiers’ Pay (1926)—had all along been an exotic alibi. The real shock, the one that tore his protagonists apart, was home-grown. And there was simply no simple way to say that.

It is time now to open up the history of that “little postage stamp of native soil” that Faulkner would recreate as Yoknapatawpha County. In Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Faulkner’s Southern protagonist, Quentin Compson, tries hard to explain the South to his incredulous Canadian roommate at Harvard. Frustrated, he says: “You can’t understand it. You would have to be born there.” The South Faulkner was born into struck Quentin—as it struck his author—as both all-explaining and inexplicable to others. The history of actual Oxford and Lafayette County undergirds the doings in his fictional Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha County. Take away the former, and the latter lose their ground and resonance. The place precedes the writer, spurring him—often by its very recalcitrance—to his most remarkable fictional moves.

Lafayette County, in North Central Mississippi, was founded by repeated acts of violence. In taking over this territory in the early 19th century, white settlers had to dislodge the native Chickasaw Indians who had long been living there. (They were forcibly expelled to the “Indian Territory,” which later became Oklahoma.) The US government acknowledged Lafayette County’s legal status in 1836. Soon enough, in order to produce its major crop, cotton, the region required a cheap and exploitable workforce. That is why it began to import slaves—to labor in the cotton fields. Cotton brought wealth to its planters, the state prospered, and in 1848 Mississippi founded its University in Oxford. The racial politics of town and county were the same. The planters treated those requisite black slaves less as kindred human beings than as animals requiring white surveillance and care. Mississippi hewed tightly to this racial stance—both economically and ideologically. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, the state took only a few weeks longer than South Carolina to determine, defiantly, that it too would secede.

A war, at first distant, soon came home. Grant and Sherman were bent on capturing a Confederate river fortress in Vicksburg and, as they advanced, they laid waste. An earlier strategy of persuasion and reconciliation had hardened into one of punishment: these Southerners had to be brought to heel. Grant took Oxford in December of 1862, and 20 months later the city was burned down. In the aftermath, an imperishable narrative of Yankee wrongdoing was launched, one which young Faulkner grew up with some 40 years later. Although the North won the War in 1865, the South insidiously won it back during the 1870s. It turned out that the promise of Reconstruction—the project of giving former slaves a full American citizenship—was beyond fulfilling. It required more courage, funding, and protection than any post-1865 federal government was willing to provide. By 1875, noting with horror his state’s successful denial of civil rights to its black population, Mississippi’s Republican Governor Adelbert Ames recognized the heartbreaking irony (as cited by Eric Foner in Reconstruction): “A revolution has taken place—by force of arms—and a race are disenfranchised—they are to be returned to a condition of serfdom—an era of second slavery.”

Throughout the first half...