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Introduction

I have been compelled by Faulkner since I first read Light in August in 1949 when I was an undergraduate at Williams College. Since that time, I have read and reread Faulkner more often, taught him more often, and read more about him than any other author I have encountered during my career—with the possible exception of Kenneth Burke, another career-long passion and, by an odd coincidence, born the same year as Faulkner. You could say, very accurately, that Faulkner was—or, rather, that his fictions were—one of the great passions of my adult and professional life. No amount of reading or rereading or reading about him has ever diminished this passion. I have known other passions: for D. H. Lawrence, for Conrad, for Melville, for Fitzgerald and Hemingway, for John Hawkes and Wright Morris, for W. S. Merwin and Whitman, for William Carlos Williams, for Thoreau and E. B. White, for Vonnegut and Gary Snyder—but no passion has been as strong nor lasted as long as this passion for Faulkner. It was inevitable that I would eventually write something long and substantial about him, which I have done in this book, and even the long ordeal of writing and rewriting this book has not diminished the force of my passion for Faulkner; in fact, it has only increased it.

Let me be accurate and exact here: it is Faulkner’s fictions, especially his novels, which have been my passion. The original title of this book was Faulkner, From Within—a title stolen from the French, who have always had a genius for getting inside the imaginative creations of an author and charting that territory for us. I had very little interest in Faulkner’s life until Joseph Blotner’s monumental two-volume biography came out in 1974.1 I finally read this wonderful work in 1978; but by then I had finished a whole first draft of this book and when I read Blotner’s Faulkner, A Biography, I was chiefly interested in trying to relate the inner imaginative life I had spent so much time studying and writing about to the outer life Blotner—and, later, others—chronicled in such minute detail (all 1,846 pages of it). It is still the inner imaginative life rather than the outer life that I find most compelling, though I admit to the usual fascination with the many mundane facts about the life of this genius that are now available to us. However, only a genius could have lived Faulkner’s amazing and unique inner imaginative life and created the novels and stories that he did. His genius, in other words, was not in the kind of life he led, as is sometimes the case, but in the fictions he created. If it were not for Faulkner’s genius, no one would have been much interested in his life anyway. Writing the life, as Blotner so lovingly did, is but one way of trying to understand and acknowledge the nature of this genius. Another way, is to go directly to the works of the genius; still a third way—as in the work of David Minter and Judith Wittenberg—is, to borrow Wittenberg’s subtitle—to try to discover how the life was “transfigured” into the fictions.2 My way was to go directly to the works, the novels, and to study them, in terms of themselves (the laws of the imagination and of fiction) more or less to the exclusion of everything else. I do not mean by this that my primary emphasis is aesthetic because it isn’t; only that, with very few exceptions, I found all of my evidence, all of the “facts” that I worked with, in the novels themselves and worked on the assumption, as I always have when dealing with literary works, that the work will reveal its intention to me from internal evidence if I study it hard enough.

I have used what Faulkner said about his novels somewhat sparingly because, once created, novels have a life of their own which even the creator of them does not, in retrospect, necessarily fully understand and maybe did not ever fully understand. History, though it does not change the text, changes the way in which we may read that text, and the huge accrual of readings of the novels adds dimensions to them not even Faulkner could possibly have anticipated. Faulkner certainly knew he was a genius; in fact, he was sometimes amazed at his own genius: but his word is not necessarily the definitive word on any novel or character—though what he says is certainly always worth paying attention to. Novels have intentions of their own which clearly transcend an author’s intentions. An author can tell us exactly what he intended, which does not mean that is what was achieved, or that there wasn’t more there than was intended or even consciously recognized. It is here that the whole theory of archetypes and symbolism becomes so important. The texts of all great writers soon transcend the intentions, and maybe even the understanding, of their creators. And it is perfectly clear from the record, that authors are great liars about their texts and that there are some things about any great text so private and secret no author will ever talk about them or divulge them. We may document the external life of an author from the record, but the only reliable record for the interior imaginative life is the record provided by the text itself. The author may lie, but the text can’t—not even so cryptographic a text as Absalom, Absalom!.

I do not mean to argue here that the life of the author and his fictions are not related and connected in interesting and complex ways—if we can but figure them out—and that pursuing this line of investigation often yields surprising, often very startling results. Minter and Wittenberg have clearly shown this to be true.3 What I want to argue is that the fictions have a life of their own; it is the fictions that will survive and remain important, not the life of the author; and even if we knew nothing at all about the author or about anything he might have said about his own work, that would not in any way diminish the power of these great fictions. Their power is intrinsic to them, and can be gotten at directly, by taking a reasonably well-trained critical mind to the texts themselves. Anyone who has taught Faulkner knows this to be true: a whole class learns to live within the imaginative world of the novels, to talk about the characters as if they were really real and as if what happened to them really mattered. It soon learns that this imaginative world, from novel to novel, has a coherence of its own, that certain kinds of characters keep reappearing, certain themes and conflicts are returned to again and again, that, no matter what, the great comic voice speaks out over and over again. These things are all in the novels and no external evidence—from the life, or anywhere else—is needed to explain or justify any of them.

If this seems like an extremely puristic (perhaps critically naive) view of the relationship between the reader and the text, a view that seems to argue that neither scholarship nor criticism is really necessary, that the text can stand alone as a set of internally coherent signs which a reader can work his way into and back out of again—well, yes, it is somewhat puristic, but certainly not critically naive. It argues for the autonomy of the text over and above all else, and for the value of as direct an experience of the text as possible. It is a position, not a dictum or a hard line doctrine. It says, I do not want to approach the texts through the life, or through the vast archeo-critical deposits that have now accumulated over and around every Faulkner novel; it says I do not want to take a psycho-critical approach, trying to explain the texts in terms of the psychology of the author: it says I want to approach the texts directly, as acts of the imagination, realizing that between reality and fiction mysterious transformations take place which are largely the work of the imagination, and that only the fiction, the finished work of the imagination, can tell its own story.

This study of Faulkner’s novels is anything but critically naive. Very high powered and extremely sophisticated critical and interpretive ideas and methods have been used to read the novels and enable me to accomplish what I set out to do when I decided I would write a book on Faulkner and the novel. Anyone familiar with modern critical theory will immediately recognize the pervasive influence of some of the great voices that have spoken to us about literature in our time. Among the most prominent are Kenneth Burke, who is ubiquitous, in this book as in my mind. My passion for Burke is certainly equal to my passion for Faulkner.4 Northrop Frye, especially his Anatomy of Criticism, certainly one of the most powerful and coherent theories of literature developed by anyone in our time, is also everywhere at work in my reading of the novels because his theory of the imagination and the nature and function of its creations, certainly had much to do with my view of these matters. Two of Gaston Bachelard’s many wonderful books, The Psychoanalysis of Fire and The Poetics of Space taught me more than I can acknowledge about the ways of the imagination and the effects of what we read on our own imaginations—a central concern of this study of Faulkner’s novels. René Girard, especially in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure revolutionized the way in which I read novels. His book—still—is certainly one of the most stimulating on the novel that I ever read, and I simply transferred much of what he said about the great European novelists to my study of Faulkner and his major characters—especially what he said about models for the self and mediators, and destructive and generative being. From my own generation, J. Hillis Miller showed me the way better than anyone else, especially in his Poets of Reality, through all the wonderful work he did on the novel and through the different ways he showed us for reading the works of poets and novelists as whole, coherent visions. Finally, I took much Roland Barthes with me to my reading of Faulkner’s novels, especially what I learned from Critique et Vérité and Sur Racine. Both of these books tell us much about the coherence of the imaginative life and the interconnectedness of what it creates—whether in poetry, drama, or fiction.

Had I not read the books of these critics (and many others, of course, including the pioneering critics of Faulkner like Olga Vickery), I could not have written this one on Faulkner; so that, contrary to what I seem to suggest above in my remarks on puristic approaches, I certainly did not come to Faulkner and his novels empty headed. Single-mindedly, yes! You might say that I came loaded for bear or, more exactly, that I came loaded for “The Bear” (as Chapter 7 will show). A book should be read in the spirit in which it was written and should not be asked to do, or be faulted for not doing, what it never intended to do. There are many things that I have not done because they did not—or did not seem to—have anything to do with what I wanted to do. I have not dealt with any of Faulkner’s early work, though at one time I tried to, but abandoned it when it seemed clearly irrelevant to my purpose. I have not discussed Faulkner’s first two novels because I wanted to begin at that point in his career where his true genius as a novelist first discovered and expressed itself. At one point that seemed to be in Sartoris. But when Douglas Day edited the complete text of Flags in the Dust in 1973, it was obvious to any student of Faulkner that Flags in the Dust, not the heavily cut and edited Ben Wasson Sartoris, was the text with which one should begin. So, though I had written part of a chapter on Sartoris, I took it out and wrote a new one on Flags in the Dust when—somewhat embarrassed—I finally got around to reading it. I have not discussed any of Faulkner’s short stories, though I recently reread all of them because none seemed to add anything to what I was able to say in discussing the novels. Perhaps somewhat perversely, I have not used much of the life or the letters or the many interviews or the many interesting things Faulkner said about his own work because I wanted to approach the texts directly and let them, as much as possible, speak for themselves. Though I have read huge amounts of Faulkner criticism, I have used very little of it directly because I did not want to write a book in which I had to disprove one critic or another or in which I carried on long contentious arguments with them. They have had their say. I will have mine here. The world is large enough for all of us—especially the world of Faulknerian criticism.

So let me say here exactly what I was interested in and what I wanted to accomplish in following Faulkner’s development as a novelist from Flags in the Dust (1927) to The Reivers (1962), treating also as novels his three coherent gatherings of stories: The Unvanquished (1938), Go Down, Moses (1942), and Knight’s Gambit (1949), each of which, as was Faulkner’s practice, is organized around a family or a central self, or both. I began with the perception—the sure sense—that in Go Down, Moses and Ike McCaslin we had the turning point in Faulkner’s career and development, and that there was a clear before and after Go Down, Moses, with everything after being essentially different in some way from everything before. So I set out to write a book which would itself turn, as this one does, upon a long, detailed analysis of Go Down, Moses and Ike McCaslin as a special or privileged Faulknerian self. In general terms, I saw this turn in Faulkner as one that went from destructive to generative being, from tragedy to comedy, from pollution to purification and redemption (with many of the later works purifying and redeeming the earlier works, as in the case of Requiem for a Nun and Sanctuary).

My approach to Faulkner from the very beginning was an ontological one: I wanted to find out why there were so many destructive and destroyed beings—selves—in the novels before Go Down, Moses; what was different about Ike McCaslin that saved him from destruction and made him non-destructive (though not generative for others), and what the sources of generative being were in the selves with which Faulkner peopled his later novels (and sometimes inserted into the earlier, highly destructive novels—such as Dilsey, Lena Grove, Byron Bunch, Bayard Sartoris, Ratliff). My analyses of the novels were always organized around an analysis of the selves, usually to the exclusion of almost everything else. The most obvious example of this, and the clearest early model of how I proceed, is found in the analysis of Light in August in Chapter 3. I tried to develop a mode of analysis that would enable me to translate every major self into a set of values and then, using this as my basic approach, I tried to develop a condensed way of working out a basic “reading” of each novel. Since my critical mind is and has always been totally text centered, I go forward, from Flags in the Dust on, novel by novel, discrete whole unit by discrete whole unit, right on through to The Reivers. Not all the novels are treated equally, but all are analyzed and every major self in Faulkner’s novels is taken up and discussed in some way. It is through the analysis of all these selves that I arrive at the issues Faulkner took up and dealt with in his imaginative life. Some issues, such as nature and role of the family, he returned to again and again in his many great family novels: Flags in the Dust, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom!, The Hamlet, Go Down, Moses, The Town/Mansion pair, even A Fable. Some issues, such as the black-white one, and later, the extended black-white-red one, he returned to periodically until his imagination was done with them. His first serious novel on this subject or issue was Light in August (1932). He returned to it in Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Go Down, Moses (1942), Intruder in the Dust (1948), and Requiem for a Nun (1951).

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 of readers, even that of the most devoted Faulknerian. 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)