B006JHRY9S EBOK (42 page)

What rhetorical traits combine as “Faulknerese”? I begin with a rough definition, to be followed by a couple of examples. “Faulknerese” is a verbal practice given to proliferating syntax and Latinate/polysyllabic vocabulary. Its insistence manifests in seemingly numberless clauses that thunder onward. “Faulknerese” does not pare down; it has no interest in the Flaubertian mot juste. It refuses to pause, to let readers catch their breath, by supplying that (increasingly longed for) period that would announce: this sentence has now
ended
. Such “Faulknerese”—either previously
encountered or dreaded in advance—is a major reason many readers are skittish toward Faulkner’s work. It appears full-blown in
Intruder in the Dust
(1948),
Requiem for a Nun
(1951), and
A Fable
(1954). To see what is at stake, we might examine part of the first sentence of
Requiem’s
opening section, “The Courthouse”:

The settlement had the records; even the simple dispossession of Indians begot in time a minuscule of archive, let alone the normal litter of man’s ramshackle confederation against environment—that time and that wilderness;—in this case, a meager, fading, dogeared, uncorrelated, at times illiterate sheaf of land grants and patents and transfers and deeds, and tax- and militia-rolls, and bills of sale for slaves, and counting-house lists of spurious currency and exchange rates, and liens and mortgages, and listed rewards for escaped or stolen Negroes and other livestock, and diary-like annotations of births and marriages and deaths and public hangings and land-auctions, accumulating slowly for those three decades in a sort of iron pirate’s chest in the back room of the postoffice-tradingpost-store, until that day thirty years later when, because of a jailbreak compounded by an ancient monster iron padlock transported a thousand miles by horseback from Carolina, the box was removed to a small new leanto room like a wood- or tool-shed built two days ago against one outside wall of the morticed-log mud-chinked shake-down jail; and thus was born the Yoknapatawpha County courthouse. (RN 475)

Each detail is saliently put before us, but they relentlessly accumulate into a sort of overwhelming. One adjective (“meager”) gives birth to four more (“fading, dogeared, uncorrelated…illiterate”), in turn followed by—it seems—every possible item that might have been preserved as “records.” When Faulkner thinks “settlement records,” he thinks exhaustively. The collection is overfull; one has little sense that the twelve different categories of archival material will later take on selective significance. (They don’t.) Rather, the Faulkner imaginary has become plenary. This is how he
sees
that historical “archive.” He seems compelled to note not only every item or object there but its metamorphosis in time or extensiveness in space (“postoffice-tradingpost-store”).

We go for a second example to Faulkner’s “biggest” novel,
A Fable
. There the reader learns immediately that the crucial plot-event has already taken place. The Great War has unexpectedly, without orders from above, ground to a halt, in a small village in France. The rest of the novel will invest this mutual cessation of fighting with extraordinary significance—moving toward the Christian passion on which the text is openly modeled. I cite
the swift arrival (a few pages into the book) of a military car carrying the three top generals. They have come to crush the incipient rebellion:

It [the car] came fast, so fast that the shouts of the section leaders and the clash of rifles as each section presented arms and then clashed back to “at ease,” were not only continuous but overlapping, so that the car seemed to progress on one prolonged crash of iron as on invisible wings with steel feathers,—a long, dusty open car painted like a destroyer and flying the pennon of the supreme commander of all the allied armies, the three generals sitting side by side in the tonneau amid a rigid glitter of aides,—the three old men who held individual command over each of the three individual armies, and the one of that three who, by mutual consent and accord, held supreme command over all (and, by that token and right, over everything beneath and on and above the distracted half-continent)—the Briton, the American, and between them the Generalissimo: the slight gray man with a face wise, intelligent, and unbelieving, who no longer believed in anything but his disillusion and his intelligence and his limitless power—flashing across that terrified and aghast amazement and then gone, as the section leaders shouted again and the boots and the rifles crashed back to simple alert. (FAB 678)

This is a carefully meditated piece of writing. If I claim that its cumulative insistence makes it hard on the reader, one might remember my earlier claim that Faulkner’s difficulty was inseparable from his importance. Indeed, the opening page of
Absalom
is more daunting than this passage. But there is difficulty, and there is difficulty. Like the other earlier masterpieces,
Absalom
proceeds in such a way as to test a reader’s willingness to sustain confusion: not to know, not yet. Its first page moves from Rosa and Quentin talking intensively together, one afternoon in September 1909, to the two-generational family history of the room they are talking in (the closed shutters, the tomblike atmosphere). From there it moves to the absent nineteenth-century company haunting that room: the ghost of Thomas Sutpen, musing on them. Then it turns to something earlier yet, and apparently inaugural: Quentin’s imagining (thanks to Rosa’s words) the spectacular imposing (in 1833) of Sutpen’s Hundred—“Be Sutpen’s Hundred!”—on the land. A slew of characters and events and settings are hurled at an unprepared reader: yet each of these elements becomes (eventually) crucial to
Absalom’s
still-to-unfold range of meanings.

The difficulty of the passage from
A Fable
has nothing to do with not knowing enough in present time, unpreparedness for all that is at stake in a moment of experience. By contrast to the opening of
Absalom
, the later
passage is oddly static—a sort of monumental tableau—as it presses us to attend to the stature of its cast of officers. The prose is at pains to insist that the Generalissimo’s “supreme command” goes beyond present company, extending to everything “beneath and on and above the distracted half-continent.” That quoted phrase is slack, as are “by mutual consent and accord,” “by that token and right,” and “terrified and aghast amazement.” We are in the presence of a “big” scene full of grandiloquent phrases—a scene whose author pulls out the stops to make sure we see how big it is. We are to be impressed by military pomp and circumstance, the arrival of men of unparalleled power. Faulkner’s prose draws attention to specific commands and positions, described to impress: presenting arms, returning to at ease, rifles moving to alert.
A Fable
rarely ceases underlining the gravity and importance of its major players. (In some ways, its rhetoric oddly reminds the contemporary reader of the 2003 phrase, “Operation Shock and Awe,” during the Iraq War.) Thematically, the book’s plot is unambiguously antimilitary. But its relentless declaiming—its verbal onslaught as a series of massive set pieces, a parading of the author’s biggest verbal guns—seems suggestively to echo the same military grandeur that the plot works to undermine.

I have cited before these words of Sam Fathers (in
Go Down, Moses)
, after he has captured the wild dog Lion and has begun to train him to take down Old Ben. Faulkner’s fiction aspired more broadly to the condition of untamedness. “When something is new and hard and bright,” Cash had said in
As I Lay Dying
, “there ought to be something a little better for it than just being safe, since the safe things are just the things that folks have been doing so long they have worn the edges off and there’s nothing to the doing of them that leaves a man to say, That was not done before and it cannot be done again” (AILD 85-6). Cannot be done again: the 1929 breakthrough that took Faulkner from
Flags
to
The Sound and the Fury
required a refusal of novelistic safety. Faulkner had good reason for believing that no publisher would take on the risk embodied in his latest novel. Yes,
Ulysses
had appeared in 1922—and without Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus (presented to the reader through interior monologue) there might well have been no Quentin Compson—but Benjy’s narrative is pure Faulkner. More, Faulkner choosing to open
The Sound and the Fury
in that untamed idiotic mind involved a greater risk than Joyce opening
Ulysses
in the comparatively accessible first chapter, “Telemachus.” (
Ulysses
becomes increasingly
bewildering once it moves past its initial investment in characters, but it begins familiarly enough.)

Each of Faulkner’s novels that followed
The Sound and the Fury
—from 1929 through 1936—pursued its version of untamedness. Retaining an interior monologue format,
As I Lay Dying
departed dramatically from Compson dysfunction. Its world was rural, vernacular, and comic rather than once-aristocratic and tragic. Its cast of characters—each granted an interior lens—expanded from the earlier book’s three to a dizzying fifteen.
Sanctuary
, for its part, ran a different kind of risk: embarking on a sequence of the most sordid sexual misdeeds and their unmoralized consequences. (“Good God, I can’t publish this,” Hal Smith had remonstrated after reading the manuscript; “we’d both be in jail” [F 239].)
Light in August
opened up a new territory of unsafe materials: the murderous territory of Southern race relations that Faulkner would continue to probe in
Absalom
and
Go Down, Moses
. Each of these novels was never far from offending its reader in its own way. Next came the rhetorically overwrought
Pylon
, soon followed by
Absalom
. In the magisterial
Absalom
—difficult to write not least because it was so freighted with historical, racial, and personal troubles—Faulkner’s thematic range and technical inventiveness surpassed the capacity of all of his American contemporaries. He had become a writer of stunning risks taken and made good on.

Of the next four books—
The Unvanquished
(1938),
If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem
(1939),
The Hamlet
(1940), and
Go Down, Moses
(1942)—only the first could be called tame. Each of the others reached into high-risk zones of analysis and implication—his own sexual experience, the broadest repercussions of racial injustice in America—that put the writer at risk. The form of each was new; Faulkner was continually reinventing himself. Then, following the six-year hiatus, came the three novels of “Faulknerese.” Shrill to the point of seeking to outshout God himself, these ambitious novels failed less because they were “tamed” than because they escaped rhetorical control. Faulkner had long admired Thomas Wolfe’s project of “trying to put the whole history of the human heart” into a single sentence (FIU 144). Thus formulated, this would be a disastrous program for fiction, and Faulkner’s great work happily eluded it (whatever lip-service he paid). In that unbridled trio of “Faulknerese” novels, however, he seems in some ways to have attempted to out-Wolfe Wolfe.

It is possible to glimpse—in Faulkner’s own early fifties, the years in which he wrote these rhetorical monsters—a cumulative despair rising and overflowing its earlier unstable boundaries. It was probably the period
of his greatest personal misery and self-doubt as a writer, joined by his most damaging attempts to elude these by way of sanctuary. By the later 1950s, however, it is as though Faulkner had emerged onto the other side of a climacteric (both imaginative and experiential). The “sinister gods” remained in charge, to be sure. Life remained something that was “not now, and perhaps never was, worth the living.” But his intensity had diminished, his sense of outrage seemed to have lessened, and his last novels began to escape a “Faulknerese” compulsion to insist. He became tame(r). The doting grandfather (Jill’s first child was born in 1956), the amiable (though still impenetrable) Charlottesville gentleman and sartorial fox hunter, the serviceable teacher at the University of Virginia and global spokesperson for American culture: this more presentable persona began to emerge. Not that Faulkner’s underlying anxieties and misgivings got resolved, but they seemed—for periods of time during his last five years—to weigh less heavily. “Pappy really changed,” Jill said, reflecting on his silent delight in her two young sons: “He became so much easier for everyone to live with…. He was enjoying life” (F 671). This older, tamer Faulkner wrote
The Town
(1957),
The Mansion
(1959), and
The Reivers
(1962).

The Town
—the second volume in the Snopes trilogy—suffers when compared to the earlier
Hamlet
. Many of the same characters reappear, but it is as though they, too, have passed through a sort of climacteric. The book is domestic, more polite, at moments almost genteel. The Ratliff who shares the narrative focus with Chick Mallison (the child protagonist of
Intruder)
and with Gavin Stevens has lost much of his earlier force. His task here—as narrator—is shrewdly to counterpoint the ever-verbose Gavin Stevens. Other than narrating about Flem, Eula, her lover De Spain, her daughter Linda, and a few other odd Snopeses, the narrators have little to do. (The voyeuristic dimension of
The Town
is extensive and a touch unpleasant.)

The Mansion
(two years later) is stronger. Eula’s illegitimate daughter Linda Snopes, as uncompromising as her mother, has grown up, traveled abroad, and returned home, endowed with radical convictions. A left-wing politics begin to manifest itself. It is as though the reactionary racism that Faulkner tried to confront throughout the 1950s produced finally its fictional antagonist: a fearless girl who pursues the projects her benighted fellow white Southerners abhor. But this last Snopes volume comes most alive when it dilates on Mink Snopes’s fanatic pursuit of his treacherous brother Flem. In this pursuit Mink is abetted by Linda—who has long detested Flem for ruining her mother’s life. Finally, Mink emerges (exiting from Parchman prison thirty-seven years behind the time) as a sort of
walking anachronism. Through him, Faulkner intimates his own nostalgia for the early twentieth-century South of his childhood—the world as it used to be.