Uses of the Past in the Novels of Williams Faulkner
PREFACE
My study of William Faulkner began in high school in 1963 with a puzzled but exhilarating reading of The Sound and the Fury. At Michigan State University in 1966 Professor M. Thomas Inge, who has remained my teacher and my guide, introduced me to “The Bear” at a time when I was also learning about the philosophy of history and historiography. This book had its inception in 1970 as a graduate paper for Professor Michael Millgate’s class on Wessex and Yoknapatawpha at the University of Toronto. Under his astute and assiduous supervision I expanded the paper and completed it in 1975. Ten years later, I revised and updated Uses of the Past in the Novels of William Faulkner, omitted a chapter, rearranged and augmented material within chapters, and expanded the introduction, conclusion, and bibliography.
For this edition, I have taken into account another decade of Faulkner criticism, acknowledging the explosion of interest in literary theory which has been brought to bear on the novels, and pruning footnotes in the earlier edition to accommodate the arguments of recent scholarship. In subtle ways, I hope, this altered book reflects my experience as a biographer who shares with Faulkner a fascination with uses of the past. I had thought, as a graduate student, that I was mainly interested in his interpretation of history. I now realize that much of his characters’ obsessions can be called biographical. They are searching for ways to interpret personalities that seem both familiar and alien to them, personalities removed by time but accessible, nevertheless, through the imagination and the documentary record. This book reflects little change in my views, I confess, but rather a deepening of conviction, a supply of fresh examples, and a dialogue with scholars who have extended and challenged my understanding of the key texts in this study.
1
INTRODUCTION
I
This book attempts to define both the uniqueness of Faulkner’s uses of the past and the extent to which those uses derive from, or are comparable to, the work of historians and historical novelists. In many respects, of course, his novels are not historical at all. Most of them are set in or near his own lifetime, none in the distant past, so that when we speak of the past in his work we are usually thinking of a time no more than three to four generations from his own, a time that was still partially present for him in the minds of old people or of the descendants of the white and black inhabitants of the antebellum South. Faulkner’s novels are historical in the sense that their concern is frequently with characters who are obsessed with a personal, family, or regional past. The chief reasons for the predominance of the past in the minds of Faulkner’s characters, for the tremendous historical depth which that predominance gives to his fiction, and for what he sees as the inherent limitations of regarding the past as the sole determinant of man’s history are perhaps illuminated by Ortega y Gasset’s suggestion:
The past is man’s moment of identity … nothing besides is inexorable and fatal. But, for the same reason, if man’s only Eleatic [immutable] being is what he has been, this means that his authentic being, what in effect he is—and not merely “has been”—is distinct from the past, and consists precisely and formally in “being what one has not been,” in non-Eleatic being.
In Flags in the Dust, for example, there are a number of moments in Miss Jenny’s, old Bayard’s, and old man Falls’s accounts of the Civil War which make the past actions of the Sartorises seem inexorable and fatal. Young Bayard’s life is blighted by his constant recurrence to the moment when his brother John jumped out of his plane and thumbed his nose at him, and in Light in August Hightower’s present is silenced by the thundering of galloping horses out of his grandfather’s past. But precisely because man tends to identify himself with his past and to see his past as the sole determinant of his being, the novels imply—and Faulkner himself has said—that man should rather see life as motion, change: to immerse one’s self entirely in the past is to remain what one “has been,” and once anything “stops, abandons motion, it is dead. Thus for Faulkner, too, “authentic being … consists precisely and formally in ‘being what one has not been.’”
Although this book is not a study of Faulkner’s view of time, his nonfiction statements on the subject help to explain the ways in which he uses the past and the extent to which his uses differ from those of his characters. Faulkner told Malcolm Cowley that “my ambition … is to put everything into one sentence—not only the present but the whole past on which it depends and which keeps overtaking the present, second by second.” On the face of it, this statement may seem to endorse Sartre’s notion that in Faulkner’s fiction “the past takes on a sort of super-reality; its contours are hard and clear, unchangeable.” Sartre demonstrates very well that in The Sound and the Fury the past overtakes Quentin’s present and that Quentin sees the present only in terms of the past. But, as several critics have pointed out, it is dangerous to equate the author’s views with a particular character’s perceptions, especially since other characters in other novels, such as Charles Bon in Absalom, Absalom!, express the opposite view of time: “What WAS is one thing, and now it is not because it is dead … and therefore what IS … is something else again because it was not even alive then.” Clearly, more needs to be said about the exact way in which Faulkner sees the past as overtaking the present.
At the University of Virginia Faulkner stated:
To me, no man is himself, he is the sum of his past. There is no such thing really as was because the past is. It is a part of every man, every woman, and every moment. All of his and her ancestry, background, is all a part of himself and herself at any moment. And so a man, a character in a story at any moment of action is not just himself as he is then, he is all that made him, and the long sentence is an attempt to get his past and possibly his future into the instant in which he does something.
The past is an inescapable part of the present. But this notion is quite different from the one which suggests that all man has is his past. Faulkner believes that the present grows out of the past and that the present is part of the continuum of time. But his statement presupposes that there is a valid distinction to be made between past and present even though both are a part of the “instant” in which a character “does something.”
In his most elaborate explanation of his conception of time Faulkner used the idea of a machine which could demonstrate in physical terms the relationship of past, present, and future to each other:
Well, a man’s future is inherent in that man
—I—in the sense that life, A.D. 1957, is not the end of life, that there’ll be a 2057. That we assume that. There may not be, but we assume that. And in man, in man’s behavior today is nineteen fifty—two thousand and fifty-seven, if we just had a machine that could project ahead and could capture that, that machine could isolate and freeze a picture, an image, of what man will be doing in 2057, just as the machine might capture and fix the light rays showing what he was doing in B.C. 28. That is, that’s the mystical belief that there is no such thing as was. That time is, and if there’s no such thing as was, then there is no such thing as will be. That time is not a fixed condition, time is in a way the sum of the combined intelligences of all men who breathe at that moment.
Faulkner sees time as a fluid and malleable medium. Not just the past but all of time is present in the “combined intelligences of all men who breathe at that moment.” If he believed otherwise—that time is a fixed condition then all of time would be past, would be was, and there would be no such thing as is. In considering this alternate possibility, Faulkner said: “If was existed there would be no grief or sorrow.” The past does not exist as a separate entity in the present but as part of the continuum of time. Thus we know the past only from our own vantage point in time, from our present moment. In a rare endorsement of another thinker’s ideas, Faulkner admitted: “I agree pretty much with Bergson’s theory of the fluidity of time. There is only the present moment, in which I include both the past and the future, and that is eternity. In my opinion time can be shaped quite a bit by the artist; after all, man is never time’s slave. With this and Faulkner’s other statements in both his fiction and nonfiction in mind, Robert Hemenway has succinctly summarized the author’s thesis:
one can only live in that present tense,. . although the past may inform the present, or sometimes even explain a part of that present, it does not and must not “exist” in the present; it cannot be permitted to determine present reality.
Much of Faulkner criticism would support Hemenway’s interpretation. In particular, two books by Warren Beck and Richard P. Adams focus on the author’s dynamic conception of time and show the various ways in which the novels call for man to break out of the stultifying patterns of the past or, indeed, out of any abstract formulation which clouds his response to the concrete reality of the present. This study attempts to build on Beck and Adams and to demonstrate how Faulkner’s definition of life as “man in motion” relates to his uses of the past. His novels are treated as representations of what in the broadest sense may be called historical process—a process in which change continues to deepen and widen the differences between past and present but in which the fundamental repetitions and ironies of history tie together all periods of time into the continuum that Faulkner and his critics have spoken of.
II
Faulkner’s conception of time—and of the past in particular—prevents him from writing anything like a conventional historical novel in the manner of Scott and his successors. Since no part of time’s continuum exists entirely in and for itself, a novel set completely in the past is virtually an impossibility, for the past can be imagined only in its relationship to the present and future, just as the present and future have to be created in Faulkner’s writing with reference to the past. If time is a fluid condition, then none of its constituents—and certainly not the past—can stay fixed long enough to justify what is commonly termed an historical novel.
In his evaluation of All The King’s Men Faulkner makes clear his profound wariness of the novelist’s hold on the past. In praising the Cass Mastern episode, in which the narrator, Jack Burden, digresses from his present into the nineteenth-century past, Faulkner notes:
It’s fine the way Warren caught not only the pattern of their acts but the very terms they thought in of that time.… He should have taken the Cass story and made a novel. Though maybe no man 75 years from that time could have sustained that for novel length.
Perhaps the past can be captured momentarily in all of its fullness and intactness, but as a rule, Faulkner seems to say, it is unapproachable as a world in itself. We get glimpses, insights, into the past but not the past as such because we are always moving further away from it.
Faulkner would probably have admired, for example, William Styron’s essay, “This Quiet Dust,” which recounts his trip to Southampton County, Virginia, where the novelist hoped to divine the truth about Nat Turner’s slave insurrection. The burden of Styron’s story is his effort to overcome the barrier between past and present, and his imaginative yearning to re-create a lost age. Styron stands in the same relation to Turner as Jack Burden does to Cass Mastern. Paradoxically, it is the strain of trying to recover the past that makes the past so real rather than the full dress re-presentation of the past that Styron essays in The Confessions of Nat Turner. Faulkner would undoubtedly have admired the integrity of Styron’s essay while finding the novel—any novel—that purported to re-create a slave’s world problematic.
This is why Faulkner makes excursions into the past that are inextricably fused with his characters’ sense of the present. Even in The Unvanquished, his most sustained narrative of the past, the chapters are more like episodes, historic moments, rather than like the continuous, integral composition of an historical period of the kind we get in The History of Henry Esmond. Unlike Thackeray, Faulkner does not attempt the portrait of an age. Historical figures rarely make an appearance in his fiction, as generals Marlborough and Webb do in Esmond. And Faulkner makes no sustained effort to disguise his narrative as a memoir or to employ archaisms—a favorite ploy of Scott, Thackeray, and many other historical novelists.
Faulkner essays an approach to the past knowing full well that the whole of it cannot be recaptured. In this regard, he acts very much like the twentieth-century historian relying on partial evidence—like Oscar Handlin, who concentrates on turning points in history where the past can be evoked concisely and dramatically in chapter-length studies. Faulkner’s grappling with historical fact and his narrators’ self-conscious grappling with the past’s elusiveness also looks forward to the advent of the nonfiction novel and of experimental biographies—such as Norman Mailer’s Marilyn, in which he deploys fictional scenes and speculative interpretations to restore some sense of an earlier period and of an ambiguous recent past.
Divisions in point of view are so prevalent in Faulkner’s treatment of the present that it is no wonder that the past should be recreated in a series of segments, distinct from each other, although capable of connection in the continuum of time. Hugh M. Ruppersburg reminds us of Faulkner’s emphasis on “distance itself—between individuals … generations … and different modes of experience.…” Faulkner also enforces this consciousness of distance, or discreetness, or disunity by beginning each chapter in Absalom, Absalom! “as a seemingly new narrative, with no apparent relationship to any other.…” The awareness of a new narrative or story is even greater in Go Down, Moses, and variations on this kind of fragmented structure occur throughout his career.
Another way to understand Faulkner’s avoidance of historical fiction per se while he remains very much concerned with the past is to realize how strenuously he explores an open-ended view of the past, especially of his own past as fiction-maker. Thus Lisa Paddock notes that in his three short story collections he rearranges old material in a new context to bring out different meanings and to give rise “to an entirely new literary creation.” Moreover, he “implicitly insists upon the connections that exist between seemingly unrelated components, transforming what appear to be discrete fragments into organically unified wholes.” The past as a self-contained narrative closed off from the present does not interest Faulkner and is not possible for him to conceive because, as Paddock puts it, the fragmented form of his fiction “attests his denial of the finality of any given work.” Each novel, and Faulkner’s entire output, seems designed to resist the idea of placing a perimeter around the past, codifying and documenting it in the manner of a consistent historical fiction. Part of the past can be documented, as Go Down, Moses demonstrates, but as a part of history the boundaries blur, become very ambiguous, and far more flexible than the past in the historical novels of Faulkner’s predecessors.
Just how flexible the past can be is revealed in the title chapter of Go Down, Moses. As Wesley Morris observes, “Was” “opens for the reader, almost without his being aware of it, a series of questions about origins.” After a full reading of the novel, events in “Was” can be dated and human motivations deciphered, but Morris is correct in remarking that the title of the first chapter suggests an indefiniteness about what exactly happen and when. The one-word title suspends or deters our immediate effort to place the story in time, in the chronology of an historical fiction, for we not sure of what came before or after; we are thrust into the middle of “Was.” The story is open at both ends, so to speak, yet it has, in Morris’s words, an “Aristotelian wholeness,” and an “adequate structure of its own.” “In its seeming internal wholeness the story presents itself, therefore, as a privileged, an objectified fragment of the past, but the suggestion of an infinite regression in the title denies this moment, and privileged status,” Morris concludes. The past has no privileged status, for, as Requiem for a Nun shows, there is no past but rather a succession of pasts. The implication of “Was” is that “not only the pattern of their acts but the very terms they thought in of that time” can be summoned, but not in novel-length narrative.
In The Unvanquished, Faulkner tries to string together as chapters his discrete, story-like excursions into the past, using Bayard Sartoris as narrator. In this respect, he emulates Esmond, Thackeray’s historical novel cum memoir. Faulkner invites our search for transitions from one part of an historical period to another that we have come to expect in a continuous historical fiction, but he fails to provide them clearly enough. Go Down, Moses, on the other hand, eschews transitions by abruptly naming Ike at the beginning of the novel without clearly indicating how his story figures into “Was.” Thus the very act of making transitions is refused, and we have to make leaps from one period of time to another, eventually learning to construct a continuum out of disparate pieces of narrative and of time.
There are still other ways in which Faulkner probably finds historical fiction inimical to the development of his dynamic idea of history. Historical fiction, after all, is an aspect of that actual world he sublimates into Yoknapatawpha County, a fictional world of self-made boundaries and histories. Before he created Yoknapatawpha, “he says he commenced with the idea that novels should deal with imaginary scenes and people,” Malcolm Cowley reports. In the writing that came before his first novels Faulkner avoids, for the most part, a realistic depiction of his native region and aims, on the contrary, for symbolic, poetical evocations of feelings and various states of mind that are all too vaguely rendered in many instances. It is as if he tries to get as far away from the factual as possible while taking to its extreme Aristotle’s notion that “poetry is more philosophical and of higher value than history; for poetry universalizes more, whereas history particularizes. With the emergence of Yoknapatawpha, Faulkner would draw upon actual places and persons for his fiction, and with the writing of his essay “Mississippi,” he would bring together aspects of his home state, his apocryphal county, and his own history, yet there is always the principle dramatized in his fiction and enunciated in his nonfiction statements that he is an independent and autonomous creator, and not an historian of the South, or of any realm outside of the one he creates.
Faulkner’s imagination, in other words, is primary; facts, sources, evidence of the sources of his creations are secondary. From this elevation of the artist’s world above its roots in reality Faulkner criticizes Sherwood Anderson:
I think when a writer reaches the point when he’s got to write about people he knows, his friends, then he has reached the tragic point. There seems to me there’s too much to be written about, that needs to be said, for one to have to resort to actual living figures.
In other words, actuality, documented history, real living figures (even if disguised), are all part of what has already been said, already been experienced. Fiction, on the other hand, is what is genuinely new, independent, and original.
One has to probe and, to some extent, stretch Faulkner’s talk in interviews to ascertain the underlying assumptions of his fictional methodology, for he often spoke, as Millgate says, “in a kind of basic Model T English that was utterly unlike his characteristic written style.” In another way, however, the statements “can be made the texts of quite intricate critical -discussions, Millgate continues,” because, like the fiction, the statements are highly compressed perceptions. Art, Faulkner surely believes, evades excessive explication, and an historically oriented art should do no less. In The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom!, Requiem for a Nun, and in a few other works, he employs words like time, the past, and history as abstractions or concepts, but he does so sparingly and never in the manner of an historical novelist, or of Jack Burden: “Soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history into history and the awful responsibility of Time.” As Millgate suggests, in his own work Faulkner avoids this kind of “summarised message.” The Cass Mastern episode, on the other hand, is a “a deeply imagined and richly worked moral fable embedded—separate, complete, intact, powerful—in the heart of the novel, enforcing without overt commentary the message central first-person narrative articulates, a little too self-consciously, on the author’s behalf.” Millgate calls the Cass Mastern story a fable that is akin to “the story of the bear and the dog in Go Down, Moses, the transcendent love story of Ike and the cow in The Hamlet, the story of the crippled racehorse in A Fable, and, I would add, the story of the French architect and Thomas Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom!. All such fables universalize and crystallize history, at once stripping and condensing it to its essential meaning. In this respect, I argue in Chapter 3, Faulkner shares much with historical fiction as it was practiced by Scott.
Faulkner’s fierce commitment to the primacy of his art precludes his direct use of the plots of history or of politics. He writes, instead, what Joseph Turner calls an “invented historical novel” that rejects the documented past or even elements of that same past disguised in fiction:
Faulkner, for example, can tell us that Rosa Coldfield never bore children, and there is the end to the question. But if a novelist were to write about Queen Elizabeth, the reader would expect from the very first that Elizabeth bore no legitimate children and that the crown was passed on to James I.
It is the prior purchase history would have on his fiction that Faulkner cannot countenance as the sole owner and proprietor of Yoknapatawpha. The originality of his voice, and of his vision of history, comes out of both a time and a place of his own making.
Robert Penn Warren calls Faulkner an apolitical novelist and wonders why
in his vast panorama of society in a state where politics is the blood, bone, sinew and passion of life, and the most popular sport, Faulkner has almost entirely omitted not only a treatment of the subject, but references to it. It is easy to be contemptuous of politics anywhere, and especially easy in Jackson, Mississippi, but it is not easy to close one’s eyes to the cosmic comedy enacted in that State House; and it is not easy to understand how Faulkner with his genius for the absurd, even the tearfully absurd, could have rejected this subject.
From Faulkner s point of view, however, it is not for him to provide commentary on political or on any other kind of already recorded history but to fashion one of his own, for unlike some authors who view their writing as one of the “many creative roles within or without established society,” he tends to view writing as the creative role, the prop, and the pillar of civilization.” Warren also suggests that Faulkner may simply have contempt for politics, and this certainly seems to be the case in The Mansion and in his view of Willie Stark:
As I read him, he wanted neither power for the sake of his pride nor revenge for the sake of his vanity; he wanted neither to purify the earth by obliterating some of the population from it nor did he aim to give every hillbilly and redneck a pair of shoes. He was neither big enough nor bad enough.
Only someone like Ahab or like Thomas Sutpen, a character larger than life, can be the subject of a great novel, in Faulkner’s estimation. Stark, on the other hand, is for Faulkner a particularization of history, not its embodiment. Stark does not move him enough because he is “second-rate”—as I suspect, much of the political world was for Faulkner. By cutting himself off from politics he simultaneously severs himself from the kind of material that might bring him closer to historical fiction. As Michael Millgate observes:
From Melville he learned about the grandiosity of design that gave the greatest life to fiction. “Melville, in fact, was the master who taught Faulkner most clearly and emphatically that the forms of fiction were not fixed but truly protean, capable of infinite evolution in response to evolving creative needs, and who showed that a writer with sufficient ability and courage could do almost anything with the novel and get away with it.
A narrative of Willie Stark’s life could not be truly protean, endlessly evolving, and capable of “almost anything.” Faulkner rather brutally told an interviewer that he would have kept the Cass Mastern story “and thrown the rest of the book away.”
Like other writers of his time, Faulkner regarded historical fiction as a degenerate form and reacted against its sentimentalization of the past. After Scott, much of Victorian historical fiction concentrated on the past as pageant and spectacle. Historical novels were escapist exercises in nostalgia and antiquarianism, and forays into the quaintness of the past, into its manners and mores. As a result, precise attention to matters of esthetic form, style, and characterization were slighted in favor of unthinking entertainment. And to some extent, Scott, the daring originator of the genre, might be charged with starting its decline, since he professed not to take his own novels very seriously. In a letter Faulkner alludes to his disrespect for the historical novel by briefly explaining his efforts to get more out of Absalom, Absalom! “than a historical novel would be. To keep the hoop skirts and plug hats out, you might say.”
In spite of all these reasons for keeping Faulkner well on the remote side of historical fiction I have attempted to show in Chapters 2 and 3, and in the Conclusion, that his novels share a certain continuity with nineteenth-century historical novels by Scott and Thackeray. Michael Millgate notes that “Faulkner may have been too conscious of standing in opposition to the historical traditions associated with Scott to have recognized him as a master … [and] there is little specific evidence of his Faulkner’s familiarity with [Thackeray’s] work,” but my judgment is that their novels formed a part of his reading until at least his sixteenth year, a year he mentions when remembering a quotation from the Polish historical novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz.
The events of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Poland, Scotland, and England surely fascinated the young Southerner and even contributed to the shaping of his vision of history. All these foreign societies, Cleanth Brooks points out, had the South’s concern with “concrete, highly personal relationships,” with the centrality of the family and clan obligations, and with manners and violence,” nurtured and tested by “the old code of honor.” Faulkner’s novels inevitably grow out of the broad cultural ties between the South and Europe that he makes explicitly in the Compson Appendix, where it is shown that man has repeatedly been dispossessed of his land and of his past—both of which he attempts to recover through memory. Certainly Faulkner radically modified what he received from his sources, but the very nature of his region oriented him toward a wider vision of history—as Brooks suggests:
Faulkner’s culture was basically agricultural, traditional, and steeped in history. Unlike the non-Southern areas of the United States, it had lost a war. It had experienced at first hand war’s ravages and the consequences, economic and political, of military and political defeat. The memories of the defeated are always long memories, whether in Ireland or Dixie.
Faulkner is as critical of the Sartorises for their vain heroics as Thackeray is of history’s political heroes. Indeed, Faulkner extends Thackeray’s exploration of the private life, the personal consciousness through which history is always filtered. Faulkner follows Scott part of the way by positioning Quentin Compson, Bayard Sartoris, and Ike McCaslin as passive heroes who are receptive to competing versions of the past. But that past exists only in their memories and speculations. Consequently, no past event in Faulkner can be over in quite the way events like the Jacobite rebellion are over at the end of Waverley. History is a permanently unsettling phenomenon in Faulkner.
As his career progressed toward Requiem for a Nun, Faulkner’s sense of the historical became more pronounced in his fiction and was stimulated by his acute consciousness of change, and of the need to interpret and to live with that change. This is a cardinal concern of the greatest historical fiction that he may have first absorbed in his childhood reading. In Chapter Six of my dissertation, I stressed far more parallels in plot and characters between his novels and those of Thackeray, and Conrad and left the impression, perhaps, that he was directly indebted to his predecessors. I have suggested fewer parallels in this book because the extended comparisons between novels tended to blur the significant differences between them and to dilute the point of my comparison: Although Redgauntlet and Absalom, Absalom!, Henry Esmond and The Unvanquished, Nostromo and Go Down, Moses employ different structures and modes of narration, these pairs of novels are comparable in the ways in which they force us to follow and to participate in the characters’ reinterpretations of past events. All of them show how such reinterpretations stem not only from the characters’ steadily increasing awareness and knowledge of past events, but also from their developing awareness of themselves as the products and extensions of those past events.
Yet it is precisely here, in the process of reinterpretation, that Faulkner’s novels differ from those of Thackeray and Scott, in that they do not offer a permanent resolution of conflicting views of the past. As I suggest in Chapter 6, Conrad perhaps prepared the way for Faulkner’s open-ended view of the past, since Nostromo often injects us into the flow of past events even as they are being described from the particular perspective of one of the novel’s character-narrators. In this way we have not the one or (at the most) two versions of a single sequence of events given by Scott and Thackeray, but several versions of several different sequences of events, so that it becomes extremely difficult to separate the character-narrator or “historian” from the sequence of events he describes. We depend upon a character like Captain Mitchell, for example, for many of the crucial “facts of the novel. Of course we can check Mitchell’s reliability by recurring to the narrator’s judgment of him, by referring to the way others regard him, or by applying to his interpretation our knowledge of Costaguana gained from other parts of the novel, yet it remains true that we experience important parts of that history in the making through his point of view. The beginning and end of the Montero revolt are encompassed in his monologues just as the revolt itself is summarized in Decoud’s letters. As a result, we, very much like the modern historian, must engage in the task of criticizing the very sources that provide us with our “history.” Indeed Conrad seems intent on demonstrating that his characters’ uses of the word “fact” reveal their determined if unsuccessful efforts to transform their individual points of view into the view of Costaguana’s history. The word “fact” by and of itself makes their observations sound more substantial and more objective than they really are.
In setting Conrad and Faulkner against the tradition of the historical novel as exemplified by Scott, I do not mean to propose an absolute disjunction. As Wolfgang Iser points out, Scott understands that there are “problems attending comprehension and perception of historical reality.” In Waverley, for example, Scott employs different eyewitnesses, separating episodes of the past in different sections, and suggests that history is perceived in a variety of ways at different social levels. But this “perspectivism,” as Iser calls it, is not the equivalent of points of view as presented by Flaubert or James—or Conrad and Faulkner, I would add. Iser contends that Scott is merely making his material vivid though the use of a panoramic method. I would argue that Scott is dramatizing the way our deepest understanding of history is created out of the conflict between points of view. But Iser is right to detect history as something “already present and divided up,” rather than something to be discovered through radical reinterpretation. Scott and his successors do not question the nature of point of view itself, of how history and a consciousness of it arise at the same time. He lacks the rigorous self-reflexiveness of modernist writers.
There has been a tendency in recent literary criticism—especially in its deconstructionist phase—to transform Faulkner’s radical questioning of point of view into the idea that history is merely a construct, a product of literature itself. This position vitiates the tension that I believe exists between fact and imagination in Faulkner. Although facts themselves are not stable properties—as I acknowledge in my chapters on Absalom, Absalom!—they are also not just figments of language and literature. Or rather, out of language and literature, facts are created that have a grounding in reality—even though that reality is not as stable as the conventional historical novel supposes. Jorge Luis Borges playfully suggests as much in his story, “Guayaquil,” in which he refers to Captain Joseph Korzeniowski (Joseph Conrad) as Costaguana’s “most famous historian.” Borges is pointing to a paradox. Costaguana exists only in Nostromo, yet Conrad’s extraordinary grasp of South American history has made him an “historian” who has profoundly influenced the work of South American writers. Nostromo is a fiction, yet as Albert Guerard demonstrates, the novel has been prophetic of many subsequent developments in South America. Using the novelist’s Polish name is a nice touch, too, since Conrad himself is a kind of fictional construct himself, a seaman who remade himself into a writer in Great Britain.
Even though a Conrad, or a Faulkner, or a Borges challenges facts and questions the reliability of point of view, the reality of history is powerfully present. There are real events and real people at stake. History is a record—no matter how fragmentary and ambiguous that record might be. Shreve, the Canadian, like Korzeniowski, the Pole, may be story-making, but he is also constructing history.
Even more than Conrad, Faulkner questions his characters’ facts. For some of the events to which the “facts” are supposed to relate may never have happened, or may not be known to have happened until they are recreated or, perhaps, invented by Quentin Compson Shreve McCannon in Absalom, Absalom!, by Ike McCaslin in Go Down, Moses, and by Gavin Stevens in Requiem For a Nun. Thus it appears that the central question in Faulkner’s “historical” novels is what the characters think really happened. What actually happened may never be entirely resolved, although our compulsion to achieve such resolution stimulates us to scrutinize the structures of the novels in order to determine which of the characters or narrative sequences is closest to the truth.
III
Flags in the Dust, The Unvanquished, Absalom, Absalom!, Go Down, Moses, The Sound and the Fury, the Compson Appendix, and Requiem for a Nun have been selected for special scrutiny in order to explore the historical dimensions of the fictional world of Yoknapatawpha and to determine that world’s relationship to the history of Faulkner’s region. While other novels such as As I Lay Dying and Sanctuary might have been examined for what they reveal of Faulkner’s general conception of time, these six novels were chosen as representative of he author’s different and distinctive uses of the past in both the early and later works of the Yoknapatawpha series. Novels which have a significant historical content—such as Light in August (which ranges widely over several periods of time and points of view), Intruder in the Dust (which speculates on the meaning of Southern history in the form of a dialogue between two main characters), and The Reivers (which narrates the events of a specific personal past)—do not receive attention because they do not significantly modify the basic reading of the comparable historical content of the novels here discussed.
The Snopes trilogy might have been given special treatment as a unique study of history. It portrays the development of a single family and the development of Yoknapatawpha County in a three-volume work presumably intended to have a higher degree of unity in its presentation of historical details than the Yoknapatawpha series as a whole. But in an introductory note to The Mansion Faulkner rejects this kind of unity and call attention to the fact that he has not corrected the contradictions and inconsistencies of his “chronicle,” thereby seeming to imply that each novel of the trilogy must be taken on its own terms. Furthermore, critics have shown how the novels of Snopes are individual works bearing as much resemblance in style and structure to the other Yoknapatawpha novels as to the remainder of the trilogy of which they are a part. Warren Beck in particular, has analyzed Snopes as an extension of Absalom, Absalom!’s, exploration of conflicting interpretations of present and past events, while Robert Penn Warren has distinguished the Snopeses from the Compsons, the Sartorises, and the McCaslins in a way that reveals the trilogy’s inappropriateness to a study of this kind:
In Faulkner’s myth of the Snopeses, the tribe descends from bushwhackers, those who had no side in the Civil War and merely exploited it. That is, the modern Snopeses, being descended from people who had no commitment to moral reality in the past, can recognize no commitment in the present. They have, in the moral sense, no identity, no history.
The questions that young Bayard Sartoris, Quentin Compson, and Ike McCaslin confront in regard to the past and its relationship to their present identity are simply not confronted by the Snopeses. These three characters may differ greatly in their efforts to ignore, embrace, or repudiate their family pasts, but all three are caught up in some kind of relationship with the past whether they wish to understand that relationship or not.
Chapter 2 analyzes Flags in the Dust, and The Unvanquished in order to show how the interpretation of historical process grows out of Faulkner’s different attempts to deal with the past as family legend and as personal reminiscence. Though Flags is set primarily in the South just after World War I and is concerned with more than exploring the Sartoris past, the novel nevertheless represents Faulkner’s first portrayal of the historical dimensions of his characters’ lives. The figure of Colonel Sartoris continues to dominate the memories of the old generation—of old man Falls, old Bayard and Miss Jenny—but more as a legend than as an historical fact. It is clear that young John and Bayard Sartoris have emulated the romantic and sometimes foolhardy exploits of their ancestors, but the parallels between past and present patterns of actions are suggestive rather than definite and sometimes vague and ambiguous. As a result, this first novel of the Yoknapatawpha series adumbrates but does not thoroughly explore the complex relationship between past and present which characterizes historical process in Faulkner’s mature fiction.
The Unvanquished attempts to present a clearer and more comprehensive view of historical process than was possible in Flags by concentrating on a mature Bayard Sartoris’s recollections of his youth and early manhood during I the Civil War and Reconstruction period. Bayard searches the past in an attempt to recover the stages by which he developed into the person he has become. Unlike young Bayard (his grandson), Quentin Compson, and Ike McCaslin, Bayard gives an intimate and immediate view of a past in which he himself has participated. But there are many points at which it is difficult to detect the perspective of the older Bayard, so that we feel directly immersed in the past events themselves; and it is often at these very points that the novel is least convincing in its portrayal of historical process, for we cannot establish the meaning those past events now have for Bayard. The Unvanquished succeeds as a reading of historical process only at those times when Bayard Sartoris, like so many of Faulkner’s characters in his major fiction, reverts to the past in search of the sources of his own identity in the present.
Chapters 3 and 5 analyze in depth the structures of Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses, Faulkner’s most complex studies of historical process. In these two novels the way in which the characters approach the recreation of the past is inseparable from the identity which they simultaneously fashion for themselves. Chapters 4 and 6 explore certain analogies which can be drawn between Faulkner’s methods and those of historians who believe that an understanding of the past grows out of the interaction between the historian and his evidence—that, indeed, the interpretative process itself (as exemplified in the exchanges between Quentin and Shreve, and between Ike and Cass) is precisely what constitutes historical knowledge. Chapter 4, in particular, considers and evaluates the large body of criticism that has focused on Absalom, Absalom! as a work of historical interpretation, while Chapter 6 shows how Go Down, Moses places more emphasis than Absalom, Absalom! on what happened in the past, offering even closer analogies between Faulkner’s methods and those of historians—though few critics have treated in any detail the ways in which Faulkner here adopts an historical approach to the past. Because there is more concrete evidence of past life (for example, the commissary books in the fourth section of “The Bear”), Ike’s reconstruction of the past can be compared with the historian’s analysis of his documents. Even so, Go Down, Moses, like most of Faulkner’s novels, is noteworthy for its concentration on contemporary life, and for its projections into the future as well as into the past.
IV
Because each of these books appears to be an inquiry into the problem of knowing the past from the viewpoint of the present, Chapter 7 suggests that the Yoknapatawpha novels do not stand in relation to some “history” outside themselves, as do most historical novels which profess to be a specific record of a particular period of time, but rather offer a rendering of “history” itself, with the various characters’ conflicting versions of what may have happened held together in a dialectical tension. As we shall see when the Compson Appendix is examined, Faulkner was not very concerned about the inconsistencies that Malcolm Cowley had detected in comparing the “facts” of the Appendix with The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner implied that there was no established Yoknapatawpha history, no saga, and that The Sound and the Fury itself was not a definitive statement against which other later works must be measured. There was, for Faulkner, only the individual work he was engaged in creating, and many of the “inconsistencies” were to be attributed to his having revised the “facts” or created them anew in response to the urgency of the present moment. Faulkner, then, is primarily interested in the recreation of history as a contemporary event, occurring now, as the author, the characters, and all of us probe a problematic past.
That problematic past is most often examined through the form of a dialogue. In Absalom, Absalom!, Go Down, Moses, and Requiem for a Nun the dialogue becomes a formal principle that makes explicit the implicit dialogues between the sections or chapters of his other books, as each of the four parts of The Sound and the Fury, for example, represents a peculiar way of integrating past and present that qualifies and defines all the other parts. The participants in each of these dialogues—Quentin and Shreve, Ike and Cass, Stevens and Temple Drake—interact and evolve their points of view in response to each other. Not only do their points of view clash, but they themselves are aware of the clash and must confront it.
Although Faulkner’s experiments with point of view are taken to be signs of his modernity, it is important that we recognize the resemblances between his dialogues and Plato’s, in which:
On the one hand, the individual’s own point of view on a problem only emerges as it comes into conflict with the points of view expressed by the other individuals participating in the dialogue. On the other hand, each participant expresses his point of view as it merges with the moral character he manifests in his actions, so that the conflict does not remain merely verbal and intellectual. The drama of these dialogues is this movement of a problem through different minds and into different lives. The participants are at cross-purposes and collide because the point of view each states is not something he happens to have thought about; it is the direction in which the life he has been leading points.
Nowhere is this function of the dialogue clearer or more completely explored than in Absalom, Absalom!, where Shreve’s attitude toward the past, as he himself realizes, is conditioned by the life he has been leading as a Canadian, so that he comes to the Sutpen story with a mind that is very different from Quentin’s. The collisions here between different individuals, cultures, and minds occur on a large historical scale.
It is natural to feel frustrated by such a dialogue, since it never seems to reach a definitive conclusion. As Euthyphro said to Socrates: “I really don’t know how to explain to you what is in my mind. Whatever statement we put forward always somehow moves round in a circle, and will not stay we put it. Faulkner’s dialogues also end on an indeterminate point in the present, so that we must “move round in a circle” always reinterpreting the past; for contemporary man, in Faulkner’s view, is forever recapitulating and reforming the past in new ways and in new contexts that accord with his present sense of himself. As in the Platonic dialogues, ideas in Faulkner’s novels are inseparable from the dramatic form in which they appear, and it is the dramatic form which above all creates and sustains the tensions out of which Faulkner’s sense of history emerges.
2
THE PRESENTATION OF THE PAST AND OF HISTORICAL PROCESS AS LEGEND AND FACT IN FLAGS IN THE DUST AND THE UNVANQUISHED
I
The question of how one should respond to historical process, and to the complex interaction of past and present, is central to our evaluation of the main characters in Faulkner’s major fiction. It is a question adumbrated in the plight of young Bayard Sartoris in Flags in the Dust