In the early half of the 20th century, three authors
dominated American Literature, and though only one (ironically the one who did
not win the Nobel Prize for Lit) is still widely read and praised (and again,
ironically, for just a single book), the three deserve attention from any
careful and committed reader of American Lit. Interestingly too, they all
made their first literary splashes during the roaring 20’s: William Faulkner,
Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Nowadays—well, time moves on, though it is still hard to
believe that some of these authors’ works were published literally a hundred years ago!
Isn’t that enough to make yours truly feel absolutely ancient! I’ve
already written in this column about Fitzgerald and Hemingway, but not Faulkner,
who is, by all odds, the most difficult and the most elusive to understand and
fully appreciate.
Faulkner was that rarity in American Lit, a true Southerner,
born and bred in Mississippi, who spent time early in his career on the West
Coast, mostly trying to write movie scripts unsuccessfully, and much later as
Artist-in-Residence at the University of Virginia, but his real home was
Oxford, Mississippi, and Oxford was the center of both his actual and literary
world. He even created a fictional county, unspellable and
unpronounceable, Yoknapotawa, and peopled it with several representative types
of families, Sartoris, Snopes, Compson, Sutpen, etc. in that area. Today
in Oxford there is a statue to him downtown, sitting casually on a park bench.
His home, Rowan Oak, is on the edge of
Oxford, and who else but John Tutor could have managed to turn up a vintage
whiskey bottle in the property’s dumping ground! (Faulkner’s fondness for
“the juice” is well documented, and one of the central traits he shared with
his fellow writers, Fitzgerald and Hemingway.)
The two novels referred to in the title allude to two
Southern fictional families, Sutpen and Compson, that represent the Old and the
New South, and I am using those terms to mean pre and post Civil War Era.
Although a number of creative writers have used these eras historically,
relatively few have taken on the issue of Slavery as deeply
or directly as Faulkner. His attitude toward the subject is often as
convoluted and complex as these works, both of which are written, in whole or
in part, in a modern style of writing first appearing in Europe, known as
“stream of consciousness,” and first expounded by writers like James Joyce and
Virginia Woolf.
I am not a fan of this style, and that is putting it
mildly. So it will suffice here to say that the style attempts to convey
a character’s thoughts and/or feelings, as they supposedly exist in the mind or
psyche, in random order, with no thought given to the organization imposed by
grammar, syntax or punctuation. There may be some kind of order, but it
is in no way apparent to the general reader. To say that such an approach
renders much of these novels virtually incomprehensible is no
exaggeration. The reader must concentrate in a way that is seldom
demanded by general fiction of today, and Faulkner is definitely not for lazy
readers. His work is both challenging and substantive, and to be fair,
many of his other works are written in a far more accessible style. But
central to almost all of his work is the Southern Family, and rarely does he
paint a pretty picture.
Harper Lee provides a good contrast to Faulkner. Her
work also concentrated on the South and the Southern Family, but her view was
much gentler and not so flawed. Faulkner’s people are seldom admirable
and sometimes downright despicable. Nonetheless they seem very true to
life, or to Southern type. As for the style, you may be able to slug
right through or surely not be as annoyed by it as a former English
teacher! It is what it is, and what it is is what Faulkner wanted it to
be. He was not striving for clarity, but depth, and the deepest waters
are often the murkiest!
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