Now to one of Helm's interests. Bleikasten stresses the fact that Faulkner is a
*story-teller* "in both senses of the term" (Alas, Bleikasten never read Grice
-- "Do not multiply 'senses' beyond necessity" -- "Storyteller" has only ONE
sense). Faulkner was fond of writing "complex," difficult, not precisely
crystal-clear, stories of “the human heart in conflict with itself” (a phrase
Faulkner uses in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech). But, curiously, he
compulsively embroiders the bare facts of his own prosaic (rather than
versical) history or "life." About the months he lives in New Orleans, Faulkner
says that he supported himself by working for a bootlegger. He said he had a
launch that he would take down the Ponchartrain into the Gulf to an island
where the green rum was brought up from overseas and buried. "We would dig it
up and bring it back to New Orleans" ("Hence the phrase, 'bring coal to
Newcastle.'). "And I would get $100 a trip for that." -- Alas, nothing about
Faulkner's bootlegger story is _historical_ true. And he doesn't seem to mean
the thing as a 'fictional' little story, either (Just as remarkable is *where*
he recounts the tall tale: at an "_American_ lit class" at West Point! Never
trust guest keynote speakers!) Bigger (if not whiter) lies Faulkner tells about
his days with the Air Force. Faulkner says, again, not precisely within the
context of a 'little (fictional) story) that he limped from "imaginary" (as
Grice would call them -- vide his "Causal Theory of Perception") machine gun
wounds that he suffered, Faulkner claims, in aerial duels over remote fields in
France. But Faulkner is still in school when the war ends. He is never sent to
France, never mind wounded in combat (He did not tell this tale at West Point,
fortunately).
To answer a Kantian question, whether Faulker lies to woo females (at West
Point or elsewhere), or because he is desperate for distinction, or for the
simple fun of it, is hard to decide, as a Kantian. Grice thinks it is the
latter ('the simple fun of it'), but then both were inherently irreverent, even
if Grice thought himself a follower of Kant (for whom lying is ultimate
anathema). Bleikasten is blunt about Faulkner’s 'fabrications': “Faulkner lies
to his parents, his brothers, his friends, his son-in-law, his mistresses, his
editor, his colleagues in Hollywood, and, worse, his doctor.” ""Life is a lie,
and then you die," is Faulkner's motto," Bleikasten implicates. Naturally,
Faulkner starts telling fewer tall tales when he starts deriving deeper
pleasure out of constructing elaborate 'fictions' in prose -- that get him the
Nobel. But is there any *history* beneath these fictional *novels*?
Faulkner seems to be following the advice of Sherwood Anderson, whose
mornings-only writing schedule appeals to Faulkner. Faulkner is slow to find a
subject for his 'fictions.' Two fictional novels— "Soldiers’ Pay" (about a
soldier's salary) and "Mosquitoes," about, as the title implicates, the insects
—came (and went). With a third novel, Faulkner follows Anderson’s advice: "to
stick to that little patch down there in Mississippi where you started from.”
Faulkner comes up with a "sprawlingly complex" novel, based on _fact_ or
recollection of fact. One publisher after another reject it. The title,
granted, did not help: "Flags in the Dust." He retitles it "Sartoris," to no
effect. "Sartoris," centred on Faulkner’s struggle to fit into civilian life
after the war (he never fought), however, show him the way.
Beginning with "Sartoris" Faulkner discovers that his own little postage stamp
of soil is worth writing about, even if he created "a cosmos of [his] own.”
Faulkner’s "cosmos" is Yoknapatawpha ["careful how you pronounce that" --
Bleikasten warns his addressee] County, with a courthouse and the town of
Jefferson at its centre, a thinly 'fictionalised' version of Oxford, where
Faulkner spends the largest part of his childhood, knows everybody, and hears
many of the 'stories' (or 'histories,' if you must) that emerge in somewhat
altered but generally perspicuous form in his novels or 'stories'. (He is a
'story-teller,' AND a 'history-teller', "a teller of tales, a historian"). The
characters in Faulkner's novels ('stories') come from the same six or so
families, beginning iwhen the first cotton farms were established on land ceded
by the Chickasaw. Faulkner's novels (or 'stories,' not 'histories') never sold
really well. Thus, Faulkner gets by with fstints writing for the 'flicks' in
Hollywood -- where he incidentally meets Meta Carpenter (named after
Aristotle's "Meta-physics"), who is working for Howard Hawks, director of "The
Big Sleep" on which Faulkner also worked.
Faulkner has girlfriends other than Miss Carpenter, develops a reputation as a
man hard to interview, answers contumaciously (if I may contumaciously say so
myself) when pestered about politics, spends too much money, is churlish about
accepting the Nobel Prize in person (“Everybody has been telling me to do
right!”), and stubbornly refused to admit that some horses are too much for
him. Bleikasten scants none of the life (or 'history') but is interested above
all in the novels (the 'story') -- the 'opinions.' Some of Faulkner's novels
('stories') are "entertainments," using the term alla Graham Greene. Other
novels (or 'stories') are as "hard" (or difficult) to tackle as the begats in
the Bible or, since Helm mentions him, Heidegger on history. Faulkner's novels
(or 'stories') are awash in detail, knotted, inexact, disturbing, and VERY
OBSCURE in their fierce pursuit of elusive "insights" of understanding.
It is hard, from a Griceian point of view, to perceive what Faulkner is trying
to understand, and harder to decide if he has understood it. That is why fewer
Americans than Frenchmen tackle Faulkner. Many Americans forced (by their dads)
to read Faulkner seem to remember preciously very little about Faulkner's
'stories' -- perhaps Benjy looking at Caddy’s drawers in "The Sound and the
Fury," or Temple Drake and the corncob in "Sanctuary." But there is a bit of a
Griceian logic to Faulkner’s intentional dependence on difficulty as to what
his intended 'insight' is.
Difficulty (a bit of a violation to Grice's "be perspicuous [sic]") arguably
serves in Faulkner's 'stories' two exegetic purposes: (a) In some of Faulkner's
'stories,' such as "Absalom, Absalom!," the lack of Griceian clarity ["be
perspicuous [sic]"] may ensure that Faulkner’s neighbours will not know what he
is talking about lest they burn his barn, if not worse. (b) A secondary,
perhaps more importantl, exegetic purpose for Faulkner's violation of Grice's
desideratum of perspicuity (or "modus," after Kant) is to force his addressee
to struggle to get the 'story' straight.
A poem seems too small, too soon over, to encompass this "big thing" on
Faulkner's mind: the great submerged obsessive guilty burden of slave times,
back when all know, but few say, that slaves are not only unpaid labourers but
unpaid sexual servants. Not to implicate it, but to say it flat out, as that
does, is a way to get past the historical fact in a hurry. But Faulkner is
never in a hurry to _explicate_ things. The narrator of “Uncle Willy” notes:
“Papa told me once that someone
said" 'if you know it you can say it.'”
The implicature possibly was that Mama thought that if you did NOT know it, you
better shut up! Faulkner, however, knew it, and somehow wins permission --
drinking surely helps -- to implicate it, “all of hit,” as a character has it
in "Go Down, Moses." The 'hit' is a hyper-correction. The character is speaking
of death of her grandson: "Is you gonter put hit in de paper? I wants hit all
in de paper. All of hit." Faulkner's novels address and wrestle with his
central obsession, which he called, simply, “the past” (or "the South"). Novels
('stories') embody one thing Faulkner displays in "Sartoris": “Not only each
novel (or story) has to have a design but the whole output or sum of an
author's stories has to have a design.”
Faulkner famously wrote in a novel (or story): "The past is never dead. It’s
not even past" (Please note that while 'the past is dead' is a metaphor -- 'the
past is not dead' is not (cfr. "No man is an island?). "The past is not past,"
on the other hand, if not a metaphor, is what Grice calls an analytically false
proposition ("on the face of it"). Faulkner is implicating that the burden of
the past is inextricably laced within the present. "There is no such thing as
'was'—only 'is,'” Faulkner tells Jean Stein. About the South, Faulkner is
ambivalent, especially with strangers like the Japanese. “Well, I love it and
hate it,” he tells reporters in Tokyo. "Some of the things in the South I do
not like at all, but, hey, I was born there, and that is my home, and I will
still defend it *even if I hate it*.” This love and hate are knotted together
most tightly in his novels or 'stories.'
It is slightly perverse to describe these novels as a 'defense' of the South,
even if that's the expression Faulkner used. Indictment is more like it. As a
result, southerners generally detest Faulkner's novels ('stories'). An
exception is sometimes made for "Intruder in the Dust," which Southerners
forgive and indulge -- especially after it becomes a popular 'flick.' To
understand how these novels fit into Faulkner’s grand design on the South, it
helps to examine the chosen expression in the South for the woman Faulkner’s
grandfather ran off with. The expression is "octoroon," defined as a person who
is 1/8 African-American (A quadroon would have one African-American
grandparent, and a mulatto would have one African-American parent). The three
expressions were coined in slave times. Interestingly, “octoroon," to use
Grice's parlance, neither says nor implies anything much about actual genetic
makeup. The African-American great-grandparent is any person who was
identified, accepted, and treated at the time as an African-American. In
Griceian terms, then, “octoroon" says nothing about the physical appearance of
an octoroon. In the South of Faulkner’s childhood, somebody had to tell you
(rather than implicate to you) who was or was not an octoroon. To find out
someone is one changes things. In "Absalom, Absalom!" Thomas Sutpen, the owner
of a huge plantation called "Sutpen’s Hundred," had once been married ito a
planter’s daughter, with whom he had a son. Sutpen abandons wife and son when
he learnes that his wife was part African-American.
Joe Christmas in "Light in August" agonizes over his “black blood.” While
Faulkner never "says" it, Joe Christmas is tortured by the taint. Joe
Christmas murders a lover, is hunted down, castrated, and killed by townspeople
infuriated by his refusal to act “like either a man." That was what made the
folks so mad. "It was like he never even knew he was a murderer.”
The connection between master and slave is a principal motif in Faulkner’s
novels. But it is never simple, never "clearly" told, or 'explicated.' In "Go
Down, Moses," the planter Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin has a daughter
named Tomasina with one of his slaves, who later walks into a creek and drowns
herself on Christmas Day. The daughter is McCaslin’s slave as well. McCaslin in
turn fathers a son, who is the main character in "Intruder in the Dust,"
threatened with lynching for a murder he did not commit. He refuses to defend
himself, claiming “I belongs to the old lot." "I am a McCaslin."
Popeye and Goodwin in "Sanctuary" are not identified "clearly" but suffer what
might be called black fates—Goodwin lynched and burned, Popeye convicted and
executed, both for murders they did not commit. I have barely touched here on
the driving motif of gradations in Faulkner’s work, where it is “black blood”
which determines fate. Each horror is the consequence of real crimes in the
past that generate fatal confusions, push characters to madness and suicide,
and fix everyone, permanently and without appeal, on one side or the other of
the great social divide.
What Faulkner contributes to this knotted history is the *understanding* that
slavery’s grip on masters is sexual, and that the South's coping mechanism is
denial. One of the few southerners to name the problem frankly is Mary Chesnut,
who records in her diary before the Civil War: "I wonder if it be a sin to
think slavery a curse to any land. Sumner said not one word of this hated
institution which is not true. Like the patriarchs of old our men live all in
one house with their wives and their concubines, and the mulattoes one sees in
every family exactly resemble the white children—and every lady tells you who
is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household, but those
in her own she seems to think drop from the clouds. The Sumner she credits with
speaking the truth was Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, who said as
plainly as he dared that it was the lure of sexual license that explained the
furious defense of slavery by slave owners. Everybody understood what Sumner
meant when he attacked Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina by name, saying,
“Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who is
lovely to him; chaste in his sight—I mean the harlot, Slavery. Butler’s
kinsman, Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina—some say he was a nephew,
some say a cousin—avenged the insult by beating Sumner nearly to death on the
floor of the Senate with a gutta-percha cane, an act of violence that helped
bring on the war that followed. As soon as the abolitionist Yankee North
started to contest slavery, its justification drove all political discourse.”
He stops there, but we might go further and date the birth of the “solid South”
to the split of the Baptist Church into a Southern and a Northern Convention,
resulting from disputes over the issue of slavery. The solid South never cracks
but has continued to speak with a single dominant voice, justifying slavery
before the Civil War and defending Jim-Crow laws and lynching in the following
century. During that century the solid South controlled the US Senate on the
issues that mattered to it most, and it is no less solid in speaking with a
single political voice. Faulkner learned about 'history' of the South from
living there.
His use of controversial expressions, of which Bleikasten offers a full
spectrum of examples, identifies him as artchetypical character in the Southern
manner of the times. The day has now come when addressees, bumping into these
expressions, can no longer pass the test. But those expressions are an
ineradicable part of Faulkner’s world. A walk through the streets of Oxford in
Faulkner's youth revealed the South’s great either/or—black or white. What
Faulkner finds a way to say that can not be silenced is the fact of centuries
of sexual exchange in which African-Americans are compelled to endure
exploitation that people minimized, rationalized, and violently denied.
Faulkner does not ultimately disguise what he thinks about the great 'fact.'
Indeed, the thing he refuses to admit to the Japanese reporters was something
he says plainly in the final words of "Absalom, Absalom!," when Quentin Compson
is flatly asked:
"Why do you hate the South?”
The question comes at night in Quentin’s room at Harvard, and it comes from his
friend Shreve. Quentin has been telling Shreve the story of Thomas Sutpen.
Quentin had been present when Sutpen’s daughter by a slave burned the house to
the ground, killing both herself and her brother. Then Shreve makes the
question and Quentin’s answers, via explicature: “"I do NOT hate it", he
thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I do NOT. I do
NOT! I do NOT hate it! I do NOT hate it!” -- Where the implicature is possibly
that deep down, he does? Which, of course, does not implicate he loves it,
either!
Cheers,
Speranza
