Faulkner’s Ghost in The American Novel
Historically, the French embrace the great artists of the US in a much more fulsome manner. Too many critics of the paid phalanx in the US are timid and unresponsive to the fine-grain textures of their countrymen's products—carrying well-whittled envy ready to spear the belly of the artist's ego, while hectoring, You may be able to make, but we have the power to crush careers—and, these days, even cancel any one of our greats no matter past canonization. Barthes, Blanchot, Derrida were keyed into the printed page while Andre Bazin, the Nouvelle Vague directors, and Michel Cimet saw the writing on the wall in cinema. Maybe the French just know how to better separate the wheat from the chaff due to hundreds of more years of higher aesthetic standards. Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and other modernists didn't just go there for bread and cheese. William Faulkner was briefly there, too, in 1926—though shy, he did spend a few evenings at one of Stein's salons.
What a treat, then, to come upon a mostly German name, Bleikasten, Andre (1933-2007) and realize he was not only the best Faulkner scholar, but a most level-headed Frenchman who could call out a good deal of the fluff flooding the aesthetic uses of literature from the late twentieth century onwards, arguing against the present wild sea raging for works of relevancy when a sense of beauty and an ear to the dynamics of the sentence are the benchmarks of timelessness: “Literature is that which silences the deafening noise of common speech…where the relation to reference, meaning, and truth is vertiginously suspended…it is…a force that resists assimilation to what we know and how we think…capable of repelling ideology as well as theory.” During his career, Bleikasten mainly focused on Faulkner's four major books that came in quick succession (The Sound and Fury, Sanctuary, As I Lay Dying, and Light in August) and wrote multiple times on each of them before raiding those efforts for The Ink of Melancholy and reluctantly writing a critical biography, William Faulkner: A Life Through Novels. Inside the former there is a curious and staunchly strident quote from Faulkner, followed by an explication by Bleikasten:
I wrote this book and learned to read. I had learned a little about writing from Soldiers' Pay—how to approach language, words: not with seriousness so much, as an essayist does, but with a kind of alert respect, as you approach dynamite; even with joy, as you approach women: perhaps with the same secretly unscrupulous intentions. But when I finished The Sound and the Fury, I discovered that there is actually something to which the shabby term Art not only can, but must, be applied. I discovered then that I had gone through all that I had ever read, from Henry James through Henty to newspaper murders, without making any distinction or digesting any of it, as a moth or a goat might. After The Sound and the Fury and without heeding to open another book and in a series of delayed repercussions like summer thunder, I discovered the Flauberts and Dostoievskys and Conrads whose books I had read ten years ago. With The Sound and the Fury I learned to read and quit reading, since I have read nothing since.
If The Sound and the Fury was a revelation, it was first of all the revelation of Literature, through the sudden (re)discovery of all the major novelists with whom Faulkner had just joined company. True, he had read them before, but if we are to believe his testimony, his first reading had been nothing but consumption without “digestion.” His second reading, on the contrary, was a process of assimilation. Carried to its furthest limits, that is, to the point where reading becomes writing. What Faulkner implicitly acknowledges here is that the relationship between reading and writing is one of reversibility: reading is always a virtual writing, and writing always a way of reading...the process at work is one of radical transformation, a way of displacing and, eventually, replacing its models. The Sound and the Fury, then, may be considered a rereading of Flaubert, Dostoevsky, and Conrad—a reading at once attentive and forgetful, fascinated and treacherous, and, by virtue of its very infidelity, creative. The gesture of appropriation is also a gesture of dismissal.
I see in these two paragraphs answers to some vexations around writing voiced by so many today, as the number of celebrated works marred by impoverished language and trepidacious imaginations grows in reverse proportion to the self-publicizing of one's art through social media and a preponderance of author interviews—even reviewers are falling by the wayside, as the last book of the accomplished Christine Schutt garnered two full-length reviews in major publications. That “process of assimilation” taken “to the point where reading becomes writing” is probably different for every writer, but I swear one can pretty much always tell the writers who have read deeply, who have read Hamlet five times over the years, taking it in to turn their own reading into writing, from those with a more lassiez-faire attitude, who have read Hamlet in college and say they've “read” Shakespeare. Bleikasten writes “reading is always a virtual writing,” but this growth can't be depicted by any infinitely-on time-lapse camera and the writer usually cannot tell at the time how or why they did it; only in retrospect like Faulkner.
Where this spillway goes is that too many books (and certainly most on the major presses) written today don't have as much presence of the march of literature in them as they should. This can be fairly easily traced to the many MFA-diluted works glutting the marketplace, the way writing has been taught for thirty some years, maybe more, and finally to our current phase of author self-marketing inside the taste-making matrix.
For two years I belonged to a writer's space where one could easily get a glimpse of the books burgeoning writers were reading. Always interested in the habits of my peers, I began to see the same seven books that had been widely promoted in the last two years (or the earlier work of those same seven authors who get the most publicity), among the occasional Cormac McCarthy, 2666, A Lover's Discourse, or Mrs. Dalloway. I could see the rationale, even the epithalamium of the catch-22 within—these writers wanted to read what was popular and celebrated, not only to feel they were reading the latest in-vogue books but also to model their own writing after them so they, too, would have a chance to be acceptable to the dreadful Hollywood fifty-words-or-less pitch that Big Five publishers admit they basically need: If you like Rachel Cusk, you'll like me. I'm from Nebraska and I moved to Bed-Stuy. It's Badlands and Picnic meet Do the Right Thing (but in a memoir). Or if you are thinking books, it's Isak Dinesen meets Jonathan Lethem meets James Baldwin.
In the writing itself, the first strains of Joyce, until the first Bloom chapter in Ulysses, are there, and yet, many of today's works come to light under the sign of the plain style—Hemingway to Carver to Munro to the typical New Yorker story, all quite late nineteenth century (e.g. translated Chekhov) in style. To amplify this, the great Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, in a “statement of purpose” piece, “The Novel of Tragedy,” breaks down how the novel changed at the beginning of the century, writing how Joyce, Broch, Lowry, and Faulkner rooted their novels in language rather than narrative:
Thus poetic discourse replaces realistic description; time chronology; simultaneous space, frontal space; taxonomy and puns, the lexicon; referential writing, ideal writing; contamination, purity; ambivalence and multivalence, rational univocality. Only poetry, in this broad sense, knows how to question, because only poetry is able to propose, simultaneously, arguments in conflict with each other. The meeting of novel and poetry means rediscovering the elementary soil where the prefabricated answers of a society that thought it had them all are replaced by the questions of men who set out once more to question themselves about everything.
To build on this, Frederick R. Karl writes in his essay “The Faulknerian Presence in Contemporary American Fiction” about the “presence” of Faulkner (rather than the “influence”) in post-war US novelists. “Presence suggests an element which remains: it is both influence and residue, and it cannot be blunted or blocked. It is like a factor in the blood, or a cell marking; it is there.” A “presence” will carry the watermark of the bewitching reversibility of reading and writing much better than influence—most everyone is influenced by Joyce, but a select few contain his “presence.” Not surprisingly, Karl finds that “presence” of Faulkner in many of the Black Humorists (Gaddis, Gass, Barth, Coover, McElroy), plus Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Walker Percy, and Guy Davenport, where language is lacquered with more adipose for greater savoring, yet not in Bellow, Roth, Styron, Mailer, Morrison, Updike, and certainly not Carver (recall Carver's one-time mentor John Gardener [no Faulkner presence in there, I believe] giving him this advice: “Read all the Faulkner you can get your hands on, and then read all of Hemingway to clean the Faulkner out of your system.”) Of the latter group, Karl adds that they
have resisted the inroads of Modernism and have crafted their work as if little had occurred technically or strategically in this century to change literature. This has not lessened their popularity, but it has created a curious cultural phenomenon: of all the Western countries, America is the only one where the dominant novel in terms of recognition and exportability has been antithetical to Modernism. What this suggests, further, is the sharp division within the American cultural scene, where forces of anti-Modernism confront those which have absorbed the lessons of Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Kafka, Woolf. Since Faulkner has himself been such an influence upon and presence in contemporary writers from other countries, we recognize the paradox. While he has remained the most influential of American novelists (perhaps only Hemingway can rival him), his opening up of the American novel has not penetrated those American writers who are best known abroad; the very ones most frequently cited as part of the contemporary American fictional tradition.
This trend, growing more in the last twenty years, can also be said to have bolstered the trenchant judgments against Maximalist writing, except for the obvious standouts: Gaddis and Pynchon (Foster Wallace, before cancellation). And though Karl himself is making a qualitative judgment call of his own, it is one I surely agree with, since the work of the latter group (and I would include Alice Munro and William Trevor) has little resonance compared to the taxonomy and puns, the contamination, the ambivalence and multivalence in the poetic discourse, energizing the pathogens of the words on the page as they propel into the mind and inner voice of the reader.
To apply this to more current writers, one can record the “presence” of Faulkner in Joseph McElroy, Don DeLillo, Alexander Theroux, Christine Schutt, Garielle Lutz, Johanna Ruocco, and Joshua Cohen—and, certainly, in a rather off-hand ways due to translation: Antonio Lobo Antunes, Peter Handke, and Pierre Michon, who called Absalom, Absalom! his father. J.M. Coetzee is a special case. In a paper by Hannah Foxton titled “How does one lay to rest the ghost of Faulkner?: William Faulkner as Coetzeean ‘counter voice,’” Coetzee openly asks that first sentence in his notebook for writing In the Heart of the Country.
Why my concentration on Faulkner rather than Melville, James, or Gaddis—certainly the three other most important US novelists? As these momentous days go by, bending late summer light into more of our dinner hours, admitting the fickle and ostentatious and smoky winds of summer, it becomes more and more obvious, being on the verge of a low-grade civil war with many racial overtones, that Absalom, Absalom! is not only the greatest American novel, it aptly represents America and its many myths in the same way that Dante stands for the Italy of the Middle Ages and Shakespeare for hundreds of years of English history. Toni Morrison said, “In Absalom, Absalom, incest is less of a taboo for an upper-class Southern family than acknowledging the one drop of black blood that would clearly soil the family line. Rather than lose its ‘whiteness’ (once again), the family chooses murder.” There is a great hulking paradox in this country and nothing can quite capture it in the shifts and mythopoetics that frame our history like Absalom. Faulkner dramatizes how two college kids (dorm bros), one of which (Quentin Compson) will die by suicide in six months in The Sound and the Fury, try and reconstruct the history of the Supten clan amid Faulkner's bending of time, what Bleikasten called “its eddies and distortions, its accelerations and decelerations.”
Undoubtedly, Absalom is the most “difficult” Faulkner, but Faulkner is probably read more today by non-writers, who sue to him for his canonization and the historical apparatus of his Deep South World. What is the blockage? Why have writers, for the most part, abandoned his example? Even in 1970, as the inheritors of Faulkner were writing their second, third, and fourth novels, Elizabeth Hardwick wrote, “Perhaps it is more difficult now if the reader must also place upon his mind the inhibiting genealogies, the mythical, unpronounceable kingdom that begins with a Y—all of the learning and sorting out that, like all learning and sorting, gives knowledge of a kind.” “Learning” might be the key to this paradox—even “smug paradox” as Faulkner writes in Sanctuary, fitting today's armies of egomaniacs who piss on “knowledge of any kind” with the internet and WebMD giving people the crass delusion they can self-diagnose a tumor inside them and maybe just pay someone in the gig economy to take it out because the doctor will make you get a vaccination.
I found a curiously poignant online comment on Faulkner during the past summer of reading him:
My perception of his work, his "big" novels in particular and The Sound and the Fury most especially, seems rather obscured by, like, Spark Notes type analysis, the banal ways you learn to pick apart a piece of literature in high school or even college. I remember Caddy's soiled panties, foreshadowing her later promiscuity, but this was a symbol and an insight that didn't come organically as I experienced the text itself but by reading some sort of supplementary analysis. I feel like there's something of an edifice in place between me and Faulkner, the writer himself.
This might help further explain many US writers’ current relationship to Faulkner, showing how his themes (detailed by critics) get over-schematized and detached from the propulsive muse and dampen the electrical current in lines of prose that retain the same wattage. Reading The Sound and the Fury for the first time fifteen years ago, I, too, recalled the bland Sparknotes easy-overs, especially to get through the Benjy section. A couple of years ago, I read through the celebrated four of the first period, along with “The Bear,” but I could not say Faulkner had much “presence” in any fiction I wrote. Earlier in the summer, I went hiking with a writer friend who felt Faulkner was a little too removed from the present day and that he would probably not go back to him, but would instead return to Cormac McCarthy's Appalachian novels which are as indebted to Faulkner as the human body is to water. I can understand the sentiment, though I don't agree with it. As I Lay Dying and The Hamlet are leagues more vivid than Outer Dark and though the best, Suttree, is extraordinary, there is more of life (hence, more wisdom) in Faulkner—with a much greater evocation of women, McCarthy's great weakness.
Still, that ghostly reversibility of reading and writing haunts. I have tried (and failed) to write in the spirit of the Gaddis of The Recognitions, but even William Gass said one cannot “do” Gaddis. Faulkner is further in time, which is measured in consciousness, writing before the metafictional parade of the fifties (inaugurated by The Recognitions). In Faulkner everything is alive, every sentence pulls landscapes, objects, or feelings (or three at once) into an invisible bas-relief, which is to say, it gives us things in themselves, Ding an Sich, with an extra dose of metaphysical uncertainty. Even in a novel barely spoken of now, but still one of his seven or eight masterpieces, The Wild Palms. It begins with a richness today’s readers would tear their heart out to read:
But even apart from the wind he could still tell the approximate time by the staling smell of gumbo now cold in the big earthen pot on the cold stove beyond the flimsy kitchen wall—the big pot of it which his wife had made that morning in order to send some over to their neighbors and renters in the next house: the man and the woman who four days ago had rented the cottage and who probably did not even know that the donors of the gumbo were not only neighbors but landlords too—the dark-haired woman with queer hard yellow eyes in a face whose skin was drawn thin over prominent cheekbones and a heavy jaw (the doctor called it sullen at first, then he called it afraid), young, who sat all day long in a new cheap beach chair facing the water, in a worn sweater and a pair of faded jean pants and canvas shoes, not reading, not doing anything, just sitting there in that complete immobility which the doctor (or the doctor in the Doctor) did not need the corroboration of the drawn quality of the skin and the blank inverted fixity of the apparently unseeing eyes to recognise at once...
And this is only half the sentence. In Faulkner, one sees in brilliantine and minute unearthly detail like the bejeweled canvases of Vermeer. Certainly, we don't write like Faulkner because the sensibility has changed to something more conservative and fearful (the terms are contemporaneously synonymous) rather than imaginative. There is an inherent bias in our fiction-making against the mysterious, the alien, the uncanny (style—not narrative). But the nexus of tastemakers and editorial powers want fiction that can easily fit the market, which short-sells the reader, (Oh, this is this type of story or Oh, I see, this is what I should be feeling as I read this type of story) and for all the liberal and left-leaning people in the US literary industrial complex, there is a rampant conservativism in its product, which is to say, its language. From an overabundance of attention to book prizes to “beach reads” to book trailers and other promotional tie-ins, US fiction has fallen in the last twenty-five years away from maximalism (which need not require a 700-page book (Flaubert's The Temptation of St. Anthony is maximalist as is Gass's In the Heart of the Country or Foster-Wallace's Oblivion or Mark De Silva's Square Wave) and even just a staid proficiency in outré language. Fuentes writes “Baroque...is the language of those peoples who, ignorant of the truth, look for it eagerly... [it is] the language of abundance, is also the language of insufficiency: only those who own nothing enclose everything”—emboldening the conservative substructure in a market that doesn't have room for the Kafka's and Beckett's of the twenty-first century.
Faulkner is nowhere a random tourniquet to noose the literary merits of our day. Hugh Kenner called him “The Last Novelist,” writing how he “stemmed from the nineteenth century’s confident positivism, from the belief that what was so was the writer’s province, that he was the supreme generalist, to be trusted by the literate for the reports they needed,” and Fuentes went in the opposite direction by calling him “the first American writer for whom the tragic element—the consciousness of separation—imposes itself from within American society” and later wonders:
Who are these men and women who, in a painful race along the present, try to discover what already has happened? They are us. Such is Faulkner's true greatness, that his characters are he, you and I. Nothing in Faulkner is gratuitous, neither the tortured rhetoric, nor the lyrical invention, nor the absolute temporariness, nor the alternate narration. His poetic radicalism has that supreme sense of revealing to us our other identity, the one we scrupulously hide or deny because we know that it only exposes and asserts us.
Seemingly, the canard that his characters are us can be said (and has been) for all the greats: Shakespeare, Joyce, Woolf, Beckett. Fuentes’ idea that Faulkner's “poetic radicalism” reveals to us our other identity is perhaps no more in lockstep than with the words of a supporting character in Absalom, Judith Supten:
Because you make so little impression, you see. You get born and you try this and you don't know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they don't know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way like five or six people all trying to make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug; and it can't matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying or having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it's all over.
V.S. Naipaul once spoke about getting one's writing to the stage where the reader reads his own book, or, in the case of the wonderfully calibrated passage, his own thoughts. Judith's words are an oasis in a sea of recoiling sentences that are history, or as Joseph McElroy describes them, “like the freedom...Faulkner ...claimed in order not only to recover the past but, more importantly, give the arduous stretching toward that recovery.” Judith's short, sharp, pointed words are like speech bathed in the chloroform of Faulkner's chemical consciousness. It is close to how a non-writer would talk—just read some YouTube comments. The second long sentence demonstrates the endless way people gab and add to the gab while the listeners try in vain to hear the missing period so they can begin, but Judith's words (which aren't her words but those imagined by Quentin) are so beautifully wrought, their preparedness belies their seeming stream of consciousness.
But I revert to that opening quote, where Faulkner produces a well-oiled koan: “With The Sound and the Fury I learned to read and quit reading since I have read nothing since.” Gertrude Stein would have caviled, “Remarks aren't literature.” Faulkner's remarks are not full of the higher calling of the work itself—as unmovable as mountains are The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom! The Hamlet and others—and the twittering behind this 1930's proto-tweet (though written as his own introduction) is meant to make the people in the audience who want to be entertained (and who won't read your book) laugh (as it is to spear the soul of a young writer), though it probably is more directed at the people who didn't believe in Faulkner—those naysayers turned holy fools who said he'd never amount to much. But there is enough spice in its sauce to gesture at the invisible writer's life—a showdown between the muse and the scribbler and those ghostly presences in the corners of consciousness that is as impossible to portray as the vividness of a dream not one's own.