Unbridgeable difference: only mindless Ike spans the unspannable. Normal humans in thrall to animal urgency are not so lucky. Faulkner and Estelle, Faulkner and Meta, Harry and Charlotte, Labove and Eula, Houston and Lucy, Mink and his sexually soiled wife: these couplings are impossible to resist or sustain. Mules appealed to Faulkner because—naturally unrelated to the rest of the animal kingdom—they steadily and (if need be) fiercely stayed what they were: separate, unreachable, beyond coupling. “We don’t want him tame,” Sam Fathers had said of the great dog Lion. At his core, the Faulkner male—animal or human—wants to be intact, individual, beyond merging. When he falls or is compelled into relationship, something primordial in him rebels. Insofar as sanctuary is a ruse for temporarily escaping one’s embattled foreignness to one’s world—for experiencing life as untroubled by the entry of others—sanctuary must fail. Because erotic love heedlessly seeks to bridge what cannot be bridged, it emerges—in Faulkner’s life and in these two novels of his early forties—as a species of sublime madness. However his males crave it, they abhor it with equal intensity. They are never ready for it, and it will not submit to domestication. It is beyond owning.
Near the end of The Hamlet, Ratliff and Uncle Will are chatting together, standing near the wounded Henry Armstid. The latter had believed, despite all evidence, that he could actually own the wild pony he has bought. He has paid for his mistake after trying to take possession. Kicked unconscious, his leg broken, writhing “Ah. Ah. Ah,” the groaning Armstid awakens in Uncle Will Varner a larger meditation on human unpreparedness for encounters. Reflecting on how we suffer when we seek to domesticate the world’s shocking otherness, Varner murmurs, “There’s a pill for every ill but the last one.” Without missing a beat, Ratliff replies, “Even if there was always time to take it.” Silent for an instant, Uncle Will rejoins, “Even if there was time to take it. Breathing is a sight-draft dated yesterday” (HAM 1019).
Breathing, as a sight-draft dated yesterday, is radically at risk. It may be cashed in at any time by “the Ones that set up the loom.” Whatever the sinister gods had in mind, it was not our prospering. We do not nicely, cumulatively, “become” ourselves over time. We muddle along, often well enough protected by the tattered garments of habit and expectation. Sooner or later, habit will fail, expectation come a cropper, and the trap will spring. We will find ourselves reduced once again to the naked amazement in which it all began—as Yeats put it, “the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.” Born to encounter a final death—that ending for which we are never prepared—we encounter on the way any number of smaller deaths, some of them potentially mortal themselves. When they hit, we suffer, but we are also, once again, alive. No one knew this better, in 1940, than William Faulkner.
“THE MAELSTROM OF UNBEARABLE REALITY”
The deepest logic in both Faulkner’s life and his work is that disaster strikes—when it strikes—prior to any preparation for it. In the moment of crisis, one is never ready. For that reason I have opened this chapter, like the preceding ones, in the midst of trouble, without explanatory framing. I have sought to render something of the texture of Faulkner’s stumbling in the present moment. It is time for further meditation on those would-be shelters Faulkner sought for protection and coherence. Each in its way—alcohol, love affairs—delivered its boon en route to failing him over time. The protection was temporary, the coherence illusory. There was no long-term escaping the troubles that beset his life.
The quest for refuge emerges as a groundswell in the work as well—a quest perhaps most memorably dramatized in Absalom. “A might-have-been that is more true than truth” (AA 115, emphasis in the original): so Rosa Coldfield thought of sanctuary. It was protection against the onslaught set loose by the “sinister gods.” The quoted clause articulates Rosa’s thinking at a moment of sudden unpreparedness. Having been ignored throughout her orphaned childhood, this needy child had invested her older niece Judith’s coming marriage—to her peerless fiancé Charles Bon—with all the emotional fulfillment lacking in her own life. Suddenly their betrothal was shot out from under her, hurtling her into “the maelstrom of unbearable reality” (120, emphasis in the original). Stunned by Wash Jones’s brutal announcement that Henry had killed Bon, Rosa rushed to Sutpen’s Hundred. There she encountered not Bon’s corpse (she was never to lay eyes on him) but instead an apparently serene, unreachable Judith. She encountered as well—invisibly filling the space around her—the collapse of her long-sustained and sustaining dream. “Why did I wake,” she wondered, “since waking I shall never sleep again?” (AA 118, emphasis in the original).
Waking into unbearable reality: Faulkner’s work explored—from start to finish—the human need for fictions that would ward off disaster lurking somewhere at the “prime foundation of this factual scheme” (AA 118, emphasis in the original). His fiction represented the world as a space that could not be confronted on its own brutely inhuman terms. A “miasmal mass” Rosa called it in Absalom: the world as a swamp ultimately inhospitable to human designs invented to make it hospitable.
What sounds like metaphysical nihilism was rooted in specific cultural dilemmas. Writ large, Faulkner’s novels powerfully illuminated an early twentieth-century South looking back, bewildered, on the collapse of antebellum dreams. Absalom lingered over the antebellum aspirations invested in Sutpen’s construction of his mansion: naked men covered in mud to ward off mosquitoes, working from dawn to dusk as they dredged from the swamp a dwelling that would match Sutpen’s dream of himself. The South had taught him to pursue precisely this figure in the world. Like all such sanctuaries—race- and class-shaped to the hilt—this one was primed to backfire over time. Finally secure inside his plantation, Sutpen denies entry to his part-black son Charles Bon—even as he himself had been denied entry, forty years before, into Pettibone’s plantation. Class abuse (white trash may not enter) repercusses as race and gender abuse (a discarded part-black wife and her part-black son who cannot be acknowledged). The unanticipated consequences of disowning Charles Bon leads to Sutpen’s being disowned himself—abandoned by his second son Henry—and eventually killed by his poor-white retainer Wash Jones. One’s desires get entangled—all the puppet strings inextricably knotted—with the desires of others. Sutpen’s precious mansion—at once shelter, antidote against earlier humiliation, and crowning glory—ends by burning in the night. Clytie—his slave, servant, daughter, victim, and avenging destroyer—sets it aflame. It reads as metaphysical rebuke. It reads more deeply as the murderous consequence of Southern class, race, and gender belief systems.
Faulkner’s earlier masterpieces—The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, and Light in August—grappled no less movingly with the same thematics of psychic exposure and protection: assaults beyond negotiation, futile attempts to secure safety. Macbeth’s soliloquy on time gone wrong would haunt Faulkner for his entire life. Time had become treacherous: we dream outdated dreams, lie our ways into wars that end before we can enter them, love women we cannot possess when we seek them, and no longer desire when they become ours. Our attempts to extricate ourselves from untimeliness are themselves untimely, burying us more deeply. The dilemma was at first existential—outrage at untimeliness—but the longer he endured it, the more he glimpsed its cultural underpinnings.
Caddy’s virginity, like Dewey Dell’s and Temple’s, harbored a cultural insistence—a mandated sanctuary—that Faulkner thought to be indefensible in theory and knew to be punitive in fact. Between life’s unanticipated abrasiveness and youth’s sexual urgency, female virginity had little chance of enduring. Virginity’s meaning, like the larger one embodied in his region’s defeat in 1865, centered on the inevitability of Southern loss, and the pathos of defending it nevertheless. In like manner, as Joe Christmas’s story would testify, the violence engendered by crossing the color line rested on racial convictions—airy conceptual sanctuaries—unsupported by biological data, physical evidence, or repressed (but unrepressible) human
desire. White male designs, insofar as they were built on the backs of others who could not be acknowledged, necessarily collapsed—and were followed by repercussive aftershocks affecting generations to come. The defeat of Quentin Compson, Joe Christmas, and Thomas Sutpen was not just existential bad news. It carried in its wake a larger diagnostic portent. Ultimately it revealed, in excruciating detail over time, that the gendered and racial maps these Southerners lived and died by—the priorities and distinctions that furnished Southern identity itself—were suicidal at their core.
In As I Lay Dying, Faulkner had one of his characters point out the difference between weightless words that rise into the air and unspeakable realities that take place on the ground. Faulkner had come to see that human values—“designs,” as he would call them in Absalom—locate in the air. There they take the form of the socially inculcated fictions we live and die by. Because they have no natural rooting, because they privilege some by exploiting others, they eventually come crashing down. By his early thirties, Faulkner grasped not only that words can be mendacious. He saw that the systemic project of culturally driven narratives—however benign—was to produce (retrospective) order by way of mendacity. Narrative lived in the air, even as it sought to make credible a verbal world of thought and feeling and belief at odds with the real in its on-the-ground, strife-ridden complexity. In this way, Faulkner took on—doubtless without identifying it thus—his novelistic project. He would reconfigure inherited verbal structures (narrative forms) so strenuously that against their own will, they would intimate the unmanageable realities their purpose was to massage into order. Absalom, Absalom!—with its array of cultural dreams along with their inevitable collapse, with its proliferation of narrative shapings along with their confessed inadequacy—embodies this project at its highest point.
Finally, and this is inseparable from Faulkner’s grandeur, no individual blame attaches to the array of collapses his great work records. Not that he narrated his stories of destruction and damage amorally, with Nabokovian detachment. Rather, sharing imaginatively the insistences of his protagonists—even as he saw that these were grounded in illusion or privilege—Faulkner did not pass judgment. He managed to place himself in his characters and outside them at the same time. To judge, one has to see past the dilemmas that bedevil one’s characters, to know not only that they are wrong, but how they might have been right. Faulkner neither knew nor pretended to know this. Thus the remarkable honesty of his best work, the reason for its heartbreaking power. No alternative exists—while reading it—to the agony his people are suffering or inflicting or both. His later work—I shall address this point more fully soon—tended to possess answers, to turn stumbling into error. It tended to do what fiction usually does: identify solutions that retroactively transform abiding dilemmas into manageable problems.
“The maelstrom of unbearable reality”: Faulkner not only wrote that condition, he lived it. More—and this was perhaps his rarest resource as a writer—he respected it. He grasped that stumbling is how humans negotiate present moments that are too much for them. Because we live inescapably in the present moment, we cannot be prepared for the ramifications of our experience. We enter a scene that began long before our moment of arrival. The scene harbors, as well, concealed consequences that long outlast our moment of departure. A childhood sweetheart he couldn’t bring himself to elope with; a war he sought unsuccessfully to enter; a plane he bought to make up for lies he had earlier told, and that he bequeathed to his brother Dean; a first child whom he lost, followed by another too precious to relinquish (as divorce would have required); a white Southerner who viewed blacks as other and inferior yet sometimes saw in them—within the mirror they put before him—his undeniable dark twins: none of these life experiences is spectacular as such. Any Southerner might have had them. But if you add them together, they can be haunting, as any life is open to being haunted. Being haunted depends not on the unusualness of the stimulus but on the imaginative depth of the response. Faulkner’s imagination was hemophilic.
These were the interrelated liabilities and resources he carried with him throughout his life. Hemophilic: channels that remained open, outside the aegis of will. His lifelong stance of impenetrability—his recourse to silence and impassivity—implies, as its counterpart, an immensely threatening inner responsiveness. Silent did not mean phlegmatic. From childhood forward, he took in everything that was happening around him and forgot little of it—its look, feel, smell, sound, and unacted possibilities. He maintained greater control by absorbing silently rather than performing out loud. Eventually, his indirect mode of performance would involve the creative probing and reshaping of what he had already absorbed—his labor as an artist. Inside his head a teeming, many-peopled world was already under way. Excessive drinking was at first a normal part of his childhood and youth. Later, it became a summoned—eventually fatal—dimension of his maturity and older years. He was a man who solved little, and who rarely fooled himself about what he had failed to solve. By his early thirties he had become badly married, given to bouts of uncontrollable drinking, determined to put onto paper the cluster of novels already roiling around inside his head. He was also in need of more money (as a Southern paterfamilias) than he could hope to earn by his fiction.
The many trips to Hollywood follow in almost predictable fashion—how else pay the bills that his inherited model of identity tells him he must incur and pay if he is to be both successful and honorable? Once in Hollywood, the gathering emotional trap is set and ready to spring. Hollywood solicits everything awry in his married life: his loneliness away from home, his alienation from the medium of film and from those who produce it, his incapacity to adapt to a world of rented dwellings and apparently interchangeable faces, each lacking its specific history. He meets at work a charming and gentle Southern woman—a decade younger, recently divorced, in awe of his reputation. They begin an affair—this will be the sanctuary that frees him from matrimonial misery—and they fall in love (this seems to be the correct sequence). He cannot divorce, begins to drink more heavily, plunges more deeply into his affair. He learns that erotic love is ecstasy and torture, incompatible with everything else he has come to know and endorse about himself. He is caught in the quagmire of his own contradictions. All along, the big book—the one that will once and for all establish him as America’s greatest—keeps eluding him, telling him that he is not yet the writer he must be.
Such is the becoming of William Faulkner—a movement through space and time that calls into question the usual meanings of “becoming.” It is nearer to a sustaining than a becoming—a sustaining of burdens whose weight increases over time. Like Mink Snopes desperately using his own neck to spring himself free from an otherwise straight path heading to jail, like the convict bleeding anew at every encounter but grimly determined to get the job done though he had nothing to do with its assignment, like the mule persevering in its speechless direction, regardless of others’ commands or beatings: so Faulkner endured the contradictions that made him up. By the early 1940s the picture is tolerably clear, the portrait more or less complete. What remains is what he called in Absalom the “rubbishy aftermath,” the later years of hospitalization, frustration, and international fame.
CHAPTER 5
TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW
Late in the second act of Requiem for a Nun (1951), Gowan Stevens and his wife Temple (miserably married for eight years now) ponder the painful sequence of events that has brought them to their current dilemma. Gowan’s uncle Gavin has gathered them together to figure out how they might have avoided the disaster at Frenchman’s Bend—the drunken car accident and subsequent rape that launched the vicious mayhem of Sanctuary. Looking back, they cannot imagine anything other than what occurred: “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,” Temple murmurs, and Gavin (“speaking her thought, finishing the sentences” [RN 611]) says without missing a beat, “—he [Gowan] will wreck the car again against the wrong tree, in the wrong
place, and you will have to forgive him again, for the next eight years until he can wreck the car again in the wrong place, against the wrong tree—” (611).
Faulkner was fifty-three years old when he wrote this hybrid text—half epic prose history of Yoknapatawpha County, half stage play in which Temple Drake Stevens seeks to reclaim her soul. Despite strenuous attempts—by Gavin, the Governor, and (behind them both) Faulkner—to “confess” Temple, the project of self-recovery does not succeed. Looking back over the unenlightened years that had passed, Temple is unable to come upon a retrospective insight that might allow her, cathartically, to liberate her future. Rather than analyze Requiem for a Nun further, I stress the failed project of recognition. Temple cannot resee her past so as to begin anew. Nor could her author, with respect to his own life. Faulkner’s last two decades reenacted conflicts that had arisen earlier and remained irresoluble. What had gone wrong earlier would inevitably go wrong again.
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