IV.
I have left to the end one other element, perhaps the key one in his writing: rhythm, by which I intend not merely the patterned interruption of a blank but also something improvisatory, shifting us from the familiar pleasures of iambic pentameter within a stanza, say, to an open-ended parabola made of words, lifting us beyond everyday discernment toward unpredictable recognitions made of iambs but incapable of exact decipherment—De Quincey’s enigmatic involute, perhaps. From register to register you find yourself deliciously slung until you experience something ineffable but precise, far from the usual fodder of fiction, but not far from Bach or Hindemith, say, and sometimes felt in the work of Beckett, Joyce, Proust, Woolf and Barnes. It is not a matter of something divine’s being vouchsafed, adumbrated, whatever the word might be; it’s a matter of something exceptionally human, so vibrant and mysterious it seems to have come from a region not our own. We have to be careful about such artistic intervals, remembering how Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, almost seeming to have tapped the mind of God in a trance of exquisite rhapsody, was composed in a concrete blockhouse on a Hollywood studio lot. We must be careful not to delude ourselves; the miracle is that we are able to feel and respond to such things at all—ecstasy with the deity snipped off. This pagan divinity stalks all through Faulkner sustained by sometimes long sentences that seem to have come into being as rhythmic abstractions, imperious and final, into which some kinds of words have to be put. Which means, of course, that the vital thing here is the ongoingness of rhythm, its perpetual energy and the peculiar sense it evinces of dictating rhythms to come, several sentences away, which when they arrive feel like inevitable culminations, working on us like Gene Krupa in Sing, Sing, Sing, say, even as the words tell us what else is going on. In this sense, I suggest, Faulkner’s best work is a model of the world: not a transcript or a photograph, but a working model of Creation, to be construed not as tract or fable but as expressive energy.
I am not enough of a philosopher to embark on theory of the model, certainly not in the wake of announcements that theoretical physicists, in their efforts to explain a huge burst of gamma rays at least two billion light years from Earth, came up with more than 140 different models. But I have had one experience, recounted fully in Portable People, bearing on it. Seated at a rather formal birthday party opposite a burly Germanic-looking gent with huge forehead and a crown of white hair, I found out that he was Hans Bethe, the man who figured out how the sun works and received a Nobel Prize in physics for his pains. He had actually worked the problem out while doodling on an envelope aboard a train from Princeton to Ithaca in the days when such trains ran. Someone had told him that one of my novels, Gala, was about a father and child who build a model of the Milky Way in their basement, and this tidbit of news entertained him, prompting him eventually, after some preliminary conversation, to ask me: “Was it a working model?” I have been told I see too much in his query; but I doubt it: buried somewhere in the vast erudition he brought to this bizarre social encounter with a non-scientist, there was a child’s hypothetical longing to have that envelope of his come to life, be not just equations but the sun itself. You could see in his face a massive, proud naïveté that said he wanted all models to behave like their originals. Of course he was teasing me, but also himself. Even to understand is not to replicate. In his generous fashion he was enlisting me in the honorable and no doubt deluded company of model-makers, who wanted more than they could get and remained dissatisfied with their models.
And so back to Faulkner, whose models, while not working models of the sun or anything else, nonetheless give off the erratic, impersonal, daunting purr of a universe in motion, with God eloquent in the details, as Mies van der Rohe said. Something processive comes through, having nothing to do with plot, but much to do with style, obliging readers to perform feats, sometimes herculean, of decoding. Call the assembled works of WF the Faulkner manifold, or the Yoknapatawpha experiment; there leaks from them a clinical, epistemological hurdy-gurdy sound that recalls Nigel Balchin’s psychiatry novel, Mine Own Executioner, in which the mind functions as a model of what it confronts and cannot dominate. Just as, for many novelists, art has become an obvious recourse to control and order in a frightening, chaotic world, so has the novel for Faulkner been the stage on which he sets the violence, the abyssal and helpless dynamism of the mind encountering a cosmos too vast to think about. There is nervous wreckage behind his sentences, nausea at the speed with which humans, nations, races, are consumed, with the result that the almost orderly procedures of fiction, muddled as they may seem, echo the assembled science pertaining to galaxies, clusters of them, and the beginning of the universe. Only Proust, who doted on science, provides a similar phobic context, not so much spelled out in technical terms as mimicked in a language almost out of control, beginning to falter and melt in the face of a physics that makes us want to think society is as much a given as nature itself, and more palatable.
Where memory upsets and steadies Proust, peering unnerves and beefs up Faulkner. They are both dealing with huger entities than dictionaries can master, both of them entrants in the stakes for ecstatic anthropology. When you come away from either, drenched in some ravishing destructive element epitomized in the ordeal of the prose, you have been subjected to an archetypal thrill in which the cave and the corncob/madeleine come together. Proust just happens to be more finesse-ridden than Faulkner, whose society is more primitive than his. Is this what Hardy was aiming for, this huge overview, or Balzac? They falter because they are not stylists enough, never taking chances, whereas Proust, forever amplifying and extending, Faulkner never quite managing to resist using the image not yet accepted, contrive to create an open-ended model, at least one that begins in the calm, temperate, obliging atmosphere that allows the enthralled human to say “This is a scale model of the Maia-Mercury seaplane combo,” but takes you out, away from all your bearings into uncharted realms of memory and pre-history. They excel in what they do most intimately, insisting that the figure attract the ground and vice versa, and that decorous dichotomy no longer applies. The disastrous reading habit they both demand is the one that robs you of exquisite response and makes you consider the thing said as perhaps the most cogent way of acquainting you with the not-said. You are no longer allowed to concentrate. You have to take in everything that leaks into view from somewhere else. If this is total reading, then it has its precursors in painting and music; and literature, we might say, has only just begun to catch up. Joyce used connotation in much the same way, blurring exposition in the cause of woof. At bottom, all three participate in the same late-twentieth-century movement to rid literature of its arbitrary features, much as Robbe-Grillet tried to rid it of false dualisms. We will never lose the yearning to concentrate on something at the expense of everything else, nor will we ever lose that freebooter inclination to help ourselves to everything else as well. Tell looters to steal only alarm clocks and asbestos oven-gloves and see what happens.
In the long run, I suppose I prefer Faulkner’s feeling for barbaric yawp to Proust’s brothel argot and Joyce’s molten lexicography, but it’s an embarrassment of riches to choose from. Faulkner has also the narrative drive, the Gothic flagrancy, the others lack, something of the gross, brutal pounding in Shakespeare. There is much knocking at the gates in Yoknapatawpha, history red in tooth and claw, geography done to kinetic rhythms.
V.
One is glad that, so far as is known, Faulkner never went and sat ringside with Joe DiMaggio as Hemingway did. Faulkner’s vicarious heroics would have taken him, rather, to reunions of the American pilots who formed the Eagle Squadron of the Royal Air Force (few survivors, alas). His true heroics, visible and audible on every page, depend on fecundity, on the constant chance of saying something original by way of oratory. It is safer to count on its happening than on its not, and if this gets him a Purple Heart, then so be it, so long as we understand by that term an added intensity, an irresistible chromatic sublimi
ty, an impenitent yen to use the full orchestra of language, indeed to create an artifact so substantial it almost supplants the world it regards. He is the auto-pilot of crescendo, the artificer of sweep, the maestro of making things thicker, the architect of density and deviance. All through he tells a straight enough story, but the entire world’s howling lingers in its margins, as if narrative were being faulted for neatness, selection, symbolism even. This guarantees him as a holist, an ever-present ancient mariner who not only gives us the full tale but augments it with what one has to call the act of agile stuffing. All along, he knows and imagines more than his completed oeuvre could ever contain, which is a monumental feat of knowledge, to be sure, but his salient contribution is not, I think, the fabricating of Snopeses, the fleshing out of that map in the back of Absalom, Absalom! and those appended chronologies and genealogies that read like belated challenges to himself rather than aide-memoires to the reader. Can these dry bones live?
They just have. Look where the east-west highway in almost Roman geometry intersects the north-south railroad and ringed spots like sperms with tails attacking an egg or the tadpole-like objects that astronomers call cometary knots tell us of sites: “WHERE OLD BAYARD SARTORIS DIED IN YOUNG BAYARD’S CAR,” “MISS JOANNA BURDEN’S, WHERE CHRISTMAS KILLED MISS BURDEN, & WHERE LENA GROVE’S CHILD WAS BORN.” It is the kind of map you need when recollecting emotion in tranquillity—not much use to you beforehand, of course, or even during. When he writes “WILLIAM FAULKNER, SOLE OWNER & PROPRIETOR,” using two reversed Ns perhaps in fake redneckery, he is urinating on ground already written up and dominated. This was no thing to send in to Random House as part of a book proposal, but scent-marking by a literary tiger out on his own, beyond editors and Fadimans, creators of ingratiating short paragraphs and short sentences. Where Nabokov deals in almost scalding precision, a diagnostic triplet of definite or indefinite article, adjective and noun, Faulkner works himself up into an elephantiasis of augment, never quite sure how little to leave it at. As in this:
He crossed that strange threshold, that irrevocable demarcation, not led, not dragged, but driven and herded by that stern implacable presence, into that gaunt and barren household where his very silken remaining clothes, his delicate shirt and stockings and shoes which still remained to remind him of what he had once been, vanished, fled from arms and body and legs as if they had been woven of chimæras or of smoke.
A prose puritan’s version might run as follows:
He crossed the strange threshold, driven by that implacable presence, into the household where his remaining clothes reminded him of what he had once been.
Anyone can help the Third Reich, even the occasional half-wit, and every incompetent can crank out a tale. What Faulkner manages to do here is convey the act of dressing and undressing in the motions of the prose, the keenest of which is how the clothes themselves undress him, themselves reject him and blow away, an illusion that of course builds upon the clad quality of the narrative itself. It would have been a cliché to denude the sentences themselves to proclaim the divestment of the last two lines, and he goes nowhere near so obvious a trick. Then he resumes with an affirmative, garbing the whole mental motion anew, filling in a physique with an entire implied biography, the point of which—nothing new—is that any given detail contains the whole story if only you have the patience to draw it out and reveal it. It’s a typical patch of execution, doing several things at once, as he mostly does, but it doesn’t launch into the egregious kind of literate back-stammer we get elsewhere in Absalom, Absalom! and which makes it a visionary novel, a model of the impenitently pensive work of art:
He was gone; I did not even know that either since there is a metabolism of the spirit as well as of the entrails, in which the stored accumulations of long time burn, generate, create and break some maidenhead of the ravening meat; ay, in a second’s time—yes, lost all the shibboleth erupting of cannot, will not, never will in one red instant’s fierce obliteration.
This is by no means the fiercest, most fluently asyntactical portion of the novel, but it does set him apart from thousands who toil to accomplish a book without mistakes in grammar, their fervent hope that the grammatically flawless ipso facto becomes high art. Why, you could even cobble together a sentence, a pseudo-sentence, using his most portentous words merely to evince his linguistic interest in the unlinguistic doings of humans: His metabolism had accumulated the meat of a maidenhead, at least until some shibboleth obliterated it. Free the least redneck part of his idiom from the “Hit wont need no light, honey”s, and the big words, out in the open as it were, will form uncanny relationships with one another—the latent high-brow that over-animates the complete sentence or paragraph. It is as if the history of the language, there ever having been a developing language for there to be a history of, loomed up behind everything, minifying it in an erudite, fervent, unSouthern voice, all points of the compass speaking at once. That is how he works on you, doing within his pages what Proust put in the margins and in his tacked-on paper wings. The vision of the All haunts them both, at their most restricted and specific, alarming them with the discovery that the minutest particular has universal force, could you but let it loose. Every mouse a rogue elephant.
Less a phrasemaker than he was a texture-weaver, an apocalyptic compound voice of all the ages, Faulkner blazed the trail. Without him as forebear, some of us would never have been. He wrote in defiance, reserving the right to stylize until the “message” of his novels was that of their idiosyncratic twang. Sometimes, we are told, a surgeon works so fast, stitching, that his gloves catch fire. You sometimes sense this happens to Faulkner at his most incantatory. I am not sure his eminent performance helps me with plot or narrative line, with, for instance, what occupies me most these days: the image of the forsaken astronaut from another galaxy, perhaps a successor of Matthew Arnold’s Forsaken Merman, who makes what he can of Earth, the planet he’s been saddled with, thus becoming a new version of that old trope the alien observer only faintly aware of where he came from. But the furor and dionysian tenacity of WF’s prose style empower me even as the fruitflies cabal and reject imagination. There’s one big thing about Mr. Faulkner. He reminds you that, when the deep purple blooms, you are looking at a dimension, not a posy.
POSTSCRIPT
How much we expect of literature without wondering why. There are two stages: one, we take it seriously (i.e., not trivially). Two: we then expect too much of it. Looking for signs among the treasure-trove of letters, we develop a habit we try to apply to the world at large. We expect the ostensible microcosm to evince the macrocosm, and it never does, though we attach to our fiercest mental longings a whole arsenal of allegory, symbolism, sign, epitome, metaphor, simile, hint, personification, vignette and so on. The truth is, we are always alone with literature; it never quite does duty for the world, and our experience of it never quite matches all that the world does to us, from neutrino to tumor. We nonetheless try to rehearse for life while reading, or to sum it up: agenda or summa. There is the work of art and then everything else, and all we can say is that the work enters the world, adds itself to that, but only sketchily conveys it. I am wondering (and pontificating) about the inadequacy of imagery, and this is what Faulkner teaches us; that gathering, teacherly hum of his continually calls up the intractable ongoingness of the world outside the artifact.
Oddly enough, in him as in Beckett and Joyce, the world becomes a symbol of itself. What art does not tell us, the world has to, but only in a fragmented, dishevelled way. Having learned to hunt for signs, we never get enough of them and so return to the world unappeased, realizing there is no satisfactory symbol after all. There is not even a suitable synecdoche. To cope with life, you either have to accept an incomplete account of it, since you can never soak up the All, or resign yourself to mere addition—one damned thing after another.
The word symbol should haunt us, denoting as it does in Ancient Greek things brought back together that were thrown a
part. Let us say the mind and all that is not mind. If this upset the Greeks, by how much more must it upset us? We have many more phenomena to deal with than they did, and I am not even counting the World Wide Web cluttered with the prattle of almost everybody. How arbitrary our sleuthing-out of the world is, how decisive on feeble premises, how shallow on poor evidence. We live and die without knowing much of the world, getting so much at second-hand, and using only a measly fraction of our brains. The best symbols, such as Beckett’s Molloy “riding” his chainless bike with the aid of crutches or Proust’s imperious madeleine, first tempt us to construe them, then become the symbols of our own inability, our constantly stymied state. The world, including its symbols and microcosms, begins and ends as what I previously called an involute: De Quincey’s idea of a compound experience incapable of being disentangled. Hence, literature or letters ends up as a cushion, an anodyne, a drug. Faulkner’s great gift is that he shrouds all he does in the noise of mystery, cloaking significance in a texture of dubiety which, although verbal, happens to be more revealing on the level of agitated recitative than on that of explanation. He chants to us the nature of being, its overbearing abundance, its terminable gratuitousness. Ultimately, we do not ask the questions because we could not stand the answers.
*Essentially the same view of art and artists as we find in Malraux’s The Voices of Silence.
Frank O’Hara:
Nothing Personal
Tributes Page 14
