CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND

William Faulkner proved to be as complex a puzzle as the South he tried to understand. His life was a continuous struggle to understand both himself and his place in the South. More than just a writer, he was an artist and historian as well. Probably no other writer's works, particularly over such an extended period of time, are as filled with a sense of history as those of this man who described himself as "just a farmer." Sherwood Anderson, whom Faulkner first met in New Orleans in his late twenties, was the man credited with pointing the young Mississippian in the direction his life's work would take. His advice was to write about what his young friend knew about, namely that area of land in northern Mississippi southeast of Memphis, that quaint country where Faulkner had been raised. This seed of literary advice would take root in Faulkner, but it would not be until his third novel that it would blossom into a beautiful flower of Southern literature. In 1927, while working on both Flags in the Dust (published in a shortened version called Sartoris) and Father Abraham (which he would abandon but later return to in his Snopes trilogy), William Faulkner created Yoknapatawpha County and peopled it with an array of blacks, aristocrats, and poor whites. It was at that time that he realized that writing was much more than just a way to avoid working for a living; now he began to see the power his written words could convey. From this point on he would breathe life into a self-sustaining universe in which he, along with the reader, could consider the appearances and realities of history, and where both together could learn more about themselves and the world around them.

History has without a doubt happened to Southerners, and Faulkner, growing up in the Deep South town of Oxford, Mississippi, had to be aware of, if not steeped in, historical tradition. His was an aristocratic family full of ancestors, in particular William's great-grandfather William C. Falkner, who by Faulkner's time had become more legendary than real. Such was the vision of the South he had inherited from his family and culture, the myth of a grand Old South victimized by the North, still reeling from the effects of defeat. In his literature, Faulkner would struggle with this mythological depiction, swinging back and forth between acceptance and disbelief. Faulkner never really knew the South; he took virtually every possible stand in his novels and stories, but he never truly faced up to the realities hidden behind the myth he had tried so hard to expose. He himself came to consider his work a series of failures; realizing as he reached the age of fifty that he had gotten off-track and now had lost the fire he had possessed as a younger man, he asked not to be judged on his success but rather on his courage and the glory of his effort. The source of his failure can be traced back to two significant portrayals of Southern history in Absalom, Absalom! and The Unvanquished, both written at virtually the same time, set in the same postbellum era, but approached very differently in terms of vision. In what seemed to be Faulkner's greatest moment of triumph can be found his most costly failure. In the decade before his death in 1962, he would look back to this literary period with a deep sense of regret, a feeling that if he just had one more chance to do it all over again, maybe then he could get it right. Realizing that he was too old to write in that same fierce spirit, he came to accept the fact that he had failed to understand and even to find his South, his Nobel Prize-winning literature little more than a collection of glorious failures.

CHAPTER 2

TRUTH AND FACT IN A WORLD OF FLUID TIME

Some of Faulkner's comments on the subjects of his writing and of the South prove interesting. In a letter to Malcolm Cowley he wrote, "I'm inclined to think that my material, the South, is not very important to me, I just happen to know it." This is certainly a strange comment for a man who seemed to know the South's history so well and to write in such a personal way, as if he desperately wanted the South to be understood instead of viewed stereotypically. He indeed did know the facts about history, but he did not consider them to be too important, more of a hindrance than a help to the writer. Truth was what had significance and what mattered, and facts served only to hide the truth. In his opinion "ideas and facts have very little connection with truth." Facts were a burden to the writer; they were essentially what separated him from the poet. In another letter to Malcolm Cowley he wrote, "I don't care much for facts, as not much interested in them. You can't stand a fact up, you've got to prop it up, and when you move to one side a little and look at it from that angle, it's not thick enough to cast a shadow in that direction." Even in his very language Faulkner would try to raise himself above the confines of fact up to a world where he could write with the freedom of a poet.

Faulkner did not consider himself to be an historian, for he was not concerned with accurately recreating history. His concern was the act of historical interpretation in and of itself. This applied particularly in terms of the past's psychological implications. In his fiction, it is "a matter of who `recalls' what in Southern history, when and why." On the level of universal meaning, his interest was in the embodiment of what people thought had happened in the past, what this history meant to each individual, and how it affected his present and future. Faulkner tries to provide the reader with insight into various interpretations of history and the individual interpreters, rather than into history itself. By presenting different characters of different backgrounds seeing the South differently, Faulkner gives the reader an abundance of ways to see the past in hopes that he might reap universal truths for himself.

William Faulkner had a unique notion of history: truth is not in the facts, and history is not simply the events of the past. He considered the past alone to be of little importance. One must live simultaneously in the past, present, and future. Time is a fluid thing, aspects of each time affecting every other time, causing every single action, even the most trivial, to be very important. In his writing, the future plays a large role in the interpretation of history; characters often see visions of their future as a result of their search for meaning in the past. This idea of historical knowledge, wherein one sees his own future as projected by another's past goes back to the work done by Hegel in Germany in the nineteenth century. One cannot live in only the past, present, or future and be truly alive. We see this idea in many of Faulkner's characters, as in the case of Quentin Compson, a young man overwhelmed and destroyed by the heritage of his past. The most conspicuous example of a character able to live in the past, present, and future simultaneously is Benjy Compson; it seems ironic that the idiot Benjy has an advantage over those around him (e.g., Jason Compson) in the ability to interpret the past. To Benjy, twenty years ago is no different from a week ago. There seems to be some significance in this; perhaps an implication is being advanced that no sane man reared in any certain tradition of interpretation can ever understand the past.

CHAPTER 3

FIVE GOALS OF THE ARTIST/HISTORIAN

Faulkner wanted to deal with universal truths, and the best way for him to accomplish this was to become an artist/historian. He recognized the burdens of facts, how they made one view the past as only a series of fragmentary events--events such as revolutions, wars, elections--loosely connected in the framework of history. As an artist, he was concerned not with events but rather with the factors and human qualities that brought them about. If history did not deal with the passions, needs, and weaknesses of human beings, Faulkner did not consider it relevant. As an artist/historian he set himself five goals. First and foremost was his ability and obligation as a writer to divine universal truths from history. Second, he could help mankind feel a link to its past. Third, he could defeat time by dealing simultaneously with the past, present, and future. Next, he could use his imagination to empathize and understand his characters. Combining all of these, he would be able to achieve a sort of immortality in his work. Not only would these goals be important for Faulkner, but also for his characters. By meeting these criteria, particularly the first three, a character--or even Faulkner himself--could come to get some understanding of history.

Faulkner was to come closest to attaining these goals in Absalom, Absalom!, his historical interpretation of the past. The novel is riddled with factual inconsistencies, all of which cannot be attributed to carelessness. For example, in one passage Mr. Compson says that Rosa Coldfield was twenty in 1864; then, only four lines later, he says she was born in 1845. An even more striking example is found in the chronology at the end of the book. In the novel, Judith Sutpen and Charles St. V. Bon die of yellow fever; however, in the chronology the cause of death is listed as smallpox. These sorts of trivial errors abound in the novel. Clearly they are there essentially for a purpose, namely to "force the reader to surrender misguided perceptions of the past, those that depend on a knowledge of inconsequential details." In other words, the reader must forget about the facts and worry about the truth. In Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner comes close to tying all aspects of time together. In their room at Harvard, Quentin and Shreve become Henry Sutpen and Charles Bon. Quentin even says, "If I had been there I could not have seen it this plain." The past should be a place where one can find comfort. Faulkner finds such comfort in his Sartoris stories, but Quentin finds no such comfort because, despite his ability to defeat time to some degree, he is too caught up in the past. He is too "messed up" inside. To understand oneself and one's place, one must be able to defeat time. Faulkner said, "My ambition is to put everything into one sentence--not only the present but the whole past on which it depends, and which keeps overtaking the present second by second."^__ At another time he said, "I'm still trying to put all mankind's history in one sentence." The letter Judith receives from Charles Bon and later gives to Quentin's grandmother (thereby becoming the only real evidence for the existence of Charles as a man rather than a legend) serves the same purpose as Faulkner's novel itself: it links generations and achieves a sort of immortality. It can be read or not read, but it does exist. Certain elements of the five goals can be seen as typified in the characters themselves.

CHAPTER 4

WORKING TOWARD Absalom, Absalom!

Unlike his other works, especially the Sartoris stories, the writing of Absalom, Absalom! proved to be a difficult, even painful process for Faulkner. Certainly it would mark a new stage in his career. In a way, his whole life's work had been leading up to such a novel, even if it was going to force him to see things he would rather not see. A lot of it, obviously, had to do with race and race relations between whites and blacks. The process, Faulkner's search for a South, had begun in Soldiers' Pay, though it was based in Georgia rather than his native Mississippi. In 1925, while working on this first novel, he wrote a story called "Sunset," which was perhaps based on the lynching of Nelse Patton. As was prevalent in his early works, there was a process of seeing behind "masks." In "Sunset" Faulkner stripped off the beast mask put on blacks by poor whites and found under it the aristocrat's "younger brother," the weak black needing the protection provided by the aristocracy. In Soldiers' Pay, he peeled away this paternalistic mask and found the "exotic" black, an image more the product of the Harlem Renaissance than actual race relations in the South. In Flags in the Dust the South was the mythical one of Faulkner's youth, a dead South where he could no longer live, in which simple, comic blacks need the protection provided by the aristocracy. Faulkner had to abandon this archaic world, and Flags in the Dust gave him a chance to try and recapture that world before it was lost and at the same time to bid it farewell. Bayard Sartoris inherited his South, the same South that Faulkner had inherited. He just failed to find his place in it, never becoming able to distinguish the myth of his family from its seeming destructiveness. In his next novel, his protagonist was going to have to find a South before he could find himself, a South where Faulkner could try to separate tradition from guilt. Now, his search for a South would begin in earnest.

In The Sound and the Fury one finds in the Compsons a deteriorating aristocratic family struggling to find its place in a world that was rapidly losing its landmarks. Quentin Compson serves as a representative of many Southern men who, even a couple of generations after the war, were clinging to the traditions of the past. In a sense, Quentin is an example of the Southern gentleman still seeking death, which was a byproduct of the fact that the South surrendered. He saw that the old traditions, rituals, and codes of the past had no link with his present reality, yet he was thoroughly committed to them. All around him were challenges to the aristocratic, paternalistic values (the same ones his grandfather had held) that he had projected on to Caddy. Even Caddy herself did little to live up to Quentin's idea of Southern womanhood. He realized that there was a curse on the family, one somehow caused by a combination of Fate and their own actions. As described by his father, time was moving away from the vitality of the Old South. Quentin was not prepared to let go of the world, believing himself unable to live in a world where the values he held so dear were challenged. The only way he could preserve those values in himself was to die. In several respects, Quentin was dead long before he ever committed suicide.

Interestingly the only character left at the end of the novel who could remember and to some degree appreciate those values was the idiot Benjy. Without a doubt he alone could live simultaneously in the past, present, and future. In any respect, the world Faulkner had tried to preserve in Flags in the Dust was now gone. Tradition now took the shape of a castrated idiot led around by a black. Faulkner was still searching for his South. In Benjy could be seen a sign of things to come. At the very end of the novel, Luster took Benjy for a ride into town by the cemetery. Symbolically, he broke with tradition and turned left at the town square rather than right, an action that sent Benjy into hysterics. To the right were the graveyards of the aristocrats; to the left one was headed down main street to where the Snopeses lived.

Faulkner had now visited two Souths: the one of the Sartorises, a world where the myth of the Old South still prospered, and the one of the Compsons, a nightmare world that showed what the old aristocracy might become. Both of these families were aristocratic. The next logical step in Faulkner's search was to visit a South with no aristocrats. To Mississippi aristocrats even of his own time, this sort of world was viewed as disastrous because aristocrats were needed to protect blacks, to serve as a buffer and restraining influence between blacks and Puritan whites. He put off for the time being a novel of such dimensions, writing in the meantime As I Lay Dying, where he learned a good bit about poor whites in the Bundrens, and Sanctuary. After these works he was finally ready to create a new South, one where he could learn even more about tradition and what it meant to lose it.

Light in August was the next novel in his search, a book that described what the South would be like without the aristocracy. Whereas most poor whites espoused Puritan values as a response to their own repressed guilt, Faulkner created in Lena Grove a character who was not indoctrinated in this Puritan theology. By writing about poor whites, he freed himself from his inherited ideas and racism. In the novel he showed that rednecks were racists because they were Puritans; they thought that any man who would own a slave had to be in league with Satan. Therein was the motive for their abolitionist sentiments. This was a significant new turn of events. By implying that planters and slaves were both only victims of Puritan prejudice, with this new myth Faulkner shifted the blame for the Civil War and the redneck revolt from the aristocrats to the Puritans, thereby exonerating the Sartorises and Compsons of all blame. By depicting a world where blacks and Puritan poor whites struggled with each other without the restraining arm of the aristocracy, he showed the value of the aristocratic world he saw disappearing before his very eyes. In Joe Christmas, Faulkner found the opportunity to view how white prejudices shaped black behavior. He tried to isolate certain aspects of blacks forced on them by Puritan society by presenting Joe in the light of no aristocratic preconceptions. He should have been able to learn more from Joe Christmas by burrowing under his own inherited ideas on racism, but, sadly, Faulkner avoided dealing with these preconceptions by showing few blacks other than Joe, offering little insight into what blacks were like without white society. This was a perspective that showed his mellow nostalgia for the world of his youth, providing an early hint as to the source of his grand failure, namely his inability to find guilt in true aristocrats.

Light in August seemed to show the necessity of paternalism by implying that blacks and Puritan whites would continue to produce these same sorts of rituals as seen in the novel, particularly the phenomenon of lynching. In essence, the novel was a moral argument for paternalism. Now Faulkner was faced with an important question: if the Puritan South had shaped black behavior through rituals of this sort, had the Old South, a world of order and protectiveness, been very much different? Clearly this was a challenge to the Old South. So far, Faulkner's search for a South had met with little success. He had found a world where the traditional, paternalistic values were almost extinct. He had shown how this decadence extended to both white classes of his own time. Now he had to wonder if this decadence did not in fact extend backward to the Old South itself. He would be preoccupied with this question for the next decade.

CHAPTER 5

RESPONDING TO THE CHALLENGE

The stage was now set for Absalom, Absalom!, the next phase in Faulkner's search. He was going to have to go deeper than he ever had or ever would again, and the process would prove hard, and in a sense disastrous, for him. In 1931 he began a story called "Evangeline." This was the story of Thomas Sutpen, related by a writer/reporter who had learned of Sutpen's tragedy from neighborhood blacks. They remembered a Charles Bon who had apparently been killed by Thomas's son Henry in the last shot of the war. Henry had fled, and Thomas Sutpen had died soon afterward. His daughter Judith, with the help of his mulatto daughter Raby (who would become Clytie in the novel), whose mother had been a Haitian slave of Sutpen's, kept the plantation together through Reconstruction. In the story, Raby was still there taking care of the house and of Henry, who was back home and at the point of death. The reporter saw Henry for himself, and then Raby told him that he was her brother. After the reporter left, Raby burned the house down with herself and Henry in it. The story proved to be very complicated, full of secrets behind secrets. The reporter had thought he found the real secret when he found the metal case Charles had given to Judith containing the picture of a mulatto woman. Then he realized that Raby had still been holding something back, something that she would never tell for the sake of pride. After her death, he knew he would never learn what that secret was. Faulkner struggled with this story, feeling as if he were wasting his time. It was a story he was not yet ready to write because he himself did not yet know Raby's secret.

"Evangeline" was unlike anything Faulkner had attempted to write before. He had dealt with the failure of aristocratic tradition in modern descendants, but this was the first time he had dealt with the actual patriarchs themselves. The ideas seemed to be "inchoate fragments" in his mind that would not coalesce. He knew that it was not yet time to attempt the whole story. The ideas stayed in his mind, then in 1933 he wrote "Wash," a description of the murder of Thomas Sutpen by Wash Jones. Whereas John Sartoris had died honorably, there was no sense of honor in Sutpen's demise. The eventual novel was going to combine the complaints of both groups of American Puritans--the Northern abolitionists and the Southern poor whites--in an effort to explore the failures of the Old South. He resurrected Quentin Compson for his protagonist, indicating that there were still some aspects of The Sound and the Fury left unresolved in his mind. In that novel, Quentin had chosen not to live in a world where traditional values were challenged. Now Faulkner was going to suggest that these old values might never have existed at all. He began to try and bring "Evangeline" and "Wash" together in 1934 in A Dark House, but still it was not yet time for him to write it. He took a break from it by writing Pylon in 1935. Set in an urban, twentieth century setting, it offered no insight into the Old South's failures. Now finding himself ready, he wrote two novels at virtually the same time, each with a seemingly different vision of the South.

Needing money while working on Absalom, Absalom!, he wrote a series of Sartoris stories for the Saturday Evening Post. These stories, with the addition of an added segment to "Raid" and "An Odor of Verbena" written after Absalom, Absalom!, would become The Unvanquished. He had not set out to write another Sartoris novel, but the stories amounted to as much. These stories rather than Pylon allowed him a chance to get away from the Old Order's failures he was dealing with in Absalom, Absalom!. Back once again with the Sartorises, he was comfortable in the mythological world of his youth. He had set out to write a novel about the Old South's failures; now with the Sartoris stories he had produced a mellow defense of its virtues.

The Sartoris stories and the story of Thomas Sutpen seemed to be virtually opposite in terms of vision. Bayard Sartoris and Quentin Compson were certainly very different. Bayard learned what it meant to be an aristocrat while his father was away in the war. Colonel John was very much a mythical figure for his son. In his place Granny came forth as Bayard's model of paternalistic responsibility. Whereas Flags in the Dust had been a fond farewell to the world of Faulkner's youth, in these stories he tried to explain how that world had come about. Colonel John and Granny felt a sense of responsibility for the whole area, not just for Sartorises. Granny, for example, smuggled mules in order to provide her neighbors with the money to plant crops. She eventually died in order to show Bayard what responsibility was supposed to mean. After that he had to learn on his own what paternalism meant. He avenged Granny's death by killing Grumby, but his education was still not complete. Then Colonel John returned and restored the Old Order, in part by killing the two Burdens trying to get a black sheriff elected. The stories stopped here, with John once again running things and Bayard set to take his place. There was a heavy dose of sentimentality in these stories. It was very much a re-creation of the Old South, almost propagandistic in its appeal. In the stories, Faulkner showed that he could still not admit that the worlds of Joe Christmas and Thomas Sutpen could possibly overlap the world of John Sartoris.

The black Ringo Strothers was added to these stories, and he would play a very important role for Faulkner. Ringo and Bayard were like brothers. They grew up together, slept together, and both called Rosa Granny. Both competed for John's attention on his rare visits home during the war. Ringo in fact was more accomplished than Bayard; he became Granny's assistant in mule-smuggling, he played a more important role in tracking down Grumby (though Bayard fired the bullet that actually killed him), and he generally surpassed Bayard in almost every sort of activity. In all ways, Ringo identified himself with whites, showing how an aggressive, smart slave could be free. But Ringo showed little about black experience. He did not win lasting acceptance, for John's praises were always for his son Bayard. Ringo was gently eased into the background.

Ringo seemed to bring up several questions for Faulkner. Ringo was the son of Simon Strothers; in Flags in the Dust Simon had a daughter named Elnora, who was insignificant in that novel. However, Faulkner brought her back in 1932 in "There Was a Queen," set two years after the death of Young Bayard. There the reader learns that Elnora was really the daughter of John Sartoris. Old Bayard had been her half-brother, though neither John nor Bayard probably knew it. This showed Colonel John to be human after all. If Ringo was Elnora's brother, he could also have been Bayard's brother. A new novel threatened to come out of Faulkner's problems with Ringo, a story in which two brothers, one white and one black, compete for their father's attention, the dark brother eventually realizing that his brother and his father are really his enemies. Faulkner was aware of such a tale when he ended the Sartoris stores with "Skirmish at Sartoris." This marked yet another turning point in his search for a South. Behind the mask of John Sartoris he had seen an image of Thomas Sutpen. Now he finally knew what secret Raby (Clytie) had been hiding.

CHAPTER 6

RISING TO THE CHALLENGE

In the first phase of Faulkner's search for a South, as seen in Flags in the Dust, Light In August, and The Sound and the Fury, he had found a wasteland where men like Colonel John Sartoris and General Compson were no more than legends, a place where blacks and Puritan rednecks struggled against each other without the aristocracy to guide them. In the second phase, he had explored these legends and found two older Souths: the South of John Sartoris and the South of Raby's secret. The more Faulkner explored, the less similar these two Souths appeared to be. In The Unvanquished John Sartoris is the model of paternalistic propaganda incarnated. Raby's secret points in the opposite direction, suggesting the tragedies of miscegenation and slavery voiced by Puritan Yankees and rednecks.

In Absalom, Absalom! four narrators try to explain Sutpen's tragedy. The reader, in the role of historical detective, actually becomes a fifth. In essence the novel is a "study of the meaning of history." In it the past shapes the present, the present shapes the past; the two even become mirror images of each other, as seen in Quentin's identification with Henry Sutpen. Quentin himself says that nothing ever just happens, that all things happen for a reason. The individual is tightly linked by invisible bonds to everyone in the past, present, and future; he is influenced by them, and they in turn are influenced by him. Even the most seemingly trivial thing can be of immense importance. Thomas Sutpen himself is unlike any other Faulkner character, an enigma that seemingly can be completely understood by no one. Whereas every other Faulkner character seems to belong to the South, to be of it, Sutpen seems "to be it, to contain and epitomize its history." Corresponding with his life is that of the Cotton Kingdom itself, its rise to power, its seemingly assumptive ties with the prerogative of aristocracy, and its fall. He appears in Yoknapatawpha County in 1833, as the South begins its period of prosperity, and he is for all practical purposes brought down when Henry kills Charles, just three weeks after Lee's surrender. The novel basically consists of others' interpretations of Sutpen and his curse, namely those of Rosa Coldfield, Mr. Compson, and the final interpretation arrived at by Quentin and Shreve, all very different versions. It is intended for the reader to combine elements of all three of these, along with that of the fictive narrator, to come up with his own personal interpretation, one based not on facts but truth as seen in these different stories. All in all, Absalom, Absalom! does no violence to Southern history. On the final page, Quentin chants to himself that he does not hate the South; in a like fashion Faulkner also does not hate it.

Each narrator, including the reader himself, tries to confront the problem of understanding just what the South really is, focusing on Quentin's interpretation more than the others. Doctor Ursula Brumm sees Bayard Sartoris, Benjy Compson, and Gail Hightower as early attempts by Faulkner to solve the problem, but each of them is too obsessed with the past, making them victims of history rather than conveyors of insight. In fact, the main problems of these character is seemingly the very fact that they were born in the South. Rosa Coldfield and Mr. Compson are the older narrators, and their attitudes seem to coincide with those of Northerners and Southerners, respectively about the Old South and the Civil War. Quentin and Shreve offer a vision based more on appearances and assumptions than on facts. For different reasons, none of these distinguishes itself as unquestionably the truth. The main hope for resolution and historical truth seems to rest with the reader and his own personal interpretation.

Rosa's account of Thomas Sutpen is a very personal one, a story into which she projects aspects of her personal life and that of her family. She makes him out to be a demon who brought a curse not only on himself but on the entire South, as well. In her mind, the Civil War was fought to extirpate Thomas Sutpen. She speaks solely from a position of hostility. Her version is equivalent to the Northern abolitionist argument against the Old South. In fact, she takes up the very abolitionist rhetoric of her father to portray Sutpen as a type of the entire race of planters who brought about their own downfall. Her mode of speaking is the same Gothic one used by abolitionists who saw the South as existing in a feudal society like that of the Middle Ages. She lives in the past, unable to transcend it. Likewise, she is equally unable to confront the essentials of the heart, able to speak only with anger and no love. She represents not one of the five ideals of the artist; therefore, she can never understand the South.

Like Rosa, Mr. Compson is a failure, seeking in the story of Thomas Sutpen an answer as to why he himself has failed. His view is the antithesis of Rosa's. He sees Sutpen as a hero whose ruin was brought about solely by Fate; in this sense he sees a reflection of his own misfortune. The decline and fall of both Sutpen and himself were brought about, at least in part, by the decline and fall of the South itself. His is a distinctly more Southern interpretation than that of Rosa. Sutpen in his mind is a man with a heroic vision, whose only fault is an inability to live up to the role of gentleman. Compson shapes Sutpen's tragedy, and therefore his own, into an account he finds emotionally manageable. By mythologizing it, he can distance himself and his vision of the South from guilt and defeat. He wants to exonerate the defeated South by claiming just a "fateful mischance" rather than some moral law to be responsible for the South's demise. According to Compson, Sutpen does not deserve to fail at all. He portrays him as a blameless, even heroic, victim of circumstance, "which is an eminently comforting explanation of the affair for those who have aspired and suffered likewise."

Mr. Compson wants Quentin to accept his version, to ignore Rosa's ideas and any version he might come up with on his own. In effect, he tries to control his son's mind. During Reconstruction, the Southern men found themselves in a position of utter powerlessness; to overcome the effects of this, they were determined to tell their version of events to their sons. He warns Quentin not to pursue things further, telling him he will never be able to understand, that he will only be rebelling. Of course, Quentin does not heed this advice. In Compson's version, the South has been defeated, but the society has never surrendered. Unwilling to accept its own demise, it lives on in a kind of paralysis. In Absalom, Absalom!, for example, the Ku Klux Klan form to bring back the past, to help invent the full myth of the aristocracy, but Sutpen will not join his neighbors in terrorizing blacks. He is a practical man opposed to these fanatical aristocrats, intent on restoring his own plantation, seeing the best hope for the future in each man restoring what was his before the war. His death in one way represents the failure of this kind of practicality to take root in the post-war South. Society stops moving forward; in fact, society tries to abandon the historical process altogether by denying time, change, and reality. This will be a significant hindrance to Quentin, namely the fear inculcated in him by his father not to discredit his aristocratic ancestors.

Compson, unlike Rosa, understands love. He sees the past as much different from the present, a time much more simple and heroic. He freely admits that he is not capable of understanding history, stressing the fact that "it just does not explain;" in other words, the facts do not lead to an understanding of truth. He knows that the present is bound to the past, but he cannot use this knowledge because he does not understand the past. In other words, he lacks the perception of the artist. He thought he knew Clytie's secret; Charles Bon was married to an octoroon lady, so Henry had killed him to prevent a bigamous marriage. Still there was something missing, though, leading Compson to surmise that it just is not possible to understand people of that time. He knew that Clytie was Henry's sister and that Bon was married to an octoroon, but he could not go beyond these facts. He was in the same position as Faulkner had been with Ringo Strothers. There were clues all around him to the truth, but his perceptions and aristocratic sensibilities allowed him to go no further than the facts.

The third interpretation is the combined result of a detached Shreve and a Quentin too caught up in the events. Their account adopts and exaggerates certain elements from the first two versions. At first, Quentin is dependent on what his father has told him, describing the relationship between Charles and Henry in an atmosphere of romance. This rosy depiction disappears, however, when he describes his visit to Sutpen's Hundred. Suddenly, elements of Gothic nightmare rise up in his words. By the end of the novel, Quentin is in a state of uncertainty, caught between this nightmare world and the chivalric world he has always considered the South to be. His dilemma seems inevitable, for Quentin never makes true contact with the South, only with various interpretations of it. He cannot escape his strong attractions to the problem, yet he can never understand it, and this failure to understand the South prevents him from understanding himself.

Shreve, unlike Quentin, tries to understand the Sutpen saga only as a way of amusing himself. He has imagination and can transfer himself into other characters, but for him it is only self-serving. Whereas Mr. Compson had at least good intentions, Shreve's are far from good. Only Quentin resembles the artist who can find meaning in the past. He is a sensitive individual who can confront the essentials of the heart, able to speak for mankind because "he was not a being, an entity, he was a commonwealth." He does encompass the five objectives of the artist, but he is just too messed up inside. He sees value in using language to connect with others, but he just gets too caught up in the burdens of history. He comes to realize that he has been lied to, that society has given him a false cultural history; the glory and grandeur he had been told was the South are nothing more than an artificial perspective. He can either live with this false history or come to realize that evil has just as large a part in history as love does; only then can he be able to connect with others and as a result be able to understand himself. He chooses to do neither, believing the traditional world he so loves to be found with his grandfather in heaven.

The room Quentin and Shreve talk in at Harvard is described as "tomblike" and cold. This represents the deadness of the past and, hence, its irretrievability. They withstand these conditions, however, and construct a past based to a large degree on their own maturations. They are able to project themselves into the past, providing a more meaningful kind of knowledge than Rosa or Mr. Compson ever could. Tragically, Quentin cannot live an independent life. This vision of the past takes over his emotional and intellectual faculties. He sees the past too well, when he is not really yet ready to see it at all. His young life is permeated with a sense of age and death. He says,"I am older at twenty than a lot of people who have died." In a sense, Quentin has to fight himself. He is a man too young to be a ghost, while at the same time he is "a barracks filled with stubborn back-looking ghosts."

Part of Clytie's secret was that the more you pulled away the mask of appearance, the more you saw an image of yourself. Bon was more of a myth than a man. The only historical remains of him was the letter he sent to Judith. For the Sutpens, this sense of mystery was a sort of charm. They did not really know themselves, so they projected their deepest wishes onto him. To Henry, he was the worldly older brother he had always wanted; for Judith he was the kind of man all girls dream of marrying; Rosa even, though she never actually saw him, fantasized a romance with him through Judith. The Bon created by Quentin and Shreve sounded a lot like the two young men themselves. He was certainly a more complex Bon than the one of Compson's creation. They think he had rejected his mother for trying to use him to reap revenge on Sutpen; if he had been merely an instrument of revenge, they feel he would just have told Ellen who he was. To them, he only wanted a sign of acceptance from his father; when this was not forthcoming, then his motives became more complex. Starved for affection, he came to love Judith first as a sister, then in time he came to want an incestuous marriage as much as he had wanted recognition. He rejected his black identity, even though his charm and sophistication had come from his mulatto mother, not his white father.

As has been shown, it is up to Quentin to guess the truth. As time moves, reality and Clytie's secret come into focus. Quentin begins to see the kinds of sins that are punishable for generations. Faulkner had been toying since 1928 with the Puritan view of miscegenation leading to apocalypse. He was going to have to investigate the relationship between moral and genetic degeneracy. The hatred Quentin projected onto the South had to do with the sorts of racial fears espoused by Radicals like Thomas Dixon, Jr. Quentin still had to pull away one mask, one that would force him to confront the genetic consequences of Sutpens curse. When Velery's mother dies, Judith brings him to Sutpen's Hundred. After rejecting his black father, the household now acknowledges Velery, but Judith and Clytie influence him the wrong way. Afraid he will sire another Sutpen mulatto, they keep him away from all outsiders. They tell him he is and must be a Negro. Charles had passed for white, dying in an attempt to get his white father's acknowledgement. Now Velery, outraged at what white blood had done to his father, wants to be black but is too white to pass. He runs off, taking a dark, feebleminded wife, thinking as Joe Christmas had that black means bestial. Whereas Bon had possessed no prejudices, Velery hates both races.

Clytie's secret was the key, but everyone saw Clytie differently. Rosa projected some of her fears onto Clytie, seeing her as representative of the war that had ruined Judith and herself. Beneath this demonized mask could be found another Clytie, one who resembled the tragic mulatto of abolitionist novels. Clytie never thought of herself as black; she was a Sutpen deprived of full status merely due to the accident of having a slave mother. Her father's spirit helped to motivate her against these tragic circumstances of her birth. Underneath the mask of a tragic mulatto was a very human Clytie, struggling to keep her family together. Clytie had inherited Sutpen's curse, too, and she passed it on to others, particularly Velery, but she had a kind of stability no other Sutpen had. She spent her life trying to protect her family.

By the end of the novel she was certainly a tragic figure, over seventy and still willing to give her life to protect her secret. When she burned down the house with herself and Henry in it, her serene face could be seen through one of the windows. This should have been the first clue to Quentin; her words revealed the truth even more, saying that "whatever he done, me and Judith and him have paid it out." Through Clytie's strength, the curse emerged into the daylight world, a world where the acts of responsible people like Clytie had meaning. This was the lost world Quentin had tried to preserve in The Sound and the Fury. Finding it now should have freed him; the fact that it did not identified his problem, namely the bitterness he projected on the South and its people. These projections destroyed him. He had accepted the nightmare of Puritan abolitionists, and now he was about to have the Radical nightmare of Dixon forced on him.

Sutpen had been aggressive and robust; Charles Bon was hardy, but sensitive and passive. Bon and his frail octoroon wife had produced an equally frail son in Velery. Clytie's Haitian mother had been as robust as Sutpen, but Clytie herself was small. When Quentin first saw her, she was very old, but her hair had not turned white and her skin had not yet begun to sag. It was as if at a certain point her body had stopped growing and started shrinking. One had to wonder, and Quentin did, if this was a genetic flaw, if miscegenation had caused this. If it had done this in one generation, there was no telling what it could do in four. Quentin had also seen the idiot Jim Bond. The regression from Sutpen to Bond seemed to support Dixon's fears. All that was left was a "nigger Sutpen," an idiot mulatto produced by four generations of interbreeding. Shreve argued that the Jim Bonds would take over the world, but Quentin could not bring himself to accept this.

Faulkner made it clear to the reader that genetic apocalypse was not a part of Clytie's secret. Jim Bond was the son of a moronic woman; there were similar explanations for the other cases. Clytie's appearance could just be an effect of aging, albeit a less than normal one. In Clytie, he showed Quentin how Sutpen's curse could teach one person about love and commitment. Quentin's problem was not the curse, but rather what he projected onto that curse. He already had doubts about his heritage before he was virtually assailed by Miss Rosa and Mr. Compson, and now he was having to experience the full impact of Dixon's argument. This left him completely vulnerable. Seeing the Radical fears manifested in Jim Bond brought the Sutpen nightmare world all too close to his own. Bon's passion for Judith was equivalent to his feelings for Caddy. Also, there was also an idiot in his own family. He was compelled to reconsider his past, but now from a Puritan viewpoint. The Sutpens had vanished, and his family was also on the way out. He could not help but wonder if his own grandfather had not invoked a curse similar to Sutpen's. If General Compson had been merely a pretender to aristocratic values, maybe the whole South had only been pretending paternalism. This was the source of his bitterness. He could only struggle against the darkness falling over him and his patrimony, chanting over and over to himself, "I don't hate it [the South], I don't. I don't! I don't hate it! I don't hate it!"

The actual killing of Charles by Henry shows the refusal of both white and black Southerners to come up with a unifying vision of common humanity. Henry asserts the power of his white blood on the one hand, and on the other hand Charles finally asserts his black blood. Faulkner had discovered that racial attitudes cannot be changed by force or economic threat. In his "Letter to a Northern Editor," Faulkner wrote:

CHAPTER 7

SEEDS OF FAILURE IN THE ROOTS OF TRIUMPH

Now it looked like the South Faulkner had been searching for was ready to open up before him. Writing with a Puritan vision, he had been able to overcome two formidable barriers. Through Clytie, he had been able to give an objective look at the realities of the curse abolitionists claimed Southern planters had brought upon themselves. Through Quentin he had been able to separate himself from the apocalyptic vision of Southern Puritans like Thomas Dixon, Jr. These were major breakthroughs: the novel read like a reappraisal of all the earlier aspects of his search. Thomas Sutpen more than John Sartoris reflected the realities about Colonel William C. Falkner. Prosperity being something new to the family, the Sutpen children did not understand genuine aristocratic values, having been forced to invent their own kind of aristocracy. These sorts of things finally opened up a way for Faulkner to deal with the realities of slavery.

In the Sartoris stories and Light in August, Faulkner had manipulated his plots in order to avoid having to confront the guilt of the aristocratic class, instead placing all the blame on Puritan rednecks and abolitionists. Now in Absalom, Absalom! he had made serious admissions about the aristocracy, portraying Sutpen in the same sort of mold with which Harriet Beecher Stowe had depicted Simon Legree. What Faulkner had done with Quentin helped bring his accomplishments to light. Quentin had never been fully real to Faulkner; eight years after The Sound and the Fury this protagonist had still been on his mind. Now Quentin was gone forever, victim of a much more believable suicide. Faulkner had finally found the courage to explore Clytie's secret; because he had, Quentin as a protagonist would bother him no more.

Absalom, Absalom! opened up many new possibilities for Faulkner. If he had learned to distinguish between the failures and virtues of his youth, the prospect of a visionary South appeared on the horizon, a South where aristocratic values as held by such men as John Sartoris and General Compson could be spread out among all men to redeem Southerners from such a curse as Sutpen's. Yet, once again this goal eluded him. For instance, there were virtually no blacks in the novel, only mulattoes. Faulkner once again offered no insight into growing up black in a white-dominated society; this called his characterization of mulattoes into question. His preoccupation with mulattoes did little more than further obscure the problems of blacks. He may have inherited this tendency from the tragic-mulatto stereotype voiced by abolitionists. Without a doubt, though, the world of Absalom, Absalom! represented in no way that of the majority of slaves.

There was a more important area where his vision faltered. To create Thomas Sutpen, Faulkner went outside of the planter class, finding a man who knew virtually nothing about paternalism. By making Sutpen a redneck, Faulkner separated the vices of the system from the character of the planter class. It allowed him to attack those faults without challenging the fundamental assumption of the aristocracy. Absalom, Absalom! seems to say that the system of slavery is evil only when it is not being run by true aristocrats. Harriet Beecher Stowe had gone outside of the South and made Simon Legree, intending to show that it was the system that was evil. Faulkner went outside of the planter class to find Sutpen, in a sense implying that not the system but some individuals are evil, namely those who did not understand. By making Sutpen a redneck Faulkner should have been able to come closer to the realities of the world of his youth, but he sidestepped those realities by projecting the ideas of the Old Order onto Compson and the fears of Puritans on Sutpen. This was the crucial moment in his search for a South. Quentin had at least been wiling to face the worst truths about Clytie's secret, but Faulkner once again manipulated his plot so that he himself did not have to. This would have a devastating effect on his career, for "planted firmly at the roots of Faulkner's triumph were the seeds of his tragedy." His search would now take a new direction, and a wrong one.

Faulkner ultimately failed in Absalom, Absalom! but there is one area in which some hope for success still exists. It is found in the fiction of the novel itself, not in the words and actions of individual characters. Yoknapatawpha County is a place where the past, present, and future are one, affecting each other, depending on one another. Faulkner's technique and his use of multiple narrators push the reader to an overall sense of reality and truth, the same reliabilities that all the characters avoided. Therefore, the reader, even more so than Faulkner, can achieve some insight into the past. Faulkner stated his goal was to "stimulate the growth of consciousness by enlarging and complicating all with which this consciousness must deal." He came closest to this in Absalom, Absalom!, but in the end he refused to deal with all of the implications himself, making the novel the scene of both his greatest triumph and greatest failure.

CHAPTER 8

A PLEA FOR UNDERSTANDING

The stories of The Unvanquished, those written before and particularly those written after Absalom, Absalom!, were a deliberate relaxation from the trials and tribulations of writing about the Old South's failures. In these we find no conflict of time, no verbal confrontation between the past and the present. It is a Romantic novel, imbued with a strong sense of mellow nostalgia. It is clear that Faulkner likes it in this world. Unlike Absalom, Absalom! these stories have little to do with facts and even less to do with truth. It is a dream world of legends, a Southern past idealized and oversimplified by Faulkner. The problems he raised but failed to personally address in Absalom, Absalom! are not even raised here. One biographer wrote, "The stereotypes to which the author clings suggest some fundamental unwillingness to confront reality." Faulkner failed not only to face up to the full implications of Puritan complaints against his heritage, in The Unvanquished he beat a hasty retreat from these problems to the world of his youth, the only world he felt safe in. This implies that Faulkner never actually set out to find the real South, or--if he did--he did not expect it to be the world of Thomas Sutpen. He did not want to believe what he had seen in Absalom, Absalom!. The Unvanquished was a plea for help and understanding, a defense of the virtues that he himself had called into question. He thought he had analyzed paternalism thoroughly, and he felt it to be right and good. Now he felt he had to explain just what paternalism meant.

To The Unvanquished, in an effort to tie the series together, he added a new section to "Raid" and the story "An Odor of Verbena." This last story was not necessary, for the previous stories comprised a complete novel in and of themselves. "An Odor of Verbena" provides insight into what had become of Faulkner's search. In it one finds Colonel John Sartoris building a railroad. During this time, Drusilla Hawk tries to explain to Bayard what paternalism ought to mean. She tells him that John has a dream that he ought to appreciate. This immediately brings to Bayard's mind the dream of Thomas Sutpen, but Drusilla--and Faulkner--goes to great pains to make him understand the difference. John's dream, like Granny's, is not just his own. John is working not just for himself but for all people, men and women, whites and blacks, paternalists and rednecks. Therein lies the difference. Whereas Sutpen's dream was a purely selfish one, John's is for the benefit of all those around him.

In this last story the reader sees a much different John Sartoris than was present in Flags in the Dust. The dream haunting his descendants there was more like Sutpen's than that of a good-intentioned paternalist. Faulkner had added a new dimension to John, promoting him to the role of moral symbol. This served to balance out the slight critique of paternalism one might sense from Flags in the Dust, giving it more perspective. One sees this also in the added portion of "Raid." In this, the reader encounters Buck and Buddy McCaslin, a couple of landowners just as countrified as Sutpen. They had revolutionary ideas about land that put them ahead of their own time. As opposed to the land belonging to people, they felt that people belonged to the land, and that the land would only allow those men who behaved themselves to live on it. They seemed to be well aware of Sutpen's curse and were struggling to avoid it. Their blacks worked not for them as masters but for the land, and through their work they could buy freedom for themselves. In the meantime, Buck and Buddy kept them in the plantation house, while they themselves lived in a little two-room log cabin. They seemed to know that slavery was wrong, and this strange ritual was their way of adapting to it. They were not abolitionists, but through this ritual they managed to attain a certain amount of inner peace.

This showed that Faulkner was still manipulating his plots, as he had since Light in August, to keep blame away from the aristocracy. Now he was trying to make the Civil War look like a Yankee mistake. With Buck and Buddy he tried to show that the first seeds of reform were already rising up in the South before 1861. If John Sartoris could understand what the McCaslin brothers were doing and why, then he and his entire class were capable of self-criticism. These were large, sweeping implications Faulkner was making. If the South had been moving toward a new awareness, then the Civil War and Reconstruction were terrible mistakes. Carrying these implications further, they were obstacles to a process that would have come about even sooner in the South had there been no outside interference. Faulkner was still preoccupied with Sutpen's curse, but now he was moving far away from the insights he had acquired in Absalom, Absalom!.

What worried Bayard about his father's dream was the amorality with which he sometimes pursued it. His reputation for duelling and killing those who stood in his way was hard for Bayard to accept. Even if these enemies were Yankee carpetbaggers, they were still men. All the while John was supposed to be working so hard due to his paternalistic dream and his concerns for the welfare of his neighbors. Faulkner still was unwilling to deal with any guilt the Sartorises might have acquired in their relations with blacks, particularly Ringo Strothers. Still, through Bayard, Faulkner was admitting that there were some things wrong with John's dream, finally implying that a blooded aristocrat might suffer from anything even remotely resembling Sutpen's curse. Still, in John's case, he felt that the ends justified the means. It was not John's guilt but how Bayard reacted to it that showed where his search would lead in the final stage of his period of productivity.

Bayard was well aware of the code his father lived and died by, yet when he went to avenge his father's death, he shocked everyone by going unarmed. For an aristocrat like Drusilla Hawk, this was unthinkable, was in fact an affront to every value John had stood for. Even after Redlaw fled, she still could not accept it. Others, like Miss Jenny Du Pre, understood better. There had been enough killing, and now it was time for a change. Bayard's gesture served to put Faulkner's search for a South into a clearer focus. In one sense, it served the same purpose as the twins' theory of land, namely that the aristocracy had been well able to handle the curse by themselves, and that the Civil War had been a Yankee mistake. It was also an acknowledgement of the truth in some abolitionist complaints and an effort to respond to them. The twins had coped with their guilt one way, while Bayard had simply found another way to respond to it. The novel, especially the added sections, implied if not stated that the aristocracy was not bad, that it would have solved all of its own problems had it not been for Yankee intervention. For the first time a Sartoris patriarch had been shown as more human than mythical. What Faulkner was saying through this was that aristocrats may not have been perfect, but they were good men and women with the best of intentions.

CHAPTER 9

CONCLUSIONS

In Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner had attacked the Old South and its traditions, but he could ultimately find no guilt in true aristocrats nor in their ideas. Now in The Unvanquished he went even further, trying not just to show that they were right but to explain why they were right. The book served as a closure for what had begun in Flags in the Dust. Bayard neither shames himself by avoiding a confrontation with Redlaw, nor does he simply perpetuate the chain of murders begun by his father. Bayard moves on to a middle ground, adapting older traditions to fit his own time. It offers a sense of hope. It is a similar case with Faulkner himself. He had attacked the Old Order in Absalom, Absalom! rather than just perpetuate the myth of his heritage. He himself found a middle ground in this world of his own creation. He had chosen not to believe that aristocrats were evil, but he had admitted that they were not perfect, that they were men and not myths. This humanistic mode of thought would play a large role in his later life, as typified in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize. He had moved back and forth, vacillated between both extremes of vision, only to wind up in the end in a world not very much different than the mythical world of his youth.

In essence, Faulkner had found the South that he had wanted to find, a more modern world of his youth. He had not moved very far at all. He had come to the horizon of a new world, and then he had retreated at the last minute. The fact that he had come so close to success made his failure that much more tragic. In his early fifties Faulkner would look back to this time and realize with great regret that he had failed, that he had been too tied up with the past, and he would wonder if it had ever even been possible for him to get things right. Realizing that his creative fires had been reduced now to warm coals, he quit searching, content to take one last romp through the world of his youth in The Reivers. Never had he truly grappled with the sources of guilt in Southern society. By the end of his life, a mood of nostalgia was all that was left. He had learned to recapture the world he had feared he would lose and regret, the world of Flags in the Dust. What he had learned was to love the world of his youth without feeling responsible for its faults. This was the South he had always wanted to find, a South where the worst rednecks and Yankees were not really too fearful after all. In this world blacks and white aristocrats understood each other, just as Southern aristocrats had always been sure they did. Peace came in the condition of both races accepting their respective places; for aristocrats, it was paternalism; for blacks, if nothing else it was the constancy of every Saturday night jubilee.

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--------. Collected Stories. New York: Vintage Books, 1977.

--------, Joseph Blotner, ed., Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner. New York: Vintage Books, 1981.

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