The University of Virginia recently posted a website of recordings of William Faulkner from the period in which he served as Writer-in-Residence in the late 1950′s. I have just discovered and begun to listen to the recordings, but I strongly suspect I will listen to all of them over time. His very voice fascinates me – its cadence, its Southern drawl, its tenor notes and, most of all, its softness.
His ideas are truly fascinating and thought provoking and seem to be informed by a consistent, master philosophy. Each of his novels and stories is but a different, singular attempt to express his vision of mankind. Faulkner, himself, makes this point when, in response to a question about “The Sound and the Fury,” he declares it his most “magnificent failure.” He goes on to explain that each of his novels and stories is yet another attempt to explain a particular truth and that each attempt must, of necessity, fail because of the complexities inherent in that truth. A true writer, Faulkner declares, must try again and again to get his message across by writing another novel or story, but the message contained in each attempt is always essentially the same – even if seen from a different point of view.
Reaction to some of Faulkner’s statements on the website must be tempered by his placement in history and his extensive Southern heritage. He is a true creature of the Southern American culture of the first half of the 20th century (a culture in which the Civil War is still very much alive and real), and his racial beliefs are fully informed by this experience. Hearing some of his beliefs about things racial from the vantage point of 2010 makes at least this admirer cringe at times, but, as with all things historical, he must be seen and judged in historical context. Using the thought, culture and history of any given “present” time to label an historical personage as “racist” (or any other epithet one might care to use) is simply unscholarly and lazy; the true scholar must make the incredibly difficult effort to evaluate that personage within the context of the thought, culture and history of their own time before judging. The Virginia of the 1950′s is not the Virginia of today, as the website takes great care to make clear.
It is clear from the first lecture that Faulkner spent his life trying to express a singularly consistent view of mankind and its place in the firmament. His is a philosophy of survival and his books are each an expression of one man’s, or one family’s, struggle to survive. He is less interested in individual means and methods of survival as he is in the overwhelming variety thereof. Consequently, he can write equally compellingly about the less-than-admirable survival techniques of the Snopes family and the magnificent death struggles of Addie Brunden. Notwithstanding the nature of their fictional lives – generally selfish and despicable in the case of the Snopes and extraordinarily complex and contradictory in the case of Addie – each character is sympathetically drawn and the survival technique employed by each eventually fails in a unique manner. Because of Faulkner’s innate ability to develop a character to the fullest and to make them real rather than imagined, the reader eventually comes to identify fully with each character, no matter how base nor how magnificent the character’s individual attempt at life may be. For in each of Faulkner’s characters are tiny bits of the reader’s own self writ large and exaggerated, such that the reader eventually realizes that, given a different set of circumstances or triggers, he or she might have walked a similar path in a similar manner.
I have long been enamored of Faulkner’s writing and of the philosophy behind it. They are equally compelling and one could not survive independently of the other. Faulkner is a staunch believer in the fragile durability of the life force, specifically as embodied in the human species. As I listen to him struggle in the recordings to answer the literary questions asked of him by his audience, I am struck by how his replies return – again and again – to simple acts of living and the deeper meanings he has drawn from them. He is tolerant of each reader’s interpretation of his own writing, while vigorously defending his own, possibly differing interpretations. It is as if he sees a sort of divinity within each human life and dares each of us, as readers, to contemplate our own divinity as expressed in our day-to-day actions and thoughts.
Generally, when I tell friends that I read and enjoy Faulkner and collect his first editions, their reaction is to shake their heads and complain about the length of his sentences and the difficulty of reading his prose. I will never argue that Faulkner is an easy read, but the satisfaction derived from a challenging read is different from that derived from the latest thriller. The latest thriller may well serve to fill a Summer’s day with pleasure, but it can never inform a lifetime. A careful reading of Faulkner can and will.
Anyone reading my posts may have come to understand by now the place that Faulkner holds in my personal literary pantheon: the title of this blog is a line from one of his short stories; the pen name I use is the name of one of his chief characters; and Humptulips County – that beautiful place where I am privileged to live and work – is both as real and as imaginary as his beloved Yoknapatawpha County.
Few would dare to pretend to write as well as William Faulkner, and I am not one of those. I can only say with some certainty that I understand his compulsion to write, for why else would I consistently post to a blog that few know exist and even fewer read? How could anyone ever pretend or hope to achieve the body of work amassed by William Faulkner over his lifetime or to approximate the magnificence by which he summarized that effort upon accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature near the end of his life:
“I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”
My thanks and profound gratitude to the University of Virginia for sharing a rare privilege with the rest of us mere mortals. You can find their website here: http://faulkner.lib.virginia.edu/
