William Faulkner: American Writer. - book reviews

National Review, August 4, 1989 by Harold Fickett

William Faulkner: American Writer, by Frederick R. Karl (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1,131 pp., $37.50)

AT FIRST William Faulkner declined the invitation to attend his own Nobel Prize ceremonies. He ignored the original letter informing him that he had been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the highest honor this nation bestows on its writers. He often fended off people at literary gatherings by being rude. Or he would withdraw into silence-before retreating even further into the annihilation of an alcoholic binge. If there was one thing William Faulkner could not endure, it was playing the writer.

He played many other roles, willingly, and to the hilt. As Frederick R. Karl makes clear in William Faulkner American Writer, much of the novelist's life was given over to imposture. Upon receiving the Nobel invitation, Faulkner begged off on the grounds that he was a farmer and could not get away. Besides playing Pa Kettle, he also assumed the characters of horseman, pilot, family patriarch, international diplomat, and Southern gentleman.

His career as an impostor began when he returned home after a brief stint as an RAF pilot trainee during World War 1. His tall tales of his heroic exploits gained him new respect in his home town of Oxford, Mississippi, where he had been known as a ne'er-do-well. In the same way, Faulkner adopted other roles for self-aggrandizement; his sense of his own accomplishments was usually nine parts imagination to one part reality.

Biographers have tended to see the various aspects of Faulkner's life as a jumble and have thrown the other roles he played away in order to concentrate on Faulkner the writer. (The standard biography, by Joseph Blotner, presents the information but does not try to form a coherent view.) Karl looks at all of Faulkner's activities, including writing, as a process of selfcreation.

Karl locates Faulkner in a matrix of inherently contradictory historical and personal circumstances. Faulkner was caught between times, with his way back to the Eden of Southern tradition blocked by the sword of racism, and his way forward to the heaven of Northern modernity blocked by that culture's materialistic and collectivizing tendencies. Personally, he was caught between his position as the oldest son of a once-great Southern family and his own taste for the bohemian life of a French symbolist poet. In terms of his work, the American realist tradition represented by Dreiser and one of Faulkner's mentors, Sherwood Anderson, was still strong, but the work of Proust, Joyce, and Mann had moved fiction onto another plane in Europe.

How to unite all of this? Once again, after Keats and Yeats and Wallace Stevens, we have the artistic enterprise represented as a matter of unifying contraries. The artist forges in his work a new synthesis of the fragmentary and contradictory data of his emerging world. He lives in an age at odds with itself, but he manages to make art out of these contradictions by showing how the terms depend on one another.

So many of Faulkner's plots, as has frequently been remarked, are generated by some "deep, dark secret." Karl points out that Faulkner tells his stories by continually frustrating their telling. We wait for the mystery to be revealed, accumulating more and more evidence as we go, the truth of the matter always just out of reach. We keep reading in the naive assumption that the author will finally divulge his secret-as, in fact, he sometimes does.

In Faulkner's most celebrated works, however, the narratives work toward dissuading us that the truth can be revealed. By presenting the same incidents from multiple points of view in The Sound and the Fury, by telling and re-telling the same story in As I Lay Dying, by placing events in the consciousness of someone of a later generation in Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner releases perception from fact and storytelling from history-he "decenters" his fiction. The "deep, dark secret" becomes and must remain virtually unknown.

Faulkner's narrative techniques, in sum, brought the American realist tradition under a kind of Bergsonian viewfinder. There, the tradition's values became objectified, part of the data now, no longer its reason. Everything isGod help us-relative.

We can lament this for its ethical implications, or we can see it as the only view possible in our time, or we can throw up our hands and say, "Well there it is again, that old Kantian phenomenal/noumenal rag."

Faulkner's capturing of the modern mind through his fictional innovations obviously pleases Karl. He sees the fiction as Faulkner's means of holding in solution the radically conflicting matrix of history and personal circumstances in which he found himself. The times are bad, but behold, Faulkner's art has overcome them. Further, the art has something to offer us in teaching us how to live in these times. The Book of Faulkner must be added to the secular Scriptures.

Behind Karl's portrait of Faulkner lies the sketch of any artist as drawn by the Romantics. The poet is an especially sensitive soul who prepares for a new age by uniting in his consciousness the new and challenging and rather exciting (if alienating) aspects of the world in which he lives.