William Faulkner: A Life through Novels
552
William Faulkner: A Life through Novels
552Hardcover
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253022844 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2017 |
| Pages: | 552 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.40(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.70(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
William Faulkner
A Life through Novels
By André Bleikasten
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2017 Aimée BleikastenAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-02284-4
CHAPTER 1
FA(U)LKNER, MISSISSIPPI
A LITTLE HISTORY, A LITTLE GEOGRAPHY
"Faulkner, Mississippi" is the title given by Edouard Glissant to his handsome meditation on William Faulkner's work. "Faulkner" is the name of a man, a name that became the hallmark of a great writer. "Mississippi" is the name of a territory, taken from the name of a great river. The two go hand in hand. For those who are not from there, have never been there, have never lived there, Mississippi exists only because of a handful of prestigious names associated with it. The Magnolia State would hold little interest for us if Oxford had not been the birthplace of a novelist of great stature, if Tupelo had not been the native town of one of the creators of rock 'n' roll, and Clarksville had not been the home of the Delta Blues.
Made of ink and paper, Faulkner's Mississippi is a fictional landscape held together solely by the unifying force of words and that knows no time other than the condensed or dispersed time of his stories. Faulkner often spoke of his "apocryphal county" (SL, 232), thereby signaling both the marginal and fictional status of his universe. However, apocryphal texts exist only by opposition and analogy to canonical texts. Although Faulkner's Mississippi is imaginary, it is nevertheless modeled on the geographical and historical land. Mississippi, in the southeastern United States, is a place that can be visited, with landscapes that can be contemplated and photographed. With its small towns, villages, and hamlets; its plains and hills; its fields of cotton and corn; its woods, rivers, and swamps, the state of Mississippi is located on the western border of the "Old South," south of Tennessee, west of Alabama, and east of Arkansas and Louisiana. Mississippi is first and foremost the Delta — or the "Black Counties" — an almond-shaped, exceptionally fertile floodplain that extends to the east of the river between Memphis and the mouth of the Yazoo River in Vicksburg, home of the richest plantations prior to the Civil War. But Mississippi also includes Piney Woods south of the Delta, red clay hills to the northeast, the tail end of the Appalachians, coastal plains, and cypress swamps — a land with less fertile earth, long populated in the main by owners of small farms and by fishermen and hunters with not a patch of land between them.
* * *
Historians of the South agree that over the last 150 years, the state of Mississippi has been the most closely wedded to the idea of the Confederacy. However, its history is shorter and less rich than that of the other "Old South" states. It started with a single episode in the settlement of the West. In 1817, when Mississippi joined the Union, two-thirds of its territory was still part of that shifting area of settled and unsettled land known as the frontier. It was inhabited by Choctaws and Chickasaws (population between twenty thousand and thirty thousand). For many years they resisted Spanish and French attempts to subjugate them, but they had traded with Europeans as far back as the eighteenth century. By the start of the nineteenth century, they appeared to have converted to the Western market economy and even owned plantations and slaves. However, from 1830 on they were dispossessed of their lands in treaties that favored white pioneers and speculators and forced to move elsewhere. The years that followed saw an influx of sons of planters from Virginia, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, and Alabama as well as poor farmers and city dwellers hoping to acquire cheap land and make a fast buck. Many of them brought their black slaves with them, attracted by the cotton, the cultivation of which was continually expanding westward and the price of which was continually rising.
At that time the territory that would come to form the state of Mississippi was both the Far West and the Deep South. It was a frontier land, with a population of mostly young and male migrants and a mobile, scarcely organized society. Few Mississippians were natives of Mississippi. Most came from neighboring states, and many were ready to move on and try their luck elsewhere. The population was also widely dispersed, with isolated farms at the center of landholdings and a handful of hamlets at crossroads, where farmers came to pick up supplies at the general store. Some may have had a forge, a small wooden church, and perhaps a tavern. People lived at a distance from one another. The family, often extended, was the only core of durable social relations. The only communities that were forming at this time were religious communities, all Protestant — Methodist, Presbyterian, or Baptist — and these would make a key contribution to the culture of the South. However, beyond the communities a society was being built; a highly hierarchical class system was being set up with, at the top, a rich, sometimes very rich, minority and, at the bottom, black slaves and a minority of poor, sometimes very poor, whites. Up to 1861 between the two there was a majority of plain folk, independent farmers or yeomen, followed in time by the middle classes — businessmen, lawyers, doctors, teachers, and public servants — living in small, growing towns such as Oxford, the seat of Lafayette County.
The owning and ruling class were the planters. With few exceptions their social origins were barely different from those of the poor whites, and although keen, their class consciousness owed nothing to tradition. In fact, they were generally entrepreneurs who had made their fortune from cotton, and some of them were recent immigrants from Europe. Even though they put on the airs of Virginian gentlemen, they were not descended from them, nor were they their heirs in any sense of the word. Nonetheless, the rich of the South were among the richest in the country. In 1860 the twelve most prosperous counties were beneath the Mason-Dixon Line, and the highest per capita income was in Adams County, Mississippi. However, for many years life remained harsh for everyone in the state. Before they built their handsome colonial mansions, even the richest often lived in modest log cabins. Joseph Ingraham, a Yankee visitor, noted at the time that "many of the wealthiest planters are lodged wretchedly, a splendid sideboard not infrequently concealing a white-washed beam — a gorgeous Brussels carpet laid over a rough-planked floor." The frontier was characterized by its contrasts of ruggedness and riches.
In the 1830s, apart from a number of counties along the river, the Mississippi economy was not yet entirely devoted to the production and sale of cotton. Everything would change over the next decade. King Cotton became an almost absolute monarch, "omnipotent and omnipresent" (N4, 625), and its reign would last many long years. However, in 1836 there was an initial alert when, in order to end the excesses of speculation and curb inflation, President Andrew Jackson issued a circular requiring that all future real estate transactions be in cash. In 1837 panic was unleashed in the United States as banks suspended payments. In 1839 the price of cotton fell and the real estate market collapsed, immediately prompting many to leave for Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas. However, toward the end of the 1840s prices started to rise again, yields improved, and the cotton trade recovered, ushering in an era of progress and prosperity for white Mississippi that would endure right up to the Civil War.
The cotton trade was based on the plantation system, which was inextricably linked to slavery. To maximize profitability, the planters needed labor that was abundant, submissive, and cheap. This led to the arrival in Mississippi of over one hundred thousand African slaves from the 1830s onward. Only the largest planters had substantial numbers of slaves, but almost half of all Southern families owned at least two or three slaves. In Mississippi before the Civil War, slaves accounted for more than half of the population, the highest percentage after South Carolina. The southeastern states had the harshest living and working conditions, the cruelest punishments inflicted for disrespect or indiscipline, and the lowest life expectancy. The state of Mississippi had a sinister reputation: the blacks called it "Goddamn Mississippi."
This "peculiar institution," as slavery was called at the time, was part of the very foundation of the economic, social, and political order of the South. As soon as the abolitionist Yankee North started to contest slavery, its justification drove all political discourse. The slavery issue was also increasingly poisoning relations between the Southern states and the rest of the Union. Southern sectionalism emerged at the end of the 1840s and continued to grow. By the end of the 1850s it had become a collective hysteria. Anyone expressing any doubt about the legitimacy of slavery became suspected of plotting with the abolitionists. The separatist fire-eaters had soon silenced the moderates attached to the Union. Those who thought differently were publicly denounced and armed militia were deployed to intimidate and punish them. All dissidence now equated to treachery. There was no further public debate, no further dissent. The issue was no longer whether Mississippi was going to leave the Union but when.
Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States on November 6, 1860. On December 20, South Carolina seceded, followed on January 9, 1861, by Mississippi. In Oxford bells were rung and cannons fired to celebrate the event. A month later the Constitution of the Confederate States of America was voted in. April saw the start of a long war. The Mississippians did not yet know what a heavy price they were to pay. Lafayette County raised fourteen companies and enlisted more than two thousand men, fired by patriotic fervor and the euphoria of war. Then in the spring of 1862, after the carnage of the Battle of Shiloh, the first convoys of wounded soldiers and cartloads of corpses began to arrive home. The war was no longer something fresh and joyous. In September 1862 northern Mississippi was invaded by Ulysses S. Grant's army, and in December the city of Oxford was occupied. The white civil population went to ground, fled, or, sometimes, collaborated with the occupier. Blacks abandoned their masters or rose up against them. Daily life became increasingly difficult as the war took its toll with requisitioning, vandalism, pillaging, and penury. Nothing was as it had been and nobody knew what tomorrow would be like. Doubt started to seep in, people became increasingly demoralized, and there were more and more desertions. Dissident voices were eventually heard denouncing a war where "the poor man was fighting for the rich man's negroes."
In August 1864, on the orders of General Andrew Jackson Smith, Oxford was sacked and burned down by Union troops. Nobody believed in a Confederate victory anymore. Between August 1864 and the capitulation of the Confederates at Appomattox in April 1865, the civil population of Mississippi struggled to survive. There were no further significant military engagements in the region and there was little left to pillage. The barns and haylofts were empty, the fields destroyed, the towns in ruins. After the Confederate defeat, Mississippians counted their cripples and their dead; over a third of the young men enlisted in the Confederate Army had died on the battlefield, while another third returned home minus a limb.
* * *
Although slavery was officially abolished in 1863, this did not mean freedom for the four million black slaves. Soon back on track, thanks to the equivocations of Lincoln's successor, President Andrew Johnson, the Southern whites resolved to restore their supremacy. In his inaugural address in 1865, Governor Benjamin G. Humphreys of Mississippi declared unambiguously that "our government is and always will be a government of white men." In 1865, while the South was still under military occupation, Mississippi legislators took the lead, adopting a range of laws restricting black rights — prohibiting them from working without a contract, from hiring or leasing farms, and from vagrancy. The entire prewar criminal legislation remained in force except that corporal punishment, which formerly had been inflicted on slaves by their masters, was now ordered by the courts. Meanwhile, the planters were violently opposed to the literacy and education of emancipated slaves; their schools were burned down, and their white teachers, most of them from the North, were reviled, harassed, assaulted, beaten, and sometimes killed.
Promptly following Mississippi's example, the other Southern states in turn voted for "black codes" rendering the "freed" slaves second-class citizens at the mercy of whites. But in 1866 the Radical Republicans won the congressional elections. A year later they decided to divide the South into five military districts and set up rules for the establishment of new governments. In 1868 the Fourteenth Amendment restated that the American nation was made up of free citizens who were equal before the law. In 1870 the Fifteenth Amendment confirmed that all citizens were entitled to vote, regardless of race. Republicans came south to mobilize their future black voters and form associations of white opponents to Democrats. In July 1866 electoral lists began to be drawn up throughout the state. According to a final check published in September 1867, Lafayette County had 2,413 registered voters — 1,464 whites and 949 blacks. Two months later the blacks of Lafayette County voted for the first time. Despite the abstention of half of the electorate, the Republicans won with a comfortable majority.
This was the start of Reconstruction, a period long execrated by white Southerners and their historians as a time of "federal tyranny," "military despotism," and "black domination," and, regrettably, Faulkner saw fit to repeat this story in his novels The Unvanquished and Requiem for a Nun. In fact, in Mississippi after the Civil War, when blacks were finally allowed to take part in politics, their elected representatives adopted a low profile. In the first legislature under the new constitution, they were very much in the minority (making up just two-sevenths of the House and with even less representation in the Senate) and occupied mostly lowly positions. What is more, the first two governors during the Reconstruction, James L. Alcorn, a scalawag, and Adelbert Ames, an alleged carpetbagger, were honest, capable men. The Radicals of Mississippi voted in new laws; created a much better education system than anything that had been in place previously; and renovated and built public buildings, hospitals, and asylums for the disabled. It is a fact not sufficiently appreciated that Mississippi was the best-governed Southern state after the war. However, the whites would not accept that their taxes were being used to fund black schools. Opposition to the Radicals hardened; the Democrats called for white solidarity, courted "loyal" blacks, and intimidated others, going as far as to reserve open graves for those who dragged their feet. This strategy paid off. In 1868 the electorate of Lafayette County voted overwhelmingly against the adoption of the state's new constitution.
Conservative Democrats, as they were now known, had an armed wing, the Ku Klux Klan, a clandestine paramilitary group organized and led by the former Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. The first targets of this shadowy army were white and black Republican leaders and their aim was to sow terror. Congress eventually voted in the laws to ratify the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and end the violence, and Grant's administration took energetic measures to disband the Ku Klux Klan. However, the first public Klansmen trial in Oxford, in June 1871, took a farcical turn. The unruly and notorious lawyer Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar — elected two years later to the House of Representatives of Mississippi and later US Secretary of the Interior and Justice of the Supreme Court, whose names Faulkner later gave to McCaslin's ancestor in Go Down, Moses — floored a police officer with a punch and, to the frenetic applause of both the public and the defendants, defied the court to arrest him.
No holds were now barred to bring an end to Reconstruction. During the 1875 electoral campaign, a Mississippi newspaper clearly nailed its colors to the mast: "All other means having been exhausted to abate the horrible condition of things, the thieves and robbers, and scoundrels, white and black, deserve death and ought to be killed [...]. Carry the election peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must." Militia were organized with the dual purpose of sabotaging the Republican campaign and terrorizing the black population. At Republican election meetings, armed agitators slipped into the crowd to cause trouble, and the ensuing scuffles often ended in fatali ties. On Election Day the blacks remained holed up in their cabins or hid in the swamp, while those few who dared go to the polls were shot at. Rifle clubs scoured the countryside shooting anyone defending democratic, antiracist values and sometimes slaughtering entire families. Crimes were now being committed in broad daylight and with faces uncovered.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from William Faulkner by André Bleikasten. Copyright © 2017 Aimée Bleikasten. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
Foreword / Philip WeinsteinTestimony and Acknowledgements / Aimée BleikastenIntroduction / André BleikastenList of Abbreviations1. F(a)ulkner, MississippiA little history, a little geographyThree fathers, two mothersChildhoodThe attitudes of adolescence 2. ApprenticeshipsPan and Pierrot: the first masks(Self)criticismIn New OrleansThe switch to prose 3. Birth of a NovelistThe first novel: Soldiers' PayAn American in ParisIncomplete portrait of the artist as an artist: ElmerA diversion: Mosquitoes4. The First FloweringThe invention of Yoknapatawpha: Flags in the DustThe most splendid failure: The Sound and the FuryThe most horrific story: SanctuaryMourning becomes the Bundrens: As I Lay DyingVersions of the sun: Light in August 5. Mid-wayScenes from married lifeThe Master of Rowan OakThe first shadowsBack and forth to Hollywood Meta6. From Pylon to Go Down, Moses The hell of fascination: PylonThe novel as research: Absalom, Absalom!Southern Tales: The UnvanquishedFault lines, flux and floods: If I Forget Thee, JerusalemA comical pastoral: The Hamlet Legacies: Go Down, Moses 7. The Dark YearsUnder siegeHollywood, againLucas' lesson: Intruder in the DustA conventional detective story: Knight's GambitJoan 8. Fame—At LastThe Nobel PrizeThe public manSetbacks, distress and other miseriesRequiem for a Nun: the education of Temple DrakeThe Gospel according to Faulkner: A Fable9. The EndThe Virginia yearsThe Snopes, second and final instalment: The Town and The MansionThe farewell smile: The ReiversThe rider unseatedChronologySelected BibliographyIndex of NamesIndex of WorksWhat People are Saying About This
Few critics have written as magisterially about Faulkner's work as Bleikasten . . . this book monumentalizes a way of reading Faulkner to which all students and enthusiasts of his work continue to return with profit.
"Few critics have written as magisterially about Faulkner's work as Bleikasten . . . this book monumentalizes a way of reading Faulkner to which all students and enthusiasts of his work continue to return with profit."
Bleikasten's book is the rarest of achievements: a meticulous literary analysis of Faulkner's body of work, resting comfortably in a wide-ranging description of his life and times, written in accessible, fluid, and engaging prose. It offers what may well be our fullest account to date of what Bleikasten calls Faulkner's 'energy for life' and 'will to write,' which together drove the destiny of one of the world's greatest writers.
"Bleikasten's book is the rarest of achievements: a meticulous literary analysis of Faulkner's body of work, resting comfortably in a wide-ranging description of his life and times, written in accessible, fluid, and engaging prose. It offers what may well be our fullest account to date of what Bleikasten calls Faulkner's 'energy for life' and 'will to write,' which together drove the destiny of one of the world's greatest writers."