Pale Faulkner

Last week I finished reading Pale Fire, my first and long overdue Nabokov. It’s the best possible version of what John Gardner described as a skilled writer “jazzing around,” a novel constructed of the implications within the text—which, superficially, is a long commentary on a long poem—and the inferences of the reader. A story told entirely between the lines, so to speak.

There’s a lot going on in Pale Fire and I look forward to a future second reading, but one of the most poignant aspects of the book is the way the painful personal reflection in the poem—which concerns the poet John Shade’s family life, including the apparent suicide of his only daughter—is ignored by the poem’s editor and commentator, Charles Kinbote (or, perhaps, “Charles Kinbote”). Kinbote, in notes that inevitably drift into tangents, spins or misinterprets every possible line and word of Shade’s poem as allusions to the imaginary kingdom of Zembla and its exiled king, about which he tells verbose, self-indulgent stories that the reader gradually infers are about himself—another layer of the story.

As TV Tropes puts it: “While Pale Fire is about a lot of things, one of the biggest is literary commentators who can't help but use other people's work as mirrors onto their own neurotic obsessions.” Or, even better, Man Carrying Thing (in a genuinely brilliant video): “It’s a hilarious maneuver watching this commentator wrangle a sincere poem about art and grief into something about his favorite subject.”

Nabokov parodies this brilliantly, and so this was all fresh on my mind when, having finished Pale Fire Friday, I picked up a book that I last read probably twenty years ago: The Sound and the Fury.

I didn’t bother with the introduction to this edition, a nice new paperback that I got for my birthday, but after a few days I flipped through it and was struck by the academic ability to Kinbote basically anything— “maneuver[ing]” a book into a discussion of one’s “favorite subject” or “their own neurotic obsessions.” We’re all aware of the way kooks like Kinbote do this, but he’s just more obvious about it because he is a kook. The tendency is present in all academics, and tolerated when the “favorite subject” is some kind of fashionable ism.

Faulkner’s novel, apparently, is mostly about racism, the legacy of slavery and white supremacy, and the Lost Cause (that bugbear, which I’m less and less sure actually means anything), or at least so thoroughly infused with the above that it becomes functionally about them. This TED Ed video, since the latter apparently wasn’t enough, adds Absalom, Absalom!’s supposed concern about “the region’s intolerable* history of genocide” to the mix.

But is this really what The Sound and the Fury is “about”? I’ve written several times in recent years about the prevalence of theme over story. As annoying and distracting as that tendency is for genre fiction (not a distinction I pay much mind to, but bear with me), the way it dominates discussion of literary fiction is intolerable.

The Sound and the Fury is first and foremost a family drama. The alcoholic father and bedridden mother; the promiscuous daughter; the brothers—one jealous, another hardworking and embittered,** yet another mentally handicapped—the help, themselves by turns loyal, impatient, entitled, detached, but never deceived; the loss of patrimony and the entire bunch’s financial straits; the sense of decay and decrepitude and judgment hanging over everyone—this is what The Sound and the Fury is about. The characters themselves impotently fume or resign themselves and more than one talks of afflictions, of curses on the family. Quentin moons around Boston feeling the weight of his own sin, not the legacy of slavery. And it is hard to read the long opening section, told from Benjy’s perspective, and see how different people treat him when no one is looking, and think that Faulkner was animated or even cared about these big social themes. If you must have something more abstract and high-falutin’ than these, decline, disappointment, and guilt are still better options than those buzzword themes because they’re closer to the characters.

Not that the themes cited above and so beloved of critics and tastemakers—who want to shepherd us into the correct interpretation of Faulkner’s story just as surely as Benjy’s caretakers want to keep him off of the golf course—don’t matter at all. They are trappings, necessary component parts of the setting and its history. A story like The Sound and the Fury that did not have Jason Compson lashing out at the family’s black help in frustration would be unrealistic and lack an important means of revealing character, and the burden of defeat in the Civil War is an appropriate part of the atmosphere of Faulkner’s world. But these trappings are not the point, and making them the point is to turn Kinbote on Faulkner.

The difference is that, in Pale Fire, Kinbote is a lonely weirdo. Today the Kinbotes hold conferences.

* Thank goodness for that “intolerable,” otherwise I wouldn’t have known what to think!

** There is a strong sense of the elder brother in “The Prodigal Son” about Jason Compson—despite being the Compsons’ second son—that I haven’t really seen explored. Something for the future, perhaps.

Not once but whenever he wants it

The Battle of Gettysburg was in its second day right now in 1863. This justly celebrated passage about the third and final day from Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust has been making the rounds again:

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago[.]

Faulkner’s vision of the instant before Pickett’s Charge on July 3 powerfully evokes both the anticipation and the what-might-have-been of the moment, but I think an overlooked parenthetical right at the beginning is especially important for his point: “not once but whenever he wants it.”

This moment, with “all in the balance,” is not just remembered but lived in. The imagination can dwell for years in an instant like the one Faulkner describes. The poignancy and suspense of the minutes before Pickett’s Charge are irresistible, not despite but because of the result. Neither Faulkner nor his Southern boy, as they are sometimes accused, “romanticize” the war; far from it. What critics of the romantic fail to understand is that romance acknowledges and embraces danger. If it didn’t it wouldn’t be romantic. This moment’s very bitterness and danger, the last instant before the plunge, is part of the allure. One returns to it again and again—Faulkner’s “This time” does not mean merely “a second time”—to relive it. “Whenever he wants it” is often.

This bit of Faulkner has lasted because it is true. It captures precisely not just the potential and inevitability and weight of July 3, but the feel of a Civil War-obsessed Southern boy’s Sehnsucht. Ask me how I know.

By the way, Georgie Wax, the narrator of Griswoldville, is fourteen at the time of the novel’s climactic action. I wrote it that way, with Faulkner far from my mind, to be true to the boy-soldier aspect of the late-war Georgia militia, and because that age corresponds with the peak of my own Civil War obsession and was the age at which I lost my grandfather. A coincidence better than anything I could have planned.