Unimportant: The Right Questions about Faulkner, the Agrarians, and the South
For William Faulkner, the artist was not important — only what the artist creates was¹ — so why it is the person behind the art so important? Why does it matter where he or she belongs? North or south? City or town? Romantic or modernist? Agrarian or Fugitive? Like the Agrarians, William Faulkner was a man of the South. They were both major contributors to the South’s Renaissance and to the revival of the literature that greatly influenced American culture during the rest of the 20th century. However, it is unclear how close they stood in their conceptions of the South, as there is a very small record of communications between Faulkner and any member of the Fugitive and Agrarian groups, even though they seem to share “so many beliefs, biographical traits, and aesthetic concepts.”². They were all in the middle of a historical conflict in which all sides were trying to let the morality of their arguments define them and the character of their leaders. For the Agrarians and Fugitives, the individual was as important as his or her work, but this was not so for Faulkner, who seemed to be personally detached from his own doings: ”If I had not existed, someone else would have written me.”³ So, how close was Faulkner to the Agrarians?
Uneducated, strange, violent, misogynist, racist, Agrarian. Many pages have been written trying to parse adjectives so that Faulkner’s legacy can be claimed by one side or the other, as if by owning the words they can own the man. He was inscrutable, a man of ever-changing and contradictory opinions, impossible to place in the dock, so much so that it has been much easier to go after his art — perennial words that can be dissected, lines that can be read in between, and fictional characters and stories that can be used as some kind of unauthorized biography to pin him down somewhere in the South. Was Quentin Compson’s suicide some kind of atonement for Faulkner’s racism? Was Miss Rosa an empowered woman and thus proof that he was not a misogynist? Was the “fear of racial mixing” a central theme in The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!?
Whatever the link is between Faulkner and his novels, for many people it is clear that he poured himself into them. They have been described as “personal” and “deeply autobiographical⁴”. Faulkner biographer David Minter provides a classic approach to this connection, explaining that he felt that Faulkner “took possession of the pain and muted love of his childhood”⁵ while dealing with his own experiences with “inadequate parents and wounded children.”⁶ At this personal level exist many similarities between Quentin and William: Murry Faulkner was certainly influenced by his heavy drinking the same way Jason Compson III was; as a young boy Faulkner’s personality seemed to parallel that of Quentin, a “quiet, observant, serious, somewhat introverted, and thoughtful child who had no really close friends outside the family”⁷; Jason’s resentment with Caddy about losing the job at Herbert’s bank — ”The bitch that cost me a job, the one chance I ever had to get ahead”⁸— strikes a note with William’s father’s bitterness with his wife when she denied him the chance of a career he loved⁹. In short, what can be found is a procession of unreliable and unloving fathers who reflect the same kind dysfunctional relationships the Faulkner’s had as a family. The same could also be said of Faulkner’s positions regarding women and race: Joe Christmas’s thoughts about women and their natural “infallibility for the spontaneous comprehension of evil” can be attributed to Faulkner’s “rather strong distrust for women”¹⁰ or Quentin Compson’s guilt about using racial slurs — ”You’ve got to think of them as colored people” — to a reflection of Faulkner’s racial ambivalence and not wanting “to keep an emotional people off-balance.”¹¹
If Faulkner’s demons were modeled after those of his parents, there is little evidence besides the claims — at times undocumented¹²— of his biographers. Correspondence between William and Murry does not seem to show an absent father who could not even read “anything his son wrote”¹³ but rather a confident and event supportive relationship between father and son discussing unimportant things like homesickness¹⁴ and trains¹⁵. With respect to Faulkner’s racism and misogyny, it is also difficult to connect them directly to any specific biographical fact or belief he held — there are just multiple interpretations trying to make sense of his life through his characters. He certainly had opinions on segregation and other racial issues, but it would be a challenge to find a quotation that places him clearly on any specific side. It seems that in Faulkner’s case, there are not primary sources, not even himself.
This dichotomy between writer and person is not unique, Faulkner himself once remarked that “the writer is a perfect case of split personality.” He claims a writer is “one thing when he is a writer and he is something else while he is a denizen of the world.”¹⁶ So, one must consider that even if the Snopes or the Compsons seemed to express Agrarian points of views, this fact may be irrelevant when it comes to boxing the artist into any category, and maybe that is the reason Faulkner decided to stay out, refusing to follow prescribed membership rules, to take their stand. Perhaps he was at times racist and misogynist, following to a T the formulaic approach of the “Statement of Principles.”¹⁷ but he was also a modernist and a best-selling author, lived in Hollywood, had an agent, and drank heavily at the local watering hole — the embodiment of the industrial artist, as Donald Davidson would describe it¹⁸ — trying to be Sophocles in the Biltmore.
However, it is perhaps Davidson who can help us formulate the right questions about Faulkner and the Agrarians. For Davidson, there was a “fundamental contradiction of principle” between the romantic artist and society — he or she is “against or away from society,” and “the disturbed relation becomes his essential theme, always underlying his work.” In this process the artist becomes a realist who “turns out to be an historian rather than an artist.”¹⁹ So, was Faulkner “away from society”? Do his writings reveal an ugly truth about the South? There was certainly a conflict between Faulkner and society, which can be seen in his relationship with the military — he claimed to has been part of the British Royal Flying Corps and seen action during the First World War, even though there are no records to support these assertions²⁰— and with money and wealth — he thought ‘brothel landlord’ was the best job for him²¹ but he always craved for an aristocratic life²²— so perhaps Faulkner was “away from society” but seemingly only because society wanted to be away from him. Nevertheless, none of this means that he was a pariah — as discussed before, he had real concerns about segregation, and he was also sympathetic to the situation of poor whites²³. These realities became a central element of his work in a fashion suitable for a man who believed that a writer should be ruthless to the point of “rob his mother” if he has to²⁴. Faulkner’s representation of the South was crude, violent, ugly and — more importantly — real, romantically real, as he never played the role of a reporter²⁵, but rather one of a writer “trying to create believable people in credible moving situations in the most moving way.”
Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante once said that even biographies become fictions once they are written down²⁶. In Faulkner’s case, it is even harder to separate the facts from fiction since most of what has been written about him seems to treat his characters as a reliable source, as if trying to shield the author from some uncomfortable truth. So, can Faulkner be described as an Agrarian? Some of his characters certainly could, and maybe his art could be considered as such. As for the man himself, it is hard to know, and it may not matter at all. Probably it would be more relevant to understand why so many authors, journalists and academics have devoted great amounts of effort trying to find these answers. Maybe they are just trying to avoid more important and difficult questions about Faulkner or maybe there is a need to reconcile his greatness with some of the darkest moments of American history. But it can be argued that Faulkner’s legacy does not require this kind of vicarious intellectual atonement. After all the writers cannot be dissected to make moral ends meet and create a more convenient version of himself for this or future generations, artists are a reflection of their time and not the other way around thus the effort appears to be futile, a fool’s errand that feels at times redundant, irrelevant, inconsequential, unimportant.
[1] Jean Stein, “The Art of Fiction no. 12 William Faulkner,” The Paris Review, 1956, http://typeofwords.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/4954_FAULKNER4.pdf.
[2] Brandi Stearns, “Race, Women, and the South: Faulkner’s Connection to and Separation from the Fugitive-Agrarian Tradition.” (Master’s Thesis, University of Tennessee, 2005), 2, Graduate School at Trace: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange.
[3] Stein, “The Art of Fiction.”
[4] David Minter, William Faulkner: His Life and Work (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980), 103.
[5] Minter, William Faulkner: His Life and Work, 104.
[6] Minter, William Faulkner: His Life and Work, 156.
[7] Jackson J. Benson, “Quentin Compson: Self-Portrait of a Young Artist’s Emotions,” Twentieth Century Literature 17, no. 3 (July 1971): 143–59, https://www.jstor.org/stable/606793.
[8] William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (New York: W.W. Norton, 2014), 198.
[9] Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography (Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 10.
[10] Minter, William Faulkner: His Life and Work, 109.
[11] James Baldwin, “Faulkner and Desegregation,” Partisan Review 23 (Fall 1956): 568–73, https://www.jstor.org/stable/606793.
[12] James G. Watson, “My Father’s Unfailing Kindness: William Faulkner and the Idea of Home,” American Literature 64, no. 4 (December 1971): 750, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2927637.
[13] Watson, “My Father’s,” 750.
[14] Watson, “My Father’s,” 753.
[15] Watson, “My Father’s,” 752.
[16] Daniel J. Singal, William Faulkner: The Making of a Modernist (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 15.
[17] Donald Davidson et al., I’ll Take My Stand (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), xli-lii.
[18] Donald Davidson, “A Mirror for Artists,” in I’ll Take My Stand (New York: Harper, 1930), 28–60.
[19] Davidson, “A Mirror”, 46
[20] Judith L. Sensibar, The origins of Faulkner’s art (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1984), 24.
[21] Stein, “The Art of Fiction.”
[22] Stearn, “Race, Women.” 30–1.
[23] Stearn, “Race, Women.” 31.
[24] Stein, “The Art of Fiction.”
[25] Davidson, “Mirror,” 46.
[26] Marie-Lise Gazarian Gautier, “A Conversation with G. Cabrera Infante,” Dalkey Archive Press, 1984, http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/a-conversation-with-g-cabrera-infante-by-marie-lise-gazarian-gautier.
