Not that all of this is either explicitly religious or — any of it — kitschy; it’s just what there is to write about today, while I wait for the next person to send in some oddity or other.
The Five- and Six-Year-Olds (who get read aloud to together): Secret Water by Arthur Ransome, part of the terrific Swallows and Amazons series.
The Eleven-Year-Old: Illustrated Basic Carpentry by Graham Blackburn. He has also just reread all seven Harry Potter books, in the space of about a week and a half.
The Teenager: Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska’s Divine Mercy in My Soul, and Northanger Abbey.
The Visiting Graduate Student: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Prayer, plus The Moviegoer by Walker Percy.
The Husband: Just received a box of sixty books, in connection with his participation in an upcoming conference. Not sure which of these he’s currently reading. Meanwhile, at the top of his bedside-table stack is Mark Noll’s The Civil War as a Theological Crisis.
The Me: I’ve been rereading William Faulkner. People respond to The Sound and the Fury, I believe, in much the same way that they respond to James Joyce’s Ulysses. I hated S&F in college. Now, having reread it last week, I can’t say that it will ever be my favorite novel of all time, but I couldn’t put it down. Trying to find a story — an actual, free-standing, objective-reality-type story — amid the swirling mists of unreliable narrative was a more interesting project than I would have thought. It was irritating, actually, to arrive at the end and discover that Mr. Faulkner had provided an appendix sorting it all out. I’d rather not have had it sorted. It seems to me that real life does not ever provide us with such a concrete clarity of hindsight, revealing to us not what should have happened, which is what hindsight generally does reveal, but what did happen, beyond the shadow of a doubt; and if art is going to murkify itself in an attempt to replicate real life, including the real life of the fallen human mind — well, you can’t really have it both ways, can you? Or can you?
Following The Sound and the Fury, I reread The Unvanquished, Faulkner’s tenth novel, which began as a serialized magazine feature, chronicling the material and moral chaos wrought by the advance of Sherman’s army through rural Mississipi. There is a maddening moment close to the end, in which a beautiful, half-insane female character opens her mouth and allows a long paragraph of pure Faulkner, complete with throwaway parenthetical asides, to issue forth and hang on the air like a kind of rhetorical inversion smog. But otherwise it’s a tremendous, not to mention a far more accessible novel than the notorious ones, and maybe the underrated novel about the South.
Meanwhile, some weeks ago I checked Peter Kreeft’s 1986 Making Sense Out of Suffering out of our church library, and I’ve got to finish it and give it back. I’ve been blogging about it a little as I’ve read, here and here.
Funnily enough, it was reading Peter Kreeft which prompted me to go back and read Faulkner. In a chapter discussing easy, ie inadequate, theo-philosophical answers to the problem of suffering, Kreeft writes,
Atheism cheapens the world, cheapens us, and cheapens life. To see this, just compare atheist fiction with theistic fiction. Belief in God does not squash man; it raises man to a divine image. Heroism grows only in the light of a divine sun. Squash the ceilings down low and we stoop. In classical Greek drama, in the Bible, in Shakespeare, man is great because he breathes the air of the absolute. In Faulkner, Gide, Sartre, Camus, Beckett, and nine out of ten lesser twentieth century writers, man is “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” because he is a cosmic orphan . . . Life in that world is a meaningless flicker of a candle for a few years between the cold and barren darkness of two eternal nights.
Well. I had to test this assertion, and there were the works — some of the works, not all of them — of Faulkner, waiting on my shelf. Like my home science experiments, my home literary experiments tend towards the scattershot: let’s just say that I haven’t spent that much time thinking about William Faulkner in the last twenty years, and I can’t find my notes from the Southern literature class I took at Vanderbilt from Dr. T.D. Young, who had studied with the Agrarians themselves and spent a lot of time talking to us about death, which he pronounced “deallllllfth.” I’m sure that my friend Steve, who took the same class, will turn up to correct my rendering of this pronunciation, but that’s approximately how I remember it.
At any rate, thinking about all this out of more or less thin air, I’d guess that Faulkner might agree that the Civil War was a theological crisis (I haven’t read Noll’s book yet, but it looks as though I’m going to have to, having started down this road). What Faulkner would say, actually, I think, is that the Civil War was tantamount to the Fall. All the action of The Unvanquished amounts to a long epilogue after the deaths of Lear and Cordelia, in which the world unravels and then unravels some more, on its way to a climax — really a moral nadir — in which thugs shoot dead the protagonist’s grandmother, resulting in much rhetoric about the depravity of shooting old women, even though the upright old woman in question has been stealing mules from Yankee regiments and turning a profit by selling them back to, mostly, different Yankee regiments. At her burial, all the preacher can say is, “Well, y’all all know where she is now,” — not that he’s pointing in any particular direction — “so I won’t keep a bunch of women and children out in the rain.”
The universe of this novel, at any rate, doesn’t strike me as absolutely godless so much as it reminds me of moments in the Psalms, in which the psalmist laments that God has forgotten him: in Faulkner’s universe, the psalmist begins, “O God, you have cast us off and broken us –” and stops, and this is the precipice over which the story throws itself.
So . . . is Kreeft right about somebody like Faulkner? I’m still not sure. It’s a meaningless-seeming universe, yet people go on doing heroic things out of habit, because they don’t know what else to do, or how else to be. The mule-stealing Granny — who has been stealing and re-selling mules in order to feed a flock of other people’s “abolished” slaves — shrugs off premonitions of disaster and walks alone into a building full of armed men, to her death. How much her actions constitute heroism, and how much they’re the function of mere expediency and up-against-a-wall-ness, is I guess open for discussion. And there’s a sort of tree-falling-in-the-forest question at work here, too: is it possible to be heroic in a world which has lost its understanding of notions like heroism and honor, in which it can no longer be assumed that real men don’t shoot old women?
I have also been reading The Backyard Homestead by Carleen Madigan and comparing, rather despairingly, my pecan-shaded and vinca-overrun backyard with the orderly garden/orchard/chicken-yard designs sketched out at the beginning of the book for a quarter-acre plot. Still, there are three dozen tomato plants flourishing in the bits of sun I do have, plus some squash and peppers and pumpkins and herbs, so I don’t feel all that despairing. Actually, I feel kind of self-congratulatory.
Meanwhile, out on the highway today I passed the best church sign I’ve seen in ages, in front of a Baptist church near Gastonia, NC. I didn’t have my camera with me, but what the sign said was this:
I was garbage, but Jesus recycled me.
Please, somebody, send me some weirdness, so I don’t have to keep banging on about Faulkner and gardening and church signs. I can be reached at sthomas at firstthings dot com, an address which I’ll write myself a note to remember to check.
And while you’re at it, go book shopping.
[Reading: 100/100]
June 22nd, 2009 | 12:32 pm
It seems that Kreeft’s observation is true in many respects, but I don’t know if it applies to Faulkner. I would almost lump Faulkner in with O’Connor as someone who peers into the untoward depravities that men work in spite of the universe’s prevailing order, rather than someone who posits that men are driven by the absence of any such order at all. But maybe that’s far too fine a line to draw based on my inadequate knowledge of Faulkner.
June 22nd, 2009 | 12:43 pm
The Sound and the Fury was one of my purchases when I cashed in the Half Price books gift card that was in my Easter Basket. I know (I think?) I’ve read it…but I mustn’t have been paying attention. So it’s on my summer book heap right now. And since the temperature is ramping up…there’s going to be a whole lot more reading going on.
June 22nd, 2009 | 3:01 pm
Titus — I think you’re probably right, and I do lump Faulkner in with O’Connor as a Southern writer who uses what I’ll probably inadequately call “the Southern predicament” to write about human fallenness, though what I can’t tell in Faulkner is whether or not there’s anything absolute to be fallen from, if you know what I mean.
I felt more like trying out Kreeft’s assertion on Faulkner than I did any of the other writers he mentions. In general I do think he’s right. It was actually his posing Faulkner in opposition to Shakespeare which got me going, since the feel of virtually all the Faulkner I’ve read, which is nowhere near all of Faulkner, is that of a long, sad epilogue to a Shakespearean tragedy.
June 22nd, 2009 | 3:32 pm
I’ve been thinking, Ellyn, that since Anthony’s hung out the “Closed” sign over at Strange Herring, I do have a lot more time on my hands all of a sudden for reading things like The Sound and the Fury.
June 24th, 2009 | 12:15 am
[...] & Curiosities: Sally Thomas shares her summer reading list. Comments [...]
June 24th, 2009 | 6:27 am
To Sally: You must be about my daughter’s age and so I speak as an elder: There cannot be a place more in need of heroism than “a world which has lost its understanding of heroism and honor. It is relatively easy to live up to the standards admired in one’s culture. A “cognitive minority” is a lonely place to be (as you certainly already know) but a place where one is put to the test – a great and good opportunity to give glory to God.
June 24th, 2009 | 6:30 am
P. S. As far as I am concerned, The Sound and the Fury is Dilcey’s story. Best wishes to you and your wonderful family. Such happiness.
June 24th, 2009 | 8:29 am
LInda: Yes, absolutely, and I think that one of the things Faulkner gets right is just what you say, albeit without the hope of giving glory to God, within the specific context of the South in the wake of the Civil War. His protagonist in The Unvanquished, Bayard Sartoris, ultimately functions as a kind of cognitive minority in a world in which the notion of “honor” has devolved into mere blood and revenge: his father has been shot dead by a political opponent, and Bayard is sent for from college (at the University of Mississippi, naturally) to go and shoot his opponent in turn. People who have been his heroes, notably his cousin Drusilla, who had ridden to war with his father and then married him, and with whom Bayard is half in love, urge guns on him. In the end he walks unarmed into the law office of his father’s murderer. The other man shoots and misses while Bayard stands in front of him, then skulks out and leaves town. The moment is a microcosmic triumph of an older kind of self-sacrificial honor, though ultimately it’s hard to say what it means in that world. People first think that Bayard has shot and missed and let the other man off without justice, ie Bayard is a coward and a screwup, though eventually someone does get it right without Bayard’s having to say himself what he has done. He goes home, though, and Drusilla, for whom he has wanted to be heroic, has gotten on the train and left town. So there’s no notion that heroism accomplishes anything or changes the madness of the world . . .
And then S&F happens so far down the road from all this that even that vestigial notion of heroism is gone. I hadn’t thought about its being Dilsey’s story, but you may well be right — “They endured.”
At any rate, I am interested in these questions in general, but I’m especially interested in them in the context of the South. I am old enough to have known many, many “old Southerners” growing up whose whole language turned on the assumption that everyone they knew was a lady or a gentleman and that there were things which were so obviously what “people we know” did or didn’t do that there wasn’t any point in even talking about them. My paternal grandmother was born in 1898; my oldest cousins were teenagers in the Sixties (I was born in 1964), and the conduct of their lives — and everyone else’s — was, I think, often completely unintelligible to her. One of my cousins, who grew up in California, tells the rather endearing story of visiting my grandparents and trying to work out, on the telephone, a rendezvous with another cousin, while my grandmother stood by wringing her hands and saying, “People in our family don’t go places we’ve never been before!”
June 24th, 2009 | 8:30 am
Just to clarify: the other man skulks out and leaves town and is revealed as a coward, not Bayard.
June 24th, 2009 | 10:55 am
What a wonderful response. Thank you. I will read it more carefully later. … but regarding Dilcey, she did so much more than endure. She literally and figuratively knew what “time” it was. She was steadfast in the face of great challenges. Her image has remained with me as the “proverbial woman”. The other pathetically confused and weak characters are virtually forgotten.
June 24th, 2009 | 11:14 am
Yes, she maintains a notion of order and right and wrong which all the more foregrounded characters have lost or never had (think Benjy, whose whole life is arbitrary and un-agented) — and which ultimately fails to hold or save them, which says a lot about the nihilism of Faulkner’s vision, at least in that novel.
I’ve been chewing on something I read recently, actually in connection with Flannery O’Connor. Joyce Carol Oates, reviewing Brad Gooch’s new bio of O’Connor for the New York Review of Books, writes off both O’Connor and Faulkner as “cultural racists” both for declining to use their fiction in the service of the advancement of the civil rights cause and, in Faulkner’s case, for voicing opposition to the integration of schools (she says something about Faulkner’s siding with his “white, racist Mississippi neighbors,” as if it were self-evident that to be white and from Mississippi meant automatically that you belonged to the KKK, and that the ONLY possible reason for opposing integration was all of the above). Anyway, it’s been observed sometimes sniffily that O’Connor, and I think that this is true of Faulkner, too, writes about black characters “from the outside” — with a handful of notable exceptions in O’Connor, the point of view is never located in a black character, but black characters, as an inevitable part of the landscape of the rural South of the time (I’m also old enough to remember black sharecroppers picking cotton in my grandfather’s fields and being about the “place”) function as a chorus commenting on the actions of the white characters in the foreground, who are usually committing some depravity or other.
That was a Faulknerian sentence which has made me completely forget where I was going with this comment. Anyway, Dilsey in S&F and Ringo in Unvanquished both come to mind as characters who see clearly and understand place and order amid great chaos. If this were O’Connor I’d say it had to do with her Thomist vision of order; with Faulkner it’s harder, for me anyway, to say where it’s coming from, unless it’s from some intuitive and possibly sentimental view of the antebellum South as a pre-lapserian world.
But I don’t know.
Anyway, “They endured” is what Faulkner writes of Dilsey in his otherwise-annoying epilogue to S&F.
June 24th, 2009 | 1:46 pm
Dear Sally: I thought of the word I wanted to use in describing Dilsey: She “prevailed”. Her circumstances did not define her; rather, she had the courage to transcend her situation. Faulkner almost certainly could not understand that, but then he was not alone! I am convinced that certain “ways of seeing” are transmitted only through faith and the sacraments. God bless you. I will be reading your posts.
June 24th, 2009 | 1:52 pm
One final thought for the day: On Dilcey – I am thinking of course of her soul – not the day to day activities of her life, not her status in a racist culture, not her lack of intellectual stimulation, not any (frankly) any of the issues of our time. Rather I am thinking of the inner self where truly “serious daring” known only to oneself and God takes place,
June 24th, 2009 | 2:06 pm
A college professor told us that that ‘epilogue’ or preface that gets published with S&F was something he was requested to write for Vintage Press for “The Portable Faulkner.” They were including one of the internal monologues and wanted something to place it in context.
Otherwise, I have found that certain atheist writers if they are honest, can and do articulate a God-shaped hole in the universe they are willing to admit to and that can be, and, for me, has been, of great benefit.
June 24th, 2009 | 2:13 pm
Oh, yeah. More to the usual stuff: You should do a web search for kepot or yamulkahs. (Don’t trust my spelling.) Recently I attended a Jewish wedding of a dear one and wanted to honor it with nicer than handed out at the door skull cap. I was looking to buy one online and found a wonderful array of them: with smile buttons, with NFL teams, camouflage, for dogs, etc.
July 8th, 2009 | 2:25 pm
[...] at First Things, Sally Thomas runs through her family’s very interesting reading list. My own husband just dashed through Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in anticipation of the [...]
July 9th, 2009 | 10:10 am
[...] that was June. This is [...]
Links
Blogs
Find Us
Contact