I have not used much of the life or the letters or the many interviews or the many interesting things Faulkner said about his own work because I wanted to approach the texts directly and let them, as much as possible, speak for themselves. Though I have read huge amounts of Faulkner criticism, I have used very little of it directly because I did not want to write a book in which I had to disprove one critic or another or in which I carried on long contentious arguments with them. They have had their say. I will have mine here. The world is large enough for all of us—especially the world of Faulknerian criticism.
So let me say here exactly what I was interested in and what I wanted to accomplish in following Faulkner’s development as a novelist from Flags in the Dust (1927) to The Reivers (1962), treating also as novels his three coherent gatherings of stories: The Unvanquished (1938), Go Down, Moses (1942), and Knight’s Gambit (1949), each of which, as was Faulkner’s practice, is organized around a family or a central self, or both. I began with the perception—the sure sense—that in Go Down, Moses and Ike McCaslin we had the turning point in Faulkner’s career and development, and that there was a clear before and after Go Down, Moses, with everything after being essentially different in some way from everything before. So I set out to write a book which would itself turn, as this one does, upon a long, detailed analysis of Go Down, Moses and Ike McCaslin as a special or privileged Faulknerian self. In general terms, I saw this turn in Faulkner as one that went from destructive to generative being, from tragedy to comedy, from pollution to purification and redemption (with many of the later works purifying and redeeming the earlier works, as in the case of Requiem for a Nun and Sanctuary).
My approach to Faulkner from the very beginning was an ontological one: I wanted to find out why there were so many destructive and destroyed beings—selves—in the novels before Go Down, Moses; what was different about Ike McCaslin that saved him from destruction and made him non-destructive (though not generative for others), and what the sources of generative being were in the selves with which Faulkner peopled his later novels (and sometimes inserted into the earlier, highly destructive novels—such as Dilsey, Lena Grove, Byron Bunch, Bayard Sartoris, Ratliff). My analyses of the novels were always organized around an analysis of the selves, usually to the exclusion of almost everything else. The most obvious example of this, and the clearest early model of how I proceed, is found in the analysis of Light in August in Chapter 3. I tried to develop a mode of analysis that would enable me to translate every major self into a set of values and then, using this as my basic approach, I tried to develop a condensed way of working out a basic “reading” of each novel. Since my critical mind is and has always been totally text centered, I go forward, from Flags in the Dust on, novel by novel, discrete whole unit by discrete whole unit, right on through to The Reivers. Not all the novels are treated equally, but all are analyzed and every major self in Faulkner’s novels is taken up and discussed in some way. It is through the analysis of all these selves that I arrive at the issues Faulkner took up and dealt with in his imaginative life. Some issues, such as nature and role of the family, he returned to again and again in his many great family novels: Flags in the Dust, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom!, The Hamlet, Go Down, Moses, The Town/Mansion pair, even A Fable. Some issues, such as the black-white one, and later, the extended black-white-red one, he returned to periodically until his imagination was done with them. His first serious novel on this subject or issue was Light in August (1932). He returned to it in Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Go Down, Moses (1942), Intruder in the Dust (1948), and Requiem for a Nun (1951).
So, though my focus throughout is upon the selves that Faulkner created, and the extent to which they are destructive or generative, destroyed or victimized, redemptive or redeemed, I have not proceeded from self to self, or thematically, by groups of novels, but novel by novel; invariably, as a result of this, I have much to say about the ways in which Faulkner constructed novels—about how he tended to center every novel around a major character, such as Joe Christmas or Sutpen or Ike McCaslin, how novel after novel conducted a searching action, a movement inward toward knowledge about that character and why each was the way he or she was (best exemplified in Absalom, Absalom!); how every novel used comedy as one of its voices in a kind of dialectic or dialogue Faulkner always conducted with himself in his imaginative life—and more, of course. Going novel by novel, I have tried to chart Faulkner’s imaginative development, to the almost total exclusion of any references to what was happening to him in his real everyday life, or, for the most part, to what was happening in history. To have attempted to correlate the fictional, personal, and historical, as others have done, would have required that I write a completely different kind of book. Faulkner was well aware of what was going on in his own time, not only in his own region, but also in his own country and the world at large. He refers to historical events constantly, even in a book apparently so remote from the present as Go Down, Moses. I do not question the importance and relevance of these correlations, but I was not the one to work them out, and it would be a mistake to go searching for them in a book that is so exclusively devoted to the internal evidence of Faulkner’s novels, treated, for the most part, as a total closed and unchanging set of verbal facts, beginning with Flags in the Dust and ending with The Reivers.
Except for the extended analysis and interpretation of Go Down, Moses in Chapter 8—my demonstration chapter, as it were, of what might be done with any major Faulkner novel—my treatment of many of the other novels is somewhat limited by a need to pursue my “thesis.” I feel this limitation most strongly and regrettably in the analysis of Absalom, Absalom!—surely Faulkner’s greatest, most complex, and most intricately narrated novel. There, I have clearly subordinated a full and adequate treatment of the novel—which would have to be a long and delicate operation—to my need to get said what I think needs to be said about Sutpen as one of the most heroic yet destructive selves in Faulkner. In doing this, I have squandered Quentin Compson and Rosa Coldfield, two of Faulkner’s great contradicted virgin selves. But in a book this long, as every writer on Faulkner knows, one must make choices, and I chose to center my book in the analysis of Go Down, Moses rather than Absalom, Absalom!. I feel this limitation, also, in my treatment of Faulkner’s late, great, and much misunderstood A Fable. Every new reading of that novel confirms its complexity and greatness and the hermeneutic difficulties confronting anyone trying to understand this novel and its place in Faulkner’s overall development. The fable of A Fable is not easy to come by, nor is an understanding of the enormous narrative and stylistic complexity of the novel and Faulkner’s decision, for the first and only time in his novelistic life, to use foreign material.
And finally, I suppose, I can be faulted for my somewhat oversimplified and abbreviated treatment of The Town and The Mansion, Faulkner’s two great works of social comedy where, near the end of his career, he returns to its beginnings, and gets rid of the monster he introduced into Yoknapatawpha County even as he was conceiving it in the late 1920s. Of course, he does considerably more than that in these two novels through some of his most generative (and generous) selves: Gavin Stevens, Ratliff, Chick Mallison, Eula Snopes and Linda Snopes. Again, I plead the need to make the overall thesis of the book clear in a concise way, and to indicate, if rather briefly, how far away Faulkner was in his imaginative life in those novels from where he was when he conceived and wrote The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August and Absalom, Absalom!. It is probably less a diminishment of power than a change in perspective from tragic to comic that we would need to deal with here. I have identified the change without trying to deal with it in a detailed way. Perhaps, like many critics, I was more compelled by what destroys individuals than by what might help us purge and redeem our community.
There is not much point, really, in apologizing for these limitations too profusely. I might have done what Cleanth Brooks did, realizing, as he surely did, that one book on Faulkner would never do it: he wrote two more. I am not sure I would have the strength or will power or even the desire to do that. This one has taken me long enough and I have probably managed to say in it most of what I have to say about Faulkner that is of any value. At least I am certain that I have accomplished what I set out to, and it is, after all, the whole book and the overall view that one is really interested in; and it is primarily this, rather than the reading of any single novel, that one wants to add to the now huge corpus of Faulkner criticism and interpretation. Faulknerians reading
