what it adds to their knowledge of individual novels and to their reading of Faulkner as a whole. Take Warwick Wadlington’s Reading Faulknerian Tragedy, for example. Once you get past his somewhat cumbersome terminology about voice and performance and get used to his rather tough prose style and get to his early demonstration readings of The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, you realize immediately, with a rush of gratitude, that he has seen something in, or brought something to the reading of Faulkner that you have not encountered before, and that his book will enable you to rethink, not just the novels he discusses so brilliantly in detail, in terms of his thesis, but all the novels, even minor ones like The Unvanquished.
That is always what one hopes for in writing a long book like this one. Beyond this, as in the work of J. Hillis Miller, one would, ideally, like to add not just a reading of—say Dickens or the novels Miller takes up in Fiction and Repetition—but a way of reading novels. In my case, I would like to add an ontological approach to one’s way of reading novels, and in my long demonstration chapter on Go Down, Moses, I would like to confirm my belief that great novels should be read as carefully and as seriously as possible so that we might explore, through them, the imaginative realities only genius makes available to us. These are always extra-aesthetic realities and to explore them in the detailed way I have in Chapter 8 is not a matter of self indulgence—though I certainly did enjoy myself while writing that chapter—but of admiration. I have sometimes been accused of indulging in hagiography in my writing about different writers, but I do not see anything wrong with that. It seems like an appropriate response when you are awestruck by what you read—as I am when I read Faulkner, or Whitman, or Merwin. We must love the way words are used by such writers before we can understand and appreciate them.
This book has been a work of love from beginning to end. I make no apologies for its length. In fact, I wish it were longer so that I could have done some things more adequately. But everything has its limits, including the patience of readers, even that of the most devoted Faulknerian. Of all the writing that I have done, this is the one from which I learned the most and the one that most completely confirmed me in my belief that one is never done with a great writer—or text—until one has written about him, her, or it. This means, of course, that we are never done with most of the great writers we read even if we are teachers. I taught Faulkner for years and worked out much of this book in embryonic form in the classroom with my students. The difference between where I was in my head and in my knowledge of Faulkner before I began the book and after I finished it can hardly be calculated. Writing the book was one long, exciting act of discovery. I can never have such an experience of Faulkner again, which is kind of sad, but then, that is the paradoxical pleasure of writing any book like this one. We lay the author to rest, not in a coffin or graveyard, but on our study shelf. We lay the way in which his works (words) have compelled us to rest in the sense that, having been compelled, we are coerced into writing about these works in what really amounts to an act of devotion. It is a pleasant-painful coercion; passion fuels it and, like Faulkner searching out the meaning of Joe Christmas or Thomas Sutpen or Ike McCaslin, we are driven forward, novel by novel, until we have searched out each novel and its characters and are satisfied that we understand more than we did when we began. We have laid the turbulence with which we began to rest (and can’t rest until we have done this) and at the end of the long hermeneutic journey, from Flags in the Dust to The Reivers, all passion spent, we can look back with pleasure upon the almost unbearable intensity and excitement of the journey itself.
But we know it is over. Faulkner is all back on the shelves, in his proper order, your thousands of pages of notes are all put away; you know that there is always more you could have done with Faulkner’s novels but you also know that you are finished with Faulkner, that you will never have to do him again, that you never will do him again. His novels are as alive and magical as ever. You could pick any one of them off the shelf and read it again with great pleasure—some for the tenth, the fifteenth time, the umpteenth time—and you might even wish that you had done it differently or more adequately in the book. But you never will. You might do it differently in your head, but the book is finished, set; how could it ever be other than it is. It is just the way you wanted it to be, even though perfection is not possible in this world, or any other, for that matter. It is what you could do with what you had in your head, at that point in time, in those places. It is how you saw Faulkner. It is how you will always see Faulkner. Had you wanted Faulkner to stay fluid in your mind, you should never have written this long book about him.
But you did. And here it is, for worse or better, one long systematic celebration of this great American genius and the truly wondrous creations of his imagination.
Take heart from the following:
A basic contention of this [book] is that great writers apprehend intuitively and concretely, through the medium of their art, if not formally, the system in which they were first imprisoned together with their contemporaries. Literary interpretation must be systematic because it is the continuation of literature. It should formalize implicit or already half explicit systems. To maintain that criticism will never be systematic is to maintain that it will never be real knowledge. The value of critical thought depends not on how cleverly it manages to disguise its own systematic nature or how many fundamental issues it manages to shirk or to dissolve but on how much literary substance it really embraces, comprehends, and makes articulate. The goal may be too ambitious but it is not outside the scope of literary criticism. Failure to reach it should be condemned but not the attempt. (René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel , 3)
Abbreviations
AA Absalom, Absalom!
ALD As I Lay Dying
F A Fable
FD Flags in the Dust
GDM Go Down, Moses
H The Hamlet
ID Intruder in the Dust
KG Knight’s Gambit
LA Light in August
MA The Mansion
MO Mosquitoes
P Pylon
R The Reivers
RN Requiem for a Nun
SA Sartoris
SF The Sound and the Fury
SN Sanctuary
SP Soldier’s Pay
T The Town
UV The Unvanquished
WP The Wild Palms
I 1927–1932
1 Faulkner Discovers His Native Territory
Flags in the Dust (1926-1927; published 1973)
Faulkner was certainly much more correct in his response to Flags in the Dust than were the many editors who rejected his third novel. He knew what he had discovered, even if they had not, and, retrospectively, we now realize just how right he was. What he had discovered was what he was destined to create: Yoknapatawpha and its people; or, as he so nicely labeled it, his “own little postage stamp of native soil”—the territory his imagination would create, create in, and be nourished by all the rest of his life. In addition, he also discovered the narrative mode and novelistic structure that were to characterize all the rest of his novels. Flags in the Dust, for example, develops (unfolds) by shifting from one character to another throughout the novel
