1.2 W. Faulkner’s aesthetic views
Martin A. Bertman said that there is something he would call the metaphysical function of literature. It is often overlooked by critics, since, as an interpretive dimension, its importance relates only to great literature. Critical accessibility to great literature, however, is incomplete without its inclusion.
The great literary work’s metaphysical function is to bring the reader to the periphery of his existence. The reader can contemplate the work, have a liberating emotion which puts a distance between himself and other emotions generated by the work. This emotion is the prerational basis for rational discrimination. It is the existential condition that provides the focus for all levels of such discriminations. It suggests the continued relevance of the great work, for those who have the capacity for appropriate discrimination.
Faulkner’s writings by their greatness exemplify this. These writings, especially some of the novels, present an added characteristic, which Martin Bertman called William Faulkner’s Thucydidean aesthetic.
Faulkner thinks to find the individual through history. Like Thucydides, he believes that an examination of the past conflicts of men will uncover for each man the “old verities”. Faulkner’s literary pursuit of the meaning of the Civil War searches for the old verities and truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice”, as he said in his acceptance of the Noble Prize in 1946. His approach assumes the eternality of human nature; and, further, it elevates character, in transaction with chance, as the essential explanatory form of human meaning.
It is understandable that the modern mentality, heir both to evolutionary models and to relativistic theories, can easily misunderstand Faulkner’s historical project cum literature. It may be seen as mere quaint moral mastication or, yet worse, be misunderstood as subject matter rather than as the method or vehicle of the subject matter [5, p.99-105].
William Faulkner in his speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm in December 1950 said: “I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work - a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will someday stand here where I am standing.
Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.
He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.
Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail” [3, p.203-205].
In his novel A Fable Faulkner shows that his aesthetic views are closely connected with the politics. One instance is the moment when ethics trespasses on politics and the marshal incorporates ethics into his politics. The marshal's profound anguish, coming from the conflict between his ardent desire to save his son's life and his sense of obligation to execute him, proves that it originates exactly from the ethics that Marthe represents. On the night after meeting with Marthe, he even tries to persuade the Corporal to escape abroad, saying, “there is the earth. You will have half of it now” [14, p.291], and “I will take Polchek tomorrow, execute him with rote and fanfare” [14, p.292] as “the lamb which saved Isaac” [14, p.292], by the name of which he means his son.
Against the marshal’s wishes, the Corporal chooses to be executed in order to show the adherents that he has not distorted his belief in his action. Therefore, even if prior to the talk with his son the marshal had bragged, “by destroying his life tomorrow morning, I will establish forever that he didn't even live in vain, let alone die so” [14, p.280], the marshal's failure to save his son's life means that he loses to him as much as Marthe loses to him in their confrontation concerning the Corporal's life. Besides that, Marthe's idea that the Corporal loses by death, which is predicated by her ethics, is eventually relativized by the Corporal’s idea that he wins by death, while the Marshal, who understands that death means victory for his son, cannot realize his wish to save his son's life. All these above suggest that, despite the ultimate political utilization of the Corporal’s mutiny and its failure, Marthe, the marshal and the Corporal all lose and win at the same time, with the political/ethical struggle over the execution suspended in undecidability.
Thus, the Corporal’s temporary success in the complete suspension of warfare is the realization of Marthe’s ethics in the form of politics; more exactly, it is the fulfillment of his design to obtaining the hegemony of ethics in a marshal-like forcible way. This is because, in actuality, the Corporal risks three thousand privates’ lives to raise a mutiny for suspension of warfare, and this makes us acknowledge that in his mutinous action there does exist the element of the politics the marshal stands for. In other words, the Corporal’s anti-war action rests in the chiasma of Marthe’s ethics and the marshal's politics. That is to say, Marthe’s ethics is certainly not represented as belonging to the women's exclusive sphere.
Ted Atkinson in his book “Faulkner and the Great Depression: Aesthetics, Ideology, and Cultural Politics” makes interdisciplinary analysis of Faulkner's aesthetic and ideological response to the anxieties that characterized the South and the nation during hard times, Atkinson makes a convincing argument for re-evaluating Faulkner’s fiction between 1927 and 1941 in the context of dominant social and political debates going on at the time. Atkinson makes logical connections between history, biography, cultural theory, and close textual analysis of individual works to highlight Faulkner's insightful engagement with the cultural politics that defined the thirties [12].
While the particular focus of this book is the Great Depression, Atkinson’s persuasive refutation of the claim that Faulkner’s experimental fiction is detached from social, political, and economic realities invites others to further examine Faulkner's work as reflective and constitutive of the social milieu in which he lived and wrote. In charting the history of political debates over literary aesthetics, Atkinson investigates the reasons behind Faulkner’s longstanding reputation as apolitical and “regionally challenged”. He provides a thorough overview both of the perceived schism between proponents of formalism and those of social realism, and of the recent theory illustrating the complex negotiation between them.
Atkinson presents interesting material showing the positive reception of Faulkner in the thirties by advocates of proletarianism, such as publications like New Masses, before launching into a careful analysis that effectively demonstrates how some of Faulkner's most modernist works defy the simplistic polarity between formalism and realism that according to Atkinson has blinded critics to the political Faulkner and prevented them from sufficiently seeing Faulkner “as a writer with his finger on the pulse of American cultural politics” [12, p.105-114].
By situating Faulkner in the context of the relationship between art and politics, Atkinson provides acute and lucid readings of Faulkner's fiction. He sees Mosquitoes as Faulkner’s effort to deal with the changing role of the artist amidst a new rise in social consciousness in the thirties, and The Sound and the Fury as a representation of the inevitable relationship between literary and capitalist modes of production. Other texts, according to Atkinson, mediate some of the central economic and political concerns of the Depression era; he reads representations of rape, lynching, and mob violence in Sanctuary, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and Dry September in the context of fascism and the popularity of Hollywood gangster movies during the thirties, and examines depictions of revolutionary sentiments in As I Lay Dying, Barn Burning, The Hamlet, and The Tall Men in the context of rural dissent, federal relief, the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, and the social activism of groups like the STFU (Southern Tenant Farmers' Union) and the SCU (Share Cropper's Union) [34].
Finally Atkinson understands The Unvanquished as part of a broader trend in American popular culture in the thirties to view the Great Depression through the Civil War, and considers the figure of Granny both as a Southern matriarch and as a gangster figure. Constantly scrutinizing the relationship between text and context, Atkinson reads Faulkner’s texts both as works of art and as cultural artifacts produced by and engaged with the multiple and often contradictory socio-cultural forces of the time.
While Atkinson offers interpretations of specific characters and texts, he resists decisive readings of what Faulkner’s texts reveal about politics, ideology, and the nature of capitalism; rather, he claims to approach Faulkner's fiction and life “by accepting, rather than trying to resolve, the dialectical forces of contradiction” and “thus reading his texts in context as sites of intense ideological negotiation and political struggle” that give aesthetic expression to the Depression-era desire to navigate and order multiple voices. In my opinion, this methodology is paradoxically both strength and limitation. On the one hand, as Atkinson draws attention to the many competing visions of the American experience embedded in the interplay of ideas within and between Faulkner’s texts, he is able to present Faulkner's “nuanced” and “complex” treatments of social relations that produce “a kind of realism cast aside in the utopian endeavors of social realism”. Such an approach allows Atkinson to grapple with modernism's simultaneous escape from and attachment to ideology, Faulkner’s “ambivalent agrarianism”, and the conflict in Faulkner's work between the critique of a socioeconomic order rooted in capitalism and the defense of classical liberalism. On the other hand, Atkinson’s approach leads him to tease out so many divergent voices from Faulkner’s work that it comes somewhat at the expense of interrogating any one at great length.
His approach also weds him to seeing Faulkner as always shifting between leftist and conservative viewpoints - meditating on class warfare and glimpsing the specter of revolution but also sharing in the “dominant-class anxiety” over social upheaval and the subsequent longing to re-impose order. As a result Atkinson seems reluctant, or unable, to consider a more overtly radical Faulkner who escapes his own class position. Atkinson maintains that Faulkner’s work “displays chronic anxiety over dissident impulses that could produce civil unrest and, in turn, fundamental changes in the existing order” and that Faulkner uses art to enact “a process not unlike, but not simply reflective of, the monumental political effort to bring some semblance of order to a volatile mix of competing interests”. One is left suspecting that there might also be textual moments that resist this desire for order at any cost, but Atkinson doesn’t acknowledge any.
Although Atkinson’s subject is certainly vast, and his need to focus on a few of Faulkner’s works is inevitable, one is also left wondering if some omissions such as Pylon, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem, and the figure of Wash Jones both in the short story Wash Jones and Absalom, Absalom! might reveal not just a political Faulkner, but a Faulkner who did not always value order, especially if it came at the expense of class struggle and social justice.
PART II. FEATURES OF A PARABLE
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