An American Epic
Today, in 1942, Go Down, Moses was published. Though he had already published a few of the stories in The Saturday Evening Post, and the first printing initially carried the subtitle and other stories, Faulkner always meant the work to read as a novel. The chapters, which are more or less self-contained narratives, work a lot like my own family. That is, there are certain episodes in the history of my family that have clear beginnings, middles, ends. Some of these I can remember myself, but the majority are stories which have been passed down into a collective family memory. These stories are never contained by the present, nor are they mere slaves to the past. These stories often misremember and mischaracterize, but they deeply ground the way my family understands itself. This is one of the reasons that I find the novel so compelling. It crystallizes how storytelling from generation to generation interprets a family's history for the family's own understanding. The dedication, for instance, is striking:TO MAMMY
CAROLINE BARR
Mississippi
[1840-1940]
Who was born in slavery and who gave to my family a fidelity without stint or calculation of recompense and to my childhood an immeasurable devotion and love
Faulkner, of course, is writing for us as much as he is writing for himself. One of my favorite tutors here at St. John's, Brother Robert, told me that he thought of "The Bear" as the definitive American epic. He was ninety-two when told me this, and had been teaching for nearly fifty years, still sharp as a tack. I must say I agree him. Here is a single sentence:
It was as if the boy had already divined what his senses and intellect had not encompassed yet: that doomed wilderness whose edges were being constantly and punily gnawed at by men with plows and axes who feared it because it was wilderness, men myriad and nameless even to one another in the land where the old bear had earned a name, a through which ran not even a mortal beast but an anachronism indomitable and invincible out of an old dead time, a phantom, epitome and apotheosis of the old wild life which the humans swarmed and hacked at in a fury of abhorrence and fear like pygmies about the ankles of a drowsing elephant; - the old bear solitary, indomitable, and alone; widowed childless and absolved of mortality - old Priam reft of his old wife and outlived all his sons.As much as I love the novel because it is the human heart in conflict, I love the sheer mastery of language. It is both humbling and inspiring, and brings back memories of Searcy in the dog days of summer, sitting on the porch with sweet tea, and long conversation. I might just read it again.
11 Comments:
I'm with you on loving it, but I think also that this is now only America as misremembered. That America -- gnawing at the wilderness -- is gone. It's time the country came up with a more constructive defining narrative, one that elevates sustainability rather than conquest and escape.
I don't really like Faulkner. I never have. Maybe it's because I just never really identified with the South that he portrayed. I do appreciate his importance, and I know that he wrote well. The Big Sleep starring Bogart, for which Faulkner wrote the screenplay, is one of my favorite movies. All of this was to say, maybe I'll try giving him another read.
Jonathan,
Excellent comment. I think you may be right. But I wonder if that age, the mythic past, is always just out of reach. Always on the edge of memory and prone to fantastic exaggeration. (Tolkien for example?) Moreover, both the Iliad and the Odyssey, our first poems, are looking backward to the age of heroes, articulating something lost in the current time. This is the narrative country of "The Bear." But the last chapter, which is the title story, is not set there. It is natural realism (taking "natural "in a very Cartesian sense). I think that is part of why the novel is so painful, and so good.
Steven,
Have you tried any of the short stories, especially "Barn Burning"? Or the longer "Old Man"? Whether you pick up Faulkner or no, happy reading.
Everett -- It's interesting that you brought up the idea of mythic time. You may know that Mircea Eliade, who is the main proponent of that idea, was the dean at my school for a long time. We're now all very busy discrediting his ideas... as those things go.
But... I don't really consider either the Iliad or the Odyssey as my first poems (cuts you deep, I know...) -- I'm more a Gilgamesh kind of guy -- but I know what you mean.
Steven: Faulkner's short stories are much better, I think, than the novels. There are even some set far outside the South.
Misremembered, that's a great way to describe how the past becomes the epic past.
Taylor and I had a conversation about an article describing this bizzare central Florida character who, on gov't contract, catches wild hogs by hand. That kind of bizarre character, the caricature, really, is something Taylor thought was distinctly Southern. I think, too, that it is the existence of these kinds of bizarre characters, still kicking in the South, that gives the epic past a solid place in the South.
Kelly's aunt tells a story about her dad's thumb being pulled off in a farm accident, and him blowing it off, and sticking it back on with tape. It was always a little crooked after that. In the days when men were men.
As Everett said about a similar story while in AR, it happened, whether it did or not.
Jonathan,
I agree, we do probably need to move on to a more constructive, less consumptive story. I'll refer you to this:
https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=33241542&postID=117024765840434663
earlier thread for information on how you can help. And can you avoid the mythic past in Gilgamesh?
It's not about avoiding the mythic past. It's about using the myth responsibly.
Jonathan, I agree with your very first statement; but, I wonder what that new defining narrative would look like. Also, isn't myth always a symptom and not a cause? Can a myth be imposed on a culture without emerging organically from it?
Taylor -- I don't see myth as a symptom of anything, really, much less "always." It is, however, always a cause.
Could you flesh out how you come to that idea? I'm interested.
Can myth be consciously created and instituted like a social program? Or does it become myth only by emerging out of the culture organically, as certain plants grow only under the circumstances of particular ecosystems? It seems to me that coming up with a more constructive defining narrative would be looking at the problem from the wrong side. The frontier myth of taming a wild Nature came out of an historical event - the contact of Protestant European civilization with something wholly 'other.' In the same way, you would be hard pressed to find the old Southern tragic myth of a underdog civilization beaten down by forces of Industrialization and Barbarism before the momentum of anti-slavery legislation that led to the civil war.
I disagree. I don't think audience receptivity is the same thing as authorship. Moreover, theme and setting as a trope are not the same thing as myth. Third, the myth about the South is not that it's lost (which is a theme that enters its literature as it's lost), but rather that it was something "more than" before it was "lost".
I think we might want to be careful with our terms here.
And yes, I do think that once a culture accepts a narrative as its primary text of self-identity, people in it misremember the lives to conform with that narrative (cf. Ricoeur's study of Aristotelian ideas of mythos). People mess with narratives all the time in order to inject their agenda into it -- e.g. the current effort to recast the civil rights era (now considered to be a hero-myth) to include other groups that consider themselves disenfranchised.
Finally, certain narratives about America, especially those who think of it as a noble & pristine wilderness to be civilized, come from Catholic Frenchmen like Rousseau, had their parallels in European Romanticism (with the same misassumptions about a European nature thought of as equally wild and untamed), etc. etc. To miscast any myth-level idea about America as rooted in America or spawned by it, and thus as inextricable or "organically grown" from it, is simply to be dishonest about the history of ideas -- and, for that matter, to worship on the equally mythic altar of American exceptionalism.
Hmm. I am trying to whack through the tangle of my own thoughts to adress your points, Jonathan. I realize that I'm working from somewhat vague notions of myth, narrative, history, nature, etc. Their origins are probably obscurly hidden somewhere in my past reading. I won't try to be exhaustive but just to make a couple of points.
As far as Nature, America, and the Protestant / Catholic views of it, I am thinking specifically of some reading I did on Robert Frost and nature, specifically a book of essays called 'Homage to Robert Frost." In one of the essays, I forget which, the author speaks of the difference between the British and American perceptions of Nature - a comparison which rang true to me at the time. For the British, no matter how 'wild' the landscape (a taste which didn't arise until the Romantics), it always had a connection with human history. For Americans, Nature and wildness have a darker and more threatening aspect. One only has to imagine the first groups of settlers, huddled together in settlements along the coast, aware of the huge and somewhat impenetrable continent to their West to get a feel for this new idea of Nature (you can see this in Hawthorne's brooding narratives about colonial New England - and this atmosphere is probably a distant cousin to Conrad's Dark Continent). I would probably contend that part of the European Romantic fascination with Nature as untamed wildness is born in part out of contact with the New World and Africa, and that in that sense it does emerge from an historical event.
My main point about the 'organically grown' business is that a writer who sits down with the idea, "I'm going to create a narrative about America that will be more constructive than the one we have currently" will probably write a very bad book. I think I was simply saying that "you can't set out to change society with art" - something that would be akin to a culture wide ad-campaign rather than a truly artistic endeavor.
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