How should we now regard this pathbreaking, Nobel Prize–winning author, who grappled with our nation’s racial tragedy in ways that at once illuminate and disturb — that reflect both startling human truths and the limitations of a white southerner born in 1897 into the stiling air of Mississippi's closed and segregated society? In our current moment oif racial reckoning, Faulkner is certainly ripe for rigorous scrutiny.His article is a review of a new book by Michael Gorra, The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War (2020). Faulkner is certainly a legitimate subject for criticism. And Faust's critique of Faulkner's "moderate" position on segregation seems reasonable. Although it takes a bit of effort now to recall that in Mississippi politics well into the 1960s, "moderate" was almost as much of a cuss word as "Communist". His race war comment in 1956 is probably the most obnoxious thing he was ever quoted as saying. The British journalist who published it insisted that the quote was accurate, although he did say that at the time of the interview, Faulkner appeared to be "inebriated", I think he put it. Faulkner worded his denial, that he had been quoted saying something no sober man would say and no sane man would believe.
Part of the challenge in analyzing Faulkner's stories is that it's easy to confuse what his characters say with what Faulkner himself is thinking or advocating. One famous quote is constantly cited to Faulkner, which Faust also does in the article, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." (Faust also gets the quote slightly wrong, but that’s also not unusual. But it's actually a quote from Gavin Stevens in "Requiem for a Nun." (Hello, Atlantic proofreaders? It's in Act 1, Scene 3.) Stevens is a recurring Faulkner character who is often taken to reflect the author's viewpoint. But Stevens plays a particular role in the stories, of being a voice of civilization and enlightenment in Yoknapatawpha County, a white lawyer with a romantic, sentimental outlook on life.
When it comes to the Civil War, what strikes me strongly about Faulkner's work is that he obviously put some serious effort into studying the actual history of the nineteenth century. And his fictional treatments do not reflect the Dunning school/Lost Cause interpretation of that history that was the dominant interpretation in the US during most of the 20th century.
The book The Unvanquished that Faust discusses has a stunning description of how Reconstruction democracy was violently overthrown in Mississippi. One of the main characters, Drusilla, on her wedding day, instead of going to the church, goes to the polling place to help her fiancé Sartoris steal the ballot box to make sure that black votes don't get counted. Drusilla brings the stolen ballot box home, and the narration describes her "standing there in her torn dress and the ruined veil and the twisted wreath hanging from her hair by a few pins." Sartoris' sister demands that she come into the house so she can fetch a minister to do the wedding. "'No,' Drusilla said. 'This is an election. Dont you understand? I am voting commissioner'."
That's still the best literary image I've come across for the "Redemption" (anti-Reconstruction) overthrow of the postwar democracy in the South: the stereotypical soiled innocence of the wedding dress and the priority of white supremacist politics over allegedly sacred traditions. (Drusilla goes on to sleep with Sartoris' son, further reflecting her attitude toward Tradition and Sacred Honuh.)
Gorra (and Drew Gilpin Faust) apparently read this story of the Sartoris family as a position of Faulkner's which "simply parrots the view of Reconstruction that was current in Faulkner’s childhood and for some decades thereafter.” And they may have a decent literary argument for that position. But there ain't no way that presentation of the cynical and sordid overthrow of Reconstruction was typical of Lost Cause presentations of it.
Faust’s article does acknowledge that the scene in The Unvanquished scene that very memorably depicts the slaves' mass desertion of their masters once word spread of the Emancipation Proclamation. That is a big reminder of how the resulting loss of labor power was also a huge blow to the Confederacy, and also not something the Lost Cause ideologues wanted to even mention. Whatever his faults were, Faulkner was operating in a whole different part of the literary universe than Margaret Mitchell or Thomas Dixon.
Faust mentions a short story which Faust says presents a sympathetic image of the war criminal and white terrorist Nathan Bedford Forrest.
He doesn’t name the story, but it's clearly, "My Grandmother Millard," which apparently was first published as "My Grandmother Millard and General Bedford Forrest and the Battle of Harrykin Creek." The story also involves the Sartoris family of The Unvanquished. It focuses on an incident during the Civil War, and the notorious Forrest does appear as a character.
But it's not at all clear to me why Faust and Gorra find the story disturbing. The story actually turns around a comical plot device in which a young Sartoris woman refuses to marry a suitor because of his last name for a reason that isn't immediately clear to the reader. Forrest provides a resolution to the problem. But the story itself pictures a slaveowning planter's family that is desperately clinging to their former way of life that is plainly disintegrating around them. Forrest himself appears in the story not as a military hero but a Confederate officer whose position obliges him to do the bidding of a rich lady who clearly has no clear grip on her real life situation.
Faust says the story "presents the slave broker and Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest in a generous manner that Gorra finds particularly 'hard to stomach'.” At least as I read it, Forrest in the story is more a contemptable figure than a hero. He even changes the name for a particular battle at her direction. Maybe we could say that his malleability makes him seem less villainous than the real Forrest was. But he certainly doesn't come off to me as a grand representative of the Master Race in this story.
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