Faulkner from Within. William H. Rueckert
can tell us exactly what he intended, which does not mean that is what was achieved, or that there wasn’t more there than was intended or even consciously recognized. It is here that the whole theory of archetypes and symbolism becomes so important. The texts of all great writers soon transcend the intentions, and maybe even the understanding, of their creators. And it is perfectly clear from the record, that authors are great liars about their texts and that there are some things about any great text so private and secret no author will ever talk about them or divulge them. We may document the external life of an author from the record, but the only reliable record for the interior imaginative life is the record provided by the text itself. The author may lie, but the text can’t—not even so cryptographic a text as Absalom, Absalom!.
I do not mean to argue here that the life of the author and his fictions are not related and connected in interesting and complex ways—if we can but figure them out—and that pursuing this line of investigation often yields surprising, often very startling results. Minter and Wittenberg have clearly shown this to be true.3 What I want to argue is that the fictions have a life of their own; it is the fictions that will survive and remain important, not the life of the author; and even if we knew nothing at all about the author or about anything he might have said about his own work, that would not in any way diminish the power of these great fictions. Their power is intrinsic to them, and can be gotten at directly, by taking a reasonably well-trained critical mind to the texts themselves. Anyone who has taught Faulkner knows this to be true: a whole class learns to live within the imaginative world of the novels, to talk about the characters as if they were really real and as if what happened to them really mattered. It soon learns that this imaginative world, from novel to novel, has a coherence of its own, that certain kinds of characters keep reappearing, certain themes and conflicts are returned to again and again, that, no matter what, the great comic voice speaks out over and over again. These things are all in the novels and no external evidence—from the life, or anywhere else—is needed to explain or justify any of them.
If this seems like an extremely puristic (perhaps critically naive) view of the relationship between the reader and the text, a view that seems to argue that neither scholarship nor criticism is really necessary, that the text can stand alone as a set of internally coherent signs which a reader can work his way into and back out of again—well, yes, it is somewhat puristic, but certainly not critically naive. It argues for the autonomy of the text over and above all else, and for the value of as direct an experience of the text as possible. It is a position, not a dictum or a hard line doctrine. It says, I do not want to approach the texts through the life, or through the vast archeo-critical deposits that have now accumulated over and around every Faulkner novel; it says I do not want to take a psycho-critical approach, trying to explain the texts in terms of the psychology of the author: it says I want to approach the texts directly, as acts of the imagination, realizing that between reality and fiction mysterious transformations take place which are largely the work of the imagination, and that only the fiction, the finished work of the imagination, can tell its own story.
This study of Faulkner’s novels is anything but critically naive. Very high powered and extremely sophisticated critical and interpretive ideas and methods have been used to read the novels and enable me to accomplish what I set out to do when I decided I would write a book on Faulkner and the novel. Anyone familiar with modern critical theory will immediately recognize the pervasive influence of some of the great voices that have spoken to us about literature in our time. Among the most prominent are Kenneth Burke, who is ubiquitous, in this book as in my mind. My passion for Burke is certainly equal to my passion for Faulkner.4 Northrop Frye, especially his Anatomy of Criticism, certainly one of the most powerful and coherent theories of literature developed by anyone in our time, is also everywhere at work in my reading of the novels because his theory of the imagination and the nature and function of its creations, certainly had much to do with my view of these matters. Two of Gaston Bachelard’s many wonderful books, The Psychoanalysis of Fire and The Poetics of Space taught me more than I can acknowledge about the ways of the imagination and the effects of what we read on our own imaginations—a central concern of this study of Faulkner’s novels. René Girard, especially in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure revolutionized the way in which I read novels. His book—still—is certainly one of the most stimulating on the novel that I ever read, and I simply transferred much of what he said about the great European novelists to my study of Faulkner and his major characters—especially what he said about models for the self and mediators, and destructive and generative being. From my own generation, J. Hillis Miller showed me the way better than anyone else, especially in his Poets of Reality, through all the wonderful work he did on the novel and through the different ways he showed us for reading the works of poets and novelists as whole, coherent visions. Finally, I took much Roland Barthes with me to my reading of Faulkner’s novels, especially what I learned from Critique et Vérité and Sur Racine. Both of these books tell us much about the coherence of the imaginative life and the interconnectedness of what it creates—whether in poetry, drama, or fiction.
Had I not read the books of these critics (and many others, of course, including the pioneering critics of Faulkner like Olga Vickery), I could not have written this one on Faulkner; so that, contrary to what I seem to suggest above in my remarks on puristic approaches, I certainly did not come to Faulkner and his novels empty headed. Single-mindedly, yes! You might say that I came loaded for bear or, more exactly, that I came loaded for “The Bear” (as Chapter 7 will show). A book should be read in the spirit in which it was written and should not be asked to do, or be faulted for not doing, what it never intended to do. There are many things that I have not done because they did not—or did not seem to—have anything to do with what I wanted to do. I have not dealt with any of Faulkner’s early work, though at one time I tried to, but abandoned it when it seemed clearly irrelevant to my purpose. I have not discussed Faulkner’s first two novels because I wanted to begin at that point in his career where his true genius as a novelist first discovered and expressed itself. At one point that seemed to be in Sartoris. But when Douglas Day edited the complete text of Flags in the Dust in 1973, it was obvious to any student of Faulkner that Flags in the Dust, not the heavily cut and edited Ben Wasson Sartoris, was the text with which one should begin. So, though I had written part of a chapter on Sartoris, I took it out and wrote a new one on Flags in the Dust when—somewhat embarrassed—I finally got around to reading it. I have not discussed any of Faulkner’s short stories, though I recently reread all of them because none seemed to add anything to what I was able to say in discussing the novels. Perhaps somewhat perversely, 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,