William and Dean and Mark and Joey (Part 2)

I don't really know Joey's feelings about William Faulkner, but I suspect that he liked him. I suspect this because Joey liked to challenge himself with difficult books, and Faulkner wrote many difficult books. Joey also liked male American writers from the first half of the nineteenth century, and Faulkner qualifies on that score, too. I imagine he read lots of Faulkner at UVA, where I further imagine Faulkner is the closest thing to a religious faith that more than a few UVA English professors profess (this is total conjecture, but it is not, I think, groundless). I also know that Joey had at least read As I Lay Dying in high school, because I read it in high school five years before he did, and the reading list didn't change much in that period. I remember liking the book but not getting it. Actually, I remember really liking the parts that I did get - the parts that were narrated by reasonably coherent narrators, the parts that were like finding a rich mineral vein in a particularly stingy mine - and being bemused by, but not hostile toward, the parts that I didn't get.

As a matter of fact, I'm almost certain Joey and I discussed Faulkner at least once - when we passed through Oxford together on that road trip whose purpose and destination I can't seem to remember. By that time I may also have read The Sound and the Fury, but that almost certainly would not have added to the interestingness of anything I might have had to say on the topic of William Faulkner. I simply cannot remember what might have transpired in that conversation, though, or even if it happened.

All this is to say that when I read Absalom, Absalom! recently, I wasn't really trying to read it for Joey's sake, as I had done with Don Quixote, which I knew he hadn't read and which I therefore felt I needed to read for him. I read this one for my sake but with him in mind - always in mind - and because I knew Faulkner was working on it when his own brother died. So I was also half-looking for that moment in the text when Faulkner would have heard the news, rushed out to identify the body, made the funeral arrangements, chosen the inscription, and then returned to his study and his typewriter to resume the tale. I didn't actually expect to find this place, this moment of rupture, this space between words or sentences or letters when the thread broke and he found himself more loosely tethered to the earth than he had once been. I know that writers revise, that Faulkner may well have wadded up his first draft after the funeral and started again. I know that he outlined his stories beforehand and may simply have edited the outline. It is possible that he may have gotten no further than the first few words ("From a little after two oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon") when he got the call about his brother, and yet I still kept one eye open for that moment. I also know that Faulkner's style makes it virtually impossible to notice any sort of rupture in the writer's process at all, not because it is all polished smooth, but because it is so anarchic that it might as well have been written in a whirlwind.

The subject of Absalom, Absalom! is the Sutpen family, whose story, told by several people to a young man named Quentin as well as by Quentin himself (this is the Quentin of The Sound and The Fury, who ends up drowning himself in the Charles River of Boston at the age of 19), is symbolic of the South itself. Faulkner's method is to uncover the tale of the family's ascent and demise slowly, passing over the same episodes repeatedly, revealing a little more each time - like wipers on a dirty windshield, slowly providing more clarity with each pass - and it requires quite a bit of patience to allow things to unfold. (It also requires quite a bit of silence. If I heard so much as a cat meowing in the next room, I'd have to back up and start again - I have rarely read a book with more concentration.) Slowly, then, you learn about Thomas Sutpen, who comes to northern Mississippi with a team of Haitian slaves and begins building a house and then a family for himself. Having come from nothing (an impoverished hillside in western Virginia), he is determined, in classic American-dream style, not just to prosper but also to found a family, a dynasty, that will last. But then the war comes (the Civil War - this is all in the nineteenth century), and Sutpen's past catches up with him, and one of his sons kills the other son - kills his brother, that is - and so Sutpen's dreams are shattered and, long after his death, and just to drive home the point, his house burns down.

I'm ruthlessly simplifying what is, of course, a very complex story, with all sorts of biblical and racial and historical and epic things going on, but I want to get to the part about Sutpen's sons. We learn very early on that Sutpen's son Henry killed a man who was about to marry his (Henry's) sister, a man named Charles Bon. Only later do we learn that Charles Bon was also Sutpen's son, making him Henry's brother - a fact of which Henry, it seems, was aware, and which would also mean that Charles Bon had been about to marry his own (Charles Bon's) sister. Still with me? I have actually spoiled the plot a little bit, for which I apologize, but I need to make a point.

So one fictional brother kills the other. The real Faulkner felt guilty about his own brother's death. Is there a connection there? Did Faulkner decide that this was how his novel would develop after Dean had his plane crash? I don't know, but I imagine some Faulkner scholar somewhere has sorted this out. I do know that Faulkner knew a lot about mortality and grief - knew about it from the death of his infant daughter Alabama 

and from the sudden, haunting death of his brother Dean - and he wrote that knowledge into the story of these two brothers. Here is what Rosa, Henry's aunt (though younger than Henry), says about learning of Charles Bon's death, the death of a man she'd never met but nevertheless loved:

There are some things which happen to us which the intelligence and the senses refuse just as the stomach sometimes refuses what the palate has accepted but which digestion cannot compass - occurrences which stop us dead as though by some impalpable intervention, like a sheet of glass through which we watch all subsequent events transpire as though in a soundless vacuum, and fade, vanish, are gone, leaving us immobile, impotent, helpless, fixed, until we can die.

Has there ever been a better description of the weird unreality of grief? Of the way it pulls you out of the world and into some other sphere that you're trapped inside of but won't - can't - accept? And that penultimate word, "can," right there before die: it captures, exactly, the yearning for release that comes with this sort of thing.

A little earlier Rosa says a similar thing, calling her grief, "that dream state in which you run without moving from a terror in which you can not believe, toward a safety in which you have no faith," and I think that also catches it perfectly. The man who wrote these things knew what it felt like to lose someone suddenly and horribly.

There's quite a bit of this  Absalom, Absalom!, as well as with lots of dark brooding about fate and destiny and the large, unseen forces that shape a man's (or a family's) life, and over which men (and women) have no control. I confess to feeling at times that my own family was living under a sort of Faulknerian curse - the tragedies that my parents and I have endured since the carefree days of my childhood sometimes seem as if they can only have been devised by some gang of sinister gods - but that idea is usually fleeting. More frequently, I feel luckier than I have any right to feel, and more in control of my life than I ought to, and so I don't worry too much about the epic tragedy that Faulkner would make of my family story. Besides, I'm not sure we're Southern enough.

But then there's this. I think it's right to assume that Faulkner dealt with his grief by writing. For someone who talked frequently about the unstoppable flood of words that he simply had to get out of him, for someone who wrote as if he were channeling words from some other realm, and, finally, for someone who frequently wrote while drunk (and was frequently drunk), writing would have been the most natural (maybe the only) way through his sorrow. And there is a hint in this book about the importance he gave to the endeavor. Writing was not therapy for Faulkner, nor was it simply a way to organize his thoughts, nor was it a way to share a story with others in order to alleviate some of their pain. It was a way to achieve immortality, that immortality that the deceased, perhaps, was unable to achieve for himself.

One of the characters, Judith, decides to give a letter to a slight acquaintance, who subsequently tells the story. It is her only letter from her dead beau (and brother) Henry Bon, and she explains her decision in the following way:

Read it if you like or dont read it if you like. Because you make so little impression, you see. You get born and you try this and you dont know why only you keep on trying it and you are born at the same time with a lot of other people, all mixed up with them, like trying to, having to, move your arms and legs with strings only the strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs and the others all trying and they dont know why either except that the strings are all in one another's way like five or six people all trying make a rug on the same loom only each one wants to weave his own pattern into the rug, and it cant matter, you know that, or the Ones that set up the loom would have arranged things a little better, and yet it must matter because you keep on trying or having to keep on trying and then all of a sudden it's all over and all you have left is a block of stone with scratches on it provided there was someone to remember to have the marble scratched and set up or had time to, and it rains on it and the sun shines on it and after a while they dont even remember the name and what the scratches were trying to tell, and it doesn't matter.

(Remember that Faulkner chose the inscription for his brother's grave.)

And so maybe if you could go to someone, the stranger the better, and give them something - a scrap of paper - something, anything, it not to mean anything in itself and them not even to read it or keep it, not even bother to throw it away or destroy it, at least it would be something just because it would have happened, be remembered even if only from passing from one hand to another, one mind to another, and it would be at least a scratch, something, something that might make a mark on something that was once for the reason that it can die someday, while the block of stone cant be is because it never can become was because it cant ever die or perish...

We're mortal, and so we write, but the medium on which we write is also transitory. So we need to give what we write to another mortal, even if what we write is never read, just so that what we write will be something that will have happened to someone. In that way, what we write will be alive in the way that a tombstone is not.

That, anyway, is what I make of this passage. And it's as good a justification as any for what I'm trying to here. Faulkner, as far as I know, didn't write explicitly about his brother - he didn't write a memoir about him, certainly didn't write a blog - but he wrote through him, through his loss, and in so doing, he defied death. It's really not a bad way of looking at things.