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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

William Faulkner’s Civil War

Carl Rollyson reviews a new book on the Nobel Prize winner and race
Faulkner_RIP

William Faulkner never wrote about the Civil War directly. Why? Michael Gorra attempts an answer in his book The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War. Faulkner scholar Carl Rollyson reviews:

Gorra takes his title from The Sound and the Fury (1929), in which Jason Compson, the son of a Confederate general, tells his son Quentin that ‘was’ is the saddest word. We cannot change the past, since it is over. But Quentin cannot take ‘was’ that way because the past is inescapable: it happens over and over again in memory. Or as Gorra puts it: ‘What was is never over.’ Not only Quentin but Gail Hightower in Light in August, young Bayard Sartoris in Flags in the Dust, and other characters cannot seem to live fully in the present because the past of their defeated land is a constant reminder of human failure, of what the South came to call the ‘lost cause.’

All this is quite familiar to readers of Faulkner and has been the subject of scholarly inquiry now for more than seventy years. But much of that inquiry has been within the parameters of Faulkner’s own fiction. Not enough attention, Gorra argues, has been focused on what Faulkner left out—not merely the Civil War battles but the very idea of the war—what it was about and how the South and the rest of the nation dealt with its defeat. In Flags in the Dust, old man Falls, a Civil War veteran, says he never did figure out the war’s purpose. Gorra suggests that at one time Falls probably did know, but like Southerners and Northerners alike he preferred to forget in a spirit of reconciliation. A whole school of historiography—in the South and North—elided the issue of slavery in favor of explanations dealing with sectional conflict and the incompetence of regional leaders. Faulkner, schooled at the turn of the 20th century, never quite surmounted the deep South view that Reconstruction was a terrible mistake, foisted by the North not only on whites but on the ill-prepared African Americans who could not govern let alone vote with any true knowledge of how to reconstitute a society . . .Gorra’s book, however, is not meant to be a debunking of Faulkner. Gorra realizes that no American novelist has treated race in quite so profound a manner that puts it at the core of what we think about the Civil War. Faulkner’s fiction, as Gorra demonstrates, often gives the lie to what Faulkner the public figure said.

In other news: NASA spacecraft touches asteroid to pick up dirt and rocks. It “unfurled its robotic arm Tuesday, and in a first for the agency, briefly touched an asteroid to collect dust and pebbles from the surface for delivery to Earth in 2023. This well-preserved, ancient asteroid, known as Bennu, is currently more than 200 million miles (321 million kilometers) from Earth. Bennu offers scientists a window into the early solar system as it was first taking shape billions of years ago and flinging ingredients that could have helped seed life on Earth.”

The Department of Justice files an anti-trust lawsuit against Google: “The long-anticipated suit claims that Google has used anticompetitive tactics to maintain its dominance in general search, search advertising, and general search advertising — what the lawsuit calls ‘the cornerstones of its empire.’ The suit targets deals that Google has with device makers like Apple (AAPL), browser developers, and wireless carriers like Yahoo Finance parent Verizon (VZ) to make Google the default search engine. Those agreements effectively shut out competition for search, the suit alleges.”

Advertising-funded journalism is dead, Antonio Garcia-Martinez argues: “COVID has been the great accelerant of every budding trend: Virtual kitchens instead of restaurants, physical stores turning into e-commerce fulfillment centers, universal work from home (at least for the privileged Zoom class), flight from exclusive urban enclaves by the most affluent roiling rural real estate markets, homeschooling pods instead of mismanaged public schools, and —finally—pulling the plug on the ads-revenue ventilator for terminally-ill news journalism. They’re all dying, all of them, laying off writers left and right: ViceVox, Buzzfeed, they’re all dead men walking.”

America’s first culinary celebrity: “James Andrews Beard (1903–1985) was 310 pounds of blazing appetite—for money, for applause, for butter, for more butter. He wore jaunty bow ties and striped aprons. He played with his food, plunging huge hands into whipped egg whites with Rabelaisian glee. He dreamed of a life in theater, but instead invented the television cooking program and the gourmet hamburger.”

What words were added to Webster’s Dictionary the year you were born? Find out here. For me, they include “cash cow,” “mani-pedi,” “slimeball,” and “woke.”

Like it or not, the modern office looks the way it does thanks to monks and Cosimo I de’ Medici: “In 1560, Cosimo I de’ Medici, who later became the grand duke of Tuscany, wanted a building in which both the administrative and judiciary offices of Florence could be under one roof. So he commissioned the building of the Uffizi, which in Italian means ‘offices.’ The lower two floors of the Uffizi were designed as offices for the Florentine magistrates that were in charge of overseeing production and trade, as well as the administrative offices. The top floor was a loggia – an area open on one or more sides.”

Tom Maschler, the publisher who helped found the Booker Prize, has died. He was 87.

The crisis in higher education continues. In Quadrant, Luke Powell argues that a lack of faith is to blame: “In the West today we have abandoned the core values that put these institutions in place . . . Instead, we have a Freudian appraisal of the senses, followed by ‘critical theories’ that find their roots in cultural Marxism.” Gerson MorenoRiaño argues in the Washington Examiner that American institutions in particular have become “anti-democratic and anti-educational.” Federal funding should be withheld from schools that fail to form responsible citizens. College is expensive, and Steven Mintz wonders if getting rid of administrators and campus amenities might help lower costs and improve what matters most: learning. (He’s not sure it will.) But is it learning that parents are actually paying for when they send their kids to school? Ian Bogost writes in the Atlantic: “By one measure, more than two-thirds of students wanted to head back to their colleges. Even parents deeply worried about the safety of their kids still packed bags and road-tripped across the country to drop them off at school. When some colleges moved to Zoom, students and parents revolted. More than 100 colleges, both private (Brown, Duke) and public (Rutgers, North Carolina), have been sued for tuition refunds. You can understand why. It costs almost $60,000 per year to attend Brown, and that’s before room, board, books, and fees. But what did families think they were paying for? Classes are still happening, and degrees will still be conferred. Parents and students are miffed because they don’t really buy teaching when they pay tuition. Instead, they get something more abstract: the college experience.”

Alexander Larman reviews Richard Ovenden’s Burning the Books: “Richard Ovenden has been the Bodleian’s librarian since 2014: he is in ultimate charge of the institution’s 13 million volumes and countless archives, manuscripts and printed material. He is only the twenty-fifth of Bodley’s librarians, as they are known, since 1599. Ovenden has been praised for his high-minded and forward-looking approach to the Bodleian, where he has worked since 2003; it was he, for instance, who was the recipient of Alan Bennett’s decision to donate his archive to the Bodleian in 2008. His book is a passionate defence of the sanctity of knowledge expressed through literature. Its tone is set early on, with an epigraph from Heinrich Heine: ‘Wherever they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn human beings.’”

Photo: University of Wrocław

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