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Faulkner and Time

Faulkner was not fixated on the past, but he was preoccupied with time
William Faulkner's Grave

Jean-Paul Sartre thought William Faulkner was fixated on the past. He wasn’t, Carl Rollyson argues, in The Hedgehog Review, because time, for Faulkner, could never be completely fixed:

‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ Hardly a day goes by without Google Alerts informing me that someone has appropriated that statement—usually prefaced with ‘Faulkner said.’ Well, he never said it. Gavin Stevens does, in Faulkner’s 1951 novel Requiem for a Nun, and like every statement of a fictional character, this aphorism cannot simply be attributed to the author. ‘The past is never dead’ pursued to its logical conclusion is an absurdity, obliterating both present and future.

This idea of Faulkner as fixated on the past has a long pedigree, perhaps beginning with ‘On The Sound and the Fury: Time in the Work of Faulkner,’ a much-read 1939 essay by Jean-Paul Sartre. ‘In Faulkner’s work,’ Sartre contends, ‘there is never any progression, never anything which comes from the future.’ But what he describes in his quotations from the novel are Quentin Compson’s ruminations about time, not Faulkner’s. Sartre says that ‘Faulkner’s vision of the world can be compared to that of a man sitting in an open car and looking backwards.’ But Sartre does not consider that in order for that vision to travel backwards the car has to move forward, and in that progress is change, which Warren Beck characterized as ‘man in motion’ in his classic 1961 study, so titled, of the Snopes trilogy. Sartre—not the first philosopher to pursue an idea that overwhelms and distorts reality—argues that the past ‘takes on a sort of super-reality, its contours are hard and clear, unchangeable.’ Tell that to any close reader of the 1936 novel Absalom, Absalom!, in which the past changes virtually moment by moment depending on who is talking.

Sartre asserts that Faulkner’s characters ‘never look ahead.’ That would come as a surprise to Lena Grove in Light in August (1932), whose road trip is nothing but looking ahead, or to Bayard Sartoris in The Unvanquished (1938), who refuses to perpetuate his father’s cycle of violence, not to mention Linda Snopes in The Mansion (1959), who puts an end to Flem Snopes’s patriarchal fascism. Characters like Ike McCaslin in Go Down, Moses (1942) are doomed because they cannot relinquish their fealty to the past. In Faulkner’s greatest novel, Absalom, Absalom!, a Canadian, Shreve McCannon, announces to his Harvard roommate, the diehard Southerner Quentin Compson, ‘In a few thousand years, I who regard you will also have sprung from the loins of African kings.’ This astonishing prediction comes after Shreve and Quentin have spent hours and hours putting together the fraught trajectory of Thomas Sutpen and his progeny: the fable of a father who rejects his mixed-blood son, of a white brother who murders his black brother, with racial division at the heart of this family tragedy occurring during the Civil War. Nearly forty-five years after that war, Shreve tries to wrench Quentin out of his fixation with the past by asking, ‘Why do you hate the South?’ Quentin’s last words are also the novel’s conclusion: ‘I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!’ Quentin is stalemated because he cannot move beyond the past.

In other news: I was glad to read Tim Keane’s piece on the poetry of Barbara Guest, friend of John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, who also collaborated with painters like Grace Hartigan. Guest is a wonderful, if at times uneven, poet. She’s far better than Kenneth Koch or James Schuyler.

But I do have a small bone to pick with Keane. He states that Guest writes like abstract painters paint: “In postwar New York she met the poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), progenitor of what Ezra Pound branded ‘Imagism’ — a condensed, pictorial form framed in dramatic monologues that read like divinations from ancient Greek theater. Guest adopted that concentrated, image-based, melodic approach, expanding on it through her collagist layering, oblique perspectives, and changeable personae . . . Guest’s piercing inquisitiveness toward concrete realities pushes the language of her poetry beyond its basic signifying functions. The word combinations become strange presences, themselves — like juxtaposed colors in a painting and shifting registers in song.”

You read this sort of thing a lot in essays on Ashbery or O’Hara, but it’s wrong. Granted, these poets were certainly enchanted by the possibility of abstract painting, but the medium of poetry is not the same as that of painting. In painting, scale is spacial. In poetry, it’s temporal. The images and colors of a painting are in contrast with all others in the work at any moment, but in poetry, the images are encountered sequentially. This creates a totally different experience of the work of art. There is no layering in poetry. There is no “push-pull” either (look the term up); nor is the ontology of a poem quite the same as the ontology of a painting. To take one example: Copies of paintings are nearly worthless. Copies of poems are as valuable as the originals and even more so in some cases (if you’ve ever had to pay for permission to reprint, you know what I’m talking about). I wrote about Frank O’Hara’s poem “Why I Am Not a Painter” a few years ago that makes a more detailed case if you’re interested.

Anyway, read Guest but not under the misconception that her poems are like paintings or that a poet must alter the foundational characteristics of his or her genre to be original.

Was Albert Camus murdered? David Coward reviews a new book translated from the Italian that argues he was: “Albert Camus spent Christmas 1959 at his house in the Vaucluse with his family and his publisher, Michel Gallimard. After New Year, instead of returning to Paris by train with his wife and children, he decided to get a lift with Gallimard, a fan of fast cars, and his family, in their 4.5 litre Facel Vega HK500. Camus saw his family off at Avignon station on January 2 and set off the next day with the Gallimards. They stayed the night near Macon, set off again on January 4, lunched at Sens and, an hour or so later, crashed at high speed into one of the plane trees lining a straight stretch of road. Camus was killed outright, Gallimard died a few days later but Mme Gallimard and their daughter survived. There was little traffic at the time but someone remembered that the car was travelling fast and ‘waltzing’ just before impact. Another witness recalled that the speedometer was stuck at 145 kph, though a third swore it read zero. Mme Gallimard said that something seemed to ‘give way’ under the vehicle just before the crash. For Giovanni Catelli, Camus’s death was no accident, but a political assassination. His book, first published in Italy in 2013, starts with the assumption that sets the tone: ‘Fate doesn’t conspire against a man just like that – that’s something men do’. So which men did it? Camus, voice of reason and Nobel prizewinner, certainly had enemies. French nationalists believed he had sold out to the Algerian rebels who, in turn, thought he was too moderate in his support for their struggle. The right resented his Resistance credentials, the left thought he had betrayed the cause. His criticism of fascist regimes riled Spain and his hostility to Soviet interventions in East Berlin and Hungary, plus his championing of Boris Pasternak, displeased Communist Party hardliners everywhere. In Prague in about 2010, Catelli found a ‘crystal clear clue’ which revealed unambiguously that Camus had been murdered by the KGB. The clue was a passing mention in the memoirs of the poet and translator Jan Zábrana (Cély život, A Whole Life, 1992) who had been told by a well-informed, well-connected but, alas, unnamed man that agents had placed a device inside a tyre of Gallimard’s car which would blow it at a pre-set high speed.”

A 400-year-old manuscript volume of John Donne’s poetry has been acquired by the British Library: “Dr. Alexander Lock, curator of modern archives and manuscripts, told the Observer: ‘It’s a manuscript of considerable literary importance, a new substantial work of Donne’s poetry that has not yet been studied.’ Carefully transcribed in ink by an unknown hand, the manuscript is one of the largest and earliest surviving collections of poetry by Donne . . . The volume includes Donne’s famous works, The Storm, The Calm, The Breake of Daye and Sunn Risinge, as well as a few contributions from lesser-known contemporaries. Lock said: ‘There are also about six unpublished, unattributed poems’.”

New Orleans’s vanishing graves: “When Gaynell Brady goes to Holt Cemetery, a historically Black burial ground here in New Orleans, she doesn’t visit any particular grave. She winds her way slowly through the walled-off seven-acre lot, making a circuit of the graves along a narrow, paved path. There are thousands of gravesites in Holt, squeezed together in haphazard rows wherever space allows. Unlike in most New Orleans cemeteries, burials here are belowground, in shallow, unnumbered plots that flood with nearly every rain. Many sites are scrupulously well tended, freshly adorned with flowers and photographs; others would hardly be recognizable as graves were it not for the bones that occasionally surface out of the loosely packed dirt. Generations of Brady’s ancestors are buried in this place, though she doesn’t know where. All of their graves have been lost.”

Dwight Garner reviews John Thompson’s autobiography: “‘I’m six feet 10 inches tall,’ the longtime Georgetown basketball coach John Thompson writes in his posthumously published autobiography. ‘I have a large mouth, a big head and a deep voice. I naturally make a big noise. Not only am I Black, but I have dark skin. My feet are big, my body is big. Sometimes I’m loud, but I’m loud because I’m composed of big things.’ Thompson, who died in August at 78, has left behind an unusually good sports memoir with an unusual title: I Came as a Shadow.”

There has been lots of talk about “fixing” Twitter and Facebook. The platforms don’t do enough to eliminate misinformation or hate speech, progressives argue. They wrongly suppress free speech, conservatives respond, in order to protect progressive ideas. Can they be fixed? No, argue Jon Askonas and Ari Schulman: “The problems of the speech platforms are not ones of bad actors at the fringes. Rather, they are baked into the incentive structures of the platforms themselves, through the kinds of speech they reward and penalize. The platforms are rotten to the core, inducing us all to become noxious versions of ourselves.”

Photos: Nevada

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