B006JHRY9S EBOK (2 page)

BECOMING FAULKNER

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 same strings are hitched to all the other arms and legs … like five or six people all trying to 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.

—Absalom, Absalom!

What would a life look like if its inner sense conformed to this passage? How might someone else try to tell such a life? We assume that a life worth the telling involves a shaping force and weight, eventually cohering into something more than “so little impression.” But this passage insists on messiness and waste, on fruitless labor. It focuses on the failure of personal coherence to emerge in time. Others are there, alongside you from the beginning, and they get in your way. They desire as urgently as you do; their desire interferes with yours. The scene is mystifying. Each individual struggles to make something, but the larger cultural loom on which the individual “patterns” are plotted and pursued is defective, in ways that those striving below might guess at but cannot alter.
¹
All the actors become entangled like stringed puppets helplessly careening into each other’s space. The more they strive, the more inextricable the entanglement.

Becoming Faulkner
: my title seems to invite us to consider the notion of “becoming”—of making something out of a life—in a more positive light. It promises the story of Faulkner’s becoming a writer and eventually a world-renowned artist. One anticipates a narrative of obstacles encountered
and eventually dealt with. One expects Faulkner to achieve his becoming—to get his arms and legs (and mind and feelings and imagination and typewriter) into the clear. “Becoming” implies a gathered coherence, an achieved project not unlike Judith’s sought-after weaving, something gaining in sense and wholeness as it progresses. William Faulkner did become a great novelist (who would deny it?), I have become a writer about his achievement (my book is in your hands), and you may become a reader of my book.
May
—there’s the rub. Inasmuch as you are now where he and I once were—in the uncertainty of the present moment—you are in a position to recognize the concealed time-trick on which all claims of
becoming
are premised. You might
not
become my reader. In the present moment, this is something that has started but not yet concluded. You could put the book down. Move back a bit further in time, when this book was still to be written, and I might not have become its author. Move back further yet, to the present time of Faulkner, and Faulkner might not have become Faulkner. We know what any becoming looks like only because,
after
it has taken place, its force and weight are recognizable. Retrospection magically transforms the messy scene of ongoing present time into the congealed order it (later) appears always to have been headed for. But in the turbulent present moment—prior to an achieved becoming—there is … what?

In the vortex of the present moment there is frustration and confusion. Confined to that moment (which is where all human beings are confined, the time frame in which life itself is lived), one experiences—whenever the unanticipated arrives—bafflement rather than recognition. And one’s ability to cope with the unexpected is inseparable from the resources culturally bequeathed for coping. In Faulkner’s desiccated early-twentieth-century South—a place stubbornly facing backward—these resources were especially tenuous. Buffeted by events, one’s strenuous moves entangled with the countermoves of others, the Faulkner protagonist—like Judith Sutpen in that passage from
Absalom!
—feels certain of one thing:
I cant matter
. Judith experiences her life not as a project in the process of becoming but as an inexplicable derailment. Whatever undivulged purpose “the Ones that set up the loom” had in mind, it was hardly her own prospering. Judith goes to her grave not enlightened by the calm that follows a storm but marked by the storm that precedes any calm. Likewise, the trajectory of Faulkner “becoming Faulkner” took shape as a risk-filled project in ongoing time. Indeed, once his incapacity for progress ceased to torment him, his work began to lose its capacity to startle, awaken, disturb. The outrage of unpreparedness is the traumatic experience he learned to
narrate—an outrage that, could he have avoided it in his own life, he might well have done so. And been freed perhaps from writing masterpieces.

Faulkner’s life registered—and his art explored—the priority of storm over calm, priority in both senses: before, and more (mis)shaping. Calm is a function of retrospective clarification—a seductive ordering after the fact. On completing
Requiem for a Nun
(a novel of failed recognitions), Faulkner wrote his friend Else Jonsson: “I am really tired of writing, the agony and sweat of it … I feel like nothing would be as peaceful as to break the pencil, throw it away, admit I dont know why, the answers either” (SL 315). We expect lives to make sense over time (we certainly want our own to do so), and we insist that narratives show us such becoming. Perhaps our deepest anticipation when reading fiction is to experience, once again, that precious sense of complex lives coming into focus and revealing their depth over time. By contrast, Faulkner’s great work all but heroically refuses the premise—hardwired into narrative itself—that time brings illumination. Time hardly did so for him. If that is true, then—to return to the question raised above—how should one narrate a life whose underlying sense of itself was “I dont know why”: it
cant matter?

Biographers typically refuse this question. And no wonder. We go to biography in order to see a human life composed from the later vantage point of the biographer—the life made sense of as a completed passage through time, even if (for the subject of the biography) it didn’t make much sense while it was happening. Faulkner’s authorized biographer, Joseph Blotner, labored for some twelve years following Faulkner’s death in 1962 (and many years prior to it) to complete his massive eighteen-hundred-page biography. Blotner drew on the passage of time for all his chapter titles: periods as long as “Summer, 1897—September, 1902” (chapter 9, the first on Faulkner’s own life) and as short as “Autumn 1921” (chapter 20, a tumultuous few months). More openly than in most biographies, Blotner’s chapter titles signal his employment of linear time as a structural principle for plotting his subject’s life. Between the opening time-title and the closing one (“May-July 1962”), Blotner was able to order a life span of sixty-five years, to shape its becoming. Looking back at the celebrated achievements of the men and women who are their subjects, what can biographers do but narrate their subjects’ lives coming into focus over time? Biographies go from birth and insignificance to death and the loss of someone who, finally, mattered so much. But what if, to himself, the subject of the biography remained persuaded that life did not add up, that life was “the same frantic steeplechase toward nothing everywhere and
man stinks the same stink”—himself included—and that his own experience
cant matter
(FCF 15)?

Faulkner was convinced that his own life was not worth the telling. The more Malcolm Cowley attempted (in 1946) to wrest from him a biographical narrative (as part of Cowley’s introduction to
The Portable Faulkner
), the more Faulkner resisted. A few years later, when Cowley sought approval for a larger biographical essay, Faulkner eloquently rebuked the entire enterprise: “this [the biographical essay] is not for me. I will protest to the last: no photographs, no recorded documents. It is my ambition to be, as a private individual, abolished and voided from history, leaving it markless, no refuse save the printed books.… It is my aim, and every effort bent, that the sum and history of my life, which in the same sentence is my obit and epitaph too, shall be them both: He made the books and he died” (FCF 126). This memorable statement (one finds variations of it throughout Faulkner’s pronouncements) deserves consideration. And not just because Faulkner’s insistence is motivated in part by his determination to stop lying about his role in World War I. More deeply, the rebuke intimates an insight into the pitfall of biography itself. It is as though Faulkner glimpsed that biography is incapable of doing justice to the inconsistency and waywardness of its subject’s actual life in time. The life itself loses its messy authenticity when it enters the monumentalizing mangle of biography: it emerges straightened out, time-ordered, false.

From Blotner in 1974 through Jay Parini (2004) and André Bleikasten (2007), Faulkner’s biographers rehearse not
cant matter
but their various constructions of why the life of Faulkner does matter. This is what biographers do. And yet they all run into trouble. Grateful as one is for their detailed account of the events that make up Faulkner’s life—and my debt to the authorized biographer, Joseph Blotner, is enormous—one comes away with the sense of something crucial missing: something that might compellingly connect the disturbed life with the disturbing work that arose from it. Too often the two are treated as parallel tracks that do not meet. We get Faulkner’s story but not, as Henry James would put it, the story of that story, the yeasty possibilities of its troubled inner structure. Or, to use Faulkner’s own metaphor in
Absalom
, the biographers scrupulously provide a multitude of sticks—the innumerable twigs and branches of the life and the work—but not their incandescence when brought together, not the bonfire. We do not get the composite
gesture
that an imaginative placing of the life against the work—the work against the life—might let us glimpse.

The biographers’ admiration for the work—which certainly
does matter
—motivates their desire to find in Faulkner’s life a kindred story of achieved
becoming. But one ends up discovering, as Jonathan Yardley put it in his review of Parini’s
One Matchless Time
, “there isn’t all that much of a story to tell. Apart from his writing—which in Faulkner’s mind seems to have taken place in its own separate universe … he really didn’t do much.” Faced with this imbalance between the unforgettable events in the fiction and the forgettable ones (often sodden as well) in his life, biographers have employed a number of strategies. Blotner (who knew Faulkner and admired him greatly) tends to whitewash the life, making it more unblemished than it was. Frederic Karl tends to estrange the life into oppositions, juxtaposing it against the Southern frame in which it had its tangled roots. Parini, for his part, tends to reveal that Faulkner’s life was … just a life. Nothing “matchless” about it. In each of these biographies, we encounter grandeur in the art contrasted with messiness in the life, but a reader seeking to understand how this particular man was able to write this particular body of work keeps wanting more.

How might we reconceive the two realms so that parallel lines begin to meet? The answer to this question requires treating what is failed in the life not as the opposite of what is achieved in the work—and therefore in need of whitewash or massaging—but rather as the work’s secret sharer, its painfully enabling ground. What tends to be missing from the biographies is a dialectical sense for how the life and the art come together as—so Faulkner put it in
Absalom
—“strophe and antistrophe.” On this model, the life is the negative of the work, the earthbound quarry for its splendid flights. Dialectical: the life’s relation to the work does not involve a recycling of personal experiences. Rather, Faulkner’s fiction revisits the dark, arresting stresses of his life, illuminating and transforming them unpredictably, diagnostically. The life and the work share a kindred turbulence. This is the turbulence of experience in ongoing time, suffered at first by the human being, then retrospectively grappled into verbal form by the writer. Grappled, not tamed. As Sam Fathers says of the wild dog Lion in Faulkner’s great story “The Bear,” “we don’t want him tame.” The work to be done requires wildness under harness—the wildness under harness that readers recognize as Faulkner’s signature.