Faulkner and the Sin of Private Property

55 RUDICH NORMAN RUDICH FAULKNER AND THE SIN OF PRIVATE PROPERTY It is precisely because William Faulkner concentrates his immense artistic powers on the mysteries of the human heart, on individual character and destiny, on the entire range of the inner life of his men and women, that the more general themes of their social, historical situations possess the unmistakable significance which no school of literary criticism can deny. Society, history and politics adhere to them, inhere in them consubstantially, like their physical presence, like qualities of mind, of speech, of gesture. They are American Southerners, white, black and miscegenated, whose generations span 150 years of our history, and whose way of life is inseparable from the mentality engendered by plantation slavery and its historical consequences. Rarely, if ever, does Faulkner describe a natural environment, a social or political situation into which he then introduces his characters, and in this sense his artistic method is the opposite of that of Balzac or Zola. Environment, external fact, is for Faulkner the natural extension of human life processes, the modes in which people experience life. The pre-bellum South of Absalom, Absalom! is disinterred when two Harvard freshmen piece things together by remembering what they have been told about the dead and deducing or speculating into life the story of Sutpen's hundred, the tragic fall of a great house amid the ruins of war. The wilderness in The Bear has meaning because Ike McCaslin performs there the ritual killing which commemorates the ancient and victorious passage from boyhood to manhood. To conclude from all this, however, that Faulkner denies objective historical reality to the worlds of his fiction, that these are significant only as imaginative projections, wish-fulfillments or dreams of his characters is to misunderstand Faulkner's art. Faulkner is a realist who describes a real world as it is perceived and lived by real people. In my opinion, the idea of property in Faulkner makes the junction between the subjective approach of the artistic method and the realistic achievement. For it is Faulkner's achievement to have created not only unforgettably living characters but also the entire organic structure of their social and historical worlds. Can anyone discuss a Faulkner novel as a fully realized work of art without talking about slaves and their descendants, Southern aristocratic slave owners, industrialization, bankers, tenant farmers, racism, lynching, and civil war? Of course, one can and one does limit 56 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW oneself to Faulkner's language, techniques for psychological analysis, or to his ideas about art. But Faulkner himself wearied at the fuss made over his stylistic innovations at the expense of his artistic aims. Great art gives shape to the great issues of life. In Absalom, Absalom! and The Bear, as in other major works, property, its ideological justification, religious status and psychological meaning, play a central role. Faulkner discovers the artistic significance of this theme in the 1930s when the Great Depression at home and the spread of socialist ideas both here and abroad reveal that the institution of private property is facing a critical historical challenge, a challenge and a crisis which have deepened with time and which now make it possible to examine his work from this point of view. Its necessity for Faulkner corresponds to the major tasks of his enterprise: to relate the defeat and demise of Southern slave society through the eyes of its survivors, among whom we must count Faulkner himself; to lay bare the processes of decomposition which that demise entailed with tragic necessity in the lives of those survivors. For the descendants of the Compsons and the McCaslins only the past is living time, which therefore can survive only in a ghost-haunted remembrance of heroic and defeated ancestors, in nostalgia for the wilderness, in a perpetual reenactment of times dead. The present is the sound and the fury of an impossible expiation, and there is no future. In a sense "A Rose for Emily" may be seen as the ideological emblem for Faulkner's major creations. Necrophilia in some form has infected the lives of his narrators. Faulkner has revived the Gothic novel and made it speak to our...