He Made the Books and He Died: The Fiftieth Anniversary of Faulkner's Death

"He made the books and he died"—so William Faulkner hoped we might speak of him after death. Only his books mattered—he was certain his life did not. When Malcolm Cowley urged him in 1945 to provide biographical details for Cowley's forthcoming Portable Faulkner, he was more explicit in his resistance: "[the biographical essay] is not for me. 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." Here we are, fifty years after his death: what should we say about the man who wrote those books?

I want to begin by respecting his plea, by not speaking of the flesh-and-blood man himself. No one has envisaged more eloquently than he the speechless, post-human, communal life that might follow his entry into the earth:

If there be grief, then let it be but rain,And this but silver grief for grieving's sake,If these green woods be dreaming here to wakeWithin my heart, if I should rouse again.

But I shall sleep, for where is any deathWhile in these blue hills slumbrous overheadI'm rooted like a tree? Though I be dead,This earth that holds me fast will find me breath.

Faulkner, A Green Bough, poem XLIV

He sleeps now, rooted and wordless these past fifty years; but we are here today partly because of the extraordinary novels for which, while alive, he labored incessantly to find the words. The question I raise is about the fate of Faulkner's words: do his novels still live in 2013? and, if they do, what in them still burns fiercely, still has the power to astonish his readers?

I raise this question at age seventy-two myself—seven years older than he lived to be, a dozen years younger than Uncle Ike in "Delta Autumn," Uncle Ike who thought he had managed to hold onto just enough wilderness to last until his death. Past eighty, Ike was sure that life harbored no more outrages for him—after having long ago given up the farm, then lost his wife and his son with her—and that the yearly ritual of the wilderness hunt would ceremoniously crown his old age. All readers of "Delta Autumn" know that such peace would not be. Roth's part-black mistress—the "doe"—intrudes upon this idyll of male bonding, shocking the old man with the news that his earlier renunciation of the farm had spoiled Roth rotten and played its part in Roth's abandoning her. Moreover he is forced to learn that the abusive miscegenation launched over a century ago by his grandfather, Old Carothers, has never ceased and is entering now its latest avatar as Roth abandons the doe. "Maybe happens is never once," Quentin muses in Absalom, Absalom!, as outrage perpetuated in the seemingly dead past "abrupts" into the present. All at once, against his will, his defenses shattered, old Ike McCaslin becomes unbearably aware. He has been hurt into life again. Hurt into life, suddenly seeing more than you can bear to see: this, I think, is the essence of Faulkner's fierce hold upon us, a half century after his death.

Let me sketch some reasons why we need this awakening. A few years ago I gave a lecture at the University of North Carolina. As I walked all over the Chapel Hill campus that autumn afternoon, I suddenly became aware of what I had been seeing on my own campus for years now: that none of those beautiful young people ambling from one class to another had anything to say to one another. Each was absorbed in speaking to someone not there; tiny cell phones ruled the scene. These young people had found a perfect way to be not...