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C h a p t e r s i x The Rumor of Race Faulkner In making a comparison between Faulkner (1897–1962) and Hemingway, Robert Penn Warren (1905–89) also raises the issue, in any writer’s work, of the career: I just mean that every man has only one story. He doesn’t know what his story is, so he keeps on fiddling with the possibilities of that story. Every writer, no matter how trivial, and every writer, no matter how great, has only one tale; and the great writers have more versions of it. Shakespeare has more versions of it than Milton does . . . And Faulkner has more than Hemingway. But you have to assume the central story. Whether or not one accepts Warren’s rankings, the notion of a central story, repeatedly fiddled with, comports pretty well with my experience of reading Faulkner and Hemingway, an experience that turns upon the question of memory. Faulkner is a patron of remembering; Hemingway, of forgetting. This is one reason why Faulkner’s style includes so much and Hemingway’s so little. Hemingway ’s approach to experience was to chase after it but not to carry it around. His prized moment is one filled with sensory pleasure and emptied of painful memory. Faulkner, who lived a much quieter life, allowed himself to be invaded by the burden of a familial, regional, and national past. His prized moment is one in which a character or narrator gathers the many versions of the past together and becomes compounded with them. The story that haunted them both, and produced such contrary reactions, was the history of their country. Hemingway wrote about America as an expatriate or an outsider, even when he wrote about life up in Michigan. He became the first modern chronicler of the American imperium, of the extension of our power into the world of nations. In the wounds suffered by his characters he anticipates the cost of this expansion of the national will. Frederic Henry above Plava becomes Billy Pilgrim fifty years later, another innocent abroad wounded in a foreign war. Even the early stories set in the United States are suffused with a sense of elegy, of the already-lost and the impossibility of return. Nick’s experience at Big Two-Hearted River proceeds from the assumption that the hero has lost the “good place” and will never again feel at The Rumor of Race 87 home at home. The response to this loss is an elliptical style, one devoted to the technique of the thing left out and to a syntax that reproduces through rhythm a speaker’s or character’s central defense mechanisms, as well as to a general refusal to speak directly about the big feelings of the heart. Faulkner places himself within a regional American myth and takes responsibility for its simultaneous construction and deconstruction. His work recollects the cost to Americans of a prior and unfinished war at home. Quentin Compson is Henry Sutpen fifty years earlier, wounded in a civil war. Faulkner deploys a recurring cast of characters, situates them in a specific landscape, and asks them to relive key moments in an epic of region building. The point of the reenactment is to demonstrate that the facts on the ground are irrecoverable and that the task of the artist or the Southern citizen is to provide an answerable version of the past while acknowledging its essential indeterminacy. Hemingway usually knew what he was leaving out and devoted himself to making the reader sense, through indirect means, this knowledge. Faulkner’s omissions work in an opposite fashion, as admissions of an honest and courageous ignorance. Why did Henry shoot Charles Bon? Faulkner truly doesn’t know, and the possible answers are various enough and contradictory enough to generate vertigo rather than a filling in of the blanks. Hemingway writes an existential novel, one dedicated to the pleasures and anxieties of being and to a continual preparation for death. Faulkner writes an epistemological novel, one obsessed by the work of knowing and haunted by events that precede a storyteller’s birth. In a letter written in 1957, John Steinbeck maintained that “a novelist, perhaps unconsciously, identifies himself with one chief or central character in his novel. Into this character he puts not only what he thinks he is but what he hopes to be. We can call this spokesman the self-character.” Both storyteller and story-taker, Quentin Compson acts as Faulkner’s “self...

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