The Fable of the Southern Writer

V: The Tenses of History: Faulkner

V The Tenses of History Faulkner ike Thomas Hardy's Wessex, William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County originated in the imagination of a young writer reared in a provincial community. In both instances a youthful mind endowed with literary genius discovered that the small, remote world of his nativity in its own way represented the major experience of modern Western civilization: the almost complete displacement of a society of myth and tradition by a novel society of history and science. In either case a youthful writer entered into the knowledge of this phenomenon through an unacademic but intensely self-conscious and sustained process of reading in a variety of literary and philosophical works; and in either case, during the struggles of his self-education, a youthful writer became a self-elected member of the cosmopolitan order of poets, critics, and literary prophets that since the end of the age of ecclesiastical dominion has thought of itself as having a moral mission to the evolving secular civilization of the West. Foreshadowed by Petrarch and Chaucer, clearly represented by Shakespeare and Cervantes, this realm has been perpetuated by myriad literary figures, great and small, to the present day—when it may be that its sense of purpose is becoming so attenuated that the vocation of the writer in the West is failing for lack of an assumed rationale. But in the first half of the twentieth century the literary vocation was still a basic cultural assumption wherever appreciable reading and writing skills extended. A Faulkner in Lafayette County, Mississippi, or a Thomas Hardy in Devonshire, England—no less than a James Joyce in Dublin or a T. S. Eliot in London—selfconsciously conceived of his interest in literature in terms of a moral L 97 The Tenses of History obligation to fulfill the image of the writer as both literary artist and "clerk," as both storyteller and prophetic voice. He might think of his commitment to literature, even as the young Eliot and the young Faulkner did, as being no small thing—as being potentially at least a historical transaction involving the past, present, and future of civilization. Although the literary vocation had suffered a severe constriction in the American South during the years dominated by the slavery issue, and by the War for Southern Independence and its aftermath, a writer in the twentieth-century South stood in relation to such cosmopolitan figures of his own region as Thomas Jefferson (the poet-philosopher-prophet who wrote the Declaration of Independence ), Edgar Allan Poe (who had a larger influence in Europe than in America), and Mark Twain (who walked on the world stage for at least half of his career). In his own time the writer of the twentiethcentury South stood, or would come to stand, in relation to a panoply of writers associated with a sophisticated literary movement that included John Crowe Raijsom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, Andrew Lytle, Robert Penn Warren, Caroline Gordon, Katherine Anne Porter, and Eudora Welty. Indeed, by virtue of a civilized commitment to letters that was still taken for granted, the writer of the twentieth -century American South bore a relation to the large body of writing, imaginative and critical, which for five centuries recorded the complex story of the conquest of the older community by the modern order—and in so doing created out of the drama of differentiation the large, many-faceted secular myth of the self's encounter with history. The modern writer participates in this myth both as author and (in various guises of alienation from modernity) as actor. The literary myth of modern history, to be sure, is in an important sense a myth of the modern literary vocation. As demonstrated by his efforts to express and define it in his early writings and by his complex realization of it in the creation and peopling of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi (a more audacious undertaking than Hardy's creation and peopling of Wessex), Faulkner's involvement in this myth is the major aspect of his career. Some of the sources of his initial experience of the drama of cultural differentiation in the history of modern Western civilization may be deduced in part from the fragmentary records of his voluminous 98 The Fable of the S o u t h e r n W r i t e r reading. At the age of twelve or thirteen, for example, Faulkner began a life-long...