The Fable of the Southern Writer

IV: War and Memory: Quentin Compson's Civil War

IV War and Memory Quentin Compson's Civil War Asked about his indebtedness to Sherwood Anderson, whom he had known personally in New Orleans in the early 19208, William Faulkner replied, "In my opinion he's the father of all my generation—Hemingway, Erskine Caldwell, Thomas Wolfe, Dos Passos." Strictly speaking, Faulkner's sense of literary genealogy may have derived more from a personal regard for Anderson than from an informed appreciation of his wider literary influence. It was Anderson who had advised the young writer from Mississippi to give up his residence in the French Quarter bohemia of New Orleans , return to his native patch of earth, and write about what life was like there. Heeding this cogent admonition had made all the difference . But neither the advice nor the stories of the well-known midwestern writer account for the compelling creative impulse that led a literary novice from Mississippi to develop into the worldfamous author of the Yoknapatawpha saga. Faulkner offered a more basic, less arguable assertion about American literary genealogy, and about his own literary descent, when he rounded out his comment on the subject by declaring that the writer who may be considered Anderson's literary father, Mark Twain, "is all our grandfather."1 Whatever he owed to Anderson, the author of the Yoknapatawpha stories might have been more accurate in his metaphor if, ignoring generational chronology, he had described himself as also a son of Mark Twain; for Mark Twain was more than a distant forerunner of Faulkner. He created the model of the crucial role Faulkner eni . Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner, eds., Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia, 1957-1958 (New York, 1965), 281. 74 The Fable of the S o u t h e r n Writer acted: that of the southern author as at once a participant in and ironic witness to a drama of memory and history that centered essentially in the never-ending remembrance of the great American civil conflict of 1861-1865. The obligation of the writer to serve as a witness, not to the actual historical event, but to the remembrance of it, was a force in shaping the vocation of the writer in the South from Thomas Nelson Page to Ellen Glasgow to Faulkner, Allen Tate, Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Penn Warren, and Eudora Welty; to, in fact, all of the writers associated with the flowering of southern authorship, especially novelists, in the 19208 and 19308. The prime testimony to the shaping power of remembrance on the identity of the southern writer is offered not in the actual lives of the writers themselves but in certain implicit portrayals of the figure of the writer in their fiction , two of the notable instances being Lacy Buchan in Tate's The Fathers and Jack Burden in Warren's All the King's Men, but the supreme example being a twenty-year-old Mississippian who appears in The Sound and the Fury and Absalom,Absalom!, Quentin Compson HI. On the surface these two Faulkner novels seem to bear no more than a coincidental relation to the war; but in the second of them, Faulkner's most baffling yet possibly finest single work, the portrayal of Quentin brings the drama of southern remembrance to its culminating expression. Mark Twain's most cogent definition of the postbellum southern sensibility of memory occurs in Life on the Mississippi. At one point in this autobiographical work, first published in 1883, Mark Twain remarks that in the North one seldom hears the recent American civil conflict mentioned, but in the South it "is very different." Here, where "every man you meet was in the war" and "every lady you meet saw the war," it is "the great chief topic of conversation." To southerners, Mark Twain declares, the war is in fact "what A.D. is elsewhere: they date from it." Thus "all day long you hear things 'placed' as having happened since the waw; or du'in' the waw; or be'fo the waw; or right aftah the waw; or 'bout two yeahs or five yeahs or ten yeahs befo' the waw or aftah the waw."2 Beneath the surface of the humor in Life on the Mississippi, the 2. Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, in Mississippi Writings, ed. Guy Cardwell (New York, 1982), 491-92. 75 War and Memory author—who had been...