The Syntax of Decadence in Absalom, Absalom!

96 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW JOHN MCCLURE THE SYNTAX OF DECADENCE IN ABSALOM, ABSALOM! The true contrary of formalism is a good theory of style, or of speech, which puts both above 'technique' or 'device' — Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs When William Faulkner began to attract an audience in the thirties, leftist reviewers were virtually unanimous in their criticism ofJiis experimental narrative modes. Philip Rahv, writing in New Masses, announced that "Absalom, Absalom! makes dull reading" because of its "unsuccessful method of presentation": "In an author who depends so much on drama to carry him forward, anything that blocks the dramatic movement is bound to disintegrate his structure."1 C. Day Lewis was equally unimpressed. The narrative method of Absalom might be "theoretically . . .justified," he wrote, "by the distance of fifty years which separates the narrators from the events they are recalling." But the mode of narration "does not come off in practice"; the prose is "purple and congested."2 When Faulkner chose a more conventional mode of presentation, leftist critics expressed approval. Edwin Burgum, writing in New Masses, hailed Wild Palms as a breakthrough: unlike earlier works, some of which are "almost incomprehensible to the average reader," it "not only reads easily; it grips the attention."3 A Modern Monthly critic, V. F. Calverton, was similarly pleased with The Unvanquished: "this," he wrote, "is the least involved, the least obscure, and the least affected of his works. It is free of the literary tricks which made certain of his earlier novels sound 'phoney' in places. It is free of all artifice, and it is to be fondly hoped that Mr. Faulkner's novels in the future will follow this novel as a model rather than go back to the distorted and contorted models of his earlier fiction."4 The consensus among left reviewers, then, was that Faulkner was interesting in spite of his narrative innovations. And many critics saw these innovations as "tricks" which only obscured the "story." In Realism in Our Time, George Lukács warns against this tendency, characteristic of both left and formalist critics, to attribute the introduction of new formal devices to fashion or to purely aesthetic motives. Identifying Faulkner as a member of the "anti-realist" tradition, he argues that "even with the most abstruse anti-realist writers, stylistic experiment is not the wilful twisting of reality according to subjective 97 McCLURE whim: it is a consequence of conditions prevailing in the modern world."5 The anti-realist transforms his own experience of social and psychological disintegration, his own condition of isolation and despair, into a universal condition humaine, and adopts narrative techniques that express his confusion, his disorientation, his conviction that the deepest reality is chaos. Lukacs's interpretation of the genesis of stylistic innovations such as Faulkner's is at once more sympathetic than that of the reviewers and more damning. For while he clears Faulkner of the implicit charge of frivolous aestheticism, he does so only to suggest that Faulkner's world view is irrationalist and ahistorical. The problem is that neither of Lukacs's generalizations about antirealism do justice to Absalom, Absalom!. Faulkner, far from being oblivious to historical forces, shares Lukacs's understanding of their paramount importance. And he is interested in the very question raised by Lukács, that of the relation between historical forces, human character, and modes of expression. Absalom, Absalom! is both a history of Thomas Sutpen and a meditiation on the situation of the white Southern aristocrats who survived the fall of the plantation system. These are, Faulkner suggests, deeply damaged people, and one manifestation of the damage they have suffered is the way they speak: what interests them, how they talk about it. Their voices reveal them as tormented, angry beings, obsessed with a past they can neither repudiate nor recapture, bent not so much on getting at the truth as on getting away from it, in spite of their protestations. Absalom, Absalom! exposes these habits of mind and voice (which were surely ones Faulkner struggled with himself) and attributes them to the desolation produced by the defeat of the old South and the triumph of industrial capitalism. It suggests that even those not directly...