William Faulkner's "Tragic Legend": Southern History and Absalom, Absalom!

104 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW NORMAN MARKOWITZ WILLIAM FAULKNER'S "TRAGIC LEGEND": SOUTHERN HISTORY AND ABSALOM, ABSALOM! Beginning with Sartoris I discovered that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and I would never live long enough to exhaust it, and by subliminating the actual to the apocryphal I would have complete liberty to use whatever talent I might have to its absolute top. It opened up a gold mine of other people so I created a Cosmos of my own. I can move these people around like God, not only in space but in time too. The fact that I moved my characters around in time successfully, at least in my own estimation, proves to me my own theory that time is a fluid condition which has no existence except in the momentary avatars of individual people. There is no such thing as was— only is. If was existed there would be no grief or sorrow. I like to think of the world I created as a kind of keystone in the universe; that small as that keystone is, if it were taken away the universe itself would collapse . . . .¦ In this stunning moment from an interview given by him in his decade of literary triumph, the 1950s, William Faulkner denied a good deal of what Marxist and much of progressive and liberal scholarship affirms, i.e., the importance of historical time, of stages of historical development , of the interaction of the particular with the universal, the community with the society, the individual with the class. Yet, Faulkner, I believe could not evade history so easily. In his major novels, particularly in Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Faulkner was haunted by what C. Vann Woodward called "the burden of Southern History,"2 the accumulated myths fostered in the post-Reconstruction "Solid South" of a proud, defeated people cursed by the money-grabbing ways of the Yankee conquerers, and by the sin and the menace of "racial impurity," a sin that had befouled a pre-class Edenic wilderness and, through miscegenation, had brought about the fall of families, fraticide, and incest at the end of the Civil War. With great skill and evocative power, Faulkner uses in Absalom, Absalom! modernist literary techniques to transform history into myth denying that one can learn anything from the "Solid South" that is his canvas, or from the other Souths, the booster capitalist South of Coca Cola and conservatism, and the dis- 105 MARKOWITZ enfranchised populist South of black and white tenants, croppers, and millhands, that he has distorted and buried. This being the case, one might legitimately ask why a Marxist scholar, particularly a historian, should waste his time with Faulkner, as against novelists whose achievements and contradictions, of both content and style, lead to a more fruitful encounter between culture and society. Perhaps it is because the academic establishment, still led in the U.S. by men who actively and passionately oppose the social and historical interpretation of literature, who see in its every expression the return of the ideas of the 1930s and the conduct of the 1960s, have placed Faulkner in the upper reaches of their literary Pantheon and have stubbornly kept him there. In a class-divided society where electronically educated masses read novels made for television and the university-trained would-be professional classes learn to buy fiction in college, Faulkner is still what students are taught a great American writer is supposed to be. After World War II, even though his work had "moved to the left" in that it dealt more explicitly with racial and social themes and posited weakly liberal solutions, Faulkner emerged as a Nobel Laureate, hailed in universities and in literary criticism by both recanted Marxists and smug conservatives as "the greatest novelist of the Twentieth century" and sent abroad as a literary goodwill ambassador by the state department.3 In the post World War II era, the era of the high cold war, the U.S. state became the leading force in the defense of world monopoly capitalism /imperialism, filling economic, military, and cultural vacuums as best it could. In the United States, the literature of social realism and political commitment...