18 SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2020IN JULY,at his memorial service at Ebene-
zer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the Hon-
orable John Lewis was eulogized by three
presidents. The sitting president was not
among them. His absence was yet another
assertion of the anti-Black hostility and
xenophobia fouling the polity with re-
newed vigor. We lament the current social
climate as though it were anomalous, an
outbreak of pestilence, when in reality
these iniquities reverberate through our
American centuries. We need a prophet —
a voice to call up the nation’s oldest stories,
a reckoning with what wasso that we
might understand what is. In “The Saddest
Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War,” part
literary biography, part Civil War history,
Michael Gorra presents a cogent case for
Faulkner as one such prophet.
Gorra’s premise is this: Through the
spectacular specificity of Faulkner’s nov-
els set in his invented Yoknapatawpha
County, he “tells about the South,” as he
wrote in “Absalom, Absalom!” — from the
King Cotton years of slavery, through the
Civil War and into the 20th century. In so
doing, Faulkner tells America. Faulkner’s
work, Gorra writes, “contains the richest
gallery of characters in all of American lit-
erature, and in his handling of time and
consciousness Faulkner stands as one of
his century’s most restless experi-
menters.” The magnitude of Faulkner’s
subject matter is matched only by the im-
mensity of his gifts.
It bears mentioning here that I come to
Gorra’s book with certain biases. I am a
novelist tasked with reviewing a scholarly
analysis of a novelist’s work. This is akin to
asking the electrician to take a look at the
plumbing. Scholars and novelists have fun-
damental differences about how to under-
stand works of fiction. The best fiction is, to
some degree, ineffable — no matter how
deeply she digs, the reader of a masterly
work cannot precisely explain what she
has experienced. Faulkner’s is among the
most masterly work American literature
has produced. My allegiances lie with the
mysteries, and I bristle a bit at analysis
that breaks the spell, so to speak.
Through the ineffable, through his re-
lentless drive to describe what cannot be
said directly, Faulkner plunges us into the
harrowing canyons of the nation’s past.
Toni Morrison, his fellow Nobel laureate,
wrote that she read Faulkner to “find out
about this country and that artistic articu-
lation of its past that was not available in
history, which is what art and fiction can do
but history sometimes refuses to do.” In
spending relatively little time with the lit-
erary aspects of Faulkner’s novels — the
astounding characterization, his brilliance
with metaphor and his dazzling descrip-
tions of perception and physicality —
Gorra misses an opportunity to tell a fuller
story of the sublime interplay of aesthetics
and theme in Faulkner’s work. This is dou-
bly unfortunate because Gorra writes sobeautifully when he turns his attention to
Faulkner’s artistry, as in this description of
“Absalom, Absalom!”: “This prose has
that same overheated fecundity, its modifi-
ers piled recklessly, rank with too much
meaning.”
But these are relatively small com-
plaints. Gorra’s well-conceived, exhaus-
tively researched book probes history’s re-
fusals. He begins with “Intruder in the
Dust” and one character’s striking reverie
about the moments before the ill-fated
charge that led to the Confederate defeat at
Gettysburg. Faulkner writes, “For every
Southern boy” there is a fantasy about the
instant before loss became inevitable, the
“still not yet” when “it’s all in the balance.”
This fixation on the horizon of defeat,
Gorra maintains, is part of the collective
delusion the South called the Lost Cause.The noble suffering of genteel Southern la-
dies, the Confederacy led by “gallant men
of principle,” slavery as a necessary and
essentially benign institution — these ele-
ments distort into a mythologized South-
ern history, what Gorra describes as a
“Valhalla” that “snapped the threads of
time itself, so reluctant has their society
been to accept that war’s verdict.”
That verdict, of course, was the end of
slavery, mourned and avenged ever after.
Faulkner did not shrink from this reality.
As Gorra writes, “Few historians andfewer novelists of his day saw the hobbling
vainglorious past so clearly, and few of
them made slavery so central to their ac-
counts of the war.” Those vainglorious
texts include “The Clansman” (1905),
chock-full of Negro rapists, pure white
women and a heroic Ku Klux Klan — and
the inspiration for the film “The Birth of a
Nation” (1915). In the years after, antebel-
lum fairy tales proliferated, works like
“Gone With the Wind,” with its hoop skirts
and happy darkies. By the time of that nov-el’s publication in the 1930s, North and
South alike had recast the war as a battle
over states’ rights, clearing a path for
white supremacy to gallop forward into
Jim Crow and beyond.
In his urgency to make the case for
Faulkner’s merits, however, Gorra over-
corrects with regard to his faults. What to
do about the Faulkner who famously said
of the civil rights struggle: “Go slow now.”
And worse: “If it came to fighting I’d fight
for Mississippi against the United States
even if it meant going out into the streets
and shooting Negroes.” Gorra isn’t an apol-
ogist, but he does go to great lengths to
avoid saying the obvious. He mentions
Faulkner’s infamous alcoholism as a factor
that may have influenced his more incendi-
ary comments. Of Faulkner’s often lacking
depictions of Black characters, Gorra
writes, “Still that absence isn’t precisely a
lacuna, a hole in his thinking.... Once
again we need to ask what Faulkner isn’t
writing here. We need to read for the un-
spoken, for the stories that peep around
the edges of the ones he’s chosen to tell.”
The thing is, I don’t expect Faulkner to
properly inhabit Blackness. His triumph is
his inhabitation of whiteness, his searing
articulations of its ruination, brutality and
shame.
Gorra mounts a further defense by sepa-
rating the man from the writing, as though
the writing “made him better than he was;
it made the books better than the man.” But
that’s a dodge — and, most significantly,
it’s not the point. Of course William Faulk-
ner, Mississippi-born in 1897, great-grand-
son of a slave-owning Confederate colonel,
was a racist. But in Faulkner, as is the case
in all of America, racism is not the conclu-
sion to any argument. It does not preclude
further discussion; it demands it.
Gorra is right when he claims “much can
and must be said about Faulkner’s limita-
tions, and yet no white writer in our litera-
ture thought longer and harder about that
problem, the one that the Civil War’s after-
math had set in place.” Faulkner could en-
gage these subjects with such bold bril-
liance precisely because he was — geo-
graphically, historically, racially — in the
maw of the beast.
This tangle aside, Gorra’s book is rich in
insight. In its final chapters, Gorra com-
pares America’s monuments to the Con-
federacy with Germany’s memorials to the
Holocaust. It would be unthinkable to most
Americans if such memorials celebrated
the Third Reich, yet monuments to the
Confederacy and its legacy of slavery are
ubiquitous — their presence tolerated, in
some cases revered, until very recently;
still more evidence that the past is with us
as it was in Faulkner’s time, poisoning our
generations like radioactivity in the soil.
Gorra’s book, as he writes in his preface, is
“an act of citizenship,” timely and essential
as we confront, once again, the question of
who is a citizen and who among us should
enjoy its privileges. 0Faulkner’s Forever War
The trauma of slavery and America’s troubled racial past live on in the author’s work.
By AYANA MATHIS
THE SADDEST WORDS
William Faulkner’s Civil War
By Michael Gorra
406 pp. Liveright Publishing. $29.95.
William Faulkner in the 1950s.PHOTOGRAPH BY MARIO DE BIASI/MONDADORI, VIA GETTY IMAGES‘Few historians and fewer
novelists of his day saw the
hobbling vainglorious past so
clearly.’AYANA MATHIS,a 2020-21 American Academy in
Berlin Prize fellow, is the author of “The
Twelve Tribes of Hattie.”