Making It New: 1900–1945 417I might have to its absolute top.” Sartoris was originally written as Flags in the Dust;
it was rejected and only published, under its new title, in an edited version. Any
other writer might have been discouraged by this, to the point of silence. Faulkner,
on the contrary, wrote a series of major modernist novels over the next seven years:
The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932),
and Absalom, Absalom! These were, eventually, to secure his reputation, if not
immediately his future. Although highly regarded, by other writers in particular, he
was frequently in financial trouble. Selling stories to the magazines like the Saturday
Evening Post helped a little; working periodically in Hollywood, where his more
notable credits included To Have and Have Not (1945) and The Big Sleep (1946),
helped even more. The restoration of Faulkner’s reputation, and his financial health,
began with the publication of The Portable Faulkner in 1946; it was consolidated by
the award of the Nobel Prize in 1950. By this time, Faulkner had produced fiction
reflecting his concerns about the mobility and anonymity of modern life (Pylon
(1935); The Wild Palms (1939)), and his passionate interest in racial prejudice and
social injustice in the South (Go Down, Moses (1942); Intruder in the Dust (1948)).
He had also written The Hamlet (1940), a deeply serious comedy focusing on social
transformation in his region. This was to become the first book in a trilogy dealing
with the rise to power of a poor white entrepreneur called Flem Snopes, and his
eventual fall; the other two were The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959). Generally,
the later work betrays an inclination toward a more open, direct address of social
and political issues, and a search for some grounds for hope, for the belief that
humankind would not only endure but prevail. This was true not only of the later
fiction set in Yoknapatawpha, like Requiem for a Nun, but also of his monumental
A Fable (1954), set in World War I, which uses the story of Christ to dramatize its
message of peace. There is, certainly, a clear continuity between this later work and
the earlier. Faulkner, for example, never ceased to be driven by the sense that identity
is community and history, that we are who we are because of our place and past. And
he never ceased, either, to forge a prose animated by the rhythms of the human
voice, talking and telling things obsessively even if only to itself. But there is also
change, transformation. It can be summed up by saying that Faulkner gravitated,
slowly, away from the private to the public, from the intimacies of the inward vision
toward the intensities of the outward. Or, to put it more simply, he turned from
modernism to modernity.
“Maybe nothing ever happens once and is finished,” reflects Quentin Compson in
Absalom, Absalom! Many lives are woven into one life in Faulkner, many texts into
one text – a text that seems to be without circumference or closure. Repetition and
revision are the norms of consciousness and narrative here. That makes it difficult,
even dangerous, to separate the life of one text from the others. The inimitable
texture of each individual text, and the translation of the author from modernism to
modernity, prevent any one story or novel from acting properly as a mirror, reflective
of Faulkner’s art as a whole. But some measure of that art, at least, can be taken from
the fourth and among the finest of the novels Faulkner produced, The Sound and the
Fury; it was the one most intimately related to his own experience (“I am Quentin inGGray_c04.indd 417ray_c 04 .indd 417 8 8/1/2011 7:53:56 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 56 AM