Making It New: 1900–1945 415daydream: “Oh Jake,” she tells him, “we could have had such a damned good time
together.” His reply is simple, and supplies the last words in The Sun Also Rises:
“Yes, isn’t it pretty to think so?” It is the perfect response for the Hemingway hero
because it is so simple and stoical – so tersely, terribly rejecting the “pretty,” the
fanciful, and in doing so registering the volcanic feelings that have to be contained
in order to prevent mental and moral confusion. Jake is wounded, an exile in a world
without pity, but so are all men and women, Hemingway intimates. He is also a hero –
just as, potentially, we all are if we have the courage to face things and ourselves.
Purity of line is what Jake sticks to, in the face of nothing; he regards it as his job, his
duty to tell the truth. So, of course, does Hemingway; and, at his best, he does so;
he sees and calls things by their right names.
“I am telling the same story over and over,” William Faulkner (1897–1962)
admitted once, “which is myself and the world.” That remark catches one of the
major compulsions in his fiction. Faulkner was prone to interpret any writing,
including his own, as a revelation of the writer’s secret life, as his or her dark twin.
By extension, he was inclined to see that writing as shadowed by the repressed myths,
the secret stories of his culture. Repetition was rediscovery, as Faulkner saw it; his
was an art, not of omission like Hemingway’s, but of reinvention, circling back
and circling back again, to the life that had been lived and missed, the emotions that
had been felt but not yet understood. Shaped by the oral traditions of the South,
which were still alive when he was young, and by the refracted techniques of
modernism, to which he was introduced as a young man, Faulkner was drawn to
write in a way that was as old as storytelling and, at the time, as new as the cinema
and Cubism. It was as if he, and his characters, in T. S. Eliot’s famous phrase, had had
the experience but missed the meaning; and telling became an almost obsessive
reaction to this, a way of responding to the hope that perhaps by the indirections of
the fictive impulse he could find directions out. That the hope was partial was
implicit in the activity of telling the story “over and over”: Faulkner, like so many of
his protagonists and narrators, kept coming back, and then coming back again, to
events that seemed to resist understanding, to brim with undisclosed meaning.
There would always be blockage between the commemorating writer and the
commemorated experience, as Faulkner’s compulsive use of the metaphor of a
window indicated: the window on which a name is inscribed, for instance, in
Requiem for a Nun (1951), or the window through which Quentin Compson gazes
at his native South, as he travels home from Massachusetts, in The Sound and the
Fury (1929). Writing, for Faulkner, was consequently described as a transparency
and an obstacle, offering communication and discovery to the inquiring gaze of
writer and reader but also impeding him, sealing him off from full sensory impact.
“You know,” Faulkner said once in one of his typically revelatory asides, “ sometimes
I think there must be a sort of pollen of ideas floating in the air, which fertilizes
similarly minds here and there which have not had direct contact.” In his case,
that “pollen of ideas” was primarily Southern in origin. He was born, brought
up, and spent most of his life in Mississippi; and most of his fiction is set in his
apocryphal county of Yoknapatawpha, based on his home county of Lafayette.GGray_c04.indd 415ray_c 04 .indd 415 8 8/1/2011 7:53:56 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 56 AM