416 Making It New: 1900–1945Not only that, every exploration of identity in his fiction tends to become an
exploration of family, community, and culture. “No man is himself,” Faulkner
insisted. “He is the sum of his past.” And, while he was thinking in particular of his
own self haunted by his ancestors when he said this, he was also thinking of that
interpenetration of past and present that is, perhaps, the dominant theme in
Southern society and its cultural forms – and of his own determining conviction
that any identity anywhere is indelibly stamped by history. A society, Faulkner
believed and said, was “the indigenous dream of any given collection of men having
something in common, be it only geography or climate.” It was a material institution
and also a moral, or immoral, force. “Tell about the South,” asks a Canadian charac-
ter, Shreve, in Absalom, Absalom! (1936). “What’s it like there. What do they do there.
Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.” In a sense, Faulkner never stopped
“telling,” since his novels constitute an imaginative recovery of the South, an attempt
to know it as a region. Those novels not only tell, however, they show. Much of their
power derives from the fact that, in drawing us a map of his imaginary county,
Faulkner is also charting a spiritual geography that is, in the first instance, his but
could be ours as well. The dreams and obsessions which so startle and fascinate
Shreve – with place, with the past, with evil, with the serpentine connections between
history and identity – all those are the novelist’s, and not just an aspect of described
behavior. And as the reader is drawn into the telling, attends to the myriad voices of
every story, he or she becomes an active member of the debate. The consequence is
that when, for example, Quentin Compson is described in Absalom, Absalom! as
“a barracks filled with stubborn backlooking ghosts,” each reader feels the descrip-
tion could equally well apply to the story itself, to Faulkner the master storyteller, and
to us his apprentices. Each reading of the story is its meaning; each reader is caught
up in the rhythm of repetition, the compulsion not only to remember but to reinvent.
Faulkner began his creative life as a poet and artist. He published poems and
drawings in student magazines in his hometown of Oxford, Mississippi; his first
book, The Marble Faun (1924), was a collection of verse that showed the influence of
an earlier generation of British and French poets, like Swinburne and Mallarmé. His
first two novels, Soldier’s Pay (1925) and Mosquitoes (1927), are conventional in
many ways: the one, a tale of postwar disillusionment; the other, a satirical novel
of ideas. Soldier’s Pay, written in New Orleans, does, however, anticipate some
familiar Faulkner trademarks; the absent center or central figure who is both there
and not there (in this case, because he has been traumatized by war), the smalltown
setting, the black characters, the present shadowed by the past. And Mosquitoes, set
in and around New Orleans, carries traces of its author’s obsession with the link, if
any, between words and doing, language and experience – and with the question,
issuing from that, of whether writing and speech, by their very nature, are doomed
to fail. Sartoris (1929), his third novel, is the first to be set in his fictional county of
Yoknapatawpha (although it was not given this name until As I Lay Dying (1930)).
“Beginning with Sartoris,” Faulkner later recalled, “I discovered that my own little
postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about, and that by sublimating the
actual into the apocryphal I would have complete liberty to use whatever talentGGray_c04.indd 416ray_c 04 .indd 416 8 8/1/2011 7:53:56 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 56 AM