The Rebirth of the South: Wolfe, Faulkner, Warren

The South is more distinctively a region than any other section of the United States is, because of the experiences and traditions that have taught it attitudes sharply at variance with some of the standard American beliefs:
● The sense of failure, which comes from being the only group of Americans who have known military defeat, military occupation, and seemingly unconquerable poverty;
● The sense of guilt, which comes from having been a part of America’s classic symbol of injustice, the enslavement and then the segregation of the Negro; and
● The sense of frustration, which comes from the consistent inadequacy of the means at hand to wrestle with the problems to be faced, whether they be poverty, racial intolerance, or the preservation of an historical past rich in tradition.

In the years after the Civil War, the Southerner attempted to deny these things by the simple, but ultimately ineffectual, process of ignoring them. The Southern local colour writers concentrated on the quaint, the eccentric, and the remote; and the creators of the “plantation tradition” idealised the past.

Against this sentimental view the first two voices that were strongly raised were those of Ellen Glasgow and James Branch Cabell, Virginians who in their differing ways defined the patterns which 20th-century Southern fiction was to take when it became serious and fell into the hands of that group of writers of talent who have practised it in that century. In other words, when this group of talented young writers in the 1920’s and 30’s addressed themselves to the representation of the world through the image of their region, they followed the paths blazed by Miss Glasgow and Cabell.

These writers were not only Southern but they were also the products of the same social and cultural forces that were shaping the world of other American writers. The idealistic movement produced a host of social critics who busily protested against their world. In other movements than realism the revolt against the present and past went forward, notably in Gertrude’s Stein experiments with language and in the expatriates’ espousal of Continental art forms. In political terms, collectivist writers like John Dos Passos attacked the capitalist system under which they had grown up and which suddenly seemed to fail them. All these writers measured the present against the American dream and found it lacking, and they relentlessly pointed out to their fellow citizens the flaws they found.

The Southern writers responded to these same impulses. But when the Southern revolt against the American present was uttered, it was a call to an agrarian order. True to his traditions, the Middle Western writer called for social reform and pled for a utopia of the future, but his Southern cousin, bound by the past, looked backward for his answers.

The Southern writers sought to revitalize for the modern world a view of man that the South had held since Thomas Jefferson. This view saw man as best in his relation to the soil (particularly as that relationship existed in the pre-Civil War South). Southern writers generally used this myth of a good order in the past as a weapon of attack against the bad order of modern industrialism.

In the case of Faulkner, even though the historical concept is almost infinitely complex, it can be reduced in this way: The South once knew an order and a tradition based on honour and personal integrity, but it was guilty of the exploitation of fellow human beings, the Indians and the Negroes. Because of this great guilt, came the Civil War like a flaming sword and ended the paradise of the noble, but guilty past. After the War, noble men for ignoble reasons submitted themselves to the moral duplicity and the mechanical inefficiency of the mindless new world, and the region fell into the darkness of moral decay. If it is to win its way out again, it will do it through the reawakening moral vision of its youth and the prevailing strength of its Negroes.

Finally, in dramatising a tragic view of man caught in his nature and the trap of Time, Southern novelists have returned to a vision of human experience that is sharply at variance with that vision to America, to a vision that is essentially romantic and idealistic. The Southern novelist sees man as a tragic figure rather than a mechanical victim and relates his meaning to a large structure of event and history. Wolfe, Faulkner and Warren each has created a kind of fiction out of the materials of his region and its past which can and does counterpoise the despairing view of man that naturalism and realism have taken in our time. In expressing their revolt against the modern world they have looked backward to a tradition and an order wherein meaning is to be sought and found, man has dignity, and history is a record of a purpose.

Literary Traits of Faulkner’s Works

Faulkner’s novels are generally laid in rural settings, but the problems they treat are psychological and moral rather than physical. His great subject on the surface is the decline of the South: its economic sterility, its moral disintegration, and its struggle to resist the progressive and materialistic civilization of the North.

The protagonists of his novels are:
● The decayed aristocrats: They are the old Southern families, past the peak of their prosperity and riddled with moral decay, yet still finer than their antagonists.
● The efficient, materialistic carpetbaggers, merchants, and entrepreneurs: They are gradually superseding the aristocrats.
● The Negroes: They are often more heroic and admired than the previous ones.

THEMES: Faulkner wrote during four decades in which America changed a great deal, as it endured the aftermath of World War I, Prohibition, the Jazz Age, the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. Naturally, he examined themes that have concerned many serious writers:

● Cultural conflict and change, as well as Generational Gap (A Rose for Emily)
● Tragic individualism (A Rose for Emily, Dry September)
● The weight of the past (Soldier’s pay, That Evening Sun, Red Leaves, There was a Queen, Sartoris/Flags in the Dust)
○ Hatred due to the aftermath of the civil war
○ Hatred between blacks and whites, indians and blacks, whites and indians.
● The power (and comedy) of sex (A Rose for Emily, Dry September, Sanctuary)
● The white goddess (Dry September)
● Conflict between conscience and duty to family (Absalom, Absalom! Burning Barn, Lo!)
○ Clan loyalty and its betrayal
● The corruptibility of the innocent in war (Soldier’s pay, Two soldiers)

Time is an entity in Faulkner’s world. The past exists so compellingly in the present for his characters that it sometimes seems that only the past really exists for them. Southerners used to believe that former times had been times of grandeur and longed to get back to the former glory; they despised war for taking it from them. However, they acknowledged it was a guilty past for they used to enslave human beings and realized the only past to follow was through the youth and the strength of its Negroes.

There is little political content in Faulkner’s work. He shows little interest in humanitarianism or socialistic planning, especially in his earlier works, and has even been wrongly accused of condescension toward Negroes. His approach to the Negro problem is purely aesthetic, psychological and physiological. It should not be imagined that because he uses the word nigger and sometimes shows Negroes as lazy and incompetent like other people he is a white supremacist.

Faulkner, like Hemingway, is greatly concerned with erotic passions, with cruelty, and with the connection between the two. He does not relate these horrors for mere shock effect; he is interested in aberration as a symbol of Southern decline, and as such treats it with the superb objectivity of a true artist.

STYLE: During his all writing years, the author used various writing styles. The narrative varies from the traditional storytelling of Light in August and a series of vignette-like snapshots in As I Lay Dying to the collage of The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom, which is often considered Faulkner's masterpiece. Where Faulkner’s style is most difficult and the narrative line most complex, he demands the active participation of the reader in the creative process.

This complex style may be regarded as consistent with his difficult objective: to keep in focus the immediate character - “the human heart in conflict” while evoking the past, which is always present with us.

Because his novels treat the decay and anguish of the South following the Civil War, they are rich in violent and sordid events. But they are grounded in a profound and compassionate humanism that celebrates the tragedy, energy, and humor of ordinary human life.

DEVICES: In Literature, “symbolism” may refer to the use of abstract concepts, as a way to obfuscate any literal interpretation, or to allow for the broader applicability of the prose to meanings beyond what may be literally described. William Faulkner used symbolism extensively, to represent themes which applied to greater contexts in his contemporary politics and society. He uses synaesthesia widely in an attempt to describe the indescribable.

He employed images and symbols drawn from many sources particularly from Freud, to strengthen and enrich his meanings event to the extent in The Sound and the Fury, it has been suggested, of making the three leading characters into personifications of the id, the ego, and the super ego.

His style observes the conventions of a new prose intending to engage the imaginative participation of the reader and to provide a language more subjective and flexible than ordinary prose. This rhetorical convention - the dislocation of logical construction in the free associations of images - facilitated Faulkner’s psychological approach, the projection of events through the memory of consciousness of the character in the form of “interior monologue”. Like, Wolfe, another representative of the Rebirth of the South, Faulkner often explored the inner self, particularly in the Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. But in the lonely selves of his characters are no satisfactory answers; for such answers we must see the characters against the larger context of the history of Faulkner’s imaginary country.

Faulkner always used a double frame of reference in his fiction, although with considerable subtlety. First it is the Bible itself, as casual references to scriptures are meaningful to the people in his stories. Echoes of the Christ narrative appear in The Light in August where the protagonist, Joe Christmas, believes he has a trace of Negro blood, a symbol of guilt, which he must expiate, and Faulkner bolsters this suggestion with a long chain of parallels between Joe’s actions and those of the Passion week. The second frame is the classical inheritance of the South, especially the sense of Greek tragedy. Like Aeschylus in the ancient drama, Faulkner creates in Absalom, Absalom! the sense of doom that permeates his other novels: “This whole land, the whole South is cursed and all of us who derive from it, [...] white and black both, lie under the curse”. In the South God’s curse on man is dramatized in the institution of slavery. Sutpen adopts the system and is in one sense the instigator of the ‘current of retribution and fatality’ but also ‘the brute instrument of that justice which presides over human events’, that is, like Agamemnon, he is guilty of committing sins himself, but he is also a subject to a curse he cannot escape and is even being used as tool for a supreme power in the machinery of that curse.

Other Faulknerian habits of presentation that show consistency throughout his career include his propensity for ambiguous and disconcerting openings. In many of his works, instead of beginning with a traditional introduction, Faulkner confronts the reader with a confusing preview of the fictional world he is about to enter. From the moment he started writing fiction, Faulkner habitually seemed to have made a point to disturbing the reader. In fact, the most confusing pages in his novels commonly fall within the first few pages.

He has a strategy known as “empty center” in which a character emerges as an elusive figure, a subjective creature of fantasy and memory. It doesn’t function as a fully realized character but as a locus of unfulfilled desire and loss around which everything in the novel revolves.

As regards Faulkner’s endings, a number of his novels close with traditional statements which bring the elements from various earlier parts of the text into some kind of final alignment, allowing us to preceding details. There are, however, a number of Faulkner’s novels that display a rather different closure strategy, that end more by rhetorical force than by achieving any kind of narrative equilibrium. Faulkner would combine climatic rhetorical structures, terminal allusions, and universally resonant images, usually derived from nature, religion, the arts or myth.