Last spring, after the world saw the video of the murder of George Floyd, few Americans could turn an oblivious eye to the racism and violence that are part of the brutal, inhuman legacy of slavery. Coincidentally, as protesters demanding justice packed the streets, William Faulkner rode into town, the subject of two major studies: Carl Rollyson’s massive, well-researched two-volume biography and Michael Gorra’s eloquent analysis of how the Civil War ricochets throughout his best-known novels.
Of course, Faulkner hasn’t been neglected: there are at least a dozen major biographies and countless scholarly studies, essays, and dissertations. He’s a veritable cottage industry. But these new books remind us that we seem always to be trying to solve Faulkner, as if he were a riddle. For there are competing and not always compatible Faulkners: the modernist Faulkner is an experimentalist respected internationally by filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard and writers like Gabriel García Márquez and Edouard Glissant who admire his lush, long sentences, accumulating modifiers and self-correcting syntax—all the ways he conveys consciousness in dialogue with itself. In 1945 Jean-Paul Sartre said that for young people in France, “Faulkner c’est un dieu.”
Then there’s the humanistic Faulkner who declared, when accepting the Nobel Prize in literature in 1950, that we possess “a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance,” that we will not and cannot perish because of that spirit, and that “the poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things.” Critics nodded approvingly, calling him an American Balzac who created a human comedy out of the hamlets and backwoods of Mississippi, the American who had absorbed John Donne and Dickens as well as Cervantes and Conrad and the Bible. “With Faulkner, the big picture is everything,” Edmund Wilson praised him. “He went out on every limb,” Eudora Welty said, “that he knew was there.”
There’s also the compromised, morally suspect Faulkner who, in 1956, announced he was as opposed to compulsory integration as he had been to compulsory segregation. The occasion was the attempt of Autherine Lucy, a young Black woman, to enroll at the University of Alabama. Riots broke out and she was asked to leave the school; later she was expelled. But Faulkner said that on the matter of integration he would advise the NAACP, which had taken up Lucy’s case, to “go slow now.” As he further explained to Russell Warren Howe of the London Sunday Times, “as long as there’s a middle road, all right, I’ll be on it.” But if troops were sent to the South to integrate the schools and “it came to fighting,” he continued, “I’d fight for Mississippi against the United States even if it meant going out into the street and shooting Negroes.”