Bury Me

Hello, you few readers who are left. I know it's been a bad semester in terms of posting, but I'm now done with the bulk of my coursework and will (I hope) be posting more, especially now that I've begun reading in earnest for my comprehensive exams. Be ready for months of very tiresome posts on Existentialism.

In the meantime, here's the basic plot of the two papers I wrote this semester.

"'The Snake Was There Before Adam': Faulkner's Inversion of Augustinian Ponerology." I build off of my earlier post on Quentin Compson as a failed St. Augustine but recast it in much more theological terms. In brief, I argue that Faulkner's Sanctuary presents us with a ponerology that's the exact opposite of St. Augustine. Here, good is a privation of evil, and it is the male element that most clearly signifies nothingness. As femaleness is biologically a lack of maleness, so good is a lack of evil. This is a bleak worldview, especially since the mingling of female and male is necessary for the race's survival.

"More Art with Less Matter: Anxiety of Meaninglessness in 'Gertrude and Claudius.'" I examine Updike's much-neglected "prequel" to Hamlet and argue that, in its inversion of "good" and "bad" characters and its influx of religious and theological references--Claudius at one point or another represents just about every religion ever conceived--Updike turns Hamlet from a mere tragedy to something much, much darker: a negation of all meaning, be it interpersonal, religious, or philosophical.

I guess it's been a dark semester, you might say. More later.

The Fire Next Time

Most of the time, William Faulkner’s characters don’t ring true; they feel for the most part less like real human beings existing in an actual world than like elaborate metaphors existing in a world of elaborate metaphors. There are a few exceptions, of course; Quentin Compson, for example, comes off as a real person despite or perhaps because of his total lack of a stable identity, as do most of his cohorts in 1936’s Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner’s finest novel.

Absalom deals with the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen, a self-made demon of a man who comes storming into Jefferson, Mississippi, in the middle of the 19th century, destroying lives left and right and eventually losing his own to the grandfather of the 15-year-old girl he’s impregnated. It’s a vision of the collapse of the South, depending on who you ask, even though Quentin memorably denies such a reading at the end of the novel.

Among all the Shakespearean drama of the Sutpen clan, however, it’s easy to lose track of the man who brings it all to an end, the indigent squatter Wash Jones. To get the whole story on him, you have to turn to the fifteen-page story “Wash.” I’ve read only a few of Faulkner’s short stories—the big ones mostly, “A Rose for Emily” and “Barn Burning” and “Dry September” and “Red Leaves” and “Mountain Victory”—but I’m not sure how he could top this one. It’s a beautiful and heartbreaking character study, exactly the type of thing you don’t expect from an aloof Modernist like Faulkner.

I was surprised to discover that the story was published before Absalom, Absalom!, in 1934. It seems like such a clear attempt to vindicate an unattractive and relatively minor character from the novel that I assumed it must have come later. Its chronological position has the effect of casting all of Absalom into doubt; it makes that novel the story of Wash Jones instead of Thomas Sutpen. That’s just as well—in his way, Wash is a far more interesting character than Sutpen, or at least more human. If Sutpen is the devil, as he’s repeatedly called in the novel, Wash is the herd of pigs he possesses and runs off a cliff.

Faulkner here presents Wash as the dregs of the earth, a man who lives in the abandoned fishing camp that Sutpen “wouldn’t let none of” his slaves live in. But at the same time, “the fact remained that the two of them would spend whole afternoons in the scuppernong arbor, Sutpen in the hammock and Wash squatting against a post, a pail of cistern water between them, taking drink for drink from the same demijohn.” If you read the story through the lens of the novel, it’s easy to read this statement as an indication of Sutpen’s decline—if you take the story on its own terms, it seems more a portrait of Wash’s ascent.

But even as he ascends, Sutpen keeps him in his place. He makes Wash lean against a post while he lays in the hammock, and he treats him as a sort of caretaker—or perhaps even as a dog:

Then it would become dark, and after a while he would lie down on the floor beside the bed, though not to sleep, because after a time—sometimes before midnight—the man on the bed would stir and groan and then speak. “Wash?”
“Hyer I am, Kernel. You go back to sleep. We ain’t whupped yit, air we? Me and you kin do hit.”

So Wash, fiercely loyal and heartbreakingly alone, is a much more sympathetic character here than the novel, even if he has a racist personal revelation or two. (“The Bible told him” that blacks “had been created and cursed by God to be brute and vassal to all men of white skin.”) He has a vague sense that the world is corrupt, not as it should be, that in fact “all men were created in the image of God and hence all men made the same image in God’s eyes at least” and that he should not be left in his own squalor in the fish camp.

Public opinion—and probably my own before I read this story—holds that Wash kills Sutpen because “He thought he had Kernel where he would have to marry the gal [Milly] or pay up. And Kernel refused.” But public opinion, as throughout Absalom, proves wrong. Wash kills Sutpen out of a real sense of justice, of getting what is owed not to him but to his defenseless granddaughter, to whom Sutpen said for no good reason, “too bad you’re not a mare. Then I could give you a decent stall in the stable.” That, as you might imagine, don’t fly.

After he kills Sutpen, however, his vague sense of the world’s injustice flowers into a crushing darkness. He hears the police approach and considers running:

It seemed to him that he had no more to run from than he had to run to. If he ran, he would merely be fleeing one set of bragging and evil shadows for another just like them, since they were all of a kind throughout all the earth which he knew, and he was old, too old to flee far even if he were to flee. He could never escape them, no matter how much or how far he ran: a man going on sixty could not run that far. Not far enough to escape beyond the boundaries of earth where such men lived, set the order and the rule of living.

And so Wash becomes a broken and defeated Cain. He kills the closest thing he's ever had to a friend, perhaps for better reasons than those for which Cain killed his brother—at least it was for the sake of someone else rather than out of pure selfishness and jealousy—but there’s no God in the story to give him a mark of protection, no one to look out for him; there’s only the cold, dark world of injustice, and he knows that he will never get a fair hearing, never get what’s coming to him.

Wash is left with what I suppose he sees as a Sophie’s choice (many readers would disagree): he can either go to prison, likely living better than he did on the fish camp but leaving Milly and her child to fend for themselves in the cruel world that planted them on Sutpen’s Hundred; or he can put a stop to the injustice by destroying the oppressed. And in the story’s horrifying final scene, he opts for the latter, setting the building on fire and leaving his granddaughter to burn to death inside, and throwing his body toward the police swinging the same scythe he’d used to kill the man with whom he used to share pails of whiskey.

I suspect Faulkner gave Wash his name because of its connotations with moonshining—wash is the liquid produced by the fermentation process, something not quite water and not quite whiskey. But the word also carries an obvious cleansing echo, and that echo rings and rings through the final paragraphs of the story bearing his name. Jones, who probably never had a proper bath, attempts to cleanse the world of its evil taint the only way he can think to do so, by a fire reminiscent of the one the Bible no doubt told him would destroy the world.

And something else interesting happens at the end. Wash knows that public opinion about him has already formed and has no hope whatsoever of reforming; he knows when he kills himself and his family that he will go down in the annals of Jefferson history as violent white trash and nothing else. But Faulkner uses the story bearing his name to turn public opinion on its head. Were Jefferson a real place, even it would have forgotten by 2009 the desperate deeds done just outside of town 140 years ago—but Faulkner has put Wash’s version of the story down for the ages, finally providing the justice he never received during his own fictional lifetime.

Nothing More Than the Traveling Hands of Time

V. and I went on Friday night to see the UGA Theater production of Thornton Wilder's Our Town, a play I loved in high school but have not really looked at since I read it for my master's comps in 2005. It's an odd play, in that you remember it as Main Street U.S.A. when it's actually The Sound and the Fury. I remembered it as sweet and a little corny--a traditional play if there ever was one--but that's a great disservice. It was as Modernist as anything Eliot or Faulkner or Joyce ever wrote, what with the whole "Stage Manager" conceit breaking the fourth wall and stopping the play every 15 seconds to trot out another "expert." (Those experts, I suppose, are a bit like Eliot's footnotes to The Waste Land, obfuscating rather than elucidating the thing in itself.)

If you read my post on Meet the Robinsons, you probably picked up on my recent interest in time. The party line--repeated nearly ad nauseum in the brutal third act of Our Town--is that we should live in the moment, appreciate each second for what it is, let go of the past, and not fixate on the future, which is of course imaginary. This clashes with the Southern Agrarians I've been reading this semester. Andrew Lytle specifically condemns the Wilder system, calling the human results of it "momentary man":

that man who no longer has location, who is forever on his way, speeding from one inn to another, to the same bed that is not the same bed, to poor cuisines served in the same false ornament of supposedly foreign architecture.

Lytle demands allegiance to the past, and in fact, out of the twelve I'll Take My Stand guys, he's the only one who could have a reasonable claim of actually living in the past, living on a farm and whatnot.

And then there's Faulkner, whose The Sound and the Fury posits three systems. Quentin Compson, the world's most famous suicidal neurotic, can live only in the past, both personal (watching his sister get her underpants dirty) and corporate (the antebellum chivalric system he can't let go); his brother Jason lives in the future, and is a monster for it. Only Benjy Compson lives in the present--and he's an idiot man-child, certainly no role model.

Faulkner's solution is to present us with Dilsey, the Compsons' black servant. Dilsey receives the final section of the novel, and her chapter is marked by its third-person narrator and its more or less coherent voice. There's no wild shifting back and forth between present-day and thirty years previous in Dilsey's section--we see things as God must see them, from above them. And so Dilsey comes off stable, happy, dependable--three words no one would ever use to describe Quentin, Jason, or Benjy.

And so I submit that Faulkner wants us to follow Dilsey's lead. In a book about the way the past, present, and future conspire to destroy your mind, only Dilsey escapes. I'm sure you could blame that on Faulkner's racism if you wanted to--perhaps Dilsey escapes because she lacks the mental capabilities to analyze time. But I don't think so. He has a real and obvious affection for her, and he gives her section the weight of the novel's structure (it closes the whole ugly story) and its themes (she receives Easter Sunday and the resurrection that day implies).

And Dilsey's secret is that she's too busy to think about time at all. She works non-stop taking care of Benjy, Jason, and Miss Quentin Compson--not to mention her own children and grandchildren--and has no time for the type of poisonous self-reflection that wrecks the Compson family. She's no idiot, but she's no intellectual, which is to say that she lives neither and simultaneously in the past, present, and future.

Wilder might agree, whatever Emily Webb screams from her grave at the end of Our Town. After all, his play--whatever else it does--collapses and twists time. First it invents an era that may never have really existed (at least the way he portrays it); further, he does so in a blatantly nostalgic move, writing the play on the cusp of World War II and setting it before World War I. But then he destroys that era. Death is all around his characters, and the Stage Manager alerts us to the eventual deaths of the people we meet nearly as soon as we meet them. So past and future have been collapsed into an amorphous blob.

And as far as the present goes, Wilder subverts himself. If the important thing is for us to live in the present, then why present a nostalgized past? And why bother talking about material progress (which is going to make us look ahead, even when the progress takes place in the past--that's what the Carousel of Progress is all about)? No, the present is not as simple as Emily Webb wants it to be, and Wilder is well aware of it. The present is important but not distinct--Our Town makes the audience into Dilsey; it collapses and combines past, present, and future and hands it to us in a ball.

Do whatever you can with it.

You've Been on This Shift Too Long

(You may have to live without part two of "The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet"; I'm not sure I'll ever get around to it.)

While doing research for a paper on R.E.M. and the New South a few years ago, I became interested in the relationship between the Old South, the New South, and the railroads, and reading Faulkner's third novel, Flags in the Dust (later edited and retitled Sartoris), has brought that concept back into my mind. Flags in the Dust, as you may have guessed, concerns the Sartoris clan, one of Faulkner's many Southern families who thrived before the war and is now dusty and rotting. John Sartoris, the paterfamalias, had a dream that the railroad would one day run through Jefferson, Mississippi, and bring a new prosperity to the area. It must have worked because his son runs a bank.

But prosperity and technology, as Faulkner fans know, are always double-edged swords. John Sartoris' dream does come true, but it comes more true than I suspect he'd hoped:

John Sartoris had once sat on this veranda and watched two trains emerge from the hills and traverse the valley into the hills again, with lights and smoke and bells and a noisy simulation of speed. But now his railway belonged to a syndicate and there were more than two trains on it, and they ran from Chicago to the Gulf, completing his dream, though John Sartoris himself slept these many years unawares.

That line to Chicago brings the accoutrements of modern life to Jefferson, it is true--and when the line goes into Alabama, it allows Birmingham (the birthplace of the modern South) to ship its coal and steel northward--but it also takes some piece of Mississippi back north, and when enough of these pieces are shipped away, Mississippi no longer exists the way it did for John and Bayard Sartoris. Such is modern life. I can't see a difference between I-85 in Georgia and I-95 in New Jersey--medians look the same the world over.

But let's not forget how important the railroad was for the Confederacy during the Civil War. Atlanta is the capitol of Georgia chiefly because it was a railroad hub during the 1850s and 1860s, and when General Sherman made his March to the Sea, his men were sure to pull up the rails. The railroads, then, so instrumental in the southern attempt to maintain an antebellum way of life, ended up killing off the Old South for good.

Of course, the railroad as an abstract idea was not long for this world, either, as R.E.M. makes clear in their classic single "Driver 8":

The walls are built up stone by stone
The fields, divided one by one
And the train conductor says, "Take a break, driver 8
Driver 8, take a break
We've been on this shift too long

And the train conductor says
"Take a break, driver 8
Driver 8, take a break
We can reach our destination
It's still a ways away"

I saw a treehouse on the outskirts of the farm
The power lines have floaters so the airplanes won't get snagged
The bells are ringing through the town again
The children look up
All they hear is sky-blue bells ringing

And the train conductor says
"Take a break, driver 8
Driver 8, take a break
We can reach our destination
It's still a ways away"

A way to shield the hated heat
A way to put myself to sleep
A way to shield the hated heat
A way to put myself, my children sleep

He piloted this song in a plane like that one
She is selling faith on the Go Tell Crusade
Locomotive 8
Southern Crescent
Hear the bells ring again
The field to weed is looking thin

And the train conductor says
"Take a break, driver 8
Driver 8, take a break
We can reach our destination
It's still a ways away"

"Driver 8" is obtuse in the way that only early R.E.M. can be, but it also marks the point at which Michael Stipe moved from the sheer poststructural nonsense of Murmur and Reckoning into a genuine attempt at storytelling and social commentary. The song makes a point that I've not heard any scholar make--the railroad is a tragic hero, paving the path for its own destruction.

The song opens with a vision of the industrializing New South of the Reconstruction, with buildings popping up and even rural areas gaining more modern farming techniques. Our hero is the noble engineer of Locomotive 8, who flies through the landscape at what seem like impossible speeds, noticing only brief and hazy images of the world around him. (Driver 8's speed accounts for the opacity of Stipe's lyrics, and presumably also for the singer's opaque delivery, best demonstrated in the hysterical Hootie and the Blowfish cover, in which Darius Rucker gets nearly half of the lyrics wrong.) The engineer has a goal in mind, presumably (given the images of progress around him) the emergence of the South as an economic powerhouse and as a modern region, and he flies toward this goal at breakneck speed.

The images become more modern in the second verse. The engineer sees high-rise apartments in major metropolitan areas (treehouses, as it were, on the outskirts of town) and electric power running through every stop on his route. He even sees, in the bridge, air-conditioning, "a way to shield the hated heat." (And if you've ever lived without central air in Georgia in the summer, you understand exactly what "a way to put myself to sleep" means.)

So in this college-radio single from 1985, we've got an antiquated image of speeding modernity, the engineer trying desperately to bring his homeland into the modern age. But the conductor knows better. "Take a break, Driver 8," he says. "We can reach our destination, but it's still a ways away." Perhaps he means that the future is decades away chronologically, or (more likely, in my opinion) he means that it's a world away spiritually, psychologically. The new world, the world that Driver 8 tries so hard to create, is of a wholly different character--it is the world so despised by Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and all the other Southern Agrarians. It is a world of airplanes, of country clubs and high finance, of a Charlotte that might as well be Boston. It is what I term the "New New South, and it is a place wholly inhospitable to the age of the locomotive. Driver 8, in helping to create this world, plants the seeds of his own destruction, and in this he is another figure of the Old South, which after all created the New South to stay alive and ended up dying.

I wonder, then, when the New New South (and the homogeneous superstructure around it in the rest of the country) will destroy itself and make way for whatever comes next (for good or for evil). I wonder, in fact, if the recent Wall Street collapse isn't evidence of that. And I wonder if the Old South laughed when the railroads died the way the Southern neo-Luddites I know are chuckling under their breath about AIG and Lehman Brothers.

Good morning, America. How are you?