Faulkner the World-Builder

Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

Biographer David Minter relays a fitting anecdote about Faulkner in Oxford, Mississippi, when Faulkner was less than ten years old. Young William and his grandmother, who he called “Damuddy,” liked to build “miniature villages in the family’s front yard,” Minter writes, “using sticks, grass, stones, and glass.” As an adult, Faulkner carried on building imaginary worlds: he invented a fictional Mississippi county named Yoknapatawpha, a hand-drawn map of which appears in the back of Absalom, Absalom, and he wrote many novels detailing the interwoven family histories of its inhabitants, the Sutpens, the Compsons, the Sartorises, and others. You sense the childlike pleasure of creation in this adult project when you notice that the grown-up Faulkner has written on the map: “Yoknapatawpha County, William Faulkner, Sole Owner and Proprietor.”

Faulkner thinks like God, in about as much detail as God, and his goal is to create a second universe standing aside our own, as persuasively real, complex, and unyielding, but more saturated with meaning and beauty. Through characters embedded in this second reality as we are in ours, he recreates subtilitas naturae (“the subtlety of nature”), nature’s intricacy, its fineness of shade and texture, the baroque complexity of forms and change found in nature and in the way our own natures observe, absorb, record, and even add to this complexity.

Conrad Aiken praised Faulkner’s “sheer inexhaustible fecundity” (quoted in Robert Alter’s illuminating chapter on Absalom, Absalom! in his 2010 book Pen of Iron, p. 84). Alter adds that Faulkner has two nearly opposite stylistic modes at his disposal: the “labyrinthine-poetic” and the “pungently vernacular.” (p. 83) From the beginning Faulkner was also hugely ambitious; he once said his collegiate poetry suffered because “he had one eye on the ball and the other eye on Babe Ruth.” (Minter, p. 37) All these attributes enabled Faulkner to assemble an oeuvre that on the whole recreates the world and its characters with more breadth and depth than any oeuvre since Shakespeare’s, and Absalom, Absalom! may be his most world-like novel unto itself. Alter calls it “arguably one of the greatest American novels of the twentieth century, as Moby Dick is of the nineteenth century.” (p. 79) Cleanth Brooks called it the greatest Faulkner novel—and the “least well understood.” (Brooks, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha County, p. 295) “Admittedly,” Brooks wrote, “the novel is a difficult one, but the difficulty is not forced and factitious. It is the price that has to be paid by the reader for the novel’s power and significance.” (p. 324)

Gabriel Garcia Marquez said Faulkner “walks blindly through his biblical universe, like a herd of goats loosed in a shop full of crystal.” (Marquez, NYT, July 26 1981). There is after all a 23-page parenthesis in Absalom, Absalom (from p. 152 to p. 175), and there are many pages in the book where a reader confronts paired rectangles of opaque, unindented, and under-punctuated text. There’s also a funny self-conscious scene on p. 225 where chief narrator Quentin Compson’s roommate Shreve criticizes Quentin’s storytelling, but Faulkner tells us that “Quentin did not even stop. He did not even falter, taking Shreve up in stride without comma or colon or paragraph....”

There is a certain sure-handedness, however, to this jungle of narrative. The characters stand fixed as Kapok trees in this jungle. That’s because Faulkner's modernist cubist obscurity, like Joyce’s, serves to represent the aforementioned complexity of the universe and the self, not postmodern, gnostic uncertainties. I’d add that if Faulkner is messy, he’s messy in a distinctly Shakespearean way. Like Shak, he creates “a cloud of alternative or overdetermining explanations round his figures” that imply a reality so complex it can only be approximated in words (as A.D. Nuttall says of the Shakespearean trope “variatio,” Nuttall, A New Mimesis, p. 180). You might say that where Hemingway persuades by punching you in the ribs, Absalom, Absalom! attacks you like a thinking ape, it pins your wrists and ankles and licks your forehead all at once until you cry, “I believe!”

It took me over two years of fits and starts to read this greatest of modernist American novels, and my paperback’s scratches, white flames of wear at the spine, stray pen marks, and water damage are together like a photogravure recording the many abuses it’s been subjected to. This is somehow fitting for a book whose lofty goal seems to be to crawl into the belly of human history and feel it digest time.

The chaos Marquez noted reflects the disordered experience of time through memory, experience that Faulkner nicely captures with the objective correlative of “a big flat river that sometimes showed no current at all and even sometimes ran backward” (p. 184). Robert Alter sees the book as a dialectic between two time-obsessed books of the Hebrew Bible—2 Samuel (featuring Absalom) on one hand, which values aspiration even when catastrophe endangers dynasty, and on the other, the despairing book of Ecclesiastes, which disavows progress with its sense of futility and eternal repetition.

This dialectic of attitudes to progress unfolds on the scale of family drama—between the unforgettable Thomas Sutpen, ambitious yet without vanity, and his son, the disinherited Charles Bon, worldly yet naïve, confident yet in need of a father. (As Quentin Compson speculates on p. 222, “a man never outlives his father.”) And it also unfolds on a national scale. Faulkner’s South has fallen because it lost the Civil War, but also because of its sins. Slavery is the original sin in the historic memory of the South, the sin that disorganizes the mind, a self-inflicted wound that anchors the mind among the mysteries of the past. There, the War never ends but is always ending at a gallop with “the shot-torn flags rushing down a sky in color like thunder” (p. 231).




View all my reviews

Shakespeare and the Mystery of Psalm 46

Holy Bible: King James Version by Anonymous

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


2011 marked the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible, and it remains the finest English translation there is. "No other book has given more to the English-speaking world," writes Adam Nicolson in the December 2011 issue of National Geographic. Robert Alter's latest book, Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible, studies the King James Bible's influence on the writing styles of the greatest American writers from Whitman, Dickinson, and Melville to Faulkner. Alter laments that "the King James Bible has ceased to be the almost universally used translation as readers have been encouraged to read more 'accessible' versions, which also happen to be stylistically inferior in virtually all respects." (pp. 9-10) By some counts the KJV has contributed even more idioms to English than Shakespeare did; Nicolson declares that "It molded the English language."

The KJV was produced during Shakespeare's lifetime, in the first decade of the 17th century. According to the Folger Shakespeare Library, Shak read the Geneva Bible of 1560 like most other Englishmen, and it's obvious to me that Shakespeare owed much to the excellent studies of character and of psychical change in the Hebrew Bible. It's also tempting to imagine that he repaid that debt, and did so with characteristic magnificence and humility. To argue as much is careless speculation, and the argument's entanglement with the number 46 imparts to it an odor of cabbala or other voodoo thinking (an odor that it ultimately merits). If it seems miraculous that Shakespeare may have contributed to the King James translation of the Bible, however, then it seems at first glance like a miracle that satisfies David Hume's criteria for credibility: that is to say, the idea of Shakespeare having contributed to the King James Bible, miraculous or no, at first looks more plausible than the alternative (that he didn't). To an amateur scholar like me, it appeared the most plausible explanation, namely, for the King James version of Psalm 46.

As I learned from Goodreads trivia, if you count 46 words from the beginning of Psalm 46 and 46 words from the ending of the psalm (not counting the "Selahs"), you arrive at these two words: "shake" and "spear." Try it. It also happens that Shakespeare would have been 46 years old in 1610, when scholars were finalizing the translations for publication the following year. So was this the translators' birthday tribute to Shakespeare in April 1610? Or did Shakespeare actually look at the drafts and buff them up here and there like a Hollywood script doctor? Did he perhaps insert a disguised autograph into Psalm 46? Given Shakespeare's connections at court with both Queen Elizabeth and King James, and given King James's assemblage of a committee of over 50 known scholars, writers, and translators to work on the text, it's tempting to imagine that King James asked Shakespeare to take a peek at the translations and weigh in or even contribute edits.

And yet, Shakespeare, with his "small Latin and less Greek," as Ben Jonson said, was not quite a scholar like the rest of the King's biblical team--and neither am I! A letter in the January 11, 2012 Times Literary Supplement from a bonafide scholar points to pretty conclusive proof that Shakespeare's authorship of Psalm 46 is no more than a "hoary myth." It seems that Miles Coverdale's translation of the psalms, published in a 1549 edition of The Book of Common Prayer--fifteen years before Shakespeare's birth--reads just about the same, with the word "shake" exactly 46 words from the beginning and "spear" almost exactly 46 words from the end (in fact 48). Alas, the miracle fails Hume's credibility test after all and must be attributed to weird coincidence.

I suppose it appealed to my innate sense of belligerence to defend the Bard's honor against that other hoary myth--that he didn't write the plays--by fighting the fire of dubious speculation with the fire of possibly slightly less dubious speculation. This article does a better job in Shakespeare's defense. And in the end, the notion that Shakespeare helped out the KJV probably slights the KJV in the same way that the theory of an earl writing Shakespeare's plays slights the writer from Stratford. The truth is that the ancient writers of the Bible needed no help, and neither did their magnificent English translators.

View all my reviews

Reality Is a Dream -- You Wish

Partial Magic: The Novel as Self-Conscious Genre by Robert Alter
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Ever since Gutenberg," Robert Alter writes, "the conditions of mechanical reproduction made it necessary for the individual artist to swim against a vast floodtide of trash out of all proportion to anything that had existed before in cultural history...."  And when the furnace of time has digested the trash-heap of twentieth-century literary criticism, one hopes that Robert Alter's brilliant oeuvre will endure and stand forth for its clarity of vision and purity of heart.  Finishing a book by Robert Alter is like bench-pressing 500 pounds, the same way I feel when I finish wrestling with a classic.  At the end of the book, I feel I'm standing atop a mountain.  I feel the climb in my legs but I see the heavens and the earth from my new vantage point.  Alter seems to have read every book and to speak every language, and yet he's immune to pretense and to fads.  His often beautiful prose elevates criticism to art and his evidence-based analysis of texts is as scientific in its method as writing on literature can be.


This study of self-consciousness in the novel from Don Quixote to Claude Mauriac's 1961 The Marquise Went Out at Five contains indispensable help in understanding the Cervantes masterpiece, as well as Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, and Nabokov's Pale Fire.  As in any Alter text, he shines plenty of light on many other books in passing.  He situates modernism between 19th-century realism and the more self-conscious works that followed in a helpful way, and draws a very useful distinction between self-conscious novels which concern themselves with reality and those novels of "flaunted artifice" that are card tricks for the sake of the trick.  (Alter refers to some of John Barth's work as an example of such fictions that don't heed the complexities of reality.)  Self-conscious novels that pursue realism do so, according to Alter, by charting the dynamics by which imagination acts on the raw material of reality.  Self-conscious novels that lose themselves in artifice demonstrate a sort of avoidant pathology--and it's precisely that pathology which is the focus of good self-conscious works about the imagination.  There is only one reply to a novel that takes seriously the notion that 'reality is a dream.'  And that is: you wish.





View all my reviews

The Poet of Nature

A New Mimesis: Shakespeare and the Representation of Reality by A.D. Nuttall

A.D. Nuttall is a god damn genius.  As of May 6, 2011, I am his only Goodreads "fan" (as well as the only "fan" of supreme literary critic Robert Alter) and that's a testament both to the meaninglessness of literary fandom and to the intellectually backwards times we live in.  But at least this Nuttall classic is still in print.

This short piece of Shakespeare criticism, first published in 1982, begins with some useful philosophical deprogramming of contemporary French literary theory, and proceeds to the best close readings I've ever read of Othello, Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, Coriolanus, and other plays.  (In truth, how many close readings of Shakespeare's plays can I say I've read?--but you can't hold this against Nuttall, or even against me, having been miseducated by New Critics and Deconstructionists.)  Nuttall illuminates the meanings and artistic methods of these plays so brightly, I wanted to reread all of them then and there (but he quotes liberally from the plays so you don't have to).

Nuttall addresses his philosophical argument specifically to the absolute skepticism and devout uncertainty that has infiltrated so much literature and literary criticism of the past 50 years (when he wrote it, it was only 20 years).  Next he goes on to reaffirm a notion that's been tossed out of English departments all over America for its supposed naivete and quaintness: viz., that Shakespeare is indeed "the poet of nature," as Samuel Johnson said in 1765.  Nuttall quotes from many other 18th c. literary critics such as John Armstrong, who in 1770 praised Shakespeare’s "deep knowledge of human nature" and his "characters drawn with the strongest, truest, and most exquisite strokes…."

Johnson and Armstrong's view is the common sense view of Shakespeare; but what's so great about Nuttall's argument is not just that it's correct, but that it's sophisticated and ought to be deemed so even by the ultraviolet lights of postmodern literary theory.  Nuttall doesn't contest the postmodern view that literature is filled with aesthetic and social conventions.  He merely asserts that literature does not proceed through convention alone, but through convention and mimesis--the imitation of nature.  And in fact, how could it be otherwise?  How could we rate a convention dubious or inadequate without the capacity for reflection on the truth of nature?  How could we possibly know what's false without also having some idea of what's by contrast true?  (There are many philosophy papers, both older and current, that explain this point in more detail--see a theory of knowledge anthology such as the one edited by Louis Pojman.)  What 18th c. critics found revolutionary about Shakespeare was that he so often cast aside "fake" conventions in order to be more truthful to the more complex reality of human nature.  Through the close readings, Nuttall shows the many different ways that Shakespeare invokes conventions, cliches, stereotypes, audience expectations and then overturns them in favor of a more complex and realistic character or situation.  In this sense, Shakespeare himself was a skeptic of phony conventions long before the postmodernists were.

It's also refreshing that Nuttall actually has a sense of humor.  This is his prefatory commentary on the style of A New Mimesis: "an alternation of donnish knowingness with aggressively simple assertion which is slightly repellent even to me, the author."

But it isn't repellent.  If I were a literature professor, I'd assign this book to everyone.

On My Grudging Disrespect for Nabokov and His Cheval Mirror

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov

I recently returned to Pale Fire after leaving it unfinished over ten years ago.  I returned not least because the sage Robert Alter commended it and quoted from it this brilliant passage on mirrors:

He awoke to find her standing with a comb in her hand before his--or rather, his grandfather's--cheval glass, a triptych of bottomless light, a really fantastic mirror, signed with a diamond by its maker, Sudarg of Bokay.  She turned about before it: a secret device of reflection fathered an infinite number of nudes in its depths, garlands of girls in graceful and sorrowful groups, diminishing in the limpid distance, or breaking into individual nymphs, some of whom, she murmured, must resemble her ancestors when they were young--little peasant garlien combing their hair in shallow water as far as the eye could reach, and then the wistful mermaid from an old tale, and then nothing.  pp. 111-112.

The 999-line poem in heroic couplets that begins Pale Fire is a technical achievement with many stirring images (like the first one, which has long been stuck in my head: “I was the shadow of the waxwing slain / By the false azure in the windowpane”).  But I had not understood the conceit that makes up the rest of the book: the fictional academic Charles Kinbote annotates the poem, which is by his neighbor John Shade, and Kinbote’s endnotes have little to do with the poem and more to do with Kinbote’s bizarre remembrances of his homeland, a Baltic kingdom called Zembla.  But according to Alter, the two parts of the book are in fact connected.  Alter suggests that the commentaries should be read as a distorted reflection of the poem, Kinbote as a distorted reflection of Shade, both figures as distorted reflections of their creator, Nabokov.  Alter points out that while Nabokov has drawn Kinbote as a farcical figure, he’s also just like Nabokov in an important way: he’s a fugitive from his homeland, living out his post-exilic life in the United States, haunted by nostalgia for his home.  (Nabokov’s family fled Russia in 1919, when he was 20, in order to escape the Bolshevik Revolution.)  On pp. 191-192 of Partial Magic, Alter’s study of the self-conscious novel, he comments on Nabokov’s passage on the cheval mirror (which is a full-length tilting mirror on a stand, or 'horse,' thus 'cheval'):

[C]onsciousness, as the example of Joyce’s technique must remind us, is essentially built up out of the infinite laminations of what the individual has seen, felt, read, fantasized in the past, however attuned he may be to the present moment.  The mirror itself here is a legacy of the past, not properly King Charles’s but his grandfather’s….  [A]s she [Fleur] observes herself transfigured in multiple reflection, we are moved further back in time into a legendary past where pastoral ancestors preen themselves by still waters.

It began to seem to me that Pale Fire was an examination of the structure of consciousness as a sort of cheval mirror: consciousness reflects reality but also tips it in its own direction, according to its own machinery.  If the commentaries were meant to mirror the poem and Kinbote to mirror Shade, I thought, then perhaps Pale Fire was really as brilliant as its adherents said.  Maybe the poem part of the book was meant to be the naturalistic and conscious way of seeing and reflecting reality, while Kinbote’s farcical commentaries were meant to be an expressionistic way of seeing and reflecting the same thing.  And in that case, maybe all that crazy rambling in the commentaries had a real meaning.  Maybe all the mirrors everywhere in the book were not postmodern symbols of infinite regression to nothing, but rather modernist symbols of the multiplicative meaning-making powers of the mind and of art.  (I alliterate in mirroring deference to Nabokov's style--and because it just came out that way.)  So, armed with 40 pages of Alter’s interpretations, I went back to Pale Fire with renewed enthusiasm and note-taking pen in hand.

Mirrors were in fact everywhere, starting with the title, Pale Fire.  Alter points out that Nabokov borrowed the phrase from a passage in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, Act IV sc iii, ll. 440-441: “…the moon’s an arrant thief, / And her pale fire she snatches from the sun….”  He points out that the name of the glassmaker referred to in the passage above, Sudarg of Bokay, is a near mirror image of the name of the assassin who pursues Kinbote throughout his semi-fantastical memories: Jakob Gradus.  It occurred to me, furthermore, that the name of Kinbote’s fantastical kingdom, Zembla, must be derived from the word ‘resemble.’

I was excited about all those mirrors as I read and hunted for meanings in their reflections.  I confess, however, that what had seemed elegant, artful, beautiful, and meaningful in Alter’s account, was upon actual reading elegant, yes, artful and beautiful, yes, but mostly not very meaningful and on top of that extremely tedious and irritating.  While both Kinbote and Shade have lost their parents prematurely, Nabokov does very little with this subject, or any other of psychological importance to his characters, and instead scatters his attention in a million different directions, introducing new characters every other page.

I wanted to like Nabokov.  He has Joyce’s gift for allusion and Woolf’s poetic sense.  But in my view—a view that could be wrong, but derives at least from serious consideration—Nabokov lacks the courage and character of both of his modernist forebears.  He can’t sustain his gaze on the complexities of reality for the duration of an entire novel, but would rather spin the mirror around and around.  I suspect that if he let it come to rest, he’d see something he didn’t want to see.

The Bible as Literature

The Book of Genesis by R. Crumb
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Harold Bloom says that Freud learned all his psychology from Shakespeare. Would it be radical to suggest that Shakespeare learned half of his psychology from the Romans and the other half from the Hebrew Bible?

Robert Alter says of the Bible’s authors, "[T]he Hebrew writers manifestly took delight in the artful limning of ... lifelike characters and actions, and so they created an unexhausted source of delight for a hundred generations of readers." The Bible is generally more realist in style and more concerned with the minute details and subtle intricacies of mental life than say, Homeric epic, or the plays of Aeschylus, where emotions certainly occupy a central position but are seen at a longer psychic distance and are represented in more abstract ways.

When Cain is snubbed by God, who heeds Abel’s offering but not the older brother's, I can put myself in Cain’s shoes (sandals) more readily than I can in those of say, Menelaus, after Paris absconds with his wife. I understand Menelaus on a more intellectual level. When Cain is snubbed, the Bible says “his face fell” and that God asked him, “Why is your face fallen?” The narration and the figures in the stories themselves are remarkably attendant to the inner life, to discrepancies between the outward manifestations of thought and feeling and the inner facts, to discrepancies between intention and action, even between inner ideas and deeper levels of consciousness (i.e., the Bible depicts lies told to oneself; i.e., denial ain’t just the river where Moses turned up in an ark of bulrushes). Noah’s ostracism of his son and grandson and Sarah’s jealousy of Hagar are entirely modern-feeling accounts of guilt and jealousy and the way such emotions are handled in the psyche.

R. Crumb’s recently published illustrations of the Book of Genesis amplify this psychological pathos in a wonderful way without diminishing the Bible's subtlety. Crumb shows Cain sweating under the weight of his offering to God juxtaposed with the tiny lightweight lamb that Abel brings. You see how unfair and hurtful it was for Cain and understand what came next.

Some of the Crumb illustrations are funny and implicitly ask subversive questions about God, particularly in the earlier chapters, where God enters the story as a kind of lunatic artisan who likes to make things for reasons unknown to anyone, including, apparently, himself and who gets furiously dissatisfied with his creations and takes out all his frustrations on his children like the put-upon alcoholic Farrington in James Joyce’s story “Counterparts.” The things God yells about seem not to make any sense as in a real human temper tantrum. The opening passages of Genesis may lose some of their gravitas in this version, but the familial dysfunction at the heart of so many of the Bible stories is thrown into bold relief. Furthermore, the satire in these early parts lends a certain existential irony to the stories, which I appreciate, and which it might be argued is not even foreign to the biblical writers. Alter sees the Bible’s main agenda as the depiction of human character in all its variety and consistency, and that character's interrelation with forces beyond human control—fate, destiny, chance (or God, if you prefer)—to create what we call history. Sometimes the biblical heroes themselves don’t understand God’s designs, and sometimes laughter is the result, as when Sarah laughs at God’s annunciation of her pregnancy in old age and this laughter is commemorated in Isaac’s name, which means “he who laughs.” Sometimes the heroes object to God's designs, as when Abraham bargains for Lot’s life. Sometimes God seems like a personification of the sort of natural disaster that just befell Haiti as when God wantonly destroys Babel. It might be argued that the biblical writers purposely made God at times cruel and outrageous because fate is cruel and outrageous. And inasmuch as the Bible writers rationalized natural disasters as punishments for bad behavior (as Pat Robertson does even today) or otherwise rationalized them as in any way useful or necessary or morally ordained—well, then this benighted and primitive element of their worldview deserves satire.

On the whole, however, what’s so remarkable about the ancient writers of the Bible is not what's primitive about them, but what is modern. They have honored the complexity and majesty of the real world with the most meticulous artistry and have not only bequeathed their wise and beautiful stories to later readers but their techniques to later writers and artists.

I reread Genesis in Crumb’s illustrated edition (which uses Robert Alter’s translation, a major upgrade from any I’ve read, sensitive as it is the artistic aims of the original Hebrew) and afterward I read Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative, a masterpiece of literary criticism and a highly accessible one at that. If you want a pair of excellent guides to one of the great artistic creations in the history of humankind, I commend to you the Roberts Alter and Crumb.

Addendum: On Bloom’s notion that Freud got everything from Shakespeare; this is surely “the anxiety of influence” in action—a wonderful concept Bloom invented with a little help from Freud. (As that immortal rock band The Bettelheims said, “I get by with a little help from my Freud....”)


View all my reviews