Be perspicuous [sic] -- The Big Thing on Grice's Mind, If He Had One -- Or In Attack Of The Ink of Melancholy?

Speranza

What Was The Big Thing on Grice's Mind?

Perhaps we can learn about it via Thomas Powers's review of "William Faulkner: A Life Through Novels," an essay by André Bleikasten, translated into Engish from the original French by Miriam Watchorn with a little collaboration by Roger Little.

It would be a grave mistake for anyone trying to understand stuff in history to overlook the novels of William Faulkner, the American southern novelist (or southern American novelist, if you prefer).

Beneath their literary "complexity," the "clearest" statement may be found of the core abuse that has driven conflict in slavery regimes (Aristotle's ethics, some philosophers argue, is tainted, since he lived under one).

But first you have to pass a test.

One of Faulkner’s biographers, André Bleikasten, devoted his life to understanding Faulkner, obviously passed the test himself, but it cannot have been easy (but rather 'difficult,' rather) for him.

Bleikasten presents his addressees with many examples of the test, but the one that seems bluntest, impossible ignore, emerges from an evening at Princeton when Faulkner met J. R. Oppenheimer.

Both men were celebrated: Oppenheimer for building the first atomic bomb and Faulkner for writing novels.

(A member of the audience who was attending the celebration thought that Faulkner had built the first atomic bomb -- and that Oppenheimer was a famous novelist).

Oppenheimer, when in the mood, could talk to just about anybody about anything -- even atomic bombs!

But Faulkner found, unlike Oppenheimer, or Grice, for that matter, casual conversation difficult with strangers (and non-foreigners alike, for that matter!)

A bare "yes" or alternatively a bare "no" was often all Faulkner could manage at the Princeton celebration.

Oppenheimer said he had recently seen a television play based on a Faulkner story and asked what Faulkner thought of television as a medium for the artist.

"Well, I don't think I would be interested to see a television programme about your bomb, darling," has his rude response.

This is the test:

Are you prepared to believe that the Faulkner who uttered such stupidity might *also* have something important to say about American history?

The test is easier for Bleikasten because he is French.

Bleikasten’s long devotion to Faulkner began, shall we say, with a happy accident.

Bleikasten was needing a safely dead writer of important novels in English for his doctoral thesis.

He was close to committing himself to D.H. Lawrence.

Then, Faulkner died after falling from a hard-to-control horse in Virginia.

Bleikasten wrote the thesis which he entitled, appropriately pretentiously, "The Ink of Melancholy.'

Friends asked, why not follow the dissertation ('the opinions') with a biography (a 'life')? ("The life and opinions of William Faulkner").

Bleikasten resisted.

“There are five already,” he answered. “Why a sixth?”

But then an editor at a small publishing house “harried me for months until finally I gave in.”

"You know: Frenchmen love Colette -- but how many have seriously read about the life and opinions of William Faulkner?"

Bleikasten’s essay on the life did not take long to finish.

It was published in France and won three big prizes.

Then Bleikasten died. An unhappy accident.

Happily, his wife, Aimee Bleikasten, took on the task, which was completed by Miriam Watchorn "with a little help from Little, Roger."

The result in English is heavy in the hand (typically of Indiana books) but the essay marches with narrative vigour, the result principally of Bleikasten’s clarity (if not difficulty) of thought (if not diction).

Bleikasten's points are never softened or simplified.

Faulkner once told Malcolm Cowley that he thought a bare-bones epitaph would be enough:

“He wrote the novels and he died.”

Bleikasten puts the novels first, too, but he sees things in "them novels" that the life helps make visible.

The big facts of Faulkner’s life are place and time; he was born in Mississippi in 1897, when the eleven states of the old Confederacy were enacting anti-black Jim Crow laws to exclude African-Americans from public life.

The intent of the laws was reinforced by mobs that brutally lynched blacks for real and imaginary crimes.

They weren’t just hanged but were often tortured as well.

Bleikasten notes that during Faulkner’s childhood more than eighty African-Americans were lynched in Mississippi, including one in Faulkner’s hometown of Oxford.

The victim was Nelse Patton, charged with murdering a woman.

A mob broke into the Oxford jail with the help of local boys, including Faulkner’s friend John Cullen, who were boosted through a window so they could unlock the door from inside.

Patton was shot dead, castrated, attached to a car that dragged him through the streets of Oxford, and finally burned.

Faulkner, who was eleven at the time and lived barely a hundred yards from the jail, wrote about the Patton lynching in two of his books, "Light in August" and "Intruder in the Dust."

The world of Faulkner’s childhood was obsessed with stuff like this.

Faulkner was born lucky, but his family held no great place in Oxford.

A feckless farmer in Faulkner’s short story “Two Soldiers” is described as always behind.

"He can’t get no further behind,” a son remarks.

Faulkner’s father was like that.

He failed in business repeatedly and was fired from his last job as comptroller at the University of Mississippi when he refused to contribute to local politicos.

Faulkner’s grandfather had been a bigger man locally but was disgraced at the end of his life after he ran off with some Oxford town funds and “a beautiful octoroon.”

The pride of the family was Faulkner’s great-grandfather, who had fought in the Civil War, built a railroad, and was shot dead in the streets of Oxford by a former partner.

Just as remarkable was the greatgrandfather’s huge popular success with a Civil War novel called "The White Rose of Memphis," which prompted Faulkner at nine to say, “I want to be a writer like my great-grand-daddy.”

Faulkner was a compulsive reader in childhood and did well in school but drifted out of college before getting a degree or knowing how to take the next step.

He was short—five feet four by Bleikasten’s account—and awkward with girls.

His two early loves, Estelle Oldham in Oxford and Helen Baird in New Orleans, both abandoned him for men who were better bets.

But Estelle’s first marriage foundered, and she married Faulkner when he asked again ("Will you marry me now -- that you are divorced?")

Faulkner told a friend, “They don’t think we’re gonna stick, but it is gonna stick.”

Note: Not "we're gonna stick -- IT is gonna stick." His friend said, "I never knew what Faulkner meant by 'it'."

Why he wanted to marry Estelle Baird is a big mystery.

Both were alcoholics and had nothing in common -- "other than this likeness for alcohol," Bleikasten wittily remarks.

When a daughter was born  (after the death in infancy of a premature baby girl Faulkner strangely named "Alabama" -- "In Italy, girls names end in "-a."), they quit having sex and tormented each other for years.

Bleikasten stresses the fact that Faulkner was a storyteller "in both senses of the term."

(Alas, Bleikasten never read Grice -- "Do not multiply 'senses' beyond necessity" -- "Storyteller" has only ONE sense).

Faulkner loved writing "complex," difficult, not precisely crystal-clear, stories of “the human heart in conflict with itself” (a phrase Faulkner uses in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech), and he compulsively embroideres the bare facts of his own prosaic (rather than versical) life.

Writing later about the months he lived in New Orleans, Faulkner claims that he supported himself by working for a bootlegger.

He had a launch that he would take down the Ponchartrain into the Gulf to an island where the green rum would be brought up from overseas and buried, and we would dig it up and bring it back to New Orleans" ("Hence the phrase, 'bring coal to Newcastle.').

"And I would get a hundred dollars a trip for that."

Nothing about Faulkner's bootlegger story is true.

But just as remarkable is where he tells it—in an "_American_ lit class at West Point!

Bigger lies he told about his eventless months with the Air Force.

After the war he limped from "imaginary" (as Grice would call them -- vide his "Causal Theory of Perception") machine gun wounds suffered, Faulkner claimed, in aerial duels over the fields of France.

Faulkner was still in school when the war ended, was never sent to France, was never wounded in combat.

Whether he lied to woo girls, or because he was desperate for distinction, or for the simple fun of it is hard to say.

Grice thinks it is "because of the simple fun of it," but he was an unredeemable irreverant.

But Bleikasten is blunt about Faulkner’s fabrications and writes that “he lied to his parents, his brothers, his friends, and later his son-in-law, his mistresses, his editors, his colleagues in Hollywood, and his doctors.”

""Life is a lie, and then you die," was his motto," Bleikasten writes.

In time, Faulkner told fewer tall tales and had the deeper pleasure of constructing elaborate fictions in prose.

Faulkner seems to have been following the example of Sherwood Anderson, whose mornings-only writing schedule appealed to Faulkner.

Faulkner set to work.

But was slow to find his subject.

Two novels— "Soldiers’ Pay" (about a soldier's salary) and "Mosquitoes," about, as the title implies, the insects —came and went.

With his third novel, Faulkner followed Anderson’s advice to stick to “that little patch up there in Mississippi where you started from.”

Faulkner loved the "sprawling complex" novel that followed, but one publisher after another rejected it. The title didn't help: "Flags in the Dust." He retitled it "Sartoris," to no effect.

"Sartoris," loosely centered on Faulkner’s own struggle to fit into civilian life after the war, showed him the way.

“Beginning with "Sartoris" I discovered that my own little postage stamp of soil was worth writing about so I created a cosmos of my own.”

Faulkner’s cosmos is Yoknapatawpha ["careful how you pronounce that" -- Bleikasten warns the reader] County in Mississippi, with a courthouse and the town of Jefferson at its center, a thinly fictionalized version of Oxford, Mississippi, where he had spent the largest part of his childhood, knew everybody, and heard many of the stories that emerged in somewhat altered but generally transparent form in fifteen of his twenty novels.

Many of the characters in Faulkner's novels come from the same half-dozen families, spanning a century beginning in the 1830s, when the first cotton farms were established on land ceded by the Chickasaws.

Few of Faulkner's novels sold well, especially in the beginning.

Faulkner got by in the early years with frequent stints writing for the 'flicks' in Hollywood, where he met the great love of his life, in Bleikasten’s view, Meta Carpenter (named after Aristotle's "Metaphysics"), a script girl working for Howard Hawks, director of The Big Sleep on which Faulkner worked.

Faulkner had other girlfriends, developed a reputation as a man hard to interview, answered contumaciously (if I may contumaciously say so myself) when pestered about politics, spent too much money, was churlish about accepting the Nobel Prize in person (“Everybody has been telling me to do right!”), and stubbornly refused to admit that some horses were too much for him.

Bleikasten scants none of the life but is interested above all in the novels.

One or two might be called entertainments, using the term as Graham Greene does.

Many of Faulkner's novels can be as "hard" to read as the begats in the Bible or Heidegger on history.

Faulkner's novels are awash in detail, knotted, inexact, disturbing, and VERY OBSCURE  in their fierce pursuit of elusive insights.

It is hard to be sure what Faulkner is trying to understand, and hard to decide if he has understood it.

That's why fewer Americans than Frenchmen tackle Faulkner.

Those forced (by their dads) to read Faulkner remember little, perhaps Benjy looking at Caddy’s drawers in "The Sound and the Fury" or Temple Drake’s rape with a corncob in "Sanctuary."

But there is a bit of Griceian logic to Faulkner’s dependence on difficulty.

Difficulty (a violation to Grice's "be perspicuous [sic]") serves two purposes in Faulkner's novels.

In some of Faulkner's novels, such as "Absalom, Absalom!," the lack of clarity ensures that Faulkner’s neighbours will not know what he is talking about lest they burn his barn, if not worse.

A second purpose for Faulkner's violation of Grice's desideratum of perspicuity ("modus," after Kant) is to force his addressee to struggle to get the story straight.

A poem, after all, or a short story, even, is too small, too soon over, to encompass what I shall call "the big thing on his mind," that is, the great submerged obsessive guilty burden of slave times, when all knew but few said that slaves were not only unpaid labourers but unpaid sexual servants.

Not to implicate it, but to say it flat out, as that does, is a way to get past the fact in a hurry.

Faulkner is NOT in a hurry.

The narrator of “Uncle Willy” notes:

“Papa told me once that someone said if you know it you can say it.”

"The implicature possibly was that Mama thought that if you didn't know it you better shut up!"

Faulkner knew it and somehow won permission—drinking helped here—to say (or 'explicate,' rather than implicate) it, “all of hit,” as Mollie Beauchamp stresses at the end of "Go Down, Moses."

The 'hit' is a hyper-correction.

Beauchamp is speaking of the life and death of her grandson and also of the century of slavery and its aftermath that determined his fate.

"Is you gonter put hit in de paper? I wants hit all in de paper. All of hit."

Five novels address and wrestle with Faulkner’s central obsession, which in one mood he called “the past” and in another “the South.”

These five novels embody one thing Faulkner learned from writing "Sartoris"—“that not only each novel has to have a design but the whole output or sum of an author's work has to have a design.”

About the past Faulkner famously wrote in a late novel, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Please note that 'the past is dead' is a metaphor -- 'the past is not dead' is not. "The past is not past" is what Grice calls analytically false.

Faulkner means that the meaning and the burden of the past are inextricably laced within the present.

"There is no such thing as 'was'—only 'is,'” he told Jean Stein, when she interviewed him for The Paris Review.

About the South Faulkner was ambivalent, especially with strangers.

“Well, I love it and hate it,” he told reporters in Japan

"Some of the things there I don’t like at all, but I was born there, and that’s my home, and I will still defend it even if I hate it.”

Faulkner’s love and his hate are knotted together most tightly in his most popular novels that are primarily, but it would be perverse to describe them as a defense of the South.

Indictment is more like it.

As the novels appeared, Bleikasten writes, southerners, generally, starting in Faulkner’s home town of Oxford, detested them all after a page or two.

A partial exception was eventually made for the last of the five, "Intruder in the Dust," which they forgave and indulged when it was made into a popular 'flick.'

The other four are "Sanctuary," "Light in August, "Absalom, Absalom!" and "Go Down, Moses."

To understand how these novels fit into Faulkner’s grand design on the subject of the South, it helps to examine the chosen expression in the South for the woman Faulkner’s grandfather ran off with in 1887, ten years before Faulkner was born.

The expression is “octoroon.” It means a person who is one-eighth African-American, or in polite usage in the nineteenth century, one-eighth Negro.

A quadroon would have one Negro grandparent, and a mulatto would have one Negro parent.

The three terms were coined in slave times and refer only to African-Americans.

A person with one Chinese or one Pacific Islander or one Inuit great-grandparent would not be an octoroon.

The final point to understand is that “octoroon” neither says nor implies anything much about actual genetic makeup.

The African-American great-grandparent is any person who was identified, accepted, and treated at the time as an African-American, whatever their actual genetic mix.

Nothing about the physical appearance of an octoroon says “octoroon.”

In the South of Faulkner’s childhood, somebody had to tell you who was or wasn’t an octoroon.

To find out you were one changed everything.

This point is crucial to "Absalom, Absalom!," which some critics think Faulkner’s greatest novel.

The central character is Thomas Sutpen, owner of a huge plantation called “Sutpen’s Hundred,” who had once been married in the West Indies to a planter’s daughter, with whom he had a son.

He abandoned both when he learned that his wife was part African-American.

Mixed race is a factor in all of Faulkner’s core novels.

Joe Christmas in "Light in August" agonizes over his “black blood.”

“Is it certain, proved, that he has negro blood?” a character asks.

Faulkner never says, but Joe Christmas is tortured equally by the taint and its uncertainty.

He murders a lover, is hunted down, castrated, and killed by townspeople infuriated by his refusal to act “like either a man…. That was what made the folks so mad…. It was like he never even knew he was a murderer.”

Sexual connection between master and slave is a principal driver of Faulkner’s core novels.

But it is never simple, never "clearly" told, and never without tragic consequence.

In "Go Down, Moses," the planter Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin has a daughter named Tomasina with Eunice, one of his slaves, who later walks into a creek and drowns herself on Christmas Day.

The daughter is called Tomey and is of course McCaslin’s slave as well.

She dies giving birth to McCaslin’s son, whose given name is Terrell but is called Turl and known by all as Tomey’s Turl.

He in turn fathers a son with Tennie Beauchamp named Lucas, who is the main character in "Intruder in the Dust," threatened with lynching for a murder he did not commit.

He refuses to defend himself, claiming “I belongs to the old lot. I’m a McCaslin,” connected through his father (Turl) and his grandmother (Tomey) to L.Q.C. McCaslin.

Popeye and Goodwin in "Sanctuary" are never "clearly" identified but suffer what might be called black fates—Goodwin lynched and burned, Popeye convicted and executed, both for murders they did not commit.

I have barely touched here on the driving force of gradations in Faulkner’s work, where it is “black blood” that determines fate.

Each horror is the consequence, often long delayed, of real crimes in the past that generate fatal confusions, push characters to madness and suicide, and fix everyone, permanently and without appeal, on one side or the other of the great social divide.

What Faulkner contributes to this knotted history is the understanding that slavery’s grip on masters was sexual, and that the coping mechanism of the South was denial.

One of the few southerners to name the problem frankly was Mary Chesnut, daughter of one large slave owner and wife of another, who recorded the great fact in her diary before the Civil War.

"I wonder if it be a sin to think slavery a curse to any land."

"Sumner said not one word of this hated institution which is not true."

"Like the patriarchs of old our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines, and the mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children—and every lady tells you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household, but those in her own she seems to think drop from the clouds."

"The Sumner she credits with speaking the truth was Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, who said as plainly as he dared that it was the lure of sexual license that explained the furious defense of slavery by slave owners."

"Everybody understood what Sumner meant when he attacked Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina by name, saying, “Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who is lovely to him;  chaste in his sight—I mean the harlot, Slavery.”

Butler’s kinsman, Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina—some say he was a nephew, some say a cousin—avenged the insult by beating Sumner nearly to death on the floor of the Senate with a gutta-percha cane, an act of violence that helped bring on the war that followed.

:As soon as the abolitionist Yankee North started to contest slavery,” Bleikasten notes, “its justification drove all political discourse.”

He stops there, but we might go further and date the birth of the “solid South” to the 1845 split of the Baptist Church into a Southern and a Northern Convention, resulting from disputes over the issue of slavery.

The solid South has never cracked but has continued to speak with a single dominant voice, justifying slavery before the Civil War and defending Jim Crow laws and lynching in the following century.

During that century the solid South controlled the US Senate on the issues that mattered to it most, and it is no less solid in speaking with a single political voice now following its takeover of the Republican Party.

Faulkner learned about the history of race in the South from living there.

His use of controversial expressions, of which Bleikasten offers a full spectrum of examples, along with much else, identifies him as indelibly character in the Southern manner of the times.

The day is has come when readers, bumping into these expressions repeatedly, can no longer pass the test.

But those expressions are an ineradicable part of Faulkner’s world.

A walk through the streets of Oxford in his youth revealed the South’s great either/or—black or white, one or the other, no exceptions.

What Faulkner saw, and found a way to say that could not be silenced, was the fact of two centuries of sexual exchange, in which African-Americans were compelled to endure exploitation that people minimized, rationalized, and violently denied.

Faulkner did not ultimately disguise what he thought about the great fact.

The thing he refused to admit to the Japanese reporters was something he had already said plainly in the final words of "Absalom, Absalom!" when Quentin Compson is flatly asked:

"Why do you hate the South?”

The question comes at night in Quentin’s room at Harvard from his friend Shreve.

Quentin has been telling Shreve the story of Thomas Sutpen, his two sons, and the fate of his house at Sutpen’s Hundred.

Quentin had been present when Clytie, Sutpen’s daughter by a slave, burned the house to the ground, killing both herself and her brother, Henry, who had shot to death their brother years earlier.

Then Shreve’s question and Quentin’s answer:

“I do not hate it, he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I do not. I do not! I do not hate it! I do not hate it!”

Which does not implicate he loves it, either!