Faulkner and Grice

Speranza

What Was "The Big Thing" on Grice's Mind, If Any?

We may learn a little about it by examining, as we are with L. J. Helm, T. Powers's review of "William Faulkner: A Life Through Novels," by André Bleikasten -- translated into English from the original French by Miriam Watchorn with a little collaboration by Little, Roger.

Some believe it is a big mistake for anyone willing to understand stuff in *history* to overlook, among other things, the *novels* of Nobel-Prize winner William Faulkner, the American southern novelist (or southern American novelist, if you must).

This sounds paradoxical, on the face of it. Novels are supposed to be 'fictitious': addressees approach them with a 'suspension of belief,' as Grice would call it. You don't approach, ceteris paribus, history _that_ way.

The paradox may be resolved if we consider that, beneath the literary "complexity" of Faulkner's 'fictional' novels, the "clearest" statement (pertaining to 'history') is 'implicated' of, for example, what historians regard as the core abuse that has driven conflict in many slavery regimes (as when Aristotle's ethical system, some philosophers argue, is tainted by the fact that he lived under one such regime).

You have to pass "a test," as it were, to proceed to learn 'history' from a 'fictional' novel, especially when the motif of 'abuse' is at play.

One biographer of Faulkner, André Bleikasten, devoted his life to understanding Faulkner's 'fictional' *novels.*

Bleikasten did pass the test, obviously, but it cannot have been that easy (rather 'difficult' I would rather gather) for him.

Bleikasten presents his addressee to the essay under review with several examples of the test.

But the one that seems the bluntest emerges from that evening at Princeton when Faulkner and J. R. Oppenheimer met.

Faulkner and Oppenheimer were both being celebrated: Oppenheimer for building the first atomic bomb; Faulkner for writing fictional *novels.*

(A rather silly member of the audience idiotically thought that it was Faulkner ("the man on the left") who had built the first atomic bomb, whereas the novelist was Oppenheimer ("the man on the right")).

Whereas Oppenheimer (like Grice) could talk to anybody about anything -- including atomic bombs! -- Faulkner, instead, Princetonians soon realised, found casual conversation difficult with strangers (and non-foreigners alike, for that matter!).

A bare "yes" or alternatively a bare "no" was often all that Princetonians managed to retrieve from Faulkner on that venerable occasion.

And then, out of the blue, Oppenheimer made a passing remark to the effect that he had recently seen a television programme based on a story -- if not *novel* -- by Faulkner.

Oppenheimer did not mention which, but hastened to ask, again slightly out of the blue, or to keep the conversation going, what Faulkner thought, in general, of television as a medium.

"Well, I don't particularly think I would be interested to see a television programme about how your bomb gets fabricated, darling," has his rude response -- some say.

(Others say his response was a bare 'No.')

This is the test:

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

The test may be slightly easier for Bleikasten because, unlike Faulkner, Bleikasten is French.

Bleikasten’s 'devotion' to Faulkner *the novelist* begins with, shall we say, a happy accident.

Bleikasten was needing a "safely dead author of important novels for his doctoral thesis at this Department of Foreign Languages (Bleikasten is a foreigner, from a foreign land where "English" is the foreign language).

Bleikasten was close to committing himself to the Nottingham novelist D. H. Lawrence, of "Chatterley" infame.

Just then, Bleikasten receives the news that Faulkner had just died in Virginia, after falling from his hard-to-control horse Toby.

And, as things go, Bleikasten ends up submitting his dissertation on novels of the recently deceased the American Southerner rather than the English Midlander.

Bleikasten pretentiously entitled it "The Ink of Melancholy' (in French) -- and it passed the test!

Then people started pestering him: why not follow your dissertation ('the opinions,' the *novels*) with a biography (a 'life', a *history*)? ("The life and opinions of William Faulkner").

At first, Bleikasten resists.

“There are five lives of Faulkner already, in various languages," he answered. “Why a sixth, pray?”

An editor in a small publishing house “harried [him] for months until finally [he] gave in.”

"You know: Frenchmen love Colette -- but how many have seriously read about both Faulkner's opinions -- or *novels* -- _and_ his _life_ ?"

Bleikasten’s bit on the _life_ (or *history*) beneath Faulkner's novels did not take that long to finish.

Published in France, the 'life' wins various prizes.

Then Bleikasten died. An unhappy accident.

Happily, his wife then takes on the task of making Faulker's life or *history* (as told by Bleikasten) available in Faulkner's own vernacular.

The result is heavy in the hand (typically of Indiana books), but the essay marches with narrative vigour, the result principally of Bleikasten’s clarity (he leaves the difficulty to Faulkner[s *novels*)) of thought (if not diction).

Bleikasten's various points are never softened or simplified. In this he is anti-Faulkner.

Faulkner famously once told Malcolm Cowley that he thought a bare-bones epitaph would do for him:

“Here lies the body of William Faulkner.
He wrote novels. And then he died.”

Bleikasten puts the novels *first,* too. But Fleikasten sees things in "them novels," the 'opinions' that the 'life' or *history* does help make visible.

The big facts of Faulkner’s life or history are the co-ordinates of place and time, having been born in Mississippi iwhen the old Confederacy was enacting Jim-Crow laws to exclude African-Americans from public life.

The intent of these laws was *reinforced* by mobs that brutally lynched African-Americans for real and imaginary crimes. African-Americans were not just hanged but were often tortured as well. During Faulkner’s childhood years, Bleikasten counts, more than eighty African-Americans were lynched in Mississippi only, including *one* in Faulkner’s very hometown. This was Nelse Patton, charged with murder. A mob breaks into the jail with the help of local boys, including Faulkner’s friend John Cullen, who are boosted through a window so they can unlock the door from inside. Patton is shot dead, castrated, attached to a car that drags him through the streets, and finally burned.

Faulkner is eleven at the time and indeed is living barely a hundred yards from the jail. Faulkner writes about the *historical* Patton lynching in two of his 'fictional' *novels*:  "Light in August" and "Intruder in the Dust."

The world of Faulkner’s childhood was obsessed with stuff like this. Whereas Faulkner was born lucky, his family did not really hold a precisely great place in town. A farmer in Faulkner’s short story (not *novel*) “Two Soldiers” is described as being always behind. "He cannot get no further behind,” the soldier's son remarks. Faulkner’s father was a bit like that. Faulkner's father fails in business repeatedly and is fired from his job as comptroller at the university when he refuses to contribute to local politicos. Faulkner’s grandfather had been a 'bigger man,' locally but is disgraced after he runs off with some Oxford town funds and “an octoroon.” The pride of the Faulkner family was the GREAT-grandfather, who had fought in the Civil War and built a railroad. The great-grandfather’s success with one *novel,* somewhat mawkishly called "The White Rose of Memphis," prompts Faulkner to utter: “I want to be a *novelist* like my great-grand-daddy -- even if I'll choose more complex titles for my novels than he did."

While a compulsive reader, Faulkner drifts out of college before knowing how to take the next step. On top, he was awkward with girls -- and some boys, for that matter! Two of his early 'loves,' Estelle Oldham and Helen Baird abandoned him to marry men whom they thought were better bets (Baird's marriage eventually founders, and she curiously does end up marrying Faulkner, after they happened to meet in the streeet:

"Will you marry me now -- that I hear you divorced?"

Faulkner confessed to his father: "My friends do not think we are gonna stick, but it is gonna stick.” (Please note the implicature: it it is not "we are gonna stick," but "IT is gonna stick." His father later recollected, "I never knew what my son meant by 'it'.")

But why did, historically speaking, Faulkner want to marry Estelle Baird in the second place? Baird (the Missus Faulkner) and Mister Faulkner were both alcoholics and had nothing in common -- "other than this addiction for alcohol," Bleikasten rather redundantly explains. When a daughter is born  (after the death in infancy of a premature baby girl Missus Faulkner strangely named "Alabama" -- "In Italy, girls names end in "-a."), they quit having sexual intercourse, and start tormenting each other.

Now to one of Helm's interests. Bleikasten stresses the fact that Faulkner is a *story-teller* "in both senses of the term" (Alas, Bleikasten never read Grice -- "Do not multiply 'senses' beyond necessity" -- "Storyteller" has only ONE sense).

Faulkner was fond of 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). But, curiously, he compulsively embroiders the bare facts of his own prosaic (rather than versical) history or "life."

About the months he lives in New Orleans, Faulkner says that he supported himself by working for a bootlegger. He said he had a launch that he would take down the Ponchartrain into the Gulf to an island where the green rum was brought up from overseas and buried. "We would dig it up and bring it back to New Orleans" ("Hence the phrase, 'bring coal to Newcastle.'). "And I would get $100 a trip for that." -- Alas, nothing about Faulkner's bootlegger story is _historical_ true. And he doesn't seem to mean the thing as a 'fictional' little story, either (Just as remarkable is *where* he recounts the tall tale: at an "_American_ lit class" at West Point! Never trust guest keynote speakers!)

Bigger (if not whiter) lies Faulkner tells about his days with the Air Force. Faulkner says, again, not precisely within the context of a 'little (fictional) story) that he limped from "imaginary" (as Grice would call them -- vide his "Causal Theory of Perception") machine gun wounds that he suffered, Faulkner claims, in aerial duels over remote fields in France. But Faulkner is still in school when the war ends. He is never sent to France, never mind wounded in combat (He did not tell this tale at West Point, fortunately).

To answer a Kantian question, whether Faulker lies to woo females (at West Point or elsewhere), or because he is desperate for distinction, or for the simple fun of it, is hard to decide, as a Kantian.

Grice thinks it is the latter ('the simple fun of it'), but then both were inherently irreverent, even if Grice thought himself a follower of Kant (for whom lying is ultimate anathema).

Bleikasten is blunt about Faulkner’s 'fabrications': “Faulkner lies to his parents, his brothers, his friends, his son-in-law, his mistresses, his editor, his colleagues in Hollywood, and, worse, his doctor.”

""Life is a lie, and then you die," is Faulkner's motto," Bleikasten implicates.

Naturally, Faulkner starts telling fewer tall tales when he starts deriving deeper pleasure out of constructing elaborate 'fictions' in prose -- that get him the Nobel. But is there any *history* beneath these fictional *novels*?

Faulkner seems to be following the advice of Sherwood Anderson, whose mornings-only writing schedule appeals to Faulkner. Faulkner is slow to find a subject for his 'fictions.' Two fictional novels— "Soldiers’ Pay" (about a soldier's salary) and "Mosquitoes," about, as the title implicates, the insects —came (and went). With a third novel, Faulkner follows Anderson’s advice: "to stick to that little patch down there in Mississippi where you started from.”

Faulkner comes up with a "sprawlingly complex" novel, based on _fact_ or recollection of fact. One publisher after another reject it. The title, granted, did not help: "Flags in the Dust." He retitles it "Sartoris," to no effect. "Sartoris," centred on Faulkner’s struggle to fit into civilian life after the war (he never fought), however, show him the way.

Beginning with "Sartoris" Faulkner discovers that his own little postage stamp of soil is worth writing about, even if he created "a cosmos of [his] own.”

Faulkner’s "cosmos" is Yoknapatawpha ["careful how you pronounce that" -- Bleikasten warns his addressee] County, with a courthouse and the town of Jefferson at its centre, a thinly 'fictionalised' version of Oxford, where Faulkner spends the largest part of his childhood, knows everybody, and hears many of the 'stories' (or 'histories,' if you must) that emerge in somewhat altered but generally perspicuous form in his novels or 'stories'. (He is a 'story-teller,' AND a 'history-teller', "a teller of tales, a historian").

The characters in Faulkner's novels ('stories') come from the same six or so families, beginning iwhen the first cotton farms were established on land ceded by the Chickasaw.

Faulkner's novels (or 'stories,' not 'histories') never sold really well. Thus, Faulkner gets by with fstints writing for the 'flicks' in Hollywood -- where he incidentally meets Meta Carpenter (named after Aristotle's "Meta-physics"), who is working for Howard Hawks, director of "The Big Sleep" on which Faulkner also worked.

Faulkner has girlfriends other than Miss Carpenter, develops a reputation as a man hard to interview, answers contumaciously (if I may contumaciously say so myself) when pestered about politics, spends too much money, is churlish about accepting the Nobel Prize in person (“Everybody has been telling me to do right!”), and stubbornly refused to admit that some horses are too much for him.

Bleikasten scants none of the life (or 'history') but is interested above all in the novels (the 'story') -- the 'opinions.'

Some of Faulkner's novels ('stories') are "entertainments," using the term alla Graham Greene. Other novels (or 'stories') are as "hard" (or difficult) to tackle as the begats in the Bible or, since Helm mentions him, Heidegger on history.

Faulkner's novels (or 'stories') are awash in detail, knotted, inexact, disturbing, and VERY OBSCURE  in their fierce pursuit of elusive "insights" of understanding.

It is hard, from a Griceian point of view, to perceive what Faulkner is trying to understand, and harder to decide if he has understood it.

That is why fewer Americans than Frenchmen tackle Faulkner.

Many Americans forced (by their dads) to read Faulkner seem to remember preciously very little about Faulkner's 'stories' -- perhaps Benjy looking at Caddy’s drawers in "The Sound and the Fury," or Temple Drake and the corncob in "Sanctuary."

But there is a bit of a Griceian logic to Faulkner’s intentional dependence on difficulty as to what his intended 'insight' is.

Difficulty (a bit of a violation to Grice's "be perspicuous [sic]") arguably serves in Faulkner's 'stories' two exegetic purposes: (a) In some of Faulkner's 'stories,' such as "Absalom, Absalom!," the lack of Griceian clarity ["be perspicuous [sic]"] may ensure that Faulkner’s neighbours will not know what he is talking about lest they burn his barn, if not worse. (b) A secondary, perhaps more importantl, exegetic purpose for Faulkner's violation of Grice's desideratum of perspicuity (or "modus," after Kant) is to force his addressee to struggle to get the 'story' straight.

A poem seems too small, too soon over, to encompass this "big thing" on Faulkner's mind: the great submerged obsessive guilty burden of slave times, back when all know, but few say, that slaves are 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 historical fact in a hurry. But Faulkner is never in a hurry to _explicate_ things.

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 did NOT know it, you better shut up!

Faulkner, however, knew it, and somehow wins permission -- drinking surely helps -- to implicate it, “all of hit,” as a character has it in "Go Down, Moses."

The 'hit' is a hyper-correction. The character is speaking of death of her grandson: "Is you gonter put hit in de paper? I wants hit all in de paper. All of hit." Faulkner's novels address and wrestle with his central obsession, which he called, simply, “the past” (or "the South"). Novels ('stories') embody one thing Faulkner displays in "Sartoris": “Not only each novel (or story) has to have a design but the whole output or sum of an author's stories has to have a design.”

Faulkner famously wrote in a novel (or story): "The past is never dead. It’s not even past" (Please note that while 'the past is dead' is a metaphor -- 'the past is not dead' is not (cfr. "No man is an island?). "The past is not past," on the other hand, if not a metaphor, is what Grice calls an analytically false proposition ("on the face of it"). Faulkner is implicating that the burden of the past is inextricably laced within the present. "There is no such thing as 'was'—only 'is,'” Faulkner tells Jean Stein.

About the South, Faulkner is ambivalent, especially with strangers like the Japanese. “Well, I love it and hate it,” he tells reporters in Tokyo. "Some of the things in the South I do not like at all, but, hey, I was born there, and that is my home, and I will still defend it *even if I hate it*.” This love and hate are knotted together most tightly in his novels or 'stories.'

It is slightly perverse to describe these novels as a 'defense' of the South, even if that's the expression Faulkner used. Indictment is more like it. As a result, southerners generally detest Faulkner's novels ('stories'). An exception is sometimes made for "Intruder in the Dust," which Southerners forgive and indulge -- especially after it becomes a popular 'flick.' To understand how these novels fit into Faulkner’s grand design on the South, it helps to examine the chosen expression in the South for the woman Faulkner’s grandfather ran off with. The expression is "octoroon," defined as a person who is 1/8 African-American (A quadroon would have one African-American grandparent, and a mulatto would have one African-American parent). The three expressions were coined in slave times. Interestingly, “octoroon," to use Grice's parlance, 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. In Griceian terms, then, “octoroon" says nothing about the physical appearance of an octoroon. In the South of Faulkner’s childhood, somebody had to tell you (rather than implicate to you) who was or was not an octoroon. To find out someone is one changes things. In "Absalom, Absalom!" Thomas Sutpen, the owner of a huge plantation called "Sutpen’s Hundred," had once been married ito a planter’s daughter, with whom he had a son. Sutpen abandons wife and son when he learnes that his wife was part African-American.

Joe Christmas in "Light in August" agonizes over his “black blood.” While Faulkner never "says" it,  Joe Christmas is tortured by the taint. Joe Christmas 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.”

The connection between master and slave is a principal motif in Faulkner’s novels. But it is never simple, never "clearly" told, or 'explicated.' In "Go Down, Moses," the planter Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin has a daughter named Tomasina with one of his slaves, who later walks into a creek and drowns herself on Christmas Day. The daughter is McCaslin’s slave as well. McCaslin in turn fathers a son, 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 am a McCaslin."

Popeye and Goodwin in "Sanctuary" are not identified "clearly" 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 motif of gradations in Faulkner’s work, where it is “black blood” which determines fate. Each horror is the consequence 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 is sexual, and that the South's coping mechanism is denial. One of the few southerners to name the problem frankly is Mary Chesnut, who records 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, its justification drove all political discourse.”

He stops there, but we might go further and date the birth of the “solid South” to the split of the Baptist Church into a Southern and a Northern Convention, resulting from disputes over the issue of slavery. The solid South never cracks 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. Faulkner learned about 'history' of the South from living there.

His use of controversial expressions, of which Bleikasten offers a full spectrum of examples, identifies him as artchetypical character in the Southern manner of the times. The day has now come when addressees, bumping into these expressions, 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 Faulkner's youth revealed the South’s great either/or—black or white.

What Faulkner finds a way to say that can not be silenced is the fact of centuries of sexual exchange in which African-Americans are compelled to endure exploitation that people minimized, rationalized, and violently denied. Faulkner does not ultimately disguise what he thinks about the great 'fact.' Indeed, the thing he refuses to admit to the Japanese reporters was something he says 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, and it comes from his friend Shreve. Quentin has been telling Shreve the story of Thomas Sutpen. Quentin had been present when Sutpen’s daughter by a slave burned the house to the ground, killing both herself and her brother. Then Shreve makes the question and Quentin’s answers, via explicature: “"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!” -- Where the implicature is possibly that deep down, he does? Which, of course, does not implicate he loves it, either!