How to Review a Book alla Grice Without Reviewing It

Speranza

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

We may learn a little about it by examining 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.

It would be a serious mistake for anyone trying 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).

Beneath the literary "complexity" of Faulkner's ovels, the "clearest" statement is 'implicated' of the core abuse that has driven conflict in many slavery regimes (as when Aristotle's ethics, some philosophers argue, is tainted by the fact that he lived under one such regime).

But first you have to pass "a test," as it were.

A Faulkner biographer, André Bleikasten, devoted his life to understanding Faulkner.

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

Bleikasten presents his addressees with several examples of the test.

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

Faulkner and Oppenheimer were being celebrated on the same evening: Oppenheimer for building the first atomic bomb; Faulkner for writing 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 while Oppenheimer ("the man on the right") was the novelist).

Oppenheimer could talk to just about anybody about anything -- even atomic bombs!

Faulkner, instead, 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 managed on that venerable Princeton occasion.

Out of the blue, Oppenheimer said he had recently seen a television programme based on a story by Faulkner story.

He didn't mentioned which, but hastened to ask, again out of the blue, what Faulkner thought 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.

(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 important to say about world history?

The test is easier for Bleikasten, of course, because, unlike Faulkner, he is French.

Bleikasten’s devotion to Faulkner began 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).

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

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

Bleikasten ends up submitting the thesis on the American Southerner rather than the English Midlander.

He pretentiously entitled it "The Ink of Melancholy' -- and it passed the test!

People started asking him: why not follow your dissertation ('the opinions') with a biography (a 'life')? ("The life and opinions of William Faulkner").

Bleikasten at first resists.

“There are five 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 the opinions _and the life_ of William Faulkner?"

Bleikasten’s bit on the _life_ did not take that long to finish.

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

Then Bleikasten died. An unhappy accident.

Happily, his wife took on the task of making Faulker's life (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)) of thought (if not diction).

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

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

“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' does help make visible.

The big facts of Faulkner’s life are place and time.

Faulkner was born in Mississippi in 1897, when 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 blacks for real and imaginary crimes.

They were not 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 murder.

A mob broke into the 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 was eleven at the time and lived barely a hundred yards from the jail. He wrote about the Patton lynching in two of his novels: "Light in August" and "Intruder in the Dust."

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

While Faulkner was born lucky, his family did not really hold a precisely great place in Oxford.

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

"He can’t get no further behind,” the soldier's son remarks.

Faulkner’s father was a bit like that.

Faulkner's father failed in business repeatedly and was fired from his 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 after he ran off with some Oxford town funds and “an octoroon.”

The pride of the family was Faulkner’s GREAT-grandfather, who had fought in the Civil War and built a railroad.

Faulkner's great-grandfather’s success with a novel, called mawkishly, "The White Rose of Memphis," prompted Faulkner: “I want to be a novelist like my great-grand-daddy -- even if I'll choose more complex titles for my novels."

Faulkner was a pretty compulsive reader but drifted out of college before knowing how to take the next step.

On top, he was awkward with girls -- and some boys, for that matter!

Both his two early 'loves' Estelle Oldham and Helen Baird abandoned him to marry men whom they thought were better bets.

But Baird's marriage foundered, and curiously ended up marrying Faulkner 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 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 Faulkner wanted to marry Estelle Baird in the second place?

Faulkner and Baird (the Missus Faulkner) were both alcoholics and had nothing in common -- "other, of course, this addiction for alcohol," Bleikasten wittily remarks.

When a daughter was 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 sex and starting tormenting each other.

Bleikasten stresses the fact that Faulkner was 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), and he compulsively embroiders the bare facts of his own prosaic (rather than versical) "life."

About the months he lived in New Orleans, Faulkner says 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 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 true.

Just as remarkable is where he recounts the tall tale: at an "_American_ lit class" at West Point!

Bigger lies Faulkner tells about his days with the Air Force.

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

But Faulkner was still in school when the war ended. He was never sent to France, never mind 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 the latter but then both were inherently irreverent.

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," was his motto," Bleikasten implicates.

Faulkner ends up telling fewer tall tales when he starts deriving deeper pleasure out 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.

But Faulkner was slow to find his subject.

Two 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 up there in Mississippi where you started from.”

Faulkner comes up with a "sprawlingly complex" novel.

One publisher after another rejected it.

The title, granted, did not 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, however, showed him the way.

Beginning with "Sartoris" Faulkner discovers that his own little postage stamp of soil was worth writing about so he created "a cosmos of my own.”

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

Admittedly, many of the characters in Faulkner's novels come from the same six or so families, spanning a century, beginning in the 1830s, when the first cotton farms were established on land ceded by the Chickasaws.

Faulkner's novels never sold well.

Faulkner got by with frequent stints writing for the 'flicks' in Hollywood, where he met Meta Carpenter (named after Aristotle's "Meta-physics"), who 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 -- the 'opinions.'

One or two might be called "entertainments," using the term alla Graham Greene.

Many of Faulkner's novels can be as "hard" (or difficult) 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, 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.

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

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

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

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

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

A short story, after all, or worse, a poem, is too small, too soon over, to encompass what Bleikasten calls "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.

But Faulkner is NOT 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 here—to 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 tdeath of her grandson:

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

Five of Faulkner's novels address and wrestle with his 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.”

Faulkner famously wrote in a novel:

"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 implicates 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*.”

Faulkner’s love and hate are knotted together most tightly in his most popular novels.

But it would be perverse to describe these novels as a 'defense' of the South.

Indictment is more like it.

Southerners generally detest Faulkner's novels.

An exception is sometimes made for "Intruder in the Dust," which Southerners forgavive and indulge -- especially after it was made into 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.” An octoroon is 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 terms were coined in slave times.

“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, “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 you) who was or was not an octoroon.

To find out you were one changed things.

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

Sutpen abandoned wife and son when he learned 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 was sexual, and that the South's coping mechanism was 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 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.

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

Faulkner does not ultimately disguise what he thinks about the great fact.

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 he, deep down, he does?

Which does not implicate he loves it, either!