American novelist William Faulkner saw human dignity as being defined by a very specific desire for wholeness. Depravity and evil, in Faulkner’s work, are marked by the attempt to sever the cords of history that bind a person to the past. The Faulkner characters who are most fully evil are the ones who to their backs on history, embracing a flawed progress, in an effort to create themselves anew.
Henry Sutpen and Flem Snopes both present us with examples of people who clamber after power and wealth as they build legacies for themselves. Their faces turned to the future, these characters have no moral center. It is no coincidence that they have also attempted to erase their pasts.
Wealth and Morality
Often characters in possession of material wealth, in Faulkner’s Mississippi, come by this wealth by dubious means. It seems the dubious and underhanded means are the only means to come into the possession of wealth in this world of barefoot, back-woods poverty.
Look at Flem Snopes from the Snopes Trilogy (The Hamlet; The Town; The Mansion). He swindles and outwits whole populations on his way to ill-gained fortune.
Look at Henry Sutpen from Absalom, Absalom! Sutpen claws and sacrifices, enslaves and cheats his way to 100 acres and a wife, emerging from the muck of mystery into the modern world like a inverted Kurtz (Heart of Darkness).
Contrast these negative, perhaps even evil, figures to that of Joe Christmas (A Light in August). Christmas is a criminal; reckless, violent and disturbed yet he is dignified by an innocent desire to know himself and to come to terms with his world.
The distinction between crime and evil is important in Faulkner’s work because here we see the line of human dignity most clearly defined. One desire is respectable and honorable. The other desire is corrupt.
This corruption is identical or at least parallel to the unfortunate dependencies and “cheapnesses” of the automated age.
Progress and Modernity as Evil
Faulkner’s attitude toward modernization is consistently condemnatory. There is no golden age in William Faulkner’s work, no idyllic era of a pre-war or post-war South, but a preference is insistently repeated for the qualities of a world where things must be earned, out of the soil, where everything takes time.
It is fitting then that Sutpen’s rush from the dark of the woods into the electric light of modernity is evidence of a falseness in his soul. No one can learn to understand themselves through shortcuts. (Perhaps the notorious density and difficulty of Faulkner’s prose can be explained with this aphorism.)
If we ask the question of why this is true in Faulkner, from As I Lay Dying to The Wild Palms to A Light in August, the answer presents itself as one of history. There are no shortcuts to history. History is, by its nature, a drawn-out process.
History is extremely important to William Faulkner as a personal, living thing. History is in nearly every sentence he writes. Characters are informed and shaped by their past and by their cultural and family histories.
To know oneself, as a Faulkner character, is to experience and realize the cavalcade of influence that has gone into creating you. It is a moment when the past gets squashed down to a single, knowable point. Importantly, the entirety of that past must be present in the epiphany.
The Sound and the Fury is the novel that most directly expresses the struggle for self-realization through wrestling with the past. Each of the four characters given chapters in the book exist in the moment as avatars of their own history and the history of the Compson family.
The conflict that leads Quentin to stand on the edge of the bridge and look down at his shadow playing on the surface of the river is the struggle to come to terms with two conflicting facts (the essential conflict in so much of Faulkner’s work): every person is defined by a larger culture, beginning with his own family. Every person is separate and individual.
Every person contains the past (culture, history, blood) and is contained by the past. For William Faulkner this conflict is a passion. It drives the work through fury and intense need. The circle must be closed.
Quentin Compson appears in two of Faulkner’s masterpieces as something of a troubled, even tragic figure of baffled innocence going to battle unarmed against the full force of this contradiction.
Heroes and Villains in William Faulkner
If anyone is a hero in Faulkner, it is the figure who brings dignity and failure to the fore as a result of an honest attempt to understand himself. Reverend Hightower (A Light in August) fits this description as does Darl (As I Lay Dying), as well as Quentin Compson. These characters are defined by memory and sometimes psychosis. To dwell within the necessary contradiction which is the force of Faulkner’s novels is to court madness or to be mad, mad with the past breaking into the present; mad with the desire to embrace history in order to know the self.
A new world, for Faulkner, is anathema to the entire project of his fiction and threatens to break the cycle that relates a person to his past. Modernity is naturally condemned then. The figures of Faulkner’s fiction who eschew the past, either in favor of modernity or in favor of creating themselves anew, are cast as evil.
Flem Snopes is one of the few characters in all of Faulkner’s work without a real past. He arrives on the scene, fully fleshed, fully born, with no history. Immediately he begins to take over the small world he steps into (just as the car comes to take-over the old world as a symbol of the new). Flem Snopes, of course, is quick to buy an automobile.
Henry Sutpen keeps his past a secret and tries to generate his own legacy, an Abraham without a god, and his plans are sundered, almost divinely ruined by circumstance after circumstance denying him the fruits of his a-historic labor.
You can’t turn away from the force of the world that shaped you and made you and expect to succeed. Without history, you are lost.
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