The Essential Faulkner Read Online Free Page A

cannot believe, toward a safety in which you have no faith.” Or, like the slaves freed by General Sherman’s army, in
The Unvanquished
, they blindly follow the road toward any river, believing that it will be their Jordan:
    They were singing, walking along the road singing, not even looking to either side. The dust didn’t even settle fortwo days, because all that night they still passed; we sat up listening to them and the next morning every few yards along the road would be the old ones who couldn’t keep up any more, sitting or lying down and even crawling along, calling to the others to help them; and the others—the young ones—not stopping, not even looking at them. “Going to Jordan,” they told me. “Going to cross Jordan.”
    Most of Faulkner’s characters, black and white, are a little like that. They dig for gold frenziedly after they have lost their hope of finding it (like Henry Armstid in
The Hamlet
and Lucas Beauchamp in
Go Down, Moses
); or they battle against and survive a Mississippi flood for the one privilege of returning to the state prison farm (like the tall convict in “Old Man”); or, a whole family together, they carry a body through flood and fire and corruption to bury it in the cemetery at Jefferson (like the Bundrens in
As I Lay Dying
); or they tramp the roads week after week in search of men who had promised but never intended to marry them (like Lena Grove, the pregnant woman of
Light in August
); or, pursued by a mob, they turn at the end to meet and accept death (like Joe Christmas in the same novel). Even when they seem to be guided by a conscious purpose, like Colonel Sutpen, it is not something they have chosen by an act of will, but something that has taken possession of them: Sutpen’s great design was “not what he wanted to do but what he just had to do, had to do it whether he wanted to or not, because if he did not do it he knew that he could never live with himself for the rest of his life.” In the same way, Faulkner himself writes, not what he wants to, but what he just has to write whether he wants to or not.
IV
    It had better be admitted that almost all his novels have some obvious weakness in structure. Some of them combine two or more themes having little relation to eachother, as
Light in August
does, while others, like
The Hamlet
, tend to resolve themselves into a series of episodes resembling beads on a string. In
The Sound and the Fury
, which is superb as a whole, we can’t be sure that the four sections of the novel are presented in the most effective order; at any rate, we can’t fully understand the first section until we have read the three that follow.
Absalom, Absalom!
though at first it strikes us as being pitched in too high a key, is structurally the soundest of all the novels in the Yoknapatawpha series—and it gains power in retrospect; but even here the author’s attention seems to shift from the principal theme of Colonel Sutpen’s design to the secondary theme of incest and miscegenation.
    Faulkner seems best to me, and most nearly himself, either in long stories like “The Bear,” in
Go Down, Moses
, and “Old Man,” which was published as half of
The Wild Palms
, and “Spotted Horses,” which was first printed separately, then greatly expanded and fitted into the loose framework of
The Hamlet
—all three stories are included in this volume; or else in the Yoknapatawpha saga as a whole. That is, he has been most effective in dealing with the total situation always present in his mind as a pattern of the South, or else in shorter units which, though often subject to inspired revision, have still been shaped by a single conception. It is by his best that we should judge him, as every other author; and Faulkner at his best—even sometimes at his worst—has a power, a richness of life, an intensity to be found in no other American writer of our time. He has—once again I am quoting from Henry James’s essay on