In response to a dear one who said, "I can imagine appreciating something about it, but overall I thought it was really difficult reading, hard to understand, and even at the end, when I did feel like I had a pretty good idea of who the characters were, how they related to each other, and what had happened to them, I found it really depressing. I say Faulkner Shmaulkner, and think that he's just one of those authors elitist literary people rave about in order to isolate themselves from the rest of the normal world."
To her, I say this (though it might be true that only an actual Southerner is allowed to say anything, in which case, I hope somebody will just bless my heart and forgive my indiscretion):
I made up my mind to read As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury partly because I wanted to understand what all the fuss was about; classic literature is categorized that way for reasons that sometimes elude me (Tess of the d’Urbervilles comes painfully to mind). I suspect some are canonized because they were innovative or came out of oppression or some sort of break from a tradition, but that by itself doesn't entirely clear it up for me. Much in academia is about separation and elusiveness for the sake of its own elusiveness, and while I can see why reading Faulkner can feel that way (it also has to me in the past, let's be honest), this last reading I've understood it differently; more importantly, I was moved. I don't love to read Dickens or Hardy, for example, because the novels I've read just don't move me in any way, and I, perhaps at my peril, fail to see their greatness. Faulkner, on the other hand – and please, let’s not forget Flannery O'Connor – stir me up. It’s not what my mom would call uplifting, necessarily, but that’s not my main motivation for exploring fiction. Sometimes I like to be mystified, challenged, horrified, perplexed, overwhelmed, or thrilled. I think there are layers upon layers of humanity to experience in Faulkner and other Southern fiction, and my crush on the genre has the most to do with learning to see the Southernness, if you will, without the cloudy lens of stereotype and generalization. I didn't used to have any idea why people classified Southern writers differently, why people even spoke of it as a subset of the greater canon. I think I'm starting to understand it, with much help from Flannery O'Connor.
I don’t mean this to be a surrogate college paper with the quoting and the MLA, but I can’t possibly say it better than Ms. O’Connor herself. Both she and Faulkner write characters inhabiting a world that she terms "the grotesque," in which "we find that the writer has made alive some experience which we are not accustomed to observe everyday, or which the ordinary man may never experience in his ordinary life. We find that connections which we would expect in the customary kind of realism have been ignored, that there are strange skips and gaps which anyone trying to describe manners and customs would certainly not have left. Yet the characters have an inner coherence, if not always a coherence to their social framework. Their fictional qualities lean away from typical social patterns, toward mystery and the unexpected."
The cultural South, unlike any other place I've lived, is haunted a certain amount by the identity of place, specifically as it relates to the Civil War. People wear and display and buy a lot of things decorated with the rebel flag, for example, which seems outrageous to people outside, because, in part, it represents things which are frankly heinous and probably best left in history. But it also seems to represent to them the fight and the pride of this region, and I don’t blame people for wanting to hold onto that history. General Robert E. Lee, I was told the other day, (and here I would take off my hat, were I wearing one) was by far the best general in the war. He just didn’t have the troops or the money to win. While I’ll admit to being perplexed by the ignorance and suspicion that often accompany that rebel flag flying high over the trailer, I get that people are hanging onto an ideal that they’ve been preaching since somebody’s great-great-granddaddy, and it’s no sin to maintain your family’s wariness and pride (with a little bit of insolence, because you did lose that war) and your good manners like you hang on to your land, Yankees be damned.
So it's not that I identify with the characters or think they're redeeming, and I definitely don’t think that Faulkner or O’Connor mean for you to impose yourself on the work’s mystery that way. It's that the spirit – the pervasive haunting – is embodied so perfectly in the characters who cling to an old ideology that they probably couldn't even define, but that is so ingrained in their blood as to paralyze them.
Maybe it's universally true that folks like to be part of something bigger; for Southerners, it's often Christianity, and that, too, seems tied to the land and to the history of those who defended it once. For Flannery, it was the most important thing; her Catholicism in the largely Protestant South – and, by extension, her faith – dictates the fall and redemption of her seemingly unredeemable characters. “The Southerner, who isn’t convinced of it,” Flannery said, “is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God.” Being haunted makes this culture tentatively committed to keeping things just so, unless it isn't meant to be, in which case your angels will most likely step in. In Southern fiction, Redemption - or its notable absence - is, not unlike a Protestant deity, personified in a closely hovering presence, everywhere and nowhere, its judgment seen and felt in the fields, the horizon, the noon sun, the river. The land is living, and holding you to a time when you almost lost it; unlike in the big-sky West, the trees form a tight little plot to make you feel at home and encourage you to stay put. It would never stop you from being neighborly, but you can sit on the porch and feel surrounded by something living rather than open space, which can start you wandering if you let it.
