108
PARTISAN REVIEW
in his most thickly overgrown passages there is always, eventually, a clear
space where the artist has been at work, with a skill perhaps more of
woodcraft than of words, hacking, draining, clearing the ground. But
again the forest closes in, and there are times when even Faulkner is
a baffled guide.
This is not good writing; it is unfortunate that it takes up such a
large and necessary part of his work. It seems to me necessary as a kind
of concealment-this is the only probable motive for such bad writing
in so good a writer. (Occasionally-as in
Absalom, Absalom!-Faulk–
ner's obscurity offers so exact a structural paraphrase of the human
relationships in the narrative, it is no longer a defect but a literary
necessity.) Faulkner writes poorly of the South (not of the people, the
objects, the activities, the countryside, but of his own legend), his
sentences like the paths of a maze, to wind and cross and stop dead–
because he has to. Clarity about the legend of the South, as in
Intruder
in the Dust,
is more than he can afford.
Strictly speaking, there is no legend of the South, not even in Faulk–
ner, because the South is too much a part of the United States. It is just
not different enough. The attempt to create a special legend always
leads to an overexploitation of the differences in history, race and culture
between South and outland (Faulkner's term). Left to itself, this exploi–
tation would die of a lack of resources. Sooner or later it must appear
even to the most stubborn Southerner that these differences are not so
great as he supposes, and nowhere nearly so significant; and if this is
too optimistic an assumption, there is a limit, by way of natural death,
which even these falsehoods must face. Say what you will about the
deficiency of the liberal imagination, you cannot go on forever making
an issue of homogeneous cultures and alleged differences between Negro
and white, when none of these issues is real. Consequently,
legend:
a mode of belief that is supposed to exempt the believer from true and
false.
But this is only the outer defense, thrown up merely at logic. There
is no case for the legend even in imagination. It serves Faulkner only
the purpose of defying the outland, and, within the South, the depthless
Snopeses who have taken over and spoiled the old tradition; he seldom
celebrates the tradition directly. The death of the old tradition is all
that matters--one could not be a "Southerner" without it. The tradition
is a convenient invention; it need never have been alive. And as a
matter of fact, Faulkner believes only in its death: a Crucifiction without
Nativity or Resurrection. The South becomes a state
of
mind with him,
proud, anarchic, willfully archaic, a condition of virtue by default of
