BOOKS
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The discussion of these matters is confined to the first half of his
.book, although they naturally have repercussions throughout. Faulkner
found himself as a writer, Mr. Howe maintains, when he discovered
"his native subject: the Southern memory, the Southern myth, the
Southern reality." But Mr. Howe goes on to show that these entities
do not work harmoniously in the novelist's mind. Much of his energy
as a writer comes out of his need to reconcile them. Feeling the myth
to be at odds with the reality, he finds the process of memory as dif–
ficult as it is necessary. The myth posits a considerable Southern civil–
ization done in by the superior force of the North. The reality consists
in the meager testimony of old tales and ruins together with the sub–
stantial fact of racial injustice. Hence the tragic quality of Faulkner's
work has its source, not only in the historical tragedy of the South but
in his own plight as a divided man; the drama begins in his mind.
Hence too his recreation of the past tends to be "mythical" rather than
precise; he has no such feeling for social fact as characterized Balzac's
reconstruction of French society; he thinks in terms not of classes but
of clans; and these correspond to certain values in his moral scheme.
"In the death of the Southern tradition he believes passionately; its
life is harder to imagine."
All this is extremely penetrating. As an account of Faulkner in his
capacity as a Southern writer, Mr. Howe's study is the best there is.
It allows for more contradiction and irony in Faulkner than the straight
Southern traditionalist account allows for.
It
supplies his mind with a
history, and that it has one we can scarcely doubt if we read his novels
in sequence. But when, in the chapter called "Outline of a World," Mr.
Howe tries to define the entire work in the light of these conceptions,
the results seem to me misleading. Describing the work as a "portrait of
Yoknapatawpha County," he derives its inspiration from "a communal
memory, some great store of half-forgotten legends ... a story of old,
confused family records that can be unraveled only with difficulty."
But can he make this dream come true in discussing the 17-odd novels?
Is he not seduced into spreading over the entire lot a Jungian haze
which is intermittent in Faulkner and which is actually thickest in the
later Faulkner who wrote
Absalom, Absalom!
and "The Bear" and de–
vised the Compson genealogy and the County map for the
Portable?
As for those pariah novels,
Pylon
and
The Wild Palms,
which lie out–
side the County, isn't he led to discount their peculiar virtues and their
weight in Faulkner's total production? For that matter, do
Sanctuary
and
Light in August
stem from "a communal memory, some great store
of half-forgotten legends"; or aren't they obviously made-up stories ani-
