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“...
In The Sound and the Fury ... Faulkner exhibited his
genius so completely that all successive Southern writers have
been automatically compared with him.”
“So
large is the shadow that he cast, that any descendant writer has
had a struggle ‘getting out from under Faulkner...’ But
‘another generation cometh.’”
(interior
quotes from Louis D. Rubin, Jr.)
Lewis A. Lawson
Another Generation: Southern Fiction Since World War II |
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Originally published in
Mississippi
Arts & Letters
July/August 1985
HAS
FAULKNER’S SHADOW stretched long enough to reach the present
generation of writers from his native state of Mississippi? Writer after
writer alluded to it in John Griffin Jones’ wonderful group of
interviews published in a two-volume work, Mississippi Writers
Talking (University Press of Mississippi).
Elizabeth
Spencer spoke of Faulkner’s influence: “I deliberately had to pull
back if I found myself writing what sounded like Faulkner.” Ellen
Douglas said that she had at one time imitated Faulkner, but that she
had “a strong reaction against that influence somewhere along the
line.”
Such
statements indicate that William Faulkner’s influence on writers who
have followed in his “little postage stamp of earth” is insidious,
something that must be avoided, a pernicious temptation (to evil? to
overblown sentences?). Similar feelings were expressed beautifully by
Walker Percy, who said that “Faulkner is at once the blessing and the
curse of all Southern novelists, maybe all novelists. ...He’s too
good, so overwhelming, so big, and also so seductive, not necessarily in
the right kind of way. His very faults are seductive. That involuted
syntax is seductive, and not necessarily good, either. You find yourself
falling victim to it – that is, using it in a lazy kind of way, using
it as an excuse not to be precise the way Camus would be precise.”
Younger
writers from Mississippi, however, seem less in the grasp of his
influence. As James Whitehead said, “Faulkner is a very great writer,
but he’s been mistreated by critics, been misunderstood by his
critics, and has been used as a way to stifle anyone who might have
grown up in his shadow. That’s something he would’ve never done,
never! ... Faulkner is like the humidity in Mississippi. You don’t
avoid Mr. Faulkner, you grow up with him.
On the occasion of “Mississippi Writer’s Day” – a celebration of
the publication of Mississippi Writers: Reflections of Childhood and
Youth (vol. 1, 1985) – we asked some of Mississippi’s young
writers to comment on the topic, “Writing in Faulkner’s Shadow.”
Jes
Simmons
Emerson
asked, “Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the
universe” Whitman warned, “You shall no longer take things at
second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead.” And
Twain stated, “I don’t take stock in dead people.” Although
it’s somewhat self-defeating to quote these past writers urging
their readers to live in the present, what they were telling their
generation applies to contemporary Southern writers writing in
Faulkner’s shadow.
Faulkner
has strip-mined Mississippi’s past. There’s nothing there for us.
We should – and we must – move on. Walker Percy sees the necessity
of writing about the suburbs, the shopping malls, the “black
Leonardos” of the contemporary South. Faulkner scholar Floyd Watkins
points out the need today for annotated editions of Faulkner, even for
college students from the South – Bayard’s Coke is not the Real
Thing.
Faulkner’s
shadow? I’m having more trouble writing under Barry Hannah’s!
Barry
Hannah
Here’s
something on Faulkner that might do. Just wrote it the other day
before I read your letter – lucky happenstance.
Percy,
Lamar – these are the famous names here, along with Faulkner, the
ghost who walks back and forth through my room with the idiot Benjy on
a leash, drooling through the fence at the coeds with their sunbrowned
legs and arms all bare and delicious, just like I do. I got my crushed
flower in my hand somebody gave me, and I stare slobbering into the
fire of my own heart. (from
Never Die, a book in progress)
Howard
L. Bahr
I
disagree that “all Southern writers... write in Faulkner’s
shadow.” Those who do must evidently choose to do so, must make a
conscious choice to batter their heads against the great monolith of
Faulkner’s canon. And anyway, to worry about it seems to me a great
waste of creative energy; energy that could be better applied to one’s
own vision of the world.
I
reckon there was a time when I was inclined to fret about dwelling in
Faulkner’s shadow. Then I discovered it was simply imitation, and very
poor imitation at that. I would read him, and imitate. Then I would read
Scott Fitzgerald, and imitate him for a while. Then Thomas Wolfe. Then
Ray Bradbury. Whoever I was reading was who cast the biggest shadow at
the time. Then I learned two things: that a writer has to imitate, if
only to find a point of departure; and that to worry about it is to
surrender to self-consciousness, something no writer can afford.
If
a man tells a tale, in the best way that he can, that is enough. That is
all he ought to worry about. He will not be telling anything new, so he
can’t worry about that. And if at first he uses another’s voice, he
can’t worry about that either – so long as he keeps trying to find
his own. That is the thing: to find your own voice. When you accomplish
that, you will dwell in no one’s shadow but your own.
One
of Faulkner’s characters said that “the past is not dead, it’s not
even past.” He was wrong, at least so far as Southern writers are
concerned. Many of the things Faulkner wrote about are past, are dead,
to the Southern writer. He can’t use them anymore, and if he tries he
will not tell them as well as Faulkner did. So he has to look to his own
world, his own South, and find what is there. I think he will discover
that now a writer is Southern only in terms of milieu, of landscape. He
writes about the South because that is what he knows, what is handy to
him. But the issues he deals with, the themes that move against that
landscape, must be universal – must strike responses outside the
Southern sensibility. There is material enough there for the rest of
time, and room enough for us all.
Larry
Johnson
I
tend to write long, involved sentences, but I don’t think it’s
because I’ve read some (by no means a lot) of Faulkner’s works.
It
seems to me that today’s young Southern writers are faced with such an
overwhelming barrage of literary influences, distractions, and
annoyances that Faulkner probably gets lost in the shuffle most of the
time.
On
the one hand, there are wonderful writers one might want to emulate (Nabokov,
for instance, who was contemporaneous with Welty and Percy yet unknown
to them when they began their careers; or Cormac McCarthy, one of
today’s greatest artisans of the English language); but on the other
hand there are many, many more authors one wants to avoid imitating
(horrendously bad and bland scriveners like Colleen McCullough, f9or
example, or monoliths of often incoherent megahype like John Barth).
Between these ecstatic heights and dismal pitfalls lies a precarious
path, and perhaps Faulkner should be merely a bright star overhead
lighting the way and reminding us of the neglect his early works
suffered, and of the vindication of history that good and great writing
will last, whereas fashionable, clever, and media-managed writing will
not.
Jack
Butler
“Writing
in Faulkner’s Shadow.” That’s a metaphor. It implies he blocks the
light. What light does he block, then?
For
me, Faulkner, like any good writer, is a source of light, not an
impediment to it. He may have his windy passages, his grandiose
simperings, but he touches the quick and the true time and time again,
he shows me not only the lives others have lived, but my own life. One
of the results of that is that writing itself is illuminated for me.
So
there is no shadow. Maybe there is an occultation – one source of
light may occlude another source from one angle only. There is that with
Faulkner – that publishers and critics and reviewers and the public
may not be able to see past Faulkner, may not see the rest of us down
here. There’s not much you can do about that sort of thing, so
there’s no point worrying about it. I w2ould think there would be even
less point desperately trying to derive a style that is dramatically
non-Faulknerian. Thee is much in Faulkner that is counted as
“Faulknerian” which is really Southern. Any Southerner has to
recognize some of it, and any Southern writer has to use some of it.
Maybe
writers have another worry, to extend the metaphor, maybe we fear that
he, like a black hole, has sucked up all the useable matter in the
vicinity. But to think so is to underestimate the wild and wicked
variousness of the world. Not to mention the, so to speak, naked
singularities of the minds of writers, from which very nearly anything
may emerge.
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