LITERATURE: One Hundred Years of William Faulkner’s Magic World

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Sep 30 1997 (IPS) - Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s memorable phrase for his mythic Latin American country’s fate was ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ – but book lovers have marked a different anniversary – 100 years of magical realism.

On Sep. 25, 1897, William Falkner – who later added a ‘u’ to his name to become Faulkner – was born in New Albany, Mississippi. A century after his birth, Faulkner stands not only as the most widely-studied U.S. writer, but as the forefather of literary motifs that have spread throughout the world.

From India’s R.K. Narayan to Colombia’s Garcia Marquez, and from Chile’s Isabel Allende to Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka, writers of diverse nationalities, styles and themes have all embraced some aspects of Faulkner’s complex heritage. That legacy would no doubt bemuse Faulkner, whose challenging novels were so widely unread during most of his lifetime that, by 1945, all of his books were out of print.

On the 100th anniversary of his birth, all that has changed.

Vintage Books came out with new editions of Faulkner’s novels and short stories, while last week, from New York to Mississippi, academics and authors staged readings, lectures and discussions on his work.

Despite that level of attention, William Faulkner’s modernist novels, including such classics as 1929’s ‘The Sound and the Fury’ and 1936’s ‘Absalom, Absalom!’, remains obscure to most readers. Perhaps it is because of his notoriously rich, Southern gothic style, full of repeated words like ‘immutable’ and ‘imponderable’, and stories like ‘The Bear’ that feature sentences that run on for 20 pages without stopping.

Perhaps it is because of his themes – the fall of the U.S. South, incest and the mixing of races. Or perhaps readers simply are not familiar enough with Yoknapatawpha County, the fictional Mississippi region featured in most of Faulkner’s novels.

When the young Southern writer decided to set a different course from the urban-based modernist authors of his day and “explore my own little postage-stamp of soil,” few readers were interested in tales about rural Southern life. Yet the fevered, obsessive stories — alternately gruesome and heroic — that Faulkner wrote about Yoknapatawpha pushed far beyond the borders of the naturalistic writing of the 1920s and 1930s, bringing in levels of myth, folk tales, history and supernatural, nearly magical themes to create a world that was entirely new.

Similarly, Faulkner’s narrative strategies – such as multiple narrators, strange uses of time, and dreamlike, stream-of- consciousness prose – inspired writers to take more risks.

He has been particularly influential in the Third World, where authors as dissimilar as Peru’s Mario Vargas Llosa and Kenya’s Ngugi wa’ Thiongo have paid him homage. Garcia Marquez, who calls him “my master William Faulkner,” was inspired to recreate his own Colombian heritage as the surreal state of Macondo, which is similarly full of turbulent family intrigues. (Also, in novels like ‘The Autumn of the Patriarch,’ Garcia Marquez has come up with sentences that are even longer than Faulkner’s: that 250-page work is five sentences long!)

Different authors have seen in Faulkner’s ouevre the key themes to their own worlds. Narayan took from him the need to build a series of interconnected tales and myths based on one small village – the basis for his Malgudi stories. Black U.S. writers, notably Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison, have taken his concerns with the often tragic relationship between black and white Southerners to new heights, often twisting Faulkner’s conservative – and bigoted – politics in the process.

Even the movies owe a debt to Faulkner, who worked in Hollywood briefly when his novels weren’t selling. His tangled, heavily- plotted scripts for films like Howard Hawks’s ‘The Big Sleep’ were so confused that the author – as notorious for his alcohol-fuelled writing binges as for his work – later admitted that he had no idea what the story meant. But many current cutting-edge films, such as Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Pulp Fiction,’ borrow heavily from Faulkner’s storytelling techniques.

For all that, the author remains just as controversial as ever. Feminist critics rightly point out that the women in his works are often shrill and hysterical, and frequently are stereotyped as prim ‘good girls’ or coquettish bad ones. The tangled racial views apparent in works like ‘Absalom, Absalom!’ and ‘Go Down, Moses’ have been alternately lauded for offering fully-realised black characters and condemned for their obsession with mixed racial blood.

Nevertheless, Faulkner’s anniversary provided a rare opportunity to appreciate the author anew.

Perhaps Faulkner himself put his mission best in his speech when he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950:

“I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not only because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance…the poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”