Lecture no.

8
William (Cuthbert)Faulkner (1897-1962)
Bible-Inspired Novels against the Curse in Settling the South

William Faulkner used a rather small number of characters. These represent the various levels of a
single region: the South. They often reappear in later novels. Faulkner shared two things with the Lost
Generation:
• its strong dislike for the post-war world and
• its belief in the value of art.
Faulkner always sought new ways to tell a story: to that end, he was one of the century’s greatest
experimenters, using new techniques to evoke
• point of view,
• dialogue,
• the movement from past to present, and
• interior monologue.
He invented, moreover, an entire county that he called Yoknapatawpha, peopling it with hundreds of
folks.
His first novel, Soldiers’ Pay (1926), is about a wounded soldier who returns home to the “wasteland”
of post-war society. His second novel, Mosquitoes (1927), is a rather dull tale about artists and art lovers in
New Orleans in the twenties.
Faulkner’s third novel, Sartoris (1929), shows a big change in his thinking. He decided that his own
“little postage stamp of soil” in Mississippi “was worth writing about”. His mythical Yoknapatawpha
County became one of the most famous “mini-worlds” in twentieth-century literature.
Sartoris is set in the South, after World War I. Bayard Sartoris, the ex-flyer, returns home. His
dissatisfaction with life makes him want to destroy himself. He is unsure about his manhood. He looks for
death in airplanes and automobiles. His careless courage reminds us of the Southern aristocrats who were his
ancestors. The story contrasts modern people with characters from the past. It also contrasts the Sartoris
family with the Snopes family. The Snopes family are “rat-like”. They are disgusting, “low” people; they
represent the new spirit of the South. This is the spirit of commerce and self-interest. The Snopes family
becomes central characters in later Faulkner novels [The Hamlet, 1940; The Town, 1957 and The Mansion,
1959).
The Sound and the Fury (1929) is one of Faulkner’s “modernist” masterpieces. It tells the tragic
story of the Compson family from four different points of view:
• Benjy, the mentally-impaired (idiot);
• Quentin, his brother, who kills himself at Harvard;
• Jason, the evil, money-hungry brother;
• and Dilsey, the black servant who keeps the family together with her love.
The novel contains many of the experimental features which appear in later Faulkner novels. One
feature is the use of limited point of view. Each of the four characters sees reality only in his or her own
way. Each lives in his or her own reality, completely separated from the others.
The reality of Benjy (the mentally-impaired) is the most completely separate. Objects, places and
people have a strange dreamlike quality when he talks. Faulkner’s special technique of narration is another
feature. The reader is put into the center of the story without any preparation. We must put together the facts
of the story by ourselves, since the author does not help us. A good example of this occurs at the beginning
of the novel. Faulkner does not tell us that this is a scene of people playing golf. Benjy, the mentally-
impaired, is watching:
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the
flag was and I went along the fence. Luster (the nurse boy) was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the
flag out and were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then
they went on and I went along the fence.
 The Sound and the Fury brought Faulkner to the attention of serious readers. Experimental in form, it
is told from the perspectives of the Compson children, one of whom is an idiot, in an effort to explain their
dysfunctional family and, at another level, equate its collapse with that of the postbellum South. The final
section of the novel is narrated in the third person but focuses on Dilsey, the black woman both involved in
and removed from the sound and the fury of the white family.
In almost all of Faulkner’s stories, time is treated in a special way. He uses the “continuous present”
style of writing, which was invented by Gertrude Stein (perhaps Faulkner learned this from Sherwood
Anderson, who was greatly influenced by Stein). Past, present and future events are mixed: “Yesterday
and tomorrow are Is: Indivisible: One.” Everything – including events from a century before – seems to
happen at the same time. Everything is part of the “now’’ of the novel. Because of these techniques it is
usually hard work to read a Faulkner novel. But the rewards are worth the effort.
As I Lay Dying (1930), composed of 59 interior monologues, follows the Bundren family through
flood and fire, mother love and motherhood, as father Anse and his five children take Addie Bundren’s
corpse home to Jefferson where she can lie peacefully at last.
In the 1930s, Faulkner was becoming increasingly concerned with the evils of modern society.
Light in August (1932) is considered by many to be another masterpiece. It shows how racism has made the
white community of the South crazy. The central character is Joe Christmas, a man who is half black and
half white: he belongs to neither race. Unhappy and confused he murders the woman who had protected him,
Joanna Burden. This gives the white community an excuse for killing him. Light in August, narrated in a
long flashback, reveals Joe Christmas’s past in an attempt to explain his violent relationships with women,
his murder of the white abolitionist Joanna Burden, and his desperate attempt to determine his race.
Absalom, Absalom! (1936) is Faulkner’s last truly “modernist” novel. Like all the other novels, this
one is set in Yoknapatawpha County. It is a huge, historical story. Thomas Sutpen plans to establish a great
family. But racism, psychological illness and a family tragedy destroy his plans. Absalom, Absalom!, perhaps
Faulkner’s most difficult novel in terms of structure and point of view, focuses on Thomas Sutpen, who built
the antebellum plantation from which he attempted to create a dynasty, only to see all his efforts fail and the
family disintegrate.
Faulkner’s descriptions of human goodness are as powerful as his descriptions of human evil. Often
(but not always) his “good” people are black. Black or white, these people show their goodness in their
relationship with nature and their ability to love. When he was given the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950,
Faulkner gave a short speech in which he described man as a spiritual being.

The South has been known up to our day, as the Lost Cause, the “Redeemer Nation,” “Baptized in
Blood,” crushed to its soul by an experience of defeat not comprehensible even to Northern Dissidents
resisting American capitalism. But, as Kazin notes, out of defeat, there rose an extraordinary Southern
literature in the twentieth century more religiously intelligent, subtle and all-encompassing.1 Due to the fact
that William Faulkner (1897-1962) lived side by side with religion in the American South as part of his
inheritance in America made him use this into his fiction.
A son of the South, Faulkner was undeniably influenced not only by the South’s heritage of defeat,
but also by the South’s predominantly Christian culture. Faulkner himself acknowledged this religious
background, maintaining that while he had never accepted as true the dogmas of any particular Christian sect,
having grown up in what Mencken labeled “the Bible Belt,” he had unconsciously absorbed a Judaeo-
Christian tradition:
“My life was passed, my childhood, in a very small Mississippi town, and that was part of my background. I grew up
with that. I assimilated that, took that in without even knowing it. It’s just there. It has nothing to do with how much of
it I might believe or disbelieve – it’s just there.”2
Undoubtedly, the best from Faulkner’s trip to Sweden for the Nobel Prize was the address he
delivered upon receiving it. No one present heard it, however, because he delivered it too far from the

1
Alfred Kazin, God and the American Writer, 234.
2
Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie eds., Faulkner and Religion: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1989 (Jackson and London:
University Press of Mississippi, 1991), xi.
microphone and in a characteristically quiet and rushed manner, in a southern accent also. The next morning,
when the text of the speech hit the news services, it was hailed as a masterpiece of rhetoric. It began by
removing the occasion of the Prize from Faulkner’s biography:
“I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work – a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the
human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something
which did not exist before.”
Thus did he keep us out of his private life even as he explained something of what it meant to do the
work – the very hard work – that he did. He invoked future winners of the Prize and spoke to them, to
encourage them:
“I believe that man will not only endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not 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,
the writer’s duty is to write about these things.”
Everyone who reads or ever has read William Faulkner “has been confused by the long sentences, the
elaborate syntax, the terrifying action, the obscure pronoun references. The only way out of such confusion is
to go through it. No shortcuts, no substitutes exist for the act of reading Faulkner; but reading Faulkner will
teach you how to read Faulkner well.”3
Calvinism was a burden to Faulkner’s characters. He criticized Calvinism due to the fact that he
perceived it as limiting human potential. The teachings of Calvinism assert the absolute sovereignty of God
and the depravity of all human beings. Historically, Calvinism has been a prominent belief in the doctrine of
the elect, a conviction that Calvinists are God’s chosen people. All this considered, we can state that Faulkner
surely singled out Calvinism as a source of Southern evil. In light of the above, Faulkner’s characters may be
viewed as absolute, fatalist, and self-righteous, features belonging to Calvinism. 4
Faulkner explained his views on the Bible. “To me,” he says,
“the Old Testament is some of the finest, most robust, and most amusing folklore I know. The New Testament is
philosophy and ideas, and something of the quality of poetry. I read that, too, but I read the Old Testament for the
pleasure of watching what these amazing people did, and they behaved so exactly like people in the nineteenth century
behaved. I read that for the fun of watching what people do. The New Testament I would read for the reason that
one listens to music, or one would go to a distance to see a piece of sculpture, a piece of architecture. That to me is the
difference. One is about people, the other is about the aspiration of man within a more or less rigid pattern.”5
William Faulkner approaches the Biblical story of Absalom in his novel Absalom, Absalom!. The title
of the novel is reminiscent of 2 Samuel 13-18, in which King David’s eldest son, Amnon, has incestual
relations with his sister Tamar. In retribution, their brother Absalom kills Amnon. The title alludes
specifically to 2 Samuel 18, in which David learns of Absalom’s death by Joab. One can easily parallel the
Biblical adulterous episode with the one in the novel.
The Sound and the Fury was the one most intimately novel related to Faulkner’s own experience (‘I
am Quentin in The Sound and the Fury,’ he once admitted), and his personal favourite because it was, he
declared, his “most splendid failure.” The novel is concerned with the lives and fates of the Compson family,
who seem to condense into their experience the entire history of their region. Four generations of Compsons
appear; and the most important of these is the third generation, the brothers Quentin, Jason and Benjy and
their sister Candace, known in the family as Caddy. Three of the four sections into which the narration is
divided are consigned to the voices of the Compson brothers; the fourth is told in the third person and circles
around the activities of Dilsey Gibson, the cook and maid-of-all-work in the Compson house.
The present time of The Sound and the Fury is distilled into four days, three of them occurring over
the Easter weekend, 1928, the Quentin section being devoted to a day in 1910 when he chooses to commit
suicide. There is, however, a constant narrative impulse to repeat and rehearse the past, to be carried back on
the old ineradicable rhythms of memory. The memories are many but the determining ones for the Compson

3
Towner, The Cambridge Introduction to William Faulkner, 10-11
4
Ibid.
5
R. A. Jelliffe, ed., Faulkner at Nagano, Tokyo, 1956, pp. 45-46, quoted in Carlos Baker, “The Place of the Bible in American
Fiction”, in Religious Perspectives in American Culture, James Ward Smith, A. Leland Jamison, eds. (Princeton University Press:
Princeton, NJ., 1961), 269.
brothers are of the woman who was at the centre of their childhood world, and who is now lost to them
literally and emotionally: their sister, Caddy Compson.6
Caddy is the source and inspiration of what became and remained the novel closest to Faulkner’s own
heart. The Sound and the Fury began, he explained, with the “mental picture … of the muddy seat of a little
girl’s drawers in a pear tree where she could see through a window where her grandmother’s funeral was
taking place” – while her three brothers gazed at her from down below. She is also the subject of a book that,
as this brief explanation suggests, carries linked intimations of sex and death. “To me she was the beautiful
one, she was my heart’s darling,” Faulkner said of Caddy later. “That’s what I wrote the book about,” he
added, “and I used the tools which seemed to me the proper tools to try to tell, try to draw the picture of
Caddy.” Trying to tell of Caddy, to extract what he called “some ultimate distillation” from her story is the
fundamental project of the book. And yet she seems somehow to exist apart from it or beyond it, to escape
from Faulkner and all the other storytellers.7
In Light in August Faulkner continues his exploration of the South’s puritan mentality; at the same
time he introduces racial miscegenation as a central dramatic issue. As a white Southerner convinced that he
has Negro ancestry, Joe Christmas directs his racial prejudice inward, against himself, and the resulting
torment commits him to a path of lonely violence. He is driven by a strong sense of guilt and a need for some
kind of punishment or moral expiation. Faulkner fits Joe’s pattern of self-destruction into a dramatic context
that establishes it as an exploration of the central moral and social problem of the racially divided South. Joe
assumes unwittingly the role of a sacrificial victim who accepts the white South’s own burden of past sin and
present injustice. His characterization brings out into the open issues that lie deep within the Southern mind,
and his death suggests a personal atonement for the racial crime of his region.8
Faulkner’s themes concern his hatred of “modern woman” and of the Negro, the “twin furies” of the
novels, which was a form of scapegoat device, “a dangerous quirk of the psyche,… a trick which may end
by deceiving the trickster.” Joanna Burden from Light in August is the primary scapegoat victim, as Joe
Christmas becomes the malicious and corrupt instrument of destruction. The murder and the lynching are,
said Geismar, the crucial expression of “his contempt for modern maturity which displays itself so eloquently
in the variety of perversions which the writer contrives for his characters.”9
The Bible as Source for Titles in Faulkner’s Works
At the simplest level, writers have used the Bible as a source of titles for their works. Of course the
Bible lends itself to such use by being an aphoristic book. Twentieth century has produced the most titles
taken from the Bible, with novels heading the list. Specimens include Go Down Moses (Faulkner), Absalom,
Absalom! (Faulkner).
Why are Faulkner’s “religious” titles not troubling to the faithful? Sanctuary for the story of the
terrible Popeye; Requiem for a Nun the story of the pretty, terrible Temple Drake. But these are literary
projections, in Faulkner’s profoundly associative style, between the inoperative world of formal religion and
the operation of our destiny, our fate, the dark thread of necessity, the end logic of our lives, as we are pulled
round and round by forces that we may call God, but which Faulkner himself calls “Opponent,” the
“Player.”10
We are being played upon by an Opponent we cannot see or truly know. Lena Grove’s miserable
seducer Lucas Burch, now calling himself Brown, has the sense even as he runs away that he is being moved
about by “an Opponent who could read his moves before he made them and who created spontaneous rules
which he and not the Opponent must follow.” (Light in August 321) So Percy Grimm in pursuit of Joe
Christmas is described as moving “with that lean, swift, blind obedience to whatever Player moved him on

6
Richard Gray, A History of American Literature, 449.
7
Ibid.
8
Peter Swiggart, The Art of Faulkner’s Novels (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1962), 131.
9
Frederick J. Hoffman and Olga W. Vickery eds., William Faulkner. Two Decades of Criticism (East Lansing: Michigan State
College, 1951), 8.
10
Alfred Kazin, “William Faulkner and Religion: Determinism, Compassion, and the God of Defeat,” in Faulkner and Religion: Faulkner
and Yoknapatawtha, 1989, Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie eds., (Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi, 1991), 12.
the board.” As he nears the doomed Christmas, “It was as though he had been merely waiting for the Player
to move him again.”( Light in August 339)
“Opponent” and “Player” are both capitalized. Man is on a track he cannot get off and there is nothing
he can do to save himself if, like Joe Christmas, it seems that his so-called “black blood” finally did him in.
Why did Faulkner throw that in when the whole point of Joe’s fate is that he never knew whether he was
partly black or not? Ironic or not, that thrust is another shovel of dirt on Joe’s coffin.11
The Bible as Source for the Names of Fictional Characters in the Works of W. Faulkner
Writers also draw upon the Bible for the names of fictional characters. In William Faulkner’s The
Sound and the Fury, Caddy is the shortened form of Candance, an English name derived from the title of the
Queen Mothers of Ethiopia. It is also a Biblical name; one of the Ethiopian candaces, being mentioned in
Acts of the New Testament when the apostle Philip baptizes an Ethiopian eunuch of great authority under
Candace Queen of the Ethiopians. The origin is uncertain; it derives either from Greek, meaning “fire-white;
incandescent” or from Latin, meaning “pure, unsullied.” 12 Nonetheless, the character’s traits in the novel are
quite opposite to “pure and unsullied.”
“A Rose for Emily” – Interpretation
The perspective of presentation in “A Rose for Emily” is not centralized. Although the event is quite
objectively recorded by the narrator, he often abandons the objective point of view and becomes a
participant in the story’s action. He doesn’t emerge as an “I” in the foreground, but he places himself as the
“we” within the circle of the townspeople, and becomes a participatory witness and observer. By means of
the directness of the experience, the presentation receives a heightened credibility and intensity.
The subjectively weak “our town,” which still invests the narrator with a certain detachment from the
group, gives way to the “our” which allows the narrator to merge entirely with the collective: “The day after
his death all the ladies prepared to call at the house and offer condolence and aid, as is our custom.”
Narrator and townspeople identify themselves with the city administration; the imposing mass stands
in contrast to Miss Emily and lets her appear in lonely isolation: “Each December we sent her a tax notice,
which would be returned by the post office a week later, unclaimed.” Even the story’s end brings no
unequivocal clarification of the concept, for who can be meant by the “we,” to which yet another dark “they”
is attached? “Already we knew that there was one room in that region above stairs which no one had seen
in forty years, and which would have to be forced. They waited until Miss Emily was decently in the ground
before they opened it.” At first certainly the townspeople, but then no longer, for it says “... for a long while
we just stood there [in the open door of the room], looking down at the profound and fleshless grin” of
Homer Barron’s corpse.
Strangely enough, nowhere in the story is there mention of a rose. In the course of her life, Miss
Emily never received a rose. But her casket was decorated with flowers: Miss Emily rested “beneath a mass
of bought flowers.” These flowers cannot express real sympathy. If anyone took Miss Emily’s part, then it
was Captain Sartoris and the members of the older generation who still had respect for the aristocratic
tradition.
If any connection of the title can be made with the “bought flowers” (in the reader’s awareness this is
conveyed through the disclosure of the “bought flowers” near the end of the story), then it must be construed
as irony, as irony which is directed against the lovelessness of the townsfolk. In the irony-laden title the
narrator preserves his separateness from the attitude of the people who ordered the flowers for the burial.
Through the title and thence through the story, the narrator strives to demonstrate his genuine sympathy for
Miss Emily and to make up, so to speak, for his neglect of her during her lifetime. The narrator feels
sympathy and probably also guilt and attempts to reach some understanding of Miss Emily through his tale.
He defends Miss Emily, for her fate was sealed by powers and forces against which she could not contend.
The meaning of the story’s title – as the titles of several other Faulknerian works, for example, Wild
Palms, Light in August – is ambivalent, and this peculiarity permits the disclosure of an essential aspect of

11
Ibid., 13.
12
<http://www.names-meanings.net/name/Candace/bible-female-Biblical> accessed online on June 22, 2010.
Faulkner’s narrative mode. It remains, as do many other concepts, complicated and multiplex and eludes any
absolute interpretation.
A powerful tension is evident in the aspect of the odd, for it is here bound up with the tragic and
macabre. One such oddity is of course the “smell” that one can detect around Miss Emily’s house, the smell
whose origin still remains a mystery: “... the smell. That was two years after her father’s death and a short
time after her sweetheart – the one we believed would marry her – had deserted her.” The smell remains a
mystery until, at the end of the story, it is resolved by the horrendous sight of Homer Barron’s cadaver. In
this manner, through hindsight, according to his reading of the tale, the relation of the macabre and the
comic becomes manifest for the reader; this relation grows out of the town administration’s deference for the
aristocratic lady.
Effective artistic possibilities reside in Faulkner’s configuration of time. Particularly through the
juxtapositions of several strictly chronological sequences of events can a few intimations of the tension be
glimpsed. The event in the first segment of “A Rose for Emily” is, in the light of the following sections,
already past. Only at the conclusion of the story’s second section, at the disclosure of Miss Emily’s father’s
death, is there an attempt at a generally normal chronological account. Previously, mention is made of the
“smell,” which appeared “after her sweetheart ... had deserted her,” but its puzzling source comes to light
only at the conclusion, through the discovery of Homer Barron’s body. By means of excising events from
their chronological sequence, the “smell” affair and the “drugstore” scene are imbued with the character of
mystery. Upon these factors a major part of the tension, unique to the story, is based, in that they are accented
in their connection with the comic. This tension is of course resolved at story’s end by the discovery, after
Miss Emily’s funeral, of Homer Barron’s corpse. The reader is shaken, as the narrator too is deeply moved,
by the sight of Homer Barron; one feels the necessity to re-examine the life of Miss Emily and her milieu.
One theorizes about the motives for Miss Emily’s action. And in the process of this re-evaluation one will
seek to comprehend the title of the story and will again experience the suggestiveness and complexity of
individual concepts as well as the many contrasts, images, allusions, and relationships, that merge with the
elements of the comic, tragic, and ironic.
Other Novels by William Faulkner
Go Down, Moses and Other Stories.
The Hamlet.
Intruder in the Dust.
Knight’s Gambit.
The Mansion.
Mayday.
Mosquitoes.
Pylon.
The Reivers.
Requiem for a Nun.
Sanctuary.
Sartoris.
The Town.
The Unvanquished.
The Wild Palms.

Glossary:
racism, practices etc. that come from the belief that one’s own race or color is better than others.
Miscegenation - interbreeding between members of different races (rom. încrucișarea rasială)
Hindsight - recognition of the realities, possibilities, or requirements of a situation, event, decision etc., after its
occurrence. (rom. înțelegere întârziată)