William Faulkner and the Effervescence of Southern Identity

The South, to this day, struggles with the demons haunting its past.

Courtesy of the Special Collections at the University of Virginia.

In his 1933 preface for The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner fashioned a lamentation  for the South, a South he argued carried the scars of its Antebellum past at its very core. Reconstruction had attempted to wipe clean the racist, aristocratic, tangled carcass of the Old South and grant it the rehabilitation it needed to be reclaimed as a part of the United States once more. Yet Faulkner, being a lifetime resident of Mississippi, could also sympathize with the enormity of the trap Southerners faced in reckoning with the slow melting away of the institution that had seeped into every single facet of their agrarian lives: slavery. For many sharing his deep South roots, it still does in a myriad of ways. 

With this in mind, we can turn to the plight of the Compson family in Yoknapatawpha County and their fall from societal prominence. Through their story, Faulkner entreats the reader to examine the turbulent times that many Southerners faced as they attempted to save face through the fragmented perspectives of the three sons, Benjy, Quentin, and Jason, as well as their servants. Of particular note here is eldest child Quentin, who shoulders the burden of the family's future legacy and ventures north to Harvard in the hopes of renewal, to escape from a land devoid of opportunity to one ripe with the flowers of providential upside. 

Quentin, though, is haunted by his Southern past, with its prevailing honeysuckle scent, and the almost-spectral presence of his kin lingering with him. Faulkner held that Southerners possess a distinct relational understanding of the world, that they "need to talk, to tell, since oratory is our heritage." More than this, they are so bound in identity to their ancestral land in a way that other Americans dare not claim in the same way. Yet, by using Quentin as a mouthpiece for this unbridled rage, Faulkner avoids moralizing his  thoughts on this reality, rendering him a rare protrusion amid a stream of Modernist thinkers pondering the biggest problems of their time among the wreckage of a Great War and the makings of collapse in an indulgent America on the horizon.

In many ways, it is ironically fitting that Quentin's departure from Mississippi comes in the context of educational opportunity. It is hard to ignore the stereotype of a South stuck in limbo, that outside the bustling Atlantan metropolis one would be hard-pressed to find life in the Jacksons and the Montgomery's that dot the Deep South's lifeless land–and for good reason. Apart from the perception of lagging behind in development and opportunities, just about the only opportunity for advancement lies in Southern universities that converge each Fall to embody the three Fs defining contemporary Southern life: Faith, Family, and Football. 

Being a citizen of the peripheral South for about a decade now, I have both heard and felt the distinction of being Southern-raised that arises in every conversation. It comes into play in every social interaction through mannerisms and a different cultural milieu. Where the Northerner relates to his fellow peers on grounds of a sports team, or belonging to an Irish or Italian sector of their town, the Southerner leverages a shared cultural heritage that imparts a collective memory of what has always been and experienced by those who lived a specific agrarian life. It is in their assessment of the place in which they, the very soul of the land that they inhabit. As he states,“ I do not believe there lives the Southern writer who can say without lying that writing is any fun to him. Perhaps we do not want it to be.” Maybe this is because the story is so implicitly present, that it remains buried in every rolling pasture and reflected in each splendid Southern moon.

So, what of this mental inheritance of the South? Is it one of hope? Or rather, is it ephemeral, always seeking to reclaim some lost promise of a romantic, idyllic South that once was and never will be again? 

Faulkner likens it to an old Roman adage of a man who keeps at his bedside a "Tyrrhenian vase which he loved and the rim of which he wore slowly away with kissing it.” To Faulkner, perhaps, in this vase lies the vision of an artistic South, a romantic South even, that "makebelieve region of swords and magnolias and mockingbirds which perhaps never existed anywhere." We hear of Southern pride and hospitality, but as a matter of fact rather than a beacon of progress to aspire to.

Faulkner knew this ideal could not be. One cannot look away from the perceived image of the South as it stands even to this day: devoid of intellectual life (for the most part), broken, and fallen. Perhaps this is what he had in mind when he chose to pen the collapsed story of the Compson family, and why he intended Benjy to have told the totality of their story in terms little understood to anyone except those around him. The title invokes Shakespeare's Macbeth in a scene when the walls are closing in around him and he ponders his life’s waning moments:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player  

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage  

And then is heard no more: it is a tale  

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,  

Signifying nothing.

(Act 5, Scene 5)

Like Macbeth, Benjy sees the moving shadows around him and nebulous shapes fly by in his tragic inability to string together the chronology of his life, to make sense of it, leaving him in a furious onslaught of isolated sounds and smells and memories of the place that made him. A blameless idiot, perhaps, but all three Compson boys reflect this detachment from reality. Yet to this day, each Southern mind emulates this sentiment, and this is why the South appears unmoving, constant in its moveless march through the immoral muck of its past, a true wasteland. 

Will this ever change? Faulkner leaves us with an ambiguous answer, but I feel that it is incumbent upon every denizen of our region to ponder. As college students, we like to think that we are the contributors to the great project of Southern renewal, in a way. But the best of us and many others will flee to greener pastures. Ask yourself next time you ponder that move to DC after undergrad or that prosperous job out in Silicon Valley: what is left? What–and who–will remain behind you?