Transcripts For CSPAN3 William Faulkner Civil War Memory 20240711

Youre welcome to our event series. Before i start, i want to mention real quick, if you have questions tonight, you ask us in the chat box or comments on the youtube page, and well get to as many as we can. If youre interested in purchasing the book, and i hope that you do, you can find it at most major retailers, but we like to point people toward bookshop. Org where you can find just about any book youre looking for and support independent booksellers across the country. Again, thats bookshop. Org. Please give them a look. I mentioned to someone the other day that i was reading the senates words in preparation for the event tonight, and they said, oh, thats the new faulkner biography. I said, well, you got the faulkner part right. The best way i can describe this book is equal parts. Literary history, social commentary and literary criticism. I think it will band to either of those subjects. What the book really did for me was force me to give serious thought on where faulkner stands at a time when were asking ourselves difficult and overdue questions when it comes to matters of race. Was he something of a pioneer on those issues . Or was he another white writer profiting off the characterism. Hes the professor of English Literature at Smith College in massachusetts. Hes the author of several books like henry james and the making after an american masterpiece which was a final in the books of biography. Dr. Gorra, thank you for joining us tonight. Thank you very much for having me, and i want to thank the library for hosting me and steven in that introduction and for putting this together. Im going to share my screen and that will take just a sec, and then i will start talking. There we go. Okay. My title probably seems cryptic, the saddest words. There were two of them. They come from William Faulkners 1929 novel the sound and the fury and their burden will become clear as i go along. Theyre also from the title of this new book and its a book that tries to ask a few simple questions, so simple that theyre terribly complicated. First, what can faulkner tell us about the civil war . And then what can that warte te us about him . How can we use them to think about each other, and how can they help us to understand this moment in our National Life . Now, ive always read and taught faulkner, but this isnt a subject i would have predicted for myself back when i began my teaching career. So i want to say a bit about how i got here. In 2010, i was finishing a book on henry james, and i was living abroad. I was living for a while in paris. And i was reading the news from home. I was learning in that Midterm Election year about a new, and to me, inexplicable movement called the tea party. I was also reading a blog in the New York Times called diseun disunion. It was 150 years since lincoln had been elected. Read and then i heard an echo. It seemed to call up so many issues as if our time rang off that one, as if nothing had ever stopped or changed or gone away, which is itself a very faulknerian thought. Then one afternoon i realized that i wanted to write an american book. Most of my scholarly works so far had been on british things or international, like henry james. Living abroad made me far more constantly interested in my own country than i had ever been before. It made me see that i need to do look more closely at our history and our literature, that i needed to sort out what i thought about the american past. I wanted to write as an american about america, and i came to see this as an act, and in some ways, a belated act. What better to focus on than the civil war . Then i saw that i could say everything i wanted to about that war, and above all, about its memory by taking up a writer i already knew and loved. The project has taken me far beyond faulkners work itself. I let myself sink into the letters and diaries, the speeches and memoirs of the war period into the other fiction about it, and into the way it was depicted in the story of faulkners own day, even the scho schoolbooks he used as a boy in his native oxford, mississippi. There were more than a few battle visits, monuments and me tor morials as well. The war is both everywhere and nowhere in faulkner. He rarely writes about it explicit explicitly, he doesnt do battle scenes and yet its causes and consequences may provide an explanation for everything in his world. But more, it also shapes the deep structure of his imagination. Its always there. Even when it doesnt seem to be. Thats how its going to be in this talk as well. There may be moments that follow when i almost dont seem to be talking about the civil war itself, as if im focusing on the private life of a few of faulkners characters. But i am talking about it. Always. Many of you will know that he set most of the his work in a place he called a certain county in his home state. He often went from one work to another with outlines, too, as if what he had to say couldnt be confined to a single book. In particular, he wrote two novels about a character he called quentin thompson. Oddly enough, each of them is set in massachusetts at harvard, where faulkner himself had not yet been when he first invented the character. One of those books is called absaleom absalom. He said, what did they do there . Why did they live there . Why did they live at all . Thats what the other Harvard Students want to know. And quentin tries to answer those questions by telling a story that goes back to 1830, a piece of history that turns inevitably upon race and inheritance. But that was faulkners second novel about him. The sound and the fury came first, and there quentin kills himself at the end of his freshman year. He drowns himself in the charles. So whatever he said in absolom, absolom is a testimony of someone who is already dead. But im going to start with henry james, another novelist, and a character from his 1876 novel the balsterians. Hes also from mississippi. He goes to see a lawyer on business, and he takgoes to seee new building on the harvard campus that was built in 1874, a monument to the union cause. The battles hostess wornnders it might not be indelicate to bring him there, because after all, he fought for the confederacy. Hes willing, though, and he even agrees when the inscription on that wall claims the dead were brave. So they were, he says. I must be brave enough to face them. It isnt the first time. Memorial hall is divided into three, the theater on one side and the dining hall on the other. But its real business happens in the mave between them, and on its walls are said tablets with the names of harvard civil war dead, most of them. Listing them first by their class year and then by the battle and the date of their death. James writes that the hall speaks of duty and honor and sacrifice. But he doesnt tell us the particular meaning that the place had for him. Two of his cousins are listed there, and so is a man named Robert Bernard shaw, the colonel of the 54th massachusetts, in which his brother wilkie was an officer. They first set units in an army that was reluctant to accept him. They took heavy casualties in the first major battle near charleston. They were defeated, but in defeat, they showed a skeptical White America that black men would make good soldiers. Ill have more to say about that later. Plaques for the class of 1960, they note 12 names, over 10 of its number. 11 men on that call got a gettysburg. The place seems the very reverse of a challenge or taunt. He was capable of being a generous foeman, james writes, and he forgot, now, the whole question of facades and parties, remembering only that he, too, had been a soldier. That is what to him the building commemorat commemorates, arching over friends as well as enemies, the victims of defeat as well as the sons of triumph. Its really the best magazine in the late 18th century. He had hoped to heal the division between different parts of White America, so many of the magazines pages in the 1880s, they were devoted to a series called battles of leaders of the civil war. He sent firstperson memoirs to the bottattles on either side, analyze neither the worlds causes nor its consequences. Bazels note of reconciliation is very much the note of the magazine itself, the place where the historian was first published. For many men like him, that soldiers sense of shared suffering would override all sectional or idealogical differences and establishing sacrifice and its memorialization os which the ground north and south would ultimately be your mind. That was only in reconstruction. It was not the spirit that Memorial Hall was built, and a delicate carving on the wall tells us that the building marks the patriotism of those who served in the army and navy of the United States during the war for the preservation of the union. It was built for the union dead, the nations loyal citizens and for them only. Harvards confederate dead are given no place in that memorial space. Memorial hall is a space of triumph and frank about it. A few decades after the war was over, and when this Reconciliation Movement was underway, Frederick Douglas found that he need to ed to rem people that there had, indeed, been a right side to the civil war and a wrong one. Reconciliation for him that had gone too far. But Memorial Hall doesnt forget such things. It insists that neither the confederacy nor its soldiers have any claim on the power they sought to ruin. Still, whenever i read the b s bostonians, im stirred by bazels heart of emotion. And when i step into Memorial Hall, i remember the year 1909 to 1910. An equal mississippian would have to come through that door if he wanted to eat. There were other doors in the dining hall, and he wouldnt always have had to walk past that hall of names. Eventually this young southerner would die himself. What would he make of them . The sound and the fury begins with a short story of four children whose parents had sent them outside to play. Theyre hoping to keep the children from realizing that their grandmother just died. But the second born was curious. She was a child called catty from kansas. Her drawer under her short dress had gotten muddy and wet. Now she climbs a tree next to the house. She looks inside an upstairs window. Shes curious, she wants to see whats going on. And her brothers, they stare up at her from below. That moment will fix them forever. She remains soiled. Only brother quentin stays in place, afraid to follow and yet wanting to. And then jason, who threatens to tell on her. The youngest child runs out without being able to speak on the lines on which faulkner takes his title. We first see catty through his eyes. He slips from moment to moment, back to his present and then to some near day and back again, each period encased within another. The movement triggered by repetition, he provides the battle of mens by which we first traced this history. Catty had one shortlived marriageshortlived marriage to another. Her fathers fatal alcoholism, suicide, and the rulings of family life that followed. Faulkner, later, tried to tell all this through benji alone. It didnt work. In quentins voice, and set in 1910. Try again. Fail again. And he moved the narration back to 1928 and he gave it over to jason but it still wasnt enough, he said. And so, he said, ill let faulkner try. With a concluding section written in the third person. Each of the three, firstperson sections, each of those, depends not on the narrators present but, rather, on the past he cant escape. And in each case, that past is defined, in terms of the sibling whose voice we dont hear. Caddy is both missing and not. She is an absent presence to whom the brothers cannot ever accommodate themselves, and none of them will ever get over her. To be traumatized as the cultural historian kathy caruth has written, hes precisely to be possessed by an image or event. An experience one cannot master. The unwitting reenactment of an event that one simply cannot leave behind. Trauma. Trauma lies in our delayed response to a violence that our minds cannot encompass. Its an unwilled memory. A repetition that forces us to relive our past. A fateful sense of doom and reiteration. Those who suffer from it have no choice but to circle around their own experience. Approaching the psychic space where they least want to be, and yet must. Drawn by its fascination and its horror, faulkner tells the compson story four times, hoping that each will be its last. And the brothers, themselves, they always return to caddys memory. Sniffing on it. Unable to let it alone. To jason, she contains the future she hasnt had. But, for my purposes, quentin is the one who matters here. On the last day of his life, most of what happens to quentin will happen in memory. Most of what counts, anyway. He knows what hell do that night, and he he buys two flatirons to wade his way in the river. He sits next to a black man in a street car and is amazed at how easy he finds it. But whats really determinative is the life that lies behind him, the life in memory, the past in which he couldnt stop caddy from being who she is. What matters is his failure. And so, the day slips gears. And he stands by the creek where he played his children. Caddy lies in the water. She climbs out. Then, she sits with her face tilted back in the grayed light and smell of honeysuckle. Push it in, she tells him. Push harder. I want you to. And he asks her to touch it. To put out her hand and guide his way. Her hand, upon the knife that he holds at her throat. And shes willing, she says, willing to die as she says she did when the other men touched her. Have you ever done that, she asks . And he asks her, how many there have been and she can only say too many. Neurologists have identified a disorder called hyperthymesia, in which a memory presents itself, with a totality of sensory detail. Those inflicted with it can see their own past, as if it were a film, a continuous show. Reruns of unforgettable reruns. Such memories seem more real than ones very present. And so, quentins conversations with both caddy and their father will return to him throughout the day. Two moments, in which he seems to lose his present, in which he seems to step fully into his past. Two such moments call for particular attention. After he fails with the knife, quentin goes looking for a man named dalton aims. Hes not caddys first lover, but he is the man whos gotten her pregnant. And when they meet in their bridge, i say you must go, not my father, not anybody. I say it. And if dalton doesnt, ill kill you. Now, ames is both amused and concerned. He tells quentin not to take it so hard. When the border repeatedly tries to hit him, the man does have to stop him. Only then, does quentin realize that he is holding a wet and bloodstained rag. That his eyes and his face feels cold. He isnt in mississippi, at all. But rather, in massachusetts still. And without realizing it, hes picked and lost a fight with another harvard student. Another young man, whos been talking too casually about women. Quentin has gone into a fugue in which the fight triggered by the memory, the memory by the fight. And the present has vanished for else as well. We read in this part of the novel, we read for a dozen pages, without quite knowing where quentin physically is. And only faulkners broken syntax, the unpunk cctuated dialogue. Thats the only thing here to remind us that were were really inside quentins mind. The day remembers itself for him. And he snaps, too. He snaps back into the present. And his roommate, shreve, tells him that hes going to have a shiner. So, too, replays a conversation with his father in his mind. Its a conversation about his own inability to accept the fact that to accept what caddy has done. To accept the fact that shes no longer a virgin. Your anguish, his father says, your anguish rose out of a purely temporary state. Thats what virginity is. Both, caddys and his own. Its something were meant to move on from, something were meant to lose. And so, is pain, itself. But the boy will have none of it. And i, temporary . And he. You cannot bear to think that someday it will no longer hurt you like this. And i temporary and he was the saddest word of all. There is nothing else in the world. Its not despair until time. Its not even time until it was. Was. Something that was lies in the past. Its fixed and unchanging. Concluded. And, therefore, temporary, indeed. He is, in contrast, ongoing and permanent. For quentin, is trauma. Its the everpresent Family History that defines him. The only thing worse than the pain it brings. The only thing worse would be the belief that he might, someday, get over it. That it would, indeed, be temporary. Was allows survival. And yet, to discard that trauma, to believe that he might outlive it. That dismisses the very womb that has come to constitute the self. Quentin would rather die than, someday, imagine it will no longer hurt. And mr. Compson recognizes that. Was is the saddest. Its t word. Its the past that one cannot mend. But the full memory of this talk, it returns to him only at the very end of the evening. The very end of the chapter that faulkner devotes to. It returns to him just a little while before he kills himself. And yet, that conversations been at the edge of his mind, all day. That morning, he stood along the charles. And with a stiff envelope of his suicide note, cracking through his coat. For a second, then, he imagines himself in the future, as if he is going to live. But then, his fathers word comes back to him. When spoken in mississippi, the summer before, was. Thats what he, soon, will be. Was. Past tense. But, here, that timeladen syllable floats on the page without explanation. Quentin has already had that conversation with his father. We havent. Not yet. We havent read it, yet. For us, it lies 50 pages on. And so, we cant know what that word means to him. So, his next thought of this moment in his narrative seems rather cryptic. Again, sadder than was. Again. Saddest of all. Again. We wont understand that claim until it becomes literally true. Until that exchange whiz fathit father runs through his head, once more. Well hear those words again. Well remember caddy again. Sadder than was. Saddest of all. Excuse me. I need a little a little liquid. But, what does all this have to do with the war . All this excursion into the lives of these characters. Thats the question i want to explore, now, before returning us to Memorial Hall, at the end of my talk. But later, a historian has argued the grief and unfulfilled desire to which his characters are forever subject. Close quotes. The anguish is never purely personal. There is a deep congruity between the movements of faulkners mind with a sense of an inescapable family trauma, and the history and culture of this region. So deep that it hardly seems possible to distinguish between them. Reverend hightower in august from 1930. He believes his life had already ceased, before it began. That he is but a single instance of darkness, which a horse galloped and a gun crashed and his confederate grandfather fell in the dust. Or take a later novel, intruder in the dust, from 1948. That book tells us that there is a place in the mind of every southern, white boy, and pickets failed charge against the unions not, yet, begun. Thats what quentin wants. A past that is still not yet, but has yet to become was. A moment, in which it all still is. A moment before the past becomes irrevocable. And in which he can stay forever. Someday, all this will no longer hurt him, mr. Compson says. But thats precisely what he cannot accept. He cant accept the idea about living his own pain. Quentin lives in an afterlife. And what he has to tell us about the south is that it all happens over and over, again. The same troubles and events. The same quarrels. The same memories of generations, repeating themselves. Now, there are many ways to understand this. But, for me, the most useful lies in pushing our sense of trauma beyond the bounds of the individual psyche. As, indeed, for its suggested we should. Because, in so far as different people in common, so they may share the same wounds. Also, suggests the traumatic event remains unrepresentable. The event. The event, itself, as opposed to its memory. Faulkner likes to work up to, and then away, from the moment. He almost never presents it directly. But prefers to write around a gap, instead. We never actually see caddy compson, for example. We know only her remembered presence. Only her presence in the narratives her brothers tell. Only the pain of her loss. And so, it is, with the civil war, itself, its everywhere felt, and yet, in faulkners work, its nowhere fully presented. Readers walk around its edges. They hear the past as it cries out for quentin. And perhaps, for his creator, too. A trauma induced by a pain they have never not known. Their voices marked by the compulsion to repeat. A part of the pleasure principle that endures even in pleasures absence. Again. But this raises a question. The sound in the fury ends with a scene on the town square where the statue of a confederate soldier. Now, if you are looking closely, you will see that this one doesnt have his hand up to his eyes. Thats because, in the novel, faulkner fused two statues in his hometown of oxford, into one. This one, on the square. And then, the one on the campus of the university of mississippi, where the the soldier does, indeed, hold his hand over his eyes to shade them. Monuments. Monuments remind us that we must always remember. Memorials, that we should never forget. But, what does such a statue ask us to remember . And what does that memory require we forget . In faulkners day, the white south filled its public spaces with mementos to its own, ruin calls. They mastered the rhetoric of victimhood. And indeed, its people were victims. Victims of what they had done to themselves, above all. They were, also, perpetrators. Their insistence on their own sense of loss, effectively, denied the greater trauma with which the land was stained. The trauma that lincoln described in his second inaugural, as 250 years of bloody and unrequited toil. But, that denial wasnt limited to the south. It belonged to most of White America. The country, in which the blue and the gray had reconciled themselves and become one. And meanwhile, the marble man stan stands century in the courthouse square. In fact, the books famous, last page makes that makes that, literally, true. On that page, the teenage servant, luster, he tries to take the carriage to the statues left, rather than to the acucustomed right, and he gets a beating, in consequence. Nevertheless, the past will speak, despite that statue. And here, im going to make a jump in both time and space. One night, i was walking with my with my family down a residential street in the german city of hamburg. Its a city i knew well. But as i looked ahead of me, i saw something new on the sidewalk before me. I saw a brass plate with a a got way ahead of myself, im sorry. My power point jumped. And i have to get to get it back. And my mouse has lost its connection. It will come back, in a second. I am so sorry for that. Hang on. Okay. I got it. Sorry about that. My mouse has lost power. So, i was walking down the street in the german city of hamburg. And i saw bright, new, metallic gleam in the street light. When we bent to look, we saw a brass plate. It was engraved with some with a name and some date. And in front of the next house, we saw another. And then, another, down the block. All the surnames were jewish. Though, their birth dates varied, everyone listed on those stones, those little plaques, had died in 1942 or 1943. Places, whose names, we knew too well. Stolpersteine, theyre called. Stumble stones. And they mark the last address, at which the person they name had lived freely. Each of them remembers a particular person, at a particular place. Not an abstract mass of victims. And there are now many thousands of these stumble stones installed throughout germany and, indeed, the whole of europe. Local groups, school children, sometimes the current household, where they, people like that do the Necessary Research to find out who had once lived at a given address. And then, the artist who con see conceived of the project, he then makes the stone by hand with brass attached to a concrete cube and here is a picture of one of them. But germany has many memorials to the holocaust, and theyre often quite cerebral. Installations, for which the visitor usually needs some explanation. A bit of text to tell him what hes seen. Such places avoid the statue. You need to work at what they say. To puzzle over them. Halting at an impasse of meaning, rather than moving directly from a Representational Image to some expected emotion. Some expected moment of sorrow or loss. But, you have to think before you get there. And the genius of the work is that its burden seems immediately clear. You can tell what the stones are about. And what yet, one stumbles, anyway. You might almost literally stumble if you bend to look. Youll look as if youre stumbling. You look. You pause. You think. That glow forces you to stop short. Its a sight youve come upon, casually, without looking for it. And it then forces itself upon you. Now, these are the best examples i know of what, in germany, is called vergangenheitsbewaltigung. Its what one does, must do, with a difficult and recalcitrant history. Its a struggle that may last for generations. And that extends even to those individuals who carry no personal share of the burden. That work. That work is unfinished and, indeed, unfinishable. Many on that countrys right have always resented it. Nevertheless, the process, itself, its become a central part of modern Germanys National identity. And for many nongermans, the seriousness of that engagement stands as a model to emulate. It took a generation fully to begin. In the American South, it took a century. Of course, its profoundly the inability of the c confederacys immediate survivors to overcome their past. To note their failure to engage in anything like it. What did exist was a religious vocabulary that might have gotten them to the same mace. Place. A vocabulary of justice and atonement. If only, the southern churches had not, long before, made their peace with slavery. Many germans felt sorry for themselves when the shooting was over. Few of them insisted that they had been perfectly within their rights. Thats what journalist did in the 1866 book called the lost cause. And jon meacham has recently written a piece on this book for the New York Times book review. 1866. Secession may have improved impossibility but to what robert lee called the norths superior numbers and resources. Their soldiers had lost. Their principles, they thought, remain unvanquished. No analogy is perfect but i have never, in germany, seen anything like a conventional memorial to the second world war. Ive noticed that. The philosopher susan nye has pointed it out as well. Which pursues this analogy. The one im making now, at length. No carved or cast figure of rommel. Or of hitler, himself, looms above a german city, as lee or jeb stewart has historically done above virginias capitol. Though, of course, the statues of richmonds monument avenue, theyre not really meant to honor their nominal subjects. They went up around the turn of the 21st century as a way to remind us all of who was once more in charge. And now, of course, thats changing. In this very summer, as weve all seen in the news. Richmond, itself, has decided to remove the confederate memorials it controls. Those to stewart, stonewall jackson, and Jefferson Davis. A an injunction against the removal has been thrown out. The removal proceedings, i think, may now be done. The enormous statue of robert e. Lee remains. But many of us have seen pictures of the changes made to it, this summer. And know that the circle around it has become a space where africanamerican dance troops have been performing and where graffiti artists have been at work. The souths own work in confronting its past and its present. That eventually took public forum in selma, in birmingham, at a greensboro lunch counter. And even at jimmy carters church in plains. It happens now at montgomerys new National Memorial for peace and justice. Its happening in faulkners hometown of oxford. The university of mississippi, a series of skeptical and contextualizing plaques have been placed next to the sites associated with the confederacy. Including tablets, the documents, the labor of the slaves once owned by the university of the south. That school has, also, decided to remove its its own confederate memorial. The statue memorializing an army unit that was raised on the campus. From a place where everybody entering the campus must see it to a cemetery. The statue on the towns courthouse square. That does remain, for now. I think some of this work of confronting the past, though. I think some of that work had to happen in print, before it could happen in public. And maybe, fiction ran just a little bit ahead of its time. Because faulkners own books. They are, in themselves. And perhaps, the sound in the fury stands as the greatest of of them. The greatest of his attempts. The greatest because the most intractable. The book most marked by the sense of its own failure. Mastering the past. Thats precisely what Quentin Compson has not been able to do. No matter how much he struggles and fights. He cant do it because the past, for him, is not even past because he still lives in the moment of loss. It simply goes on happening. And yet, the novels account of that very impossibility. That stands, in itself, as an instance of that neverfinished process. Ill move toward a conclusion and change change my focus again, in doing so. In 1961, the novelist and poet Robert Penn Warren marked the wars centennial with a booklength essay called legacy of the civil war. A legacy he defined in the very different, psychological costs the war had imposed on either side. The white south embraced what he called the great alibi. A reference to defeat served to justify its every failing. Poverty, laziness, lynching. But war was held to excuse them all. That belief allowed the south to evade its reckoning with what lincoln called the offense of american slavery. It stands as one reason why it did not do the work. But the yankees had a corresponding myth and one that warren found, quote, equally corrosive. Southerners felt trapped by history. But northerners believed themselves redeemed by it. They pramerhaps i might say forgot how many yankee fortunes were on slavegrown cotton. Victory underlying the section sense of its own righteousness. Free to enjoy its own prejudices. Whenever i stand inside harvards Memorial Hall, i feel just a little bit smug. As though, i were drawing on that stillundepleted treasury. My side was right. But the building wants to persuade us that victory proves it was right. And the place seems all too effective in doing so. That makes me recoil from my own, northern reflexes. It makes me think, for a moment, that maybe the centuries the century magazines belief and reconciliation. Maybe, that wasnt such a bad thing. And that emphasis to which drew faust has spoken, the emphasis on reunion through a sense of shared suffering. Yet, an emotional appeal like the one i have just described. That emotional appeal to reconciliation. Thats no substitute for historical or political judgment. In richmond, we can, indeed, still drive down memorial avenue. We drive around the grand equestrian sculpture of lee, 60 feet high, from the stone base to the top of his head. For a century, the one to Jefferson Davis stood further down the road. A tall man standing before the kind of column that usually marks a victory. There have been moments in our past when this meaning of the civil war has seemed settled. This now, in 2020, is not one of them. And the questions of race and region and remembrance that the thought of that war, the thought of that war provokes. They seem to lie, again, at the heart of our National Life. This summer has made them all vivid, again. I will always second guess myself. But i do think that Memorial Halls finally a legitimate exercise of public memory. Marking the victory of the United States. But its act of kmem ragcommemor just and right and, in part, because its focus is on the individual names of the dead. The confederate statues on monument avenue dont have that legitimacy. The one to lee was erected in 1890 and it spoke, at the time, to the tyranny of virginias majority opinion. But, it has never served a morally valid purpose. And its presence was always a great balm. That is, it is a monument that was always intended as an insult to a large portion of virginias citizens. The sound in the fury doesnt say anything about Memorial Hall. But, it does provide a curious relic of the war in the form of a minor character called deacon. He is a black man, whos met every train at the start of school for the last 40 years. He runs errands. Lives on tips. And hes been in and out of quentins room all year. Sometimes, he appears in a costume of patches, dressed like uncle tom, and talking like uncle remis. Others, he wears a Brooks Brothers suit. And speaks as one gentleman to another. The details of his biography are never clear, though. And quentin doesnt even know where he comes from. 40 years takes us back to 1870. When the memory of the fighting was new. Is deacon a southerner . Was he born a slave . He likes parades and ceremonies and quentin has seen him just a few days before, stepping out for Decoration Day in the uniform of the grand armory of the republic. Now, the gar was a fraternal organization, whose members had all served in the union in the unions forces. Its posts were integrated. And during reconstruction, it fought for blackvoting rights. Many of deacons clothes are other peoples castoffs. But id like to think the uniform was his from the start. That he might once have been a soldier. And no matter that uniforms source, a man with deacons sense of occasion would, if he were real, have been on Boston Common in may 1897 for the unveiling of augustus bronze relief in honor of the 54th massachusetts. I put this slide up a little earlier that earlier than i anticipated. But there it is. Thats the particular relief i am talking about. This is new englands most stirring work of civilwar memory. It sits at the very top of beacon hill, across the street from the statehouse. Many things make it powerful, and among them is the perfect fusion between the artists skill and the Ethical Imperatives of his subject. Nothing here is abstract. Canteens and shoes. The seam of a trousers leg. The stripes on a soldiers arm. The bedrolls creased by the straps that hold them onto each soldiers pack. No other work can match the perfection of its detail. Not at gettysburg or but that alone is not the source of its power. Shows these individual men and they are individuals. Every face here is different. Shows these men at the start of their the journey that would lead to their defeat nearly charleston. His work implies a story and has the narrative of force of a great history painting. And that force reminds us why the civil war was necessary. Now, the work was intended as a memorial to himself rather than to his regiment. And its true that his figure is the first we see. But the faces of his soldiers are modeled with equal care. And time has named the work in our minds, making the individual moment into a collective one. The statue actually captures is the parade that the ceremonial parade the regiment made through boston, right before they embarked. And during that parade, shaw would have been, as a matter of realistic fact, positioned on the outside of his men, riding his horse alongside them. Time is renamed the work in our minds, as ive said. It makes the individual work into a collective one. I dont think many people in boston think of it, now, as the shaw memorial. Its the memorial to the 54th. Now, its dedication was a great ceremony with speeches by the governor and the mayor. Though, not unfortunately by any of the surviving soldiers. Booker t. Washington was asked to talk, instead. And the harvard philosopher, william james. And more importantly, wilkie james, the 54th agitant who died, never quite recovering from the war and its wounds. And already, james notes that this memorial, its not for shaw alone. But the care with which hes depicted a group of ordinary soldiers rather than some great captain. That care makes it exceptional. Except, of course, he says, they were not ordinary soldiers. They were the first black regiment to be recruited in the north. And as such, an embodiment of the war, itself. A reminder, in jamess words, that there are americans of all colors and conditions. That is why, he says, massachusetts why massachusetts has honored a regiment that lost its fight. And, in describing both the monument and the troops own march, he seems to echo the battle of the republic. But then, it is a selfaversion of that great him. It gives us the terrible, let us die to make men free. So, julia howe wrote, in 1862, and that is the resolution the sculptor has placed in each mans eyes. They did not make this war, their faces say. But, they have accepted it. And they will not call retreat. Thank you. Thank you, dr. Gore, that was fantastic. We have time for a few audience questions here. But i wanted to start with one of my own, if i might. Sure. And im sorry, without my mouse, i cant get rid of this screen share. Oh, i think that i can do that for you. There we go. Thank you so much, steve. No problem. So, there there are a lot of moments in the book that that kind of stood out to me. But but the first one actually came early on. 35 words in, to be exact. When you say you call faulkner the most important novelist of the century. Not arguably the most important, the most important. And i was wondering if you could just make your case for faulkner over people like fitzgerald, hemingway, steinbeck, and lee. Right. Sure. So, the most important american novelist. I think that hemingway. I think the the the comparable case, perhaps, would be hemingway. Although, we have yet to see how the influence of bello and Tony Morrison plays out, over the decades. Hemingways influence is stylistic. Its sentence by sentence. That hemingway is hemingways an innovator, on the level of the sentence. Hes not an innovator in the form of the novel. He doesnt he doesnt he tells, basically, chronological narratives with a heavy reliance on dialogue. They dont do much in the way of formal innovation. Great gatsby, obviously, is an enormous influence on everyone. With faulkner, there is a huge shelf of works. Just a huge shelf of works. You know, and and that influence has gone in many, many ways. Southern the literature of the American South in the decades that follow is sort of inconceivable, without faulkner. Everybodys either following him or sort of running away from him as fast as they can. Somebody asked what it was like to write in faulkners shadow, and she says when the dixie is coming down the tracks, you just get out of the way. That that he was inescapable. You dont want to be caught doing the same things he does because he will overwhelm you. And yet, there was an attraction to the train. Hes been an enormous influence on africanAmerican Literature, too. Ralph ellison spoke to his influence. Morrison, to to his great presence. Right now, younger writers. They might be fighting him but theyre engaging with him. But beyond that, i think, also also, the innovations of faulkner lays with time and memory, with point of view, have been influential for writers outside that south. The sheer willingness to try new things in every in every novel. There is, also, the fact that that our sense of the past is an inescapable thing. Hes the one who gives voice to that more than more than i think any american novelist, 19th or 20th century. Hawthorne may be the exception. Thats the way we have begun to think about our american past. I feel passionately about it. Faulkners had enormous influence abroad of on french fiction. A lot of french writing from the from the 1930s on is heavily influenced by faulkner. Beyond that, though, my book has gotten one review abroad. Its in a spanish newspaper. The book hasnt been translated but it was in the the the leadingmadrid newspaper by a leading contemporary spanish writer, antonio, wrote that faulkner has been crucial for both spanish and latinamerican writers. Gabriel Garcia Marcos thought that faulkner showed how you could write about what looks like a cultural back way, an isolated place, cut off from cities, and make great literature out of that. And Garcia Marcus thought of that as inspiration for what he wanted to do in writing about colombia. So, i could go on but ill stop there. Lets leave room for other questions. But thank you for that one. So, there there an audience question here thats a good one given that we are a week and a half out from books week now. Dr. Gora, how would you respond to a request to not include faulkner in a collegelevel western civilization course . Would an instructor be justified in removing him from a syllabus . Yeah. I have a complicated answer to that question. Because i think that, in a western civ course, we have an you have an enormous range of material you can deal with. Im not certain that theres any single, 20th century novelist who has to be on that list. Yeah. Theres no single 20th century novelist that has to be on that list. You have to have some example of modernism to be on that list. Whether its faulkner, whether its virginia wolfe, whether its conrad. You need a 20th century modernist. Im not saying you need faulkner. Now, if its an American Literature course, i think, absolutely, you do need faulkner. You do need faulkner. And in doing that, some of the reasons people might want to remove him is is because he can be controversial. His characters use the n word all the time. He writes about racially through topics. I give what Movie Reviews call content advisory. I say were going to have that word. Rape, murder, incest. In one book, beastiality. We are going to have violent death. Were going to have every crime imaginable and i just want you to know that. Movie reviews will say why this movie got an r rating. I think hes got to be in an American Literature class that doesnt say you have to admire everything thats on that page. I, myself, think that literature becomes most alive, not when its presented as something to bow down before but, as something to wrestle with. To engage with. Sometimes, to mire and to argue with. To fight with. You know, i think i think that that that that thats thats when literature, for me, is most alive. When you are engaged and sometimes when you are quarreling with it. Which is, what, say say, writers in the africanamerican tradition have been doing with faulkner. What actually, southern writers were doing. There was an agonistic relationship. I like to encourage that with my students, too. As another audience question, you have a sense of how people in the south felt about how faulkner wrote about the south . Were there any instances he revealed things maybe they rather rather he would not have talked about . Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. So, this is a story in the book. But faulkners uncle, who was a tough lawyer. Sort of, half a generation older. And who didnt think much of his of billy when billy was young. Thats what they called him in the family. He said even after even, you know, well on into the 1930s. He says, you know, i dont think very much of billys books. I dont read him much. I guess he makes money off them writing those dirty books for yankees. That is how he was regarded by a lot of proper mississippians. Hes writing dirty books for yankees. You know, to the degree the Publishing Industry was in new york, they were, in that sense, being published by yankees, certainly. Hes wrote books that did spill secrets. Sometimes, he exaggerated things. Some College Libraries of the south, in the 1930s, didnt want to have his books. Now, this this is a kind of this is a thing that often happens to writers from groups that are perceived as as marginalized. And the peculiar thing here is faulkner writes as a member of the dominant class, white southerners, that is, nevertheless, marginalized within u. S. Culture, as a whole. And he gets accused of saying things saying things we should keep in the family, as it were. This is something that writers from other marginalized groups run into, all the time. Phillip roth, when he was a young man, was told, you know, you shouldnt say those things about our people in front of chris m christian readers. Richard wright and Ralph Ellison got the same kind of complaints. Dont show us in that light. So, this this this is sort of sort of a frequent thing. But yes, faulkner got a lot of criticism. As time went on, younger writers or writers his own age began to realize there was something pretty special going on in oxford. And began to write critical essays about him. But, it it took a while for that kind of for any kind of wide acceptance to come. Im not even certain that the nobel prize did it fully, in his hometown. They like the fact, eventually, that he would bring tourists there. Or that a movie based on one of his books was shot in oxford. That brought business. But they had reservations about the work. Thats a great question. Thank you. So, well do two more here. Over the course of all his work, is there a particular character that most closely resembles faulkner, himself . Not so much in terms of biography but, maybe, in terms of the belief system . I want to say yes and no. There is a character in some of his later books. In intruder in the dust. In and then, in in figures in some other books. The the the leading lawyer in in jefferson, which is the name he gave to his town. Its a man named Gavin Stevens who will often explain things. Explain the meaning of southern history. Hell explain the relation between different parts of the county. Thats probably as close as it comes, except that faulkner, also, presents him, ironically, skeptically, as a kind of windb windbag, in places. You know, he he he so, there there there no character who really is like the faulkner persona. Its not like if you read hemingways farewell to arms. And we know that hemingway, in creating frederick henry, the narrator of that novel, has drawn very much on his own experience in world war i and his own, early love affairs. Hemingways gone beyond beyond frederick henry. But theres still this a lot of the author in you. Faulkners somebody who has a lot of different voices and characters and people jostling around inside him. And and he wants to let them out. So, the i would say stevens talks a lot, much more than faulkner ever did in person. Faulkner talked only on the page. But but, you know, there are moments when he seems a little close to the author. And then, moments when faulkner sort of washes his hands of him and makes it seem hes a little bit of a fool. And i i changed my mind. Were going to do two more because we have another one in here that i really like. Has faulkner taken any criticism for the sound in the fury, for the depiction of benji, a differently abled character, from members of that community . And if so, is that criticism warranted . Right. Thats a good question. You know, this is, of course, a new strain in faulkner criticism. That people tended to, for much of the critical history of the novel, people tended to read benji as what macbeth says is an idiot. They might say he has down syndrome and so on. Disability studies in critical literature is is is is a growth area. Ive seen more recent readings that suggest that benji is, in some ways, autistic. However one wants to define that. The criticism is more directed at other critics, at earlier critics for their sort of narrow version of benji. That that not so much at faulkner, himself. Now, this may change because there is an area where there is a lot of critical literature being written about benji, particularly from a disability studies point of view. But, yeah, the criticism is more directed at earlier, traditions than at faulkner, himself. I will say here, he did have an actual person in mind when he created benji. It was a young man, who lived in town in a large, white house. With a history to the house and with a rodiron fence around its yard. If you visit oxford, people will take you by and say thats the model for the compson house. This man is named edward chan. His older sister had been faulkners 1st grade teacher. He would run along the fence looking at people. Faulkner was he was this boy or young man was was often teased by others. And faulkner, himself, was very upset, by the way. Other people would tease and bother him. And when he, even after writing the sound in the fury, when he had an infant daughter of his own, he would often take his take his daughter, jill, and go for walks. And they and they would visit edwin chandler. So, thats thats a biographical story, i actually love. Its great. Im going to close here. I mentioned, before we got started, that one of my favorite books is our declaration by your colleague, danielle alan. And in that book, she parses the declaration of independence, kind of line by line, word by word. And parses every possible meaning based on everything from Historical Context to a change in comma placement made in the editing process. Yeah. You dont go quite that far but there are a lot of examples in your book of, you know, how do we interpret this particular line . And particularly, the old man example you use where he is asked what they were fighting for. And he says, be damned if i ever did know. And and, you know, you asked the question, does that is that he never knew . Or is that he thought he knew but now he realizes he really never did know . But i wonder, is there a line, in particular, that stands out to you . That maybe, has been misinterpreted by readers over the years . Yeah. Well, think there is a lot of lines. Heres this question is a test of my memory of how much i can remember particular faulkner lines. And i have never really been able to i i remember details of plot and character. Ive never been able to memorize a poem. So im going to cheat. And im going to say the shortest chapter in as i lay dying where the character who is about 8 years old. His mother has just died. He is and hes and simultaneously, hes caught a big, big fish down in the creek. And somehow, the two events get confused in his mind. And he says, this is the entirety of this chapter. My mother is a fish. And some early readers took that line to mean as an indication that bartam, himself, was an idiot. That he was crazy. That he was unstable, in some way. But, no, its just he suffered a traumatic event. His mother has just died. Later in the novel, i becomes an entirely reliable, authoritative witness. He is a reliable witness. This my mother is a my students always laugh when they come upon this chapter. This is an entire chapter. But its what what faulkner does is to suggest that these two things have become associated in his mind in this moment of trauma. And gotten themselves confused with each other. But early readers, who hadnt, yet, gotten a handle on what faulkner is doing. They often did misread that. Excellent. Dr. Gorra, thank you so much for joining us and good luck with the rest of your virtualbook tour. Okay . Thank you. I hope my mouse comes back. Okay. Byebye. Good night, everybody. Looking at whats coming up tonight. Beginning at 8 00 eastern, a couple of programs from our American History tvs real america series. First, all the way home. A 1957 film looking at changing racial demographics in u. S. Neighborhoods. Then, its the american look. This film examines the style of mass goods produced in the 1950s, including classicamerican cars. At 9 00 p. M. , we will show you this years cabletv pioneers induction ceremony, honoring 22 men and women who have made lasting contributions to todays cable and broadband industry. And at 9 55, more from real america with crisis in levitown. A film about racial issues in american suburbs during the 1950s. American history tv on cspan3. Exploring the people and events that tell the american story, every weekend. Coming up this weekend. Saturday, at 10 00 p. M. Eastern, on real america. As Health Officials prepare to roll out a vaccine against the coronavirus, we take you back in time with five archival films a about vaccines and the fight against disease. On sunday, at 6 00 p. M. Eastern, on american artifacts, tour new york citys Lower East Side museum that show how coped with poverty and crowded conditions in the 19th and early 20th century. At 6 30 p. M. , look at president ial leader. Then at 9 00 p. M. , a u. S. Constitutional debate hosted by the Colonial Willamsburg Foundation featuring a reenactment from Founding Fathers James Madison and george mason on issues from the bill of rights to slavery. Watch American History tv this weekend on cspan3. Every saturday at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on American History tv on cspan3, go inside a Different College classroom and hear about topics ranging from the american revolution, civil rights and u. S. President s to 9 11. Thanks for your patience and for logging into class. With most College Campuses closed due to the impact of the coronavirus, watch professors transition to a virtual setting. Gorbachev did most of the work to change the soviet union but reagan met him halfway, reagan encouraged him, reagan supported him. Freedom of the press, which well get to later i should just mention, madison originally called it freedom of the use of the press and it is indeed freedom to print things and publish things. Its not a freedom for what we now refer to institutionally as the press. Lectures in history on American History tv on cspan3. Every saturday at 8 00 p. M. Eastern. Lectures in history is also available as a podcast. Find it where you listen to podcasts. Youre watching American History tv. Every weekend on cspan3, explore our nations past. Cspan3, created by americas Cable Television companies as a Public Service and brought to you today by your television provider. Next on American History tv, two bestselling authors discuss how they use Historical Research in their work. Kathleen rooney and miles harvey will talk about their new books. The conversation was moderated by amy tyson. Authors rooney and harvey both teach in depauls english department. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us tonight. This is an event hosted by the visiting wrirs