Preparation for the event tonight and they said that is the new faulkner biography. I said well, you got the faulkner part right. The best way i can describe this book is equal parts military history, social commentary, and literary criticism. And i think it will appeal equally to fans of any of those subjects. What the book really did for me is force me to give some serious thought to where faulkner stands at a time when we are asking ourselves some difficult and longoverdue questions about our countrys historic difficulties when it comes to matters of race. Was he something of a pioneer on those issues or was he or another white writer profiting off of racist caricatures of black americans . Dr. Michael gorra, as you might imagine, has some thoughts on that. He is a professor of English Literature at Smith College in massachusetts. He is the author of several books including portrait of a novel, the making of an american masterpiece, which was a finalist for the pool surprise and biography. His essays have appeared in the atlantic, the New York Times book review, among others. Dr. Gorra, thank you for joining us tonight. Prof. Gorra thank you for having me. I want to think the library for hosting me and steve for that introduction and for my friend for putting us together. I am going to share my screen, and that will take just a second. Then, i will start talking. There we go. Ok. My title probably seems cryptic. The saddest words. There were two of them, was and again. They come from faulkners novel sound and the fury. Their burden will become clear. This book tries to ask a few simple questions, simple yet terribly complicated. First, what can faulkner tell us about the civil war . Then, what can that war tell us about him . How can we use them to think about each other . And how can they help us understand this moment in our National Life . I have always read and taught faulkner, but this is not a subject i would have predicted for myself back when i was beginning my teaching career. So i want to say a bit about how i got here. In 2010, i was finishing a book about henry james, and i was living abroad, 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 this union. It was 150 years since lincoln had been elected, and they and the paper decided to follow the week by week course of the civil war. I read, and then i heard an echo. It seemed to call up so many of the same issues, as if our time rang off that one, as if nothing had ever stopped, changed, or gone away, which itself is a very faulknerian thought. And then one afternoon i realized i wanted to write an american book. Most of my works so far had been on british things or consciously International Like henry james. But living abroad had made me far more consciously interested in my own country than i had ever been before. It made me see that i needed to 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 a act, and in some ways, a belated act. Citizenship as much as a scholarship. What better moment to focus on then civil war . I thought i could say everything i wanted to about that war, and above all, about its memory. By taking up the 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, speeches ,nd memoirs from the war period into the fiction about it, and the way it was depicted in faulkners own day. Even the schoolbook he used as a boy in mississippi. There were more than a few battlefield visits, a few monuments and memorials to consider as well. Monuments to think about in this summer especially. The war is both everywhere and nowhere in faulkner. He rarely writes about it explicitly. He does not do battle scenes. And yet it is causes and consequences, they provide an explanation for everything in his world, but more. It also shapes his deep construction structure of his imagination. But war. His deephapes structure of his imagination. It is always there, even when it does not seem to be. That is how it will be in this talk as well. There will be some moments in what follows where i might not seem to be talking about the civil war itself. I am just focusing on the private lives of a few of faulkners characters. But i am talking about it, always. Many of you will know that he sent most of his work in a place, an imaginary realm in his home state. He often carried characters over from one book to another. Plot lines, too. As if what he had to say could not be confined to a single book. In particular, he wrote two novels about a character he called quinton thompson. Oddly enough, each of them was set partly in massachusetts at harvard, where faulkner himself had not yet been when he first invented the character. One of those books is called absalom absalom. It was published in 1936, and it depends on the question quinton has been asked ever since he arrived at harvard in the fall of 1909. Tell about the south. What is it like there . What do they do there . Why do they live there . Why do they live at all . That is what faulkner says the other Harvard Students want to know. Quinton 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. That was faulkners second novel about him. The sound in the fury came first. There, quinton kills himself at the end of his freshman year. He drowns himself in the charles. So whatever he says in this book, its the testimony of somebody who is already dead. I am not going to start with quentin, or even with faulkner. Instead im going to start with henry james, my other novelist, and with a character from his 1886 novel the bostonians. I am going to start there because basil, too, also comes from mississippi. Originally comes from mississippi. He is a lawyer, and he goes to boston on business. He gets taken to see a new building on the harvard campus, a place called Memorial Hall, which was built in 1974, a monument to the union cause. Basils hostess wonders if it might be indelicate to bring him there, because after all, he fought for the confederacy. He is willing, though. He even agrees with the inscription on the wall that reads the dead were brave. So they were, he says. I must be brave enough to face them. It is not the first time. The Memorial Hall is divided into three, with the theater on one side and the dining hall on the other. But its real business happens arch dialem, a high on a window. On its walls are a set of tablets with the names of harvards civil war dead. Most of them. Listing them first by their class year and then by the battle and date of the death. James writes that the hall speaks of duty and honor and sacrifice. But he does not tell us the particular meaning the place had for him. Two of his cousins are listed there. So was a man named robert shaw, a kernel of the 54th massachusetts, in which his brother was a junior officer. That was a regimen of black troops with white officers. First an army that was in an army that was first reluctant to take them. They took heavy casualties in their first major battle, fort wegner near charleston. They were defeated. In their defeat, they showed a skeptical white america. Blackman had no souls. I will have more to say on that later. Over 12 of its number. 11 men on that wall died at gettysburg. The place seems the very reverse of a challenge or taunt. He was capable of being a generous omen and he forgot. Now, the whole question of size lyd parties, remembering on that he too had been a soldier. That is what the building commemorates, arching over friends and enemies the victories of defeat. The bostonians materialized in a magazine called the century. Is the best american magazine of the late 19th century. The executive editor, the owner, fought for the union. But he hoped to find a way to heal the division between the different parts of white america. So many many of the magazines pages in the 1880s were devoted to a series called battles and leaders of the civil war. Instead of first person memoirs, how the surviving commanders and other side memoirs of the surviving commanders on the others on either side. They claim to look at the conflict on a strictly Military Point of view. To analyze neither the wars causes or its consequences. Reconciliation is very much the it themselves. For many people like him, that soldier sense of shared suffering, it would override all sectionals or ideological differences and establish a sacrifice and its memorialization on the ground which north and south would ultimately reunite. Its that sense of a common loss. That emerged only after the end of reconstruction. It was not in the spirit in which it was built. In which Memorial Hall was built. In a dedicatory carving on the us 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 were given no place at that memorial space. Memorial hall is a space of triumph, and frank about it. A few decades after the war was over, when this Reconciliation Movement was underway, Frederick Douglass found that he needed to remind people that there had indeed been a right side to the civil war and a wrong side. Reconciliation, for him, had gone too far. Memorial hall does not forget such things. It insists that neither the confederacy nor its soldiers have any claim on the polity they sought to ruin. Still, whenever i read the bostonians, i am stirred by basils openhearted emotion. And when i step inside Memorial Hall, i remember that during the Academic Year of 1909 to 1910, an equally fictional mississippian would have had to enter that Building Three times a day at least if you wanted to eat. There are other doors to the dining hall. Faulkners quentin, he would not always have to walk past that line of dead union names, but did as thismes he young southerner. What we have made of them . The sound and the fury began its short story about four children whose parents sent them outside to play. They are hoping to keep the kids from realizing that their grandmother just died. The second child is curious. And her drawers under her dress had gotten muddy and wet. Now, she climbs a tree next to upstairs, looks in an window, is curious, once to see going see what is going on. Her brothers stare up at her from below. Caddie remained adventurous and soiled, ruled by a desire that led to her expulsion from the family. In older brother stays place, afraid to follow yet wanting to. And jason who threatens to tell on her. The youngest child walks without being able to speak. Hes the idiot in the lines faulkner takes its title, whos is full of sound sad and tale is full of lonely. Go first person narrations from moment to moment, back with back in his normal prison of 1928 and into childhood. Each period encased within another and the movement between triggered by association or repetition, he combines the events to which we first approaches Family History. Her promiscuity, her pregnancy by one man and marriage to another, her fathers fatal quentins suicide, and the ruins of family life that follow. Faulkner had later said that he tried to tell all of this through benji alone. It did not work until he started over, this time in sectioning quentins voice, set in 1910 on the last day of his life. Try again, fail again. He moved the narration back to 1928, anti gave it over to the vicious jason. But it still was not enough, he said. And so he said, i will 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 siblings sibling whose voice we dont hear. Catty is an absent presence to whom the brothers cannot ever accommodate themselves and one none of them will ever get over her. To be traumatized as a cultural historian has written, it is precisely to be possessed by an image or event. An experience one cannot master, the unwitting reenactment of an nt one cannot simply cannot decouple. Trauma, trauma lies in our delayed response to a violence that our minds cannot encompass. Isnt unwritten memory, a repetition that forces us to relive our past. A faithful sense of dual reiteration. Those who suffer from it have no choice but to circle around the their own experience. Approaching the psychic space where they least want to be and yet must. Drawn by fascination and horror. Faulkner tells the constant story four times, hoping that each will be its last. The brothers himself, they always return to her memory, sniffing at it, unable to let it alone. For benji, she was comfort. To jason, she contains the future he had not 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 he will do that night, and he buys two flat irons to weight has way into the river. He sits next to a black man on the streetcar and is amazed at how easy he finds him. What is really determinative is the life that lies behind you. The life and memory, the past in which you could not stop catty from being who she is. What matters is his failure. So the day slips gears and he stands by the creek where they had played as children. She lies in the water, her skirt soaked against her, she climbs out. But she sits with her face tilted back, the smell of honeysuckle. Push it in, she tells him, push harder, i want you to. He asks her to touch it. To put out her hand and got his way. Her hand upon the night that he holds at her throat. And she is willing, she says, willing to die as she says she did when the other men touched her. Have you ever done that . She asks. How many there have been, and she only says too many. Neurologists have identified a disorder called hyper thien identified a disorder in which a memory presents itself unbidden for the totality of sensory decay. Those afflicted with a can see their own tasks, as if it were a film, a continuous shell, reruns of unforgettable reruns. Such memories seem more real than ones at the very present conversationss would continue throughout the day. Big moments on why she seems to lose his presence, he steps fully into his past. Moments that cause particular intention. After he fails with a knife, he goes looking for a man. He is not her first lover, but he is the man who has gotten her pregnant. And when they meet, quentin orders him to leave town. I say he must go, not my father, not anybody, i say it. If dalton does not, i will kill you. Amused andth concerned. He tells quentin not to take it so hard. When he tries to hit him, the man does have to stop him. Only then does he realize that he is holding a wet, bloodstained rag and his face feels cold. He is not in mississippi at all, but rather in massachusetts still. And without realizing it, he has picked and lost a fight with another harvard student, and another man who has been talking too casually about women. He has gone into a feud, and which the present seems to bend, the fight triggered by the memory, the memory by the fight. And the present has vanished for us as well. We read in this part of the novel, we read for a dozen pages. Without quite knowing where quentin is physically, and only only faulkners broken syntax, the unpunctuated lowercase lines of dialogue spilling down this page, that is the only thing here to remind us that we are really inside quentins mind. The day remembers itself for him. Betty too, he snaps back into the present. His roommate tells him hes going to have a shiner. So too a critical conversation with his father replace in his mind, a conversation about his own inability to accept the fact that she is no longer a virgin. Your anguish, his father says, your anguish grows out of a purely temporary state. That is what virginity is, both cattys and his own. It is something to move on from, something we are meant to lose. 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. Was theemporary, and he saddest road of all. There is nothing else in the world. It is not despair until time, it is not even time until it was. Was. Something that was lies in the past. It is fixed and unchanging, concluded and therefore temporary indeed. He is, in contrast, ongoing and permanent. Is with his trauma, an ever present Family History that defines him. The only thing worse would be the belief that he might someday get over it, that it would not it would indeed be temporary. Was allows survival, to discard that trauma, to believe he might outlive it, that dismisses the the very wound that has come to constitute itself. Quentin would rather die than imagine that someday it will no longer hurt. Mr. Thompson recognizes that. Was is the saddest word. It is the past that one cannot mend. Quentin will find a different word. The full memory of this talk returns to him only at the very end of the evening, the very end of the chapter faulkner devotes to. It returns to just a little while before he kills himself. That conversation has been at the edge of his mind all day. That morning, he stood along the charles, and with a stiff envelope with his suicide note cracking through his coat. For a second, he imagines himself in the future, as if hes going to live, but then his fathers word comes back to him. When spoken in mississippi the summer before, was. Be, was, soon will past tense. But here, that timeladen syllable floats on the page without explanation. Quentin has already had that conversation with his father. We have not. Not yet. We have not read it yet. For us, it lies 50 pages on, so cannot know what that word means to him. , at thisxt thought moment in his narrative, seems rather cryptic. Again, sadder than was. Again, saddest of all. Again. We wont understand a claim until it becomes literally true. Until that exchange with his father runs through his head once more. We will hear those words again. We will remember catty again. Sadder than was, saddest of all. Excuse me, i need a little liquid. What is all this have to do with does all of this have to do with the war . All of this excursion into t