Aug

25

"Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders."

This quote by Faulkner says much though you'll have to read it over again many times along with Light in August before it sinks in. Faulkner knew much about tragedies which befell the South and wrote about them as honestly as anyone. Understanding the South starts with reading Faulkner.

Most of his books concerned individuals saddled with crimes and mistakes inherited from the past, borne for lifetimes and passed on for many more. Eventually even their statues grew tired, and only the memory of memories remained; and they wondered if the past had finally offered up redemption. Faulkner believed no; history never once forgave nor was ever forgiven.

Stefan Jovanovich writes: 

Faulkner is the classic schoolie author. He is the Henry James of the South, and almost everything he writes about actual history is complete bunk. He lied about being in the Royal Flying Corp in WW I and seeing action. His only actual service was as a reserve cadet in the British Army in 1918 in Canada. The only "front" he saw was Toronto. "Pickett's charge was the end of the Civil War" because he and Shelby Foote say it was; the Confederates who were there - including the man in charge of the artillery, General Alexander - thought it was only a loss and no worse for the Army of Northern Virginia than Chancellorsville had been for the Army of the Potomac. The actual war - the period when there is not one bloodbath in a year but one each month that the weather permits - is won and lost in 1864; but that doesn't fit the story of how "they" drove Old Dixie down.

Faulkner's obsession with history is about all the lost Butler money of his mother Maud and her mother Lelia. He and his fiction mourned the good old days when Mississippi was the richest state in the Union, and his sentiment for the former slaves was the same bathetic crap that people indulge in when they talk about the old cars they once owned but were forced to sell.

If political blacks and their allies want to continue "the struggle" 150 years later, that is hardly shocking or surprising. The Irish in America were still marching and crying and complaining to the United Nations 250 years after the Battle of the Boyne; and the Irish Free State was still choosing to be neutral when presented with a choice between Hitler and Churchill.

Understanding "the South" starts with knowing that Faulkner never picked cotton, never missed a meal and never, ever had to eat shit from Yankees for talking funny; and that absolutely none of that matters, as history.
 


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