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| “A CASEBOOK ON MANKIND”:
FAULKNER’S USE OF SHAKESPEARE
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The parallels in the lives and careers of the two writers are remarkably striking. Both were born in provincial small towns but found their eventual success in metropolitan cities, Shakespeare in London and Faulkner in New York and Hollywood. Both had a great love of nature and the rural outdoors. Neither received a great deal of formal education. Both started out as poets but shortly turned to other narrative forms, Faulkner to fiction and Shakespeare to drama. Both had extramarital affairs that were reflected in some of their writings. Each wrote both tragedies and comedies, and in each case their final work was a comedy, Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Faulkner’s The Reivers. A number of dominant themes and emphases are common to both writers, including the imaginative use of historical materials, the incorporation of both tragic and comic views of life, and the paradoxical tension between fate (in Faulkner’s case, determinism) and free will. Moreover, both writers exhibit a fascination for experimental form and language, flouting conventional rules to create new narrative structures and delighting in neologisms, puns, and other forms of word play. Finally, both writers were acutely interested in the paradoxical relationship of life and art. Allusions Allusions, or cross references, by one author to
the works of another provide irrefutable evidence of a deliberate and conscious
literary borrowing. Without question
the most famous allusion to Shakespeare in all of Faulkner is the title of his
1929 novel, The Sound and the Fury.
As Faulkner readily acknowledged, the title phrase was borrowed from
Macbeth's famous speech, Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Not only Faulkner’s title phrase, “sound and
fury,” but also the opening chapter of Faulkner’s novel which is narrated
through the consciousness of a mentally retarded person, thus “told by an
idiot,” and the second chapter which presents Quentin Compson very much as “a walking shadow” seeking “dusty death,”
provide obvious links to this Shakespearean passage. However, as William A. Frye has astutely demonstrated in his
study of the bell imagery in The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner’s
use of Shakespeare's play goes far beyond the points just mentioned. Frye traces dozens of references to bells
and chimes throughout Faulkner’s text.
Linking these to Lady Macbeth's bell that provides the signal for
Macbeth to murder Duncan (“I go, and it is done. The bell invites me. / Hear it
not, Duncan, for it is a knell / That summons thee to heaven or to hell”
[2.1:63-5]), Frye demonstrates that the bells in both Macbeth and The
Sound and the Fury “denote not only time, but opportunities for choices,
summonings, even, to choose” (27). In
this connection, Faulkner appears to be using the Shakespearean pattern, much
as Joyce used the Homeric in Ulysses, to ironically juxtapose the
heroic, bold, if mistaken, choices of an earlier age with the indecision and
impotence often associated with the early twentieth century. Faulkner employs another significant
Shakespearean allusion in Light in August. Gail Hightower, a major character in that novel, is, as his name
implies, an individual who has sought to escape from actual experience to live
in a “high tower” of self-delusion and fantasy. A defrocked clergyman, Hightower has elected to stay on in
Jefferson despite the personal scandal that, years earlier, had cost him his
marriage, his position as pastor of a church, and finally even his right to the
title of ordained minister. When we
meet him early in the novel, he is living out his barren existence largely
behind the closed doors of his house, entertaining no visitors except one, a
mill worker and church layman named Byron Bunch. As Faulkner’s novel unfolds, looping backward as
well as forward, we are led to understand the reasons for Hightower’s tragic
failure. Like many of Faulkner’s modern
white male Southerners, the youthful Hightower had become fixated on an
idealistic Southern heritage, embodied for Hightower in the image of his
grandfather, a Confederate calvary officer who, the young minister had been led
to believe, sacrificially gave his life for homeland and personal honor. Hightower’s worship of this ancestor and the
values he supposedly represented come to dominate Hightower’s consciousness;
the grandfather's legendary exploits even become the focus of Hightower’s sermons: “It was as if he couldn't get religion and
that galloping cavalry and his dead grandfather shot from the galloping horse
untangled from each other, even in the pulpit” (56). When Hightower learns, however, that the fabled grandfather had
not died heroically in battle but, quite the contrary, was actually shot while
engaged in the ignominious act of stealing chickens, Hightower is robbed of his
mythical past; and this loss contributes to Hightower’s decision to disengage
himself from life and action, passing his days “as though the seed which his
grandfather had transmitted to him had been on the horse too that night and had
been killed too and time had stopped there and then for the seed and nothing
had happened in time since, not even him” (59). What is interesting and relevant about all this
to my purpose this evening is the reading material that Faulkner assigns to
Hightower. During his long period of
escape and disengagement, we are told, Hightower reads “a great deal” in the
large number of books housed in his study (67). One author whom he finds particularly attractive is Alfred, Lord
Tennyson. Obviously Hightower finds in Tennyson’s
mellifluous lines, even more than in prayer, an anodyne to his pain and
anguish. But on the day he returns from
the cabin where he has served as midwife at the birth of Lena’s child, he
ignores the “dogeared” Tennyson volume and turns to Shakespeare. As the words “solidly” and “heavily” imply, Hightower has abandoned the dream world associated with Tennyson’s “gutless swooning” and “sapless trees” and “dehydrated lusts” to enter the real world of physicality and substance. If I understand Faulkner’s allusion correctly, Hightower’s choice is not altogether unlike the choice that Prince Hal must make in his transition from youthful irresponsibility to the duties of kingship as Henry V. A second aspect of Faulkner’s work that seems
linked to the possible influence of Shakespeare relates to the manner that both
writers make significant use of historical material. Shakespeare, as most of you well know, seldom invented an
original plot, choosing rather to take familiar characters and events from
older plays or historical chronicles, most notably Raphel Holinshed’s Chronicles
of England, Scotland, and Ireland and Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble
Grecians and Romans, and reworking them to suit his own dramatic
purposes. Faulkner, too, drew heavily
upon history for his fictional materials, incorporating into his Yoknapatawpha
narratives accounts of the settlement of the South, the Civil War and
Reconstruction, the racial patterns and conflicts of Jim Crow and segregation,
and the displacement of an agrarian life style by mechanization and
industrialization. But it would be a mistake to think that either
Shakespeare or Faulkner was primarily interested in history as mere
history. They both wrote in what I like
to call--accurately, I think, if ungrammatically--”the past-present tense,”
that is, in a way that utilizes the past as an analogue to or even a commentary
on the present situation. Here, it will
be helpful to take a brief excursion into contemporary literary theory. Recent advancements in literary criticism
and linguistics have helped us to understand better the always complex
relationship existing between a writer, that writer’s world, and any literary
text. We now acknowledge that there can
never be a definite demarcation between a literary work and its creator,
between objectivity and subjectivity, or between the past as lived and the past
as perceived by one looking back on it from the altered perspective of the
present. One of the best illustrations
of this point is Arthur Miller’s great play, The Crucible, on the
literal level a treatment of the mass hysteria evidenced in the Salem
witchcraft trials of 1692 but through contextual parallels an expose of the
McCarthyism that was rampant in America at the time Miller published the play,
1953. There can be no denying that The
Crucible is an “historical” play; but it would certainly be a mistake to
view the play as merely or even primarily historical: the ultimate meaning of
the play can be grasped only by placing the historical elements alongside the
contemporary event--the McCarthy hearings--that provided the motivation for
Miller’s writing of the play. In
Miller’s case, we know, the use of the past present tense was conscious and
calculated; but modern theorists would argue that even had it been unconscious
and coincidental, Miller’s choice of historical subject and his treatment of it
would still have been influenced by his present situation, that is, by his
summons to appear as a witness before the Senate’s Committee on Un-American
Activities. While Shakespeare’s main purpose in his
repetitions of history was in all likelihood to tell a good story, or, more
precisely, to elevate the old stories into poetic form, there can be little
doubt that he was very much aware of the parallels between the historical
narratives he chose to dramatize and his contemporary Elizabethan world. To cite only two examples: think of Shakespeare’s
presentation in the great comedies of the pastoral life style that was
disappearing with the development and spreading influence of the metropolitan
culture of London; or, better, think of Shakespeare’s obsession with the
history of kingship, even the divine right of kings, at a time when the right
to the throne of the contemporary wearers of the crown, first Queen Elizabeth
and then King James, was continually being challenged and even threatened with
insurrection. Perhaps the best example of Shakespeare’s using
the past as a mirror to contemporary events is Richard II. Here Shakespeare deals with one of the most
crucial episodes in English history, the deposing of King Richard by Henry
Bolingbroke, afterwards King Henry IV.
This event had occurred in 1399, nearly 200 years before Shakespeare
wrote about it; and from his later perspective Shakespeare knew that the
ultimate outcome of Richard’s overthrow was the long and tragic War of the
Roses, the civil war between the royal houses of York and Lancaster that lasted
for thirty years. Before writing Richard
II, Shakespeare had already written four plays about the War of the
Roses--the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III. Now, having already dramatized the national
calamity of the war, he explores the source of that conflict in Bolingbroke’s
usurpation of Richard’s crown. Yes,
Shakespeare acknowledges in his play, Richard was a weak king, a dreamer and an
aesthete, out of touch with his subjects; and Henry was a doer, a man of
action, and the crowd’s favorite--but there was still the huge question,
towering large for Shakespeare and others of the Renaissance, of whether any
degree of inefficiency or even wickedness could justify the overthrow of God’s
anointed ruler and the political chaos that would ensue. As Richard states the case, Not all the water in the rough, rude sea In the Deposition scene Shakespeare has Richard
compare himself to the crucified Christ: . . . you Pilates Clearly, if Richard is Christ, then Henry is
Judas, the political leaders Pilates, and the British populace the fickle mob
that demanded the freeing of Barrabas and the crucifixion of Christ. The issue of who is the rightful ruler is a
universal question of British politics, but Shakespeare’s interest in the
question, as indeed the entire history of the War of the Roses, was being
fueled by particular events of his own day, not unlike the way Arthur Miller’s
interest in the witchcraft trials was fueled by the McCarthy hearings, or our
recent revival of interest in President Andrew Johnson’s impeachment was
brought about by the impeachment of President Clinton. At the time Shakespeare wrote Richard II,
the Henry-Richard conflict was being repeated in the opposition of the Earl of
Essex to Queen Elizabeth. Shakespeare
was very close to, if not personally involved in, this issue, since his patron,
the Earl of Southampton, was one of the leading supporters of Essex. Modern audiences and readers may not be much
aware of this parallel when they view or read Shakespeare’s play, but the parallel
would have been unmistakable to the Elizabethan audience. We know that the parallel was obvious to
both Essex and the queen. In 1601, when
Essex and his followers attempted to overthrow Elizabeth and place Essex on the
throne, they arranged to have a performance of Richard II staged at the
popular Globe Theatre the very night before the attempted coup--a kind of pep
rally before the big game the following day.
When the coup failed, the conspirators were arrested; and in the trial
that followed Essex was condemned to death and Southampton was imprisoned in
the Tower, where he remained until the death of Elizabeth two years later. One of the real mysteries in all these
developments is how Shakespeare managed to escape censure or worse, since he
was such a close personal friend of Southampton and thus probably a close
acquaintance of Essex. We also know that Queen Elizabeth was acutely
aware of the parallel being drawn between herself and Richard II. “I am Richard II, know ye not that?” she is
quoted as saying after the conspiracy trial was over; and her sensitivity to
the issue was undoubtedly the reason that the Deposition scene in Shakespeare’s
play--where Henry actually takes the crown from Richard--was officially
censored and thus omitted in the first printings of Richard II, not
finding its way into print until after the accession of James I (Rowse 235). This question of kingship and right rule is at
the very heart of so many of Shakespeare’s plays, not only the two tetralogies
of the Henrys and the Richards, but also the great tragedies of Macbeth,
Hamlet, Julius Caesar, and King Lear, and even many of the
comedies such as Twelfth Night, Much Ado about Nothing, and The
Tempest. There can be little doubt,
I think, that this theme was of great concern for Shakespeare; and his relating
it to both past and present situations--in other words, his effective use of
the past-present tense--provided him a means of warning his age about the
tragic lessons of history. Like Shakespeare, Faulkner was an historical
writer who courageously explored the past in his attempt to analyze and
understand the present. We see this
approach operative in Faulkner on the level of both individual characters and
Southern society as a whole. The best
example is Faulkner’s most complex, and, many think, greatest, novel:
Absalom, Absalom!. Published in 1936, Absalom, Absalom!
expands the story of the suicidal Quentin Compson from The Sound and the
Fury of seven years earlier. Set
during the final year of Quentin’s life, 1909-10, Absalom presents
Quentin’s desperate and ultimately unsuccessful attempts to come to understand
both himself and his native region. In
this quest for understanding and, indeed, salvation, Quentin displaces his own
inner guilts and conflicts onto a legendary story that he has heard all his
life, the story of the rise and fall of Thomas Sutpen, a rags-to-riches
Southern planter who carved a plantation out of the Yoknapatawpha wilderness in
the 1830s and sought to create a family dynasty, but who saw his dream
eventually destroyed by a father-son conflict that parallels the tragic
conflict from which Faulkner draws his title, the biblical account of the
conflict between King David and his son Absalom. In structuring the plot of his novel, Faulkner moves back and
forth from the Quentin narrative of 1909-10 to the Supten narrative of the
1810s to the 1860s. In analyzing these
time shifts, however, and in seeking to determine whether the main character of
the novel is Quentin Compson or Thomas Sutpen, critics typically overlook the
novel’s third time dimension, that is, the time of Faulkner, the creator of the
novel, which is, of course, 1935-36, when the novel was being written. Thus, not unlike the better-known novel
published the same year, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, Absalom,
Absalom! is written in past-present tense: while an historical novel of
Civil War days, it is also a novel about, and with a message for, the Great
Depression. And what is that message? We can begin the search for an answer to
that question, I think, by recognizing that Thomas Sutpen is a character type
frequently found in American history and literature but one that in the 1930s
was coming under increased scrutiny: an entrepreneurial, laissez-faire
capitalist. Like the real-life Benjamin
Franklin and John D. Rockefeller and Henry Flagler and the fictional Poor
Richard, Horatio Alger’s Tattered Tom, and Jay Gatsby, Sutpen is born poor but,
through ambition, industriousness, and good fortune (pluck and luck), rises to
a position of tremendous wealth and status.
With the advent of the Great Depression, however, such character types,
as indeed all the business practices of capitalism, were being called into
question, the more so since the failures of the Great Depression appeared to be
the logical consequences of the excesses of the all-too-recent robber barons
and monopolists. As Faulkner’s novel
demonstrates, it was not merely New Deal politicians like Franklin Roosevelt or
Henry Wallace or socialistic writers like John Dos Passos and John Steinbeck
who were questioning the American economic enterprise. The characterization of Thomas Sutpen is a
serious critique of the American Dream at a time of crisis when the traditional
values and methods associated with that Dream were being challenged. In dramatizing the reasons for Sutpen’s
self-destruction, Faulkner stresses Sutpen’s ruthless exploitation of other
people in his quest to amass wealth and power.
He utilizes and brutalizes the slaves who build his mansion, and he
holds a French architect in virtual imprisonment until the house is
completed. Sutpen marries twice, in each case not for love but for financial
and social advancement. A racist as well as a materialist, he
rejects his first wife when he learns she is part-Negro, turns away from his
door the son of that union, and eventually provides his white son with a motive
to murder his mulatto half-brother. As
a sad, pathetic old man and a widower, with his plantation gone and his family
dead or scattered, he seeks to revitalize his dream by seducing a poor-white
teenaged girl in the hope of producing a male heir: when the child turns out to
be a female, Sutpen rejects both the mother and the child with perhaps the
cruelest words in the novel: “Well, Milly; too bad you’re not a mare too. Then I could give you a decent stall in the
stable” (286). “They did not think of
love in connection with Sutpen,” the reader is told early in the novel. “They thought of ruthlessness rather than justice
and of fear rather than respect, but not of pity or love” (43). Treating Thomas Sutpen as Faulkner’s 1930s portrait of capitalism without any redeeming social consciousness leads one to a very different interpretation of Quentin Compson’s obsession with the Sutpen legend than is currently offered by critics. While, like many Americans of every day and time, Quentin envies, perhaps even subconsciously admires, the boldness and the audacity of pragmatic doers and achievers like Sutpen, at the same time Quentin is an idealist, a believer in noblesse oblige, a defender of community and brotherhood and family loyalty and romantic love--indeed, a practitioner (to reverse the negative terms earlier applied to Sutpen) of justice rather than ruthlessness, of respect rather than fear, of pity and love. Caught between such oppositions, the America of the 1930s sought to find itself--and Faulkner, just as Shakespeare had done with Richard II, employed an historical analogue to serve as a critique of the contemporary situation. Death seems to have been an obsession with
Faulkner from an early age. Perhaps
this fear of death may have derived from his near demise from scarlet fever at
age four or from his experience, at age nine, of watching his beloved grandmother
(“Damuddy”) destroyed by cancer.
Whatever its origin, death surfaces as a major subject in Faulkner’s
early poetry and prose and is seldom again absent from his work. Indeed, among American writers only Edgar
Allan Poe seems as obsessed as Faulkner with death, decay, corpses, and cemeteries. But an existential recognition of the tragic inevitability of death is only one--and not the most important--facet of Faulkner’s handling of the subject. For Faulkner the ultimate meaning is to be found in the heroic resistance to death, and from Thomas Sutpen’s struggle against time and mortality in Absalom, Absalom! onward, this theme becomes an overt motif in Faulkner’s work. As Ernest Becker has convincingly argued in The Denial of Death, all individuals experience death anxiety and consequently long for immortality, whether natural or supernatural; but Faulkner contends that this psychological conflict is especially acute for the artist. As he once said, “Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist’s way of scribbling 'Kilroy was here' on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass” (LIG 253). Perhaps Faulkner’s most sublime expression of this idea is found in his Foreword to The Faulkner Reader (1954), in which he contends that the ultimate goal of any writer is “to uplift man’s heart” by “saying No to death.” “Some day,” Faulkner concludes, “[the writer] will be no more, which will not matter then, because isolated and itself invulnerable in the cold print remains that which is capable of engendering still the old deathless excitement in hearts and glands whose owners and custodians are generations from the air he breathed and anguished in” (ESPL 181-2). Given his deep concern for the nature and role of
artists and art, it is not at all surprising that Faulkner frequently
introduces into his works what might be termed “art surrogates,” that is,
particular objects that have survived from the past to evoke memories or
thoughts of people and incidents from earlier times. Predictably, a significant number of these art surrogates take a
“literary” form, eliciting the response of a “reader.” There is, for example, in Absalom,
Absalom! the letter that Judith Sutpen gives to Quentin Compson’s
grandmother, which Quentin’s father, two generations later, interprets as
Judith’s compulsion “to make that scratch, that undying mark on the blank face
of the oblivion to which we are all doomed” (127). Other examples, presented by Faulkner in greater detail, are the
commissary ledgers that Ike McCaslin reads in Go Down, Moses
and the “story” evoked by the signature of Cecilia Farmer scratched into the
windowpane of the Jefferson jailhouse in Requiem for a Nun. All such surrogates express symbolically the
same idea that Faulkner stated explicitly in one of his letters to Joan
Williams, his lover and protégé: “That’s the answer, the reason for it all, the
one and only way on earth you can say No to death: the best, the strongest, the
finest, the most enduring: to make something" (FAB 1461). We know less about Shakespeare’s personal life
and opinions than we do of Faulkner’s, but a number of the sonnets clearly
evidence the same mortality vs. immortality theme that we have been exploring
in Faulkner. These sonnets are
addressed to one or more unidentified individuals whom Shakespeare loved dearly
(whether patron, friend, or lover we cannot be quite sure), and they all set
actual experience, “Where wasteful time debateth with decay / To change your
day of youth to sullied night” (sonnet 15), against the poet’s desire to write
“eternal lines” (sonnet 18) in which the beloved will be made immortal: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can
see,” sonnet 18 concludes, “So long lives this and this gives life to thee.” One of the most sublime expressions of this idea
is sonnet 65: Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless
sea, It is a cardinal irony, of course, that an
individual whose name or identity we do not know is immortalized in
Shakespeare’s poetry. But that causes
us no concern, since it is the universal and immortal poem that we celebrate
and not its particular historical circumstance. Faulkner certainly understood that. As he once said, “[Man] can't live forever. He knows that. But when he’s gone somebody will know he was here for his short
time. He can build a bridge and will be
remembered for a day or two, a monument, for a day or two, but somehow the
picture, the poem--that lasts a long time, a very long time, longer than
anything” (LIG 103). And here, I
think, he was stating a principle that he learned at least partly from reading
Shakespeare’s sonnets. Time does not permit my exploring additional parallels between Shakespeare and Faulkner; but I hope that the few examples I have cited will serve to suggest that Faulkner’s use of Shakespearean materials was often conscious, sometimes undoubtedly unconscious, and always significant. Given such parallels, perhaps it is not altogether unfitting that Faulkner is sometimes called “the American Shakespeare.”
Works Cited Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. New
York: Free Press, 1973. Blotner, Joseph. Faulkner: A Biography.
New York: Random House, 1974. Cited as FAB. Faulkner, William. Absalom, Alsalom! New
York: Vintage, 1972. --------. Light in August. New York:
Vintage, 1972. Frye, William A. "Mythic Imagery in Absalom,
Absalom!, The Sound and the Fury, and Light in August: Faulkner's Structural Motifs." Master's thesis,
Southeast Missouri State University, 1995. Greenblatt, Stephen, and others, eds. The
Norton Shakespeare. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. Gwynn, Frederick L., and Joseph L.
Blotner, eds. Faulkner
in the University: Class Conferences at the University of
Virginia, 1957-1958. Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 1959. Cited as FIU. Meriwether, James B., ed. Essays, Speeches,
and Public Letters by William Faulkner. New York: Random House,
1965. Cited as ESPL. --------, and Michael Milgate, eds. Lion in
the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, 1926-1962. New York: Random House, 1968. Cited as LIG. Rowse, A. L. William Shakespeare: A Biography.
New York: Harper and Row, 1963. Webb, James W., and A. Wigfall Green, eds. William
Faulkner of Oxford. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1965.
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