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In the Wake of Faulkner
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20176 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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1 / 1992 |
2,033 Words |
| Author
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Walter Sullivan
Walter Sullivan, a novelist and literary critic, is professor
of English and director of the program in creative writing at
Vanderbilt University. His most recent novel is The War the
Women Lived: Voices From the Confederate South (1996). |
There were others, of course, first-rate novelists and dramatists and poets who helped create the southern literary renaissance, but the overwhelming genius of southern literature was William Faulkner. In his cycle of novels set in mythical Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, Faulkner re-created the South in its own image. He gave form to southern life, showed his readers relationships between individuals and classes that they had not seen or had not understood. He reproduced southern voices that spoke more accurately than the originals. He delineated characters who transcended their own separate identities to become paradigms of southern citizenry.
His invented world consists of white aristocrats and black servants, or poor tenant farmers and small landowners, of small town professionals and city prostitutes, of slaves and slave owners, of Confederate soldiers and their descendants, of entrepreneurs and ne'er-do-wells, and of almost every other segment of southern society. His rendering of the southern experience, the southern culture and consciousness, the southern landscape and history and sense of life, is so complete that his work has become the first problem that most southern novelists who have come after him have had to encounter.
If Faulkner's South still exists, and in part it does, what is a contemporary novelist to write that Faulkner has not already written? To be sure, he left gaps, but other writers have filled most of them. Faulkner wrote little about southern politics, but Robert Penn Warren has given us All the King's Men. Flannery O'Connor expanded Faulkner's sense of southern religiosity. Walker Percy and Peter Taylor chronicled the lives of southern city dwellers, whom Faulkner had largely neglected. Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Spencer created southern women with a subtlety of which Faulkner was not capable. But these writers, and others who came after Faulkner and succeeded in adding their own dimensions to southern literature, only made the task of the most recent generation of southern writers more difficult. Not only has most of what we think of as typically southern already been used as literary material; as time passes, southern qualities and attitude are slowly wearing away. More and more, the South resembles the rest of the nation.
So, to restate the problem: Contemporary southern novelists need to find methods by which to create original work without totally abandoning their southern heritage. One way to do this is to do what writers have always done--to write what you see. Last year, Jill McCorkle published her fourth novel, Ferris Beach. The story is set in McCorkle's native North
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