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The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War
William Faulkner, one of America's most iconic writers, is an author who defies easy interpretation. Born in 1897 in Mississippi, Faulkner wrote such classic novels as Absolom, Absolom! and The Sound and The Fury, creating in Yoknapatawpha county one of the most memorable gallery of characters ever assembled in American literature. Yet, as acclaimed literary critic Michael Gorra explains, Faulkner has sustained justified criticism for his failures of racial nuance--his ventriloquism of black characters and his rendering of race relations in a largely unreconstructed South--demanding that we reevaluate the Nobel laureate's life and legacy in the twenty-first century, as we reexamine the junctures of race and literature in works that once rested firmly in the American canon.
Interweaving biography, literary criticism, and rich travelogue, The Saddest Words argues that even despite these contradictions--and perhaps because of them--William Faulkner still needs to be read, and even more, remains central to understanding the contradictions inherent in the American experience itself. Evoking Faulkner's biography and his literary characters, Gorra illuminates what Faulkner maintained was "the South's curse and its separate destiny," a class and racial system built on slavery that was devastated during the Civil War and was reimagined thereafter through the South's revanchism. Driven by currents of violence, a "Lost Cause" romanticism not only defined Faulkner's twentieth century but now even our own age.
Through Gorra's critical lens, Faulkner's mythic Yoknapatawpha County comes alive as his imagined land finds itself entwined in America's history, the characters wrestling with the ghosts of a past that refuses to stay buried, stuck in an unending cycle between those two saddest words, "was" and "again." Upending previous critical traditions, The Saddest Words returns Faulkner to his sociopolitical context, revealing the civil war within him and proving that "the real war lies not only in the physical combat, but also in the war after the war, the war over its memory and meaning."
Filled with vignettes of Civil War battles and generals, vivid scenes from Gorra's travels through the South--including Faulkner's Oxford, Mississippi--and commentaries on Faulkner's fiction, The Saddest Words is a mesmerizing work of literary thought that recontextualizes Faulkner in light of the most plangent cultural issues facing America today.
Interweaving biography, literary criticism, and rich travelogue, The Saddest Words argues that even despite these contradictions--and perhaps because of them--William Faulkner still needs to be read, and even more, remains central to understanding the contradictions inherent in the American experience itself. Evoking Faulkner's biography and his literary characters, Gorra illuminates what Faulkner maintained was "the South's curse and its separate destiny," a class and racial system built on slavery that was devastated during the Civil War and was reimagined thereafter through the South's revanchism. Driven by currents of violence, a "Lost Cause" romanticism not only defined Faulkner's twentieth century but now even our own age.
Through Gorra's critical lens, Faulkner's mythic Yoknapatawpha County comes alive as his imagined land finds itself entwined in America's history, the characters wrestling with the ghosts of a past that refuses to stay buried, stuck in an unending cycle between those two saddest words, "was" and "again." Upending previous critical traditions, The Saddest Words returns Faulkner to his sociopolitical context, revealing the civil war within him and proving that "the real war lies not only in the physical combat, but also in the war after the war, the war over its memory and meaning."
Filled with vignettes of Civil War battles and generals, vivid scenes from Gorra's travels through the South--including Faulkner's Oxford, Mississippi--and commentaries on Faulkner's fiction, The Saddest Words is a mesmerizing work of literary thought that recontextualizes Faulkner in light of the most plangent cultural issues facing America today.
448 pages, Paperback
First published August 25, 2020
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2238 people want to read
About the author
Michael Gorra
22 books24 followersMichael Gorra is an American professor of English and literature, currently serving as the Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English Language and Literature at Smith College, where he has taught since 1985.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 81 reviews
December 3, 2021
Extremely good. At times dazzling. It’s prompted me to reread all the Yoknapatawpha novels, this time in sequence. But if you don’t know Faulkner‘s work, I can’t imagine a more splendid introduction to it than this book. Admittedly, there is a lot here about the Civil War that I already know, but the insights into how the war affected WF’s life and work are fresh and new. For example, there are parallels between WF’s great-grandfather and namesake, William Falkner—no u, that was the novelist’s enhancement—and Faulkner’s horrible fictional Colonel Sartoris, especially as he appears in the novels Flags in the Dust and The Unvanquished. The author discusses all of Faulkner‘s novels and many stories as they reflect the Civil War, especially as that conflict was understood by him and his fellow Southerners. This is a rich book and there are many intellectual joys here I’m not touching on, but the comparison late in the book between the reconciliation the Germans undertook after WW2 with regard to their Nazi legacy, and the utter lack of such a coming to terms by the South with regard to slavery, is beautifully argued.
December 20, 2021
The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War by Michael Gorra was a beautiful and exhaustive analysis of the literary works of William Faulkner examined in the light of the influence of the Civil War on Faulkner's fiction. It was a stunning book that I found myself immersed in as Gorra's premise is that we need understand the presence of the Civil War in his work and the persistent echo of the war in the decades to come. While I am just beginning to read some of the works by William Faulkner, there was a lot of insight into his fiction. However, it is certainly a book that I will read again once I have read more of the books by William Faulkner most taking place in the fictitious county of Yoknapatawpha in Mississippi.
According to Michael Gorra, William Faulkner's works contain the richest gallery of characters in all of American literature. Gorra is of the opinion that the Civil War seemed to break the history of Faulkner's region in two and drew a bright line between the past and the present with Faulkner's South unable to forget the traumas of its past. Throughout this book, Gorra talks about the motivations as well as the vivid and unforgettable words of many of his characters from Absalom, Absalom! to The Sound and the Fury to Intruder in the Dust to The Unvanquished to Go Down Moses as well as many others in Faulkner's body of work examining not only the effects from the Civil War but the issues surrounding slavery. Michael Gorra sums up William Faulkner's body of work in the following and haunting words:
"But what really matters in his Mississippi isn't finally the lost war, the Lost Cause; nor is it the quarrel between the mythic grace of the Old South and the grasping hands of the New. What matters are all of the wasted years since. What matters is the century between the Emancipation Proclamation and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The legacy--the final meaning--of the Civil War lives on in the things undone, the work unfinished and the wounds unbound; it lives in the continued resistance to any attempt at amelioration. It lives in our quarrels; it lives today in the battle of the blue and the red."
According to Michael Gorra, William Faulkner's works contain the richest gallery of characters in all of American literature. Gorra is of the opinion that the Civil War seemed to break the history of Faulkner's region in two and drew a bright line between the past and the present with Faulkner's South unable to forget the traumas of its past. Throughout this book, Gorra talks about the motivations as well as the vivid and unforgettable words of many of his characters from Absalom, Absalom! to The Sound and the Fury to Intruder in the Dust to The Unvanquished to Go Down Moses as well as many others in Faulkner's body of work examining not only the effects from the Civil War but the issues surrounding slavery. Michael Gorra sums up William Faulkner's body of work in the following and haunting words:
"But what really matters in his Mississippi isn't finally the lost war, the Lost Cause; nor is it the quarrel between the mythic grace of the Old South and the grasping hands of the New. What matters are all of the wasted years since. What matters is the century between the Emancipation Proclamation and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The legacy--the final meaning--of the Civil War lives on in the things undone, the work unfinished and the wounds unbound; it lives in the continued resistance to any attempt at amelioration. It lives in our quarrels; it lives today in the battle of the blue and the red."
March 28, 2022
I really loved this book about the Civil War and Faulkner's writing. I am rereading all of Faulkner this year - I just finished As I Lay Dying and will soon read Sanctuary) and found that this book gave me some incredible insights into Flags in the Dust, As I Lay Dying, and The Sound and the Fury. I especially appreciated his open-eyed analysis of Faulkner's innate racism but how he was more evolved on that question than his contemporaries (particularly when he was not drinking, as seldom as that was in the later years). If you love Faulker's writing, this should be essential reading along with Cleanth Brook's William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country and Blotner's excellent 2-volume biography.
January 8, 2021
“Was- a determining force, on which we can have no purchase, and for which there is no redress. The past stays with us, irrevocable and unrecoverable.”
This reads more like a semi-stream-of-conscious damming history of the Civil War and Reconstruction with cameos by Faulkner characters as though they were real, but I wasn’t mad about it. Not for the Faulkner unfamiliar as it assumes a high level of familiarity with his works and characters. It’s dense, but I found it very readable and educational. The Sound and the Fury analysis was buried in the end but worth it. Author clearly deeply admires Faulkner but it’s a bit of takedown at the end of his personal failures and enduring racism.
This reads more like a semi-stream-of-conscious damming history of the Civil War and Reconstruction with cameos by Faulkner characters as though they were real, but I wasn’t mad about it. Not for the Faulkner unfamiliar as it assumes a high level of familiarity with his works and characters. It’s dense, but I found it very readable and educational. The Sound and the Fury analysis was buried in the end but worth it. Author clearly deeply admires Faulkner but it’s a bit of takedown at the end of his personal failures and enduring racism.
July 21, 2020
This scholarly book examines Faulkner's novels and stories in relation to post-Civil War Southern culture, both as experienced directly by the Nobel Prize laureate in Mississippi and as reflected in the wider society distilled and condensed by Faulkner to create his unforgettable fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Gorra's close readings and clear explications of Faulkner's works will reward any reader interested in 20th century American literature. Thanks to the publisher for supplying an advance reading copy via NetGalley.
May 21, 2022
TL;DR Review: This book is great.
Longer Review:
In *The Saddest Words*, Gorra argues for a new reading of one of American Modernism’s most lasting, and troubling, figures that moves away from the traditional lens of early Faulkner scholarship, specifically those who followed Malcolm Cowley, the Agrarians, and Cleanth Brooks’s lead to view Faulkner almost exclusively through Faulkner’s depiction of his white characters (i.e., viewing Faulkner’s presentation of social class within the white community). Drawing extensively from Faulkner’s fiction and historical documents, Gorra offers an interdisciplinary exploration of the work and world of William Faulner, weaving biography, history, and literary analysis into a seamless whole, demonstrating how William Faulkner’s fiction focuses on the before and after of events, but rarely the during. Faulkner more often than not described in detail the causes of an event and the results of an event, but the event itself was rarely depicted.
[Faulkner spoilers]
This is the case with the rape of Temple Drake (*Sanctuary*), the death of Joe Christmas (*Light in August*), the shooting of Charles Bon (*Absalom! Absalom!*), etc.
[End Spoilers]
It is also the case with Faulkner’s relationship to The Civil War. The Civil War, and the racism at the center of that conflict, functions almost as a decoder ring in rightly understanding both William Faulkner the man and the world that fills the pages of his novels and short stories. In light of this, Gorra argues that merely investigating Faulkner’s work for the aesthetics of his prose or his examination of the human psyche in general is “no longer adequate” (4). The reader must account for the historical setting of both the writer and the setting of his stories. Gorra presents Faulkner as an obviously flawed figure who, albeit a man of his times, was incapable of maintaining his personal prejudices and Southern assumptions as he composed his fiction.
Gorra presents the world Faulkner created as one that is as historically and locally rooted as it is timeless and universal. Gorra’s work is broken into three main sections, with an introductory section and concluding chapter. In it, Gorra looks at documents of the time to show how the war, and the racism that prompted it, were presented in a softened manner, minimizing the effects of racism on African Americans. Gorra seeks to produce “an account not only of Faulkner’s work but also of what (he) might call the rhetoric of the Civil War itself, of the ever-changing ways in which it has been conceived over time” (27). Rather than focus on Faulkner’s work novel-by-novel, Gorra presents a Civil War narrative through the writings of Faulkner--the Civil War as it affected (physically and psychologically) Yoknapatawpha County, while also examining the Civil War hagiography that flourished during the same time as Faulkner himself was writing. As he does this, Gorra examines how what was comes back again, demonstrating how Faulkner’s work reflects the perpetual racism infecting American individuals and undergirding American structures.
In the three parts of his study, Gorra tends towards various rhetorical modes. In “Part One: Twice-Told Tales,” Gorra writes in a biographical manner. In “Part Two: Yoknapatawpha’s War,” Gorra advances the conversation by focusing more on history, specifically Faulkner’s presentation of emancipation. Finally, in “Part Three: Dark House,” Gorra concludes his study with more literary analysis, as well as extensive interactions with Faulkner’s understanding and presentation of racial identity. These divisions are not hard and fast, but the sections do lean towards these categorizations. Throughout, Gorra presents Faulkner’s work chronology, not in publication or composition, but in the development of Faulkner’s fictional South, Yoknapatawpha County.
While Faulkner wrote much about the effects of the Civil War and even life before the War, he spends little if any time addressing the war itself. Gorra argues that the Civil War is “not dramatized as much as invoked”(3) in the works of Faulkner. It is simultaneously “everywhere” and “nowhere” (1). Gorra argues that this is a strength of Faulkner’s work.Faulkner’s work, while firmly situated in its place and time, maintains a timeless quality because of how he interacts with historical events like The Civil War. It also highlights the perpetual nature of much of humanity’s ills. Gorra argues that in the writings of Faulkner, “What was is never over” (10). History remains: good, bad, and very ugly. Gorra argues that the “saddest words” in the literature of Faulkner are “was” and “again.” Drawing this from The Sound and the Fury, Gorra shows how these are words that indicate the history of Faulkner’s fiction and the perpetual relatability of the world he created. “Was” is a world that ceased to be; “again” is the world that returns over and over. Faulkner shows us a world that we dare not forget because we have proven that we will rebuild it, or at least attempt to, again.
William Faulkner was a man of his time, and Gorra does not gloss over that truth. A white author in the Jim Crow South, Faulkner never fully overcame the racism in which he existed and even to more than a little degree participated. But Faulkner’s work dealt with race and the ugliness of racism in a way that few could or would and as much as the “was” of our racist past seems to perpetually arise “again,” Faulkner’s works remain as culturally relevant as they are artistically profound. Gorra’s work goes a long way towards making the case for all of us to revisit Yoknapatawpha County to understand America, to revisit, through literature, the 19th and 20th centuries to better understand the 21st.
Longer Review:
In *The Saddest Words*, Gorra argues for a new reading of one of American Modernism’s most lasting, and troubling, figures that moves away from the traditional lens of early Faulkner scholarship, specifically those who followed Malcolm Cowley, the Agrarians, and Cleanth Brooks’s lead to view Faulkner almost exclusively through Faulkner’s depiction of his white characters (i.e., viewing Faulkner’s presentation of social class within the white community). Drawing extensively from Faulkner’s fiction and historical documents, Gorra offers an interdisciplinary exploration of the work and world of William Faulner, weaving biography, history, and literary analysis into a seamless whole, demonstrating how William Faulkner’s fiction focuses on the before and after of events, but rarely the during. Faulkner more often than not described in detail the causes of an event and the results of an event, but the event itself was rarely depicted.
[Faulkner spoilers]
This is the case with the rape of Temple Drake (*Sanctuary*), the death of Joe Christmas (*Light in August*), the shooting of Charles Bon (*Absalom! Absalom!*), etc.
[End Spoilers]
It is also the case with Faulkner’s relationship to The Civil War. The Civil War, and the racism at the center of that conflict, functions almost as a decoder ring in rightly understanding both William Faulkner the man and the world that fills the pages of his novels and short stories. In light of this, Gorra argues that merely investigating Faulkner’s work for the aesthetics of his prose or his examination of the human psyche in general is “no longer adequate” (4). The reader must account for the historical setting of both the writer and the setting of his stories. Gorra presents Faulkner as an obviously flawed figure who, albeit a man of his times, was incapable of maintaining his personal prejudices and Southern assumptions as he composed his fiction.
Gorra presents the world Faulkner created as one that is as historically and locally rooted as it is timeless and universal. Gorra’s work is broken into three main sections, with an introductory section and concluding chapter. In it, Gorra looks at documents of the time to show how the war, and the racism that prompted it, were presented in a softened manner, minimizing the effects of racism on African Americans. Gorra seeks to produce “an account not only of Faulkner’s work but also of what (he) might call the rhetoric of the Civil War itself, of the ever-changing ways in which it has been conceived over time” (27). Rather than focus on Faulkner’s work novel-by-novel, Gorra presents a Civil War narrative through the writings of Faulkner--the Civil War as it affected (physically and psychologically) Yoknapatawpha County, while also examining the Civil War hagiography that flourished during the same time as Faulkner himself was writing. As he does this, Gorra examines how what was comes back again, demonstrating how Faulkner’s work reflects the perpetual racism infecting American individuals and undergirding American structures.
In the three parts of his study, Gorra tends towards various rhetorical modes. In “Part One: Twice-Told Tales,” Gorra writes in a biographical manner. In “Part Two: Yoknapatawpha’s War,” Gorra advances the conversation by focusing more on history, specifically Faulkner’s presentation of emancipation. Finally, in “Part Three: Dark House,” Gorra concludes his study with more literary analysis, as well as extensive interactions with Faulkner’s understanding and presentation of racial identity. These divisions are not hard and fast, but the sections do lean towards these categorizations. Throughout, Gorra presents Faulkner’s work chronology, not in publication or composition, but in the development of Faulkner’s fictional South, Yoknapatawpha County.
While Faulkner wrote much about the effects of the Civil War and even life before the War, he spends little if any time addressing the war itself. Gorra argues that the Civil War is “not dramatized as much as invoked”(3) in the works of Faulkner. It is simultaneously “everywhere” and “nowhere” (1). Gorra argues that this is a strength of Faulkner’s work.Faulkner’s work, while firmly situated in its place and time, maintains a timeless quality because of how he interacts with historical events like The Civil War. It also highlights the perpetual nature of much of humanity’s ills. Gorra argues that in the writings of Faulkner, “What was is never over” (10). History remains: good, bad, and very ugly. Gorra argues that the “saddest words” in the literature of Faulkner are “was” and “again.” Drawing this from The Sound and the Fury, Gorra shows how these are words that indicate the history of Faulkner’s fiction and the perpetual relatability of the world he created. “Was” is a world that ceased to be; “again” is the world that returns over and over. Faulkner shows us a world that we dare not forget because we have proven that we will rebuild it, or at least attempt to, again.
William Faulkner was a man of his time, and Gorra does not gloss over that truth. A white author in the Jim Crow South, Faulkner never fully overcame the racism in which he existed and even to more than a little degree participated. But Faulkner’s work dealt with race and the ugliness of racism in a way that few could or would and as much as the “was” of our racist past seems to perpetually arise “again,” Faulkner’s works remain as culturally relevant as they are artistically profound. Gorra’s work goes a long way towards making the case for all of us to revisit Yoknapatawpha County to understand America, to revisit, through literature, the 19th and 20th centuries to better understand the 21st.
May 4, 2022
I’m on a Faulkner binge, marathon, tear lately. I’ve visited his home, read his biography, finished his short stories, perused his Paris Review interview, flipped through some criticism, sampled some relevant Wikipedia and Cliffs Notes and Goodreads reviews, and tried another three of his novels. And now this. I didn’t want to like the book because it often strays from a clear line of development. But I’m the end I fell in love with the author’s broad reading on the literature of the Civil War, close readings of Faulkner texts, and sensitivity to questions of race and memory in American history. I’ll try his James book soon I hope.
April 2, 2021
I am not sure where to begin in my review. As a genetic Southerner with a mother from Memphis, a best friend from Holly Springs, relatives and friends across Mississippi, a medical education in New Orleans, and a professional life in Atlanta I have seen my homeland closeup for 74 years. I watched the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, the economic resurgence of the Southeast, and the beginnings of a new century. As an MD I have lived my life as an applied scientist, but in my youth, high school, I was exposed to literature, in particular Faulkner. I remember reading The Bear, difficult to say the least. As I was then lead thru an analysis by my brilliant English teacher, I was was struck, not by its lineage, but its depiction of the destruction of the last wilderness. Mr. Gorra's book is an excellent biography/analysis of Faulkner's splendid work, pulling it together to someone who only knows it by bits and pieces. At times he is a bit harsh on the old man, given the Faulkner was a man of his time and past like no other. At once he asks the question I have often pondered can a "white" person ever write an accurate depiction of a "black" person by speech, thought, or action? Or vice versa? I might then ask if anyone who was not raised in Faulkner's circumstance, a narrative of the past which is now even longer passed, write about his intent, mindset, or make judgement? All in all an impressive work about America's most unique and challenging author. I might add, modern genomics, the principle of migrate and mix, the principle of gender bias, all did not exist in Faulkner's time and have changed our perspective. Meanwhile our nation does eternal penitence for its racist past and present.
January 12, 2021
The motto of this book might well be Faulkner’s famous line—“The past is never dead. It's not even past.” Certainly, the Civil War is not dead in Faulkner's work.
The subtitle suggests that the book is about the Civil War in Faulkner’s writings. However, this book takes slavery, the Civil War, and the subsequent history of race relations in America as all one topic, so the phrase means much more than the conflict that occurred in the 1860s. I use the term in this same very broad sense.
The book deals with the actual history of the Civil War, the understanding of the War during Faulkner’s era, and the way that Faulkner’s books treat the war. Again slavery and race relations are inseparable from the Civil War.
This approach leads to discussions of the Battle of Gettysburg as well as the treatment of blacks under slavery, during the Civil War, and during Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era. The book also discusses history textbooks, academic history, and Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind to establish how people of Faulkner’s time thought of these events. Most importantly this book is a close reading of Faulkner’s writings. Although some chapters deal specifically with one of Faulkner’s novels, the author invariably draws other novels or short stories into the discussion. Given Faulkner’s writing, this is almost inevitable because his characters will appear in a number of different novels or short stories, and sometimes several novels tell different versions of the same stories. Most of Faulkner's work is interconnected.
The author shows, I think convincingly, that Faulkner was ahead of his time in terms of his understanding of the Civil War. The author suggests that Faulkner imagined his characters inner lives—for example, he wondered what it would have been like to be a recently freed slave? This empathy led him away from repeating conventional wisdom about the Civil War. And yet…
And yet, Faulkner, particularly in his interviews after 1950, definitely espoused ideas that are inconsistent with the way most of his contemporary readers think about the Civil War. He was not unreconstructed but he had an ambiguous attitude towards the Civil Rights movement.
The author notes that Faulkner thought that the proper subject for fiction is the conflicts within the human heart. He suggests that Faulkner himself was conflicted on this whole topic.
I should mention that I have read a fair amount of Faulkner (six to ten novels), and I have also read a fair amount about the Civil War, slavery, and race relations in the South after the War. I think this background certainly helped me appreciate this book more, but I don’t think it is essential. Beware though, this is not the book to get a history of the Civil War, slavery in the United States, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. The author discusses all of these topics, but refers to incidents rather than laying out a systematic history. The focus is on Faulkner.
The subtitle suggests that the book is about the Civil War in Faulkner’s writings. However, this book takes slavery, the Civil War, and the subsequent history of race relations in America as all one topic, so the phrase means much more than the conflict that occurred in the 1860s. I use the term in this same very broad sense.
The book deals with the actual history of the Civil War, the understanding of the War during Faulkner’s era, and the way that Faulkner’s books treat the war. Again slavery and race relations are inseparable from the Civil War.
This approach leads to discussions of the Battle of Gettysburg as well as the treatment of blacks under slavery, during the Civil War, and during Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era. The book also discusses history textbooks, academic history, and Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind to establish how people of Faulkner’s time thought of these events. Most importantly this book is a close reading of Faulkner’s writings. Although some chapters deal specifically with one of Faulkner’s novels, the author invariably draws other novels or short stories into the discussion. Given Faulkner’s writing, this is almost inevitable because his characters will appear in a number of different novels or short stories, and sometimes several novels tell different versions of the same stories. Most of Faulkner's work is interconnected.
The author shows, I think convincingly, that Faulkner was ahead of his time in terms of his understanding of the Civil War. The author suggests that Faulkner imagined his characters inner lives—for example, he wondered what it would have been like to be a recently freed slave? This empathy led him away from repeating conventional wisdom about the Civil War. And yet…
And yet, Faulkner, particularly in his interviews after 1950, definitely espoused ideas that are inconsistent with the way most of his contemporary readers think about the Civil War. He was not unreconstructed but he had an ambiguous attitude towards the Civil Rights movement.
The author notes that Faulkner thought that the proper subject for fiction is the conflicts within the human heart. He suggests that Faulkner himself was conflicted on this whole topic.
I should mention that I have read a fair amount of Faulkner (six to ten novels), and I have also read a fair amount about the Civil War, slavery, and race relations in the South after the War. I think this background certainly helped me appreciate this book more, but I don’t think it is essential. Beware though, this is not the book to get a history of the Civil War, slavery in the United States, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow. The author discusses all of these topics, but refers to incidents rather than laying out a systematic history. The focus is on Faulkner.
November 2, 2020
Blending Civil War primary sources, Faulkner's own text, and literary criticism, Gorra helps the reader see how the weight of the social memory of the Civil War infuses Faulkner's works. I learned much that I didn't know and much that I was mistaught as a young student in the 1970s and 1980s. There just aren't any redeeming qualities at all to the stance of the southern states -- either from their own arguments in 1860 or those of their apologists from 1865 to the present. It's a weight this nation is still bearing, and resonates in this year of George Floyd and the rise of Trump reelection bullies.
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January 7, 2026I'm not sure that this book would appeal much to people who aren't interested in (and really who haven't read several of Faulkner's novels) but as a companion to and exploration of his work it's fascinating and very much worth reading! Faulkner is a very controversial author now and I really agree with Gorra's point that Faulkner is worth reading because of his contradictions, the ways that he was both more progressive and insightful than a lot of his contemporaries and also just as racist at times as those contemporaries.
February 7, 2025
I will gladly confess, that though I have read and loved Faulkner, I now realize I have not been knowing what I loved or what I read.
All of this context and analysis creates a beautiful, sparkling, and ever tightening web that draws the reader down to a center of astonishing clarity. One may continue to read and love Faulkner - but it will never be the same again.
All of this context and analysis creates a beautiful, sparkling, and ever tightening web that draws the reader down to a center of astonishing clarity. One may continue to read and love Faulkner - but it will never be the same again.
April 13, 2022
I’ll give Michael Gorra 3.5 stars for diving deep into William Faulkner, the man, the writer and his works. But, Gorra’s study, introspection and writing is a bit too deep for me to grasp. Let’s just say “The past is never dead. It’s not even past”.
March 15, 2024
For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance …
No, that is not a snippet plucked from a Shelby Foote anecdote delivered with mellifluous voice in his signature cadence on the Ken Burns docuseries, The Civil War, but a passage from William Faulkner’s 1948 novel, Intruder in the Dust. Foote, writer and raconteur, who masqueraded as historian, is celebrated as much in some circles for his three volume narrative history of the Civil War as he is by a much wider audience for his extensive on-camera commentary on the docuseries that articulates the southern perspective in thinly disguised “Lost Cause” soundbites that deftly excised slavery from any conversation about the war. Faulkner also was no historian, nor did he pretend to be, but he certainly understood that slavery was the central cause of the war as well as its tragic aftermath for the denizens of the south, for blacks as well as for whites, even if he had difficulty saying that out loud, although we do hear it quite loud and clear through his carefully crafted characters in the drama and poetry that decorated the prose of his magnificent fiction. Slavery and its Jim Crow offspring poisoned the south, and the toxin was no less potent in Faulkner’s day than it was on that July afternoon in 1863.
The excerpt above references the moment just prior to the doomed Confederate assault known as Pickett's Charge on the third and final day of the Battle of Gettysburg, seen by many then and now as the turning point of the Civil War, although careful students of the conflict would tell you that another far more consequential Union victory, the fall of Vicksburg, which cut the Confederacy in half, took place just one day later, more than a thousand miles distant in Faulkner’s native Mississippi. Faulkner aficionados glean that too, not least because its significance is subtly underlined in the short story “Ambuscade” (1934) that later serves as the opening installment of The Unvanquished (1938), when Colonel Sartoris’ young son Bayard and his enslaved companion Ringo eavesdrop on the colonel’s revelation that Vicksburg is gone just as the family’s silver, packed in a trunk, is shuttled out to be buried in the orchard.
But the point here, for the purposes of Faulkner’s fiction—as well as the real-life tragedy of the south that still prevails today, well beyond the sesquicentennial of the Civil War—is that the “what-if” of the war’s outcome persistently echoes across far too much of the southern landscape in 2024: if not as loudly as it did in 1865 or in 1962, the year of Faulkner’s death, it yet remains all too perceptible socio-economically and politically. Nothing ever spoke to that phenomenon better than a more famous Faulkner quotation found in another novel, Requiem for a Nun (1951): “The past is never dead. It's not even past.” And possibly nothing proves its endurance better than the fact that this election year has seen at once bans against teaching about slavery and race in some southern states and, more remarkably, pro-secession candidates vying for office in Texas, perhaps grown men still fantasizing about that instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863.
The past and present together underscore the relevance of The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War, a brilliant and extremely well-written blend of history, biography, literary criticism, and travel writing by Michael Gorra, professor of literature at Smith College. After years of reading, studying, and teaching Faulkner, Gorra decided to take it to the next level, and he set out to visit the various geographies where Faulkner walked the earth, battlefields where southern blood was shed, and the likely environs of the fictional characters—Compsons, Sutpens, Snopes, and a host of memorable African Americans—that inhabited the author’s imaginary Yoknapatawpha County. Had he stopped there, the end result might have been another academic biography peppered with literary analysis. But instead, Gorra—who correctly identifies the Civil War and its repercussions as existential to Faulkner’s literary themes—assigned himself a rigorous self-study of the war and its wider implications. In the process, the author discovered what today’s historians have long recognized, that there was and remains more than one war: the actual war as it occurred, with all of its ramifications, and the way the war is remembered, especially in the south. There are multiple versions of the latter, both conflicting and overlapping, informed at once by truth and by imagination.
The most twisted and most stubborn of these is known as the “Myth of the Lost Cause,” that has the south waging a righteous if hopeless quest for liberty against a rapacious north intent on domination. Eventually, the heroic south is overwhelmed by sheers numbers of men and materiel, and goes down to an honorable defeat, only to fall victim to northern plunderers in the Reconstruction days that follow. Here it is solely a white man’s war, brother against brother, forged by incompatible forces arrayed in opposition: states’ rights vs. federalism, agriculture vs. industry, rural vs. urban, free trade vs. tariffs. In this version, slavery is almost beside the point, and blacks are essentially expunged from history. African Americans appear in cameo roles when they show up at all, as harmless servants in the south’s peculiar institution, which is presented as something benign, even benevolent, that would have simply faded away on its own had Lincoln not launched what is still known in some circles as the “War of Northern Aggression.” More recently, blacks make an awkward reappearance in some odd strands of Lost Cause, now recast as comprising legions of imaginary uniformed “Black Confederates” who eagerly stand guard with their masters to defend southern sovereignty. Otherwise, blacks disappear almost without a trace. Gone are the millions held in chattel slavery, the half million that self-emancipated by fleeing to the Union lines, the nearly two hundred thousand that fought for Union in the United States Colored Troops (USCT)—and most thoroughly erased are the many, many thousands of camp slaves that accompanied Confederate armies throughout the war, including Lee’s infantry at Gettysburg, a fact likely unknown to that fourteen year old dreaming of southern victory.
The Lost Cause is a vile lie, but like all effective lies it is infused with elements of truth. Of course, slavery was not the only cause of the Civil War—just ninety-five percent of it! The key is to focus on the other five percent, and that effort was so successful that this fictitious story became America’s story. So successful that the United States became the only nation in the world to host hundreds of monuments to traitors and rebels across its landscape, many that still preside over public squares today. So successful that it was integrated into the historiography that dominated American education for a century to follow. And ingredients of that distorted curriculum even touched me, growing up in New England in the 1960s, dramatically reinforced on our family’s console TV as the networks commonly replayed Gone with the Wind, the histrionic paean to Lost Cause: an endless loop of the hapless enslaved Prissy incongruously shrieking the “De Yankees is comin!” in terror rather than celebration. I was a Connecticut boy, a state that saw thousands of lives sacrificed in the cause of Union, but I pretended to be a Confederate soldier when I played war, so deeply sympathetic was I to the southern cause. There was only one black child in my elementary school, so I did not find it odd that blacks made few appearances in my textbooks.
But I was a voracious reader, even as a young teen, and books shaped me. I read deeply in American history, fell in love with the Civil War era, and began to discover that what I had learned in school was not only superficial but woefully incomplete and conspicuously misleading. I also read a good deal of fiction in those days, across multiple genres. I think I was fifteen when I discovered Faulkner, and the first novel I read is one of his most challenging to follow or comprehend, The Sound and the Fury (1929). The first section consists of nearly sixty pages propelled solely by a vehicle manufactured from disjointed bits of the stream of consciousness of Benjy Compson, a severely intellectually disabled adult—tagged as an “idiot” in Faulkner’s day—who experiences time as directionless in an interior monologue that speeds along a twisting road of sharp turns from 1928 to 1912 to 1902 and swerves back again repeatedly, with no signs or guard rails to assist the reader, a marvelous journey motif in nonlinear time instead of distance. I found myself reading and re-reading paragraphs and pages, again and again, often lost but relishing the long, strange trip, a dictionary habitually at my elbow as I struggled against an onslaught of vocabulary both unfamiliar and intimidating. I loved every minute of it! And, in that early 1970s acid-infused era, Faulkner’s style here, verging on the phantasmagoric, seemed the perfect companion to the likes of Jefferson Airplane and Pink Floyd.
In my teens, I did not connect Faulkner to the Civil War, but literature and history were then, and today remain, my two great passions. I would read many more Faulkner novels and short stories in the years to come, and my fascination with the Civil War was a part of my motivation, decades later, to return to school to obtain a master’s degree in history. By then the connection between Faulknerian themes and the tortured legacy of the war was apparent.
But it was not until I read The Saddest Words that I came to understand how inextricable that link truly was. Faulkner (and Foote for that matter) grew up indoctrinated in a version of Lost Cause more virulent than that which touched my northern classroom, a memory of the war and Reconstruction so far removed from reality that it amounted to a greater fiction than any of Faulkner’s novels—a fairy tale mandatory to explain to later generations why the weird world they inhabited existed as it did, lest they be crushed by cognitive dissonance. But, as Gorra detects in his superb analysis, it is Faulkner’s characters who speak to truth, even if the living, breathing William Faulkner could not articulate those contradictions. The violence, the rape, the incest, the guilt, the despair that are part and parcel of the body of Faulkner’s works are a kind of subliminal confession that the author is well aware of the actual horror that disfigures southern life that real life pretends away. His white protagonists voice this. His black characters—who speak in dialect now judged offensive—bear authentic witness in what is left unsaid.
In The Sound and the Fury and its cousin, the even more daunting Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Faulkner dwells upon “miscegenation,” a term anachronistic today that once served in the white south as an epithet for race-mixing. Gorra notes that the neologism itself only dates to 1863 (and I recall it still wielded as a cudgel in Dixiecrat rhetoric in the 1960s), although it certainly reflected a fear deeply rooted in the antebellum. But what could never be uttered aloud in the south was that the kind of race-mixing deemed revolting was strictly limited to that which might occur consensually between a white woman and a black man. Because the reality was that the institution of slavery sponsored a vast mixing of the races, but that was primarily the product of the white men of the planter aristocracy coupling with black girls and black women held as chattel property, and it was almost always nonconsensual.
They preached against a dread of a “racial amalgamation” while essentially engineering it; the enslaved population on any given plantation frequently included those who were children of those who owned and worked them. There were contemporary observations at Monticello that among the enslaved were light-skinned blacks with red hair and freckles who bore more than a passing resemblance to Jefferson. Gorra cites the familiar observation from southern diarist Mary Chestnut that: “The mulattos one sees in every family ... resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody's household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds.” Of course, we now know that none of this is strictly hypothetical: genome-wide analysis reveals that the DNA of African Americans contains on average about twenty-five percent European ancestry. We can make an educated guess that there are few traces of consent in those numbers.
Blacks and whites were always together in those days, although in clearly defined roles. Gorra refers to an episode in The Sound and the Fury when Harvard-bound Quentin Compson has cause to reflect on race when he sits next to a black man on a bus in 1910, something that was common to the north then but taboo in Jim Crow Mississippi. But that was not always the case; segregation was invented in the north. At one time, free Boston blacks, subject to discrimination on rail travel, while hardly envying their enslaved brethren marveled that southern railroads did not separate the races. (Massachusetts finally desegregated railcars in the 1840s.) It was not until the 1880s that segregation was characteristic to southern life, and that was only obtained by the failure of Reconstruction and the rise of “Redemption.” No longer enslaved, blacks were terrorized and murdered as former Confederate officers and officials returned to power and cowed the southern black population into second class status, stripped of rights granted by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, while the rest of the nation collectively averted its eyes. This is, by the way, not ancient history; I was seven years old when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964: “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
Of course, “separate but equal” always translated into separate and unequal, but southern whites and blacks could not ever really be separate—and that’s the rub! Faulkner saw that through the eyes of his white characters who lived in terror of incest and race-mixing only to turn around and see a world outlined inescapably by these implications. It is likely that the enslaved Sally Hemings, who bore Jefferson several children, was the half-sister of his late wife, Martha.
It is said Foote and Faulkner met, and even developed a sort of friendship. Foote was a stubborn defender of southern culture. Deep down, many of Faulkner’s characters seem to hate the south. I can’t help but wonder if the two ever talked about that. The Sound and the Fury’s Quentin Compson was certainly consumed by it, by the purity of southern women, by the conundrum of race, by a devotion to honor, so much so that he discovers that he cannot leave the ill-fated south behind him even at Harvard, more than a thousand miles from Mississippi, and in his anguish he takes his own life. But first he conjures a memory of something his father once said to him:
every man is the arbiter of his own virtues but let no man prescribe for another mans well-being 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
Gorra’s synthesis of Faulkner’s fiction, Civil War memory, and the echo of systematic racism that yet stains America is nothing short of superlative. That he achieves this while probing sometime arcane avenues of literature, history, and historiography—while ever maintaining the reader’s interest—is especially impressive. If I was to find fault, it is only that towards the end of the volume, the author seems to drift away from the connective tissue in his thesis and wander off into what is clearly his first love, a detailed literary analysis of Faulkner’s prose. But that is a quibble. And truth be told, I now feel inspired to turn to my own shelves and once more dig deeply into my Faulkner collection. In this arena, I must confess that Gorra has truly humbled me: I have read The Sound and the Fury no less than three times, but his commentary on it makes it clear that I still did not entirely understand what Faulkner was trying to say, after all. I suppose I must go back and get to know Benjy again, one more time!
Review of: The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War, by Michael Gorra – Regarp Book Blog https://regarp.com/2024/03/15/review-...
No, that is not a snippet plucked from a Shelby Foote anecdote delivered with mellifluous voice in his signature cadence on the Ken Burns docuseries, The Civil War, but a passage from William Faulkner’s 1948 novel, Intruder in the Dust. Foote, writer and raconteur, who masqueraded as historian, is celebrated as much in some circles for his three volume narrative history of the Civil War as he is by a much wider audience for his extensive on-camera commentary on the docuseries that articulates the southern perspective in thinly disguised “Lost Cause” soundbites that deftly excised slavery from any conversation about the war. Faulkner also was no historian, nor did he pretend to be, but he certainly understood that slavery was the central cause of the war as well as its tragic aftermath for the denizens of the south, for blacks as well as for whites, even if he had difficulty saying that out loud, although we do hear it quite loud and clear through his carefully crafted characters in the drama and poetry that decorated the prose of his magnificent fiction. Slavery and its Jim Crow offspring poisoned the south, and the toxin was no less potent in Faulkner’s day than it was on that July afternoon in 1863.
The excerpt above references the moment just prior to the doomed Confederate assault known as Pickett's Charge on the third and final day of the Battle of Gettysburg, seen by many then and now as the turning point of the Civil War, although careful students of the conflict would tell you that another far more consequential Union victory, the fall of Vicksburg, which cut the Confederacy in half, took place just one day later, more than a thousand miles distant in Faulkner’s native Mississippi. Faulkner aficionados glean that too, not least because its significance is subtly underlined in the short story “Ambuscade” (1934) that later serves as the opening installment of The Unvanquished (1938), when Colonel Sartoris’ young son Bayard and his enslaved companion Ringo eavesdrop on the colonel’s revelation that Vicksburg is gone just as the family’s silver, packed in a trunk, is shuttled out to be buried in the orchard.
But the point here, for the purposes of Faulkner’s fiction—as well as the real-life tragedy of the south that still prevails today, well beyond the sesquicentennial of the Civil War—is that the “what-if” of the war’s outcome persistently echoes across far too much of the southern landscape in 2024: if not as loudly as it did in 1865 or in 1962, the year of Faulkner’s death, it yet remains all too perceptible socio-economically and politically. Nothing ever spoke to that phenomenon better than a more famous Faulkner quotation found in another novel, Requiem for a Nun (1951): “The past is never dead. It's not even past.” And possibly nothing proves its endurance better than the fact that this election year has seen at once bans against teaching about slavery and race in some southern states and, more remarkably, pro-secession candidates vying for office in Texas, perhaps grown men still fantasizing about that instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863.
The past and present together underscore the relevance of The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War, a brilliant and extremely well-written blend of history, biography, literary criticism, and travel writing by Michael Gorra, professor of literature at Smith College. After years of reading, studying, and teaching Faulkner, Gorra decided to take it to the next level, and he set out to visit the various geographies where Faulkner walked the earth, battlefields where southern blood was shed, and the likely environs of the fictional characters—Compsons, Sutpens, Snopes, and a host of memorable African Americans—that inhabited the author’s imaginary Yoknapatawpha County. Had he stopped there, the end result might have been another academic biography peppered with literary analysis. But instead, Gorra—who correctly identifies the Civil War and its repercussions as existential to Faulkner’s literary themes—assigned himself a rigorous self-study of the war and its wider implications. In the process, the author discovered what today’s historians have long recognized, that there was and remains more than one war: the actual war as it occurred, with all of its ramifications, and the way the war is remembered, especially in the south. There are multiple versions of the latter, both conflicting and overlapping, informed at once by truth and by imagination.
The most twisted and most stubborn of these is known as the “Myth of the Lost Cause,” that has the south waging a righteous if hopeless quest for liberty against a rapacious north intent on domination. Eventually, the heroic south is overwhelmed by sheers numbers of men and materiel, and goes down to an honorable defeat, only to fall victim to northern plunderers in the Reconstruction days that follow. Here it is solely a white man’s war, brother against brother, forged by incompatible forces arrayed in opposition: states’ rights vs. federalism, agriculture vs. industry, rural vs. urban, free trade vs. tariffs. In this version, slavery is almost beside the point, and blacks are essentially expunged from history. African Americans appear in cameo roles when they show up at all, as harmless servants in the south’s peculiar institution, which is presented as something benign, even benevolent, that would have simply faded away on its own had Lincoln not launched what is still known in some circles as the “War of Northern Aggression.” More recently, blacks make an awkward reappearance in some odd strands of Lost Cause, now recast as comprising legions of imaginary uniformed “Black Confederates” who eagerly stand guard with their masters to defend southern sovereignty. Otherwise, blacks disappear almost without a trace. Gone are the millions held in chattel slavery, the half million that self-emancipated by fleeing to the Union lines, the nearly two hundred thousand that fought for Union in the United States Colored Troops (USCT)—and most thoroughly erased are the many, many thousands of camp slaves that accompanied Confederate armies throughout the war, including Lee’s infantry at Gettysburg, a fact likely unknown to that fourteen year old dreaming of southern victory.
The Lost Cause is a vile lie, but like all effective lies it is infused with elements of truth. Of course, slavery was not the only cause of the Civil War—just ninety-five percent of it! The key is to focus on the other five percent, and that effort was so successful that this fictitious story became America’s story. So successful that the United States became the only nation in the world to host hundreds of monuments to traitors and rebels across its landscape, many that still preside over public squares today. So successful that it was integrated into the historiography that dominated American education for a century to follow. And ingredients of that distorted curriculum even touched me, growing up in New England in the 1960s, dramatically reinforced on our family’s console TV as the networks commonly replayed Gone with the Wind, the histrionic paean to Lost Cause: an endless loop of the hapless enslaved Prissy incongruously shrieking the “De Yankees is comin!” in terror rather than celebration. I was a Connecticut boy, a state that saw thousands of lives sacrificed in the cause of Union, but I pretended to be a Confederate soldier when I played war, so deeply sympathetic was I to the southern cause. There was only one black child in my elementary school, so I did not find it odd that blacks made few appearances in my textbooks.
But I was a voracious reader, even as a young teen, and books shaped me. I read deeply in American history, fell in love with the Civil War era, and began to discover that what I had learned in school was not only superficial but woefully incomplete and conspicuously misleading. I also read a good deal of fiction in those days, across multiple genres. I think I was fifteen when I discovered Faulkner, and the first novel I read is one of his most challenging to follow or comprehend, The Sound and the Fury (1929). The first section consists of nearly sixty pages propelled solely by a vehicle manufactured from disjointed bits of the stream of consciousness of Benjy Compson, a severely intellectually disabled adult—tagged as an “idiot” in Faulkner’s day—who experiences time as directionless in an interior monologue that speeds along a twisting road of sharp turns from 1928 to 1912 to 1902 and swerves back again repeatedly, with no signs or guard rails to assist the reader, a marvelous journey motif in nonlinear time instead of distance. I found myself reading and re-reading paragraphs and pages, again and again, often lost but relishing the long, strange trip, a dictionary habitually at my elbow as I struggled against an onslaught of vocabulary both unfamiliar and intimidating. I loved every minute of it! And, in that early 1970s acid-infused era, Faulkner’s style here, verging on the phantasmagoric, seemed the perfect companion to the likes of Jefferson Airplane and Pink Floyd.
In my teens, I did not connect Faulkner to the Civil War, but literature and history were then, and today remain, my two great passions. I would read many more Faulkner novels and short stories in the years to come, and my fascination with the Civil War was a part of my motivation, decades later, to return to school to obtain a master’s degree in history. By then the connection between Faulknerian themes and the tortured legacy of the war was apparent.
But it was not until I read The Saddest Words that I came to understand how inextricable that link truly was. Faulkner (and Foote for that matter) grew up indoctrinated in a version of Lost Cause more virulent than that which touched my northern classroom, a memory of the war and Reconstruction so far removed from reality that it amounted to a greater fiction than any of Faulkner’s novels—a fairy tale mandatory to explain to later generations why the weird world they inhabited existed as it did, lest they be crushed by cognitive dissonance. But, as Gorra detects in his superb analysis, it is Faulkner’s characters who speak to truth, even if the living, breathing William Faulkner could not articulate those contradictions. The violence, the rape, the incest, the guilt, the despair that are part and parcel of the body of Faulkner’s works are a kind of subliminal confession that the author is well aware of the actual horror that disfigures southern life that real life pretends away. His white protagonists voice this. His black characters—who speak in dialect now judged offensive—bear authentic witness in what is left unsaid.
In The Sound and the Fury and its cousin, the even more daunting Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Faulkner dwells upon “miscegenation,” a term anachronistic today that once served in the white south as an epithet for race-mixing. Gorra notes that the neologism itself only dates to 1863 (and I recall it still wielded as a cudgel in Dixiecrat rhetoric in the 1960s), although it certainly reflected a fear deeply rooted in the antebellum. But what could never be uttered aloud in the south was that the kind of race-mixing deemed revolting was strictly limited to that which might occur consensually between a white woman and a black man. Because the reality was that the institution of slavery sponsored a vast mixing of the races, but that was primarily the product of the white men of the planter aristocracy coupling with black girls and black women held as chattel property, and it was almost always nonconsensual.
They preached against a dread of a “racial amalgamation” while essentially engineering it; the enslaved population on any given plantation frequently included those who were children of those who owned and worked them. There were contemporary observations at Monticello that among the enslaved were light-skinned blacks with red hair and freckles who bore more than a passing resemblance to Jefferson. Gorra cites the familiar observation from southern diarist Mary Chestnut that: “The mulattos one sees in every family ... resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody's household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds.” Of course, we now know that none of this is strictly hypothetical: genome-wide analysis reveals that the DNA of African Americans contains on average about twenty-five percent European ancestry. We can make an educated guess that there are few traces of consent in those numbers.
Blacks and whites were always together in those days, although in clearly defined roles. Gorra refers to an episode in The Sound and the Fury when Harvard-bound Quentin Compson has cause to reflect on race when he sits next to a black man on a bus in 1910, something that was common to the north then but taboo in Jim Crow Mississippi. But that was not always the case; segregation was invented in the north. At one time, free Boston blacks, subject to discrimination on rail travel, while hardly envying their enslaved brethren marveled that southern railroads did not separate the races. (Massachusetts finally desegregated railcars in the 1840s.) It was not until the 1880s that segregation was characteristic to southern life, and that was only obtained by the failure of Reconstruction and the rise of “Redemption.” No longer enslaved, blacks were terrorized and murdered as former Confederate officers and officials returned to power and cowed the southern black population into second class status, stripped of rights granted by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, while the rest of the nation collectively averted its eyes. This is, by the way, not ancient history; I was seven years old when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1964: “The past is never dead. It's not even past.”
Of course, “separate but equal” always translated into separate and unequal, but southern whites and blacks could not ever really be separate—and that’s the rub! Faulkner saw that through the eyes of his white characters who lived in terror of incest and race-mixing only to turn around and see a world outlined inescapably by these implications. It is likely that the enslaved Sally Hemings, who bore Jefferson several children, was the half-sister of his late wife, Martha.
It is said Foote and Faulkner met, and even developed a sort of friendship. Foote was a stubborn defender of southern culture. Deep down, many of Faulkner’s characters seem to hate the south. I can’t help but wonder if the two ever talked about that. The Sound and the Fury’s Quentin Compson was certainly consumed by it, by the purity of southern women, by the conundrum of race, by a devotion to honor, so much so that he discovers that he cannot leave the ill-fated south behind him even at Harvard, more than a thousand miles from Mississippi, and in his anguish he takes his own life. But first he conjures a memory of something his father once said to him:
every man is the arbiter of his own virtues but let no man prescribe for another mans well-being 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
Gorra’s synthesis of Faulkner’s fiction, Civil War memory, and the echo of systematic racism that yet stains America is nothing short of superlative. That he achieves this while probing sometime arcane avenues of literature, history, and historiography—while ever maintaining the reader’s interest—is especially impressive. If I was to find fault, it is only that towards the end of the volume, the author seems to drift away from the connective tissue in his thesis and wander off into what is clearly his first love, a detailed literary analysis of Faulkner’s prose. But that is a quibble. And truth be told, I now feel inspired to turn to my own shelves and once more dig deeply into my Faulkner collection. In this arena, I must confess that Gorra has truly humbled me: I have read The Sound and the Fury no less than three times, but his commentary on it makes it clear that I still did not entirely understand what Faulkner was trying to say, after all. I suppose I must go back and get to know Benjy again, one more time!
Review of: The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War, by Michael Gorra – Regarp Book Blog https://regarp.com/2024/03/15/review-...
July 16, 2025
As I have never read Faulkner, a lot of the content was lost on me; although Micheal Gorra is a fantastic writer and this book was a thoughtful read. It was a bit hard to separate Civil War history and the literary plot lines carefully woven throughout this book.
If you're not familiar with the works of Faulkner; give this book a pass until you've read some Faulkner, then return to The Saddest Words and enjoy!
If you're not familiar with the works of Faulkner; give this book a pass until you've read some Faulkner, then return to The Saddest Words and enjoy!
February 2, 2021
This is a fantastic study of the novels of William Faulkner, with an emphasis on their ties to the Civil War and the myths that developed about the “Lost Cause” in the post-war period. The author closely analyzes Faulkner’s writings, and explains the influences of earlier regional writing, actual historical events that occurred in the area of Mississippi where Faulkner lived and Faulkner’s own family background. The bulk of the book discusses the legacy of the Civil War as illustrated in Faulkner’s work, most particularly the inability to get beyond the pain and humiliation of the South’s defeat or to accept that events in history have occurred and can’t be avoided - the whole “the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past” thing. The whole discussion is mesmerizing.
I particularly liked the extended treatment of “Absalom, Absalom!” one of my all time favorite novels. Though I was surprised when the author said that people didn’t realize that “The Sound and the Fury” was about the Civil War until “Absalom , Absalom!” came out. Really? I’m not very insightful but I figured that out.
The author does a good job of contrasting Faulkner the writer with Faulkner the flawed man, not giving him a pass for his personal blindnesses, while giving full credit for the insights contained in his stories. He also effectively shows that the issues examined so closely and so well in Faulkner’s writing continue on to this day.
Just a marvelous book, one of the best I’ve read in a while. Highly recommended.
I particularly liked the extended treatment of “Absalom, Absalom!” one of my all time favorite novels. Though I was surprised when the author said that people didn’t realize that “The Sound and the Fury” was about the Civil War until “Absalom , Absalom!” came out. Really? I’m not very insightful but I figured that out.
The author does a good job of contrasting Faulkner the writer with Faulkner the flawed man, not giving him a pass for his personal blindnesses, while giving full credit for the insights contained in his stories. He also effectively shows that the issues examined so closely and so well in Faulkner’s writing continue on to this day.
Just a marvelous book, one of the best I’ve read in a while. Highly recommended.
March 11, 2021
What a magnificent book!
May 31, 2021
Unstitches the story of the Civil War and William Faulkner's oeuvre, and lays them side-by-side, using each as a map to the other.
It covers about a century, and jumps back and forth in time, as the author selects elements of both stories to work over themes. This can be a little disconcerting, but once you let go of the idea of a sequential narrative, it'll read all right. After all, Faulkner's writings themselves were not sequential.
It's been 40 years since I read Faulkner intently, so I just had to go along for the ride for that part. I'm a little better acquainted with the history of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow - I was able to engage more actively for the history
Along the way, the author engages with, and dissects various myths in Civil War historiography and the rise of Jim Crow, often using Faulkner as a lens. Of particular interest to me is his struggle against the ideology of the "Lost Cause" and its proponents, such as Robert Penn Warren (author of "The Legacy of the Civil War"). To me, this is particularly relevant to our own moment in time, as that ideological framework is being repurposed to our own day's "Lost Cause." It's what made this book, for me, unputdownable.
Could be a good complement to Heather Cox Richardson's "How the South Won the Civil War." Also, Clint Smith's "The War On Nostalgia" (The Atlantic, June 2021)
It covers about a century, and jumps back and forth in time, as the author selects elements of both stories to work over themes. This can be a little disconcerting, but once you let go of the idea of a sequential narrative, it'll read all right. After all, Faulkner's writings themselves were not sequential.
It's been 40 years since I read Faulkner intently, so I just had to go along for the ride for that part. I'm a little better acquainted with the history of the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow - I was able to engage more actively for the history
Along the way, the author engages with, and dissects various myths in Civil War historiography and the rise of Jim Crow, often using Faulkner as a lens. Of particular interest to me is his struggle against the ideology of the "Lost Cause" and its proponents, such as Robert Penn Warren (author of "The Legacy of the Civil War"). To me, this is particularly relevant to our own moment in time, as that ideological framework is being repurposed to our own day's "Lost Cause." It's what made this book, for me, unputdownable.
Could be a good complement to Heather Cox Richardson's "How the South Won the Civil War." Also, Clint Smith's "The War On Nostalgia" (The Atlantic, June 2021)
November 30, 2020
This book is for Faulkner lovers, without shying away from Faulkner's racism and own nostalgia for an antebellum south. And yet he could somehow see the South with a clarity that few others of that time could, or at least, could express. He captured the horror, and the moral rot, and though he couldn't quite capture the black people of that time in their full interiority, he mostly knew better than to try. He is one of the few writers who actually grappled with the rape and incest that was pervasive and, in fact, seemed unable to look away.
The book diverts into travelogue and examines other Southern writers of the time and from the Civil War itself. While not as gripping as the parts on Faulkner himself (I loved how he basically just retold the plot of Absalom! Absalom! I can't get enough of that craziness!), reading those diary excerpts at a time when some significant percentage of our country was trying to talk themselves into stealing an election because they didn't like the result felt all too familiar. People couldn't quite deny the wrongs of slavery and yet somehow managed to twist arguments in it's favor because that was easier than admitting that everything they loved was built on a moral wrong. Sounds familiar! Self-delusion is a powerful thing!
The book diverts into travelogue and examines other Southern writers of the time and from the Civil War itself. While not as gripping as the parts on Faulkner himself (I loved how he basically just retold the plot of Absalom! Absalom! I can't get enough of that craziness!), reading those diary excerpts at a time when some significant percentage of our country was trying to talk themselves into stealing an election because they didn't like the result felt all too familiar. People couldn't quite deny the wrongs of slavery and yet somehow managed to twist arguments in it's favor because that was easier than admitting that everything they loved was built on a moral wrong. Sounds familiar! Self-delusion is a powerful thing!
December 28, 2020
This took a while only because I read it while re-reading Absalom, Absalom! at the same time, and making notes, checking maps, thinking about it. This book pulls together my two favorite genres: literary fiction and history, especially that which deals with our very flawed past. Now I have a new list of books to read, several of those used in Gorra's research. I will read Faulkner again with a new understanding.
November 30, 2020
A must for Faulkner fans, and anyone interested in the fraught legacy of the Civil War -- masterful!
October 18, 2021
William Faulkner is one of my biggest influences as an artist. Though I only work in fim/tv format, Faulkner's novels are as influential on me as the work of the Coen Brothers, Taylor Sheridan, or Jodie Hill.
Faulkner is perhaps the greatest writer of small town/rural life in American history, and no matter how your list might go, he has to be in your top five. But with that designation comes a certain amount of baggage, as small towns -- especially Southern small towns -- are complicated.
Michael Gorra sets out to untangle those complications in his excellent work of literary criticism "The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War." The question at the heart of the text is familiar to anyone from a small town who has attempted to write about rural life for an urbane audience: Did Faulkner hate the South? Or, conversely, did Faulkner love the South? And finally, does it matter either way?
At the end of "Absalom, Absalom" Quentin Compson famously wails, "I don't hate the South! I don't hate it!" And just as we doubt the veracity of the young man's words, so too do we doubt Faulkner's insistence that Quentin's thoughts are not also the author's. This is the springboard from which Gorra begins his deep dive into Faulkner, his influences, his history, his contemporaries, and his legacy.
To be from a small town or rural area is to both love and hate where you are from. You hate the backward, the provincial, the regressive. But you love that it is a place that is not like everywhere else that everyone else is from.
In Faulkner's struggle to reconcile himself with Oxford, Mississippi, I have always seen my struggles to come to terms with my hometown of Stewartstown, Pennsylvania. While Pennsylvania is north of the Mason-Dixon Line, my hometown went 2/3 for Donald Trump both times, and I must also confront the evil attitudes of many of the people who shaped me into who I am today. My upbringing brings we no shortage of material, but with that uncommon perspective comes a responsibility to neither throw your home under the bus nor paint a rosy portrait to hang next a Thomas Kinkade for maudlin nostalgic mass consumption.
Gorra finds this question, of loving and hating home, as interesting as I do, and builds a rigorous, lovely, and complex book around the idea. He smartly uses the Civil War, as Faulkner depicted it in his work, as other artists and thinkers depicted it, and as it actually happened, as a basis for his exploration of Faulkner's attitudes towards race, gender, class, and place.
The author resists final judgment on Faulkner, who like so many was more progressive than his contemporaries as a young man and found himself out of step with the times as he aged, but rather uses the idea of such a trial as a means of exploring what we mean when we say that an artist is "of his time." Faulkner was both a contemporary of W.E.B. DuBois and D.W. Griffith, so who of these three is "of their time" and what do we mean by that?
This is not a book about whether or not Faulkner should be "canceled" but about how politics functions in art, what we can expect from our great artists, and how moral purity and political rightness have nothing to do with artistic excellence. In fact, Gorra implicitly argues, moral complexity and even moral shortcomings might make for more interesting and enduring art. He jokes towards the end of the book that DuBois would have destroyed Faulkner in a debate and that Faulkner probably knew that.
To really enjoy this book, you probably need to have read at least four Faulkner novels or have a deep familiarity with the era. Even if you are casually well-read on Faulkner and/or his era, the long digressions on his relationship with Sherwood Anderson and the speculations on how his screenwriting career helped or hindered his work will likely only appeal to real fans. But, I doubt anyone expects the casual reader will pick this one up.
As a fan of American history and a devotee of Faulkner, I am probably close to an ideal reader for Gorra, at least among his readership that does not hold an advanced degree in history or literature. And on those terms, "The Saddest Words" is a complete success.
I only hope that you can find as good a book about an author you love as much as Faulkner fans have in "The Saddest Words."
Faulkner is perhaps the greatest writer of small town/rural life in American history, and no matter how your list might go, he has to be in your top five. But with that designation comes a certain amount of baggage, as small towns -- especially Southern small towns -- are complicated.
Michael Gorra sets out to untangle those complications in his excellent work of literary criticism "The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War." The question at the heart of the text is familiar to anyone from a small town who has attempted to write about rural life for an urbane audience: Did Faulkner hate the South? Or, conversely, did Faulkner love the South? And finally, does it matter either way?
At the end of "Absalom, Absalom" Quentin Compson famously wails, "I don't hate the South! I don't hate it!" And just as we doubt the veracity of the young man's words, so too do we doubt Faulkner's insistence that Quentin's thoughts are not also the author's. This is the springboard from which Gorra begins his deep dive into Faulkner, his influences, his history, his contemporaries, and his legacy.
To be from a small town or rural area is to both love and hate where you are from. You hate the backward, the provincial, the regressive. But you love that it is a place that is not like everywhere else that everyone else is from.
In Faulkner's struggle to reconcile himself with Oxford, Mississippi, I have always seen my struggles to come to terms with my hometown of Stewartstown, Pennsylvania. While Pennsylvania is north of the Mason-Dixon Line, my hometown went 2/3 for Donald Trump both times, and I must also confront the evil attitudes of many of the people who shaped me into who I am today. My upbringing brings we no shortage of material, but with that uncommon perspective comes a responsibility to neither throw your home under the bus nor paint a rosy portrait to hang next a Thomas Kinkade for maudlin nostalgic mass consumption.
Gorra finds this question, of loving and hating home, as interesting as I do, and builds a rigorous, lovely, and complex book around the idea. He smartly uses the Civil War, as Faulkner depicted it in his work, as other artists and thinkers depicted it, and as it actually happened, as a basis for his exploration of Faulkner's attitudes towards race, gender, class, and place.
The author resists final judgment on Faulkner, who like so many was more progressive than his contemporaries as a young man and found himself out of step with the times as he aged, but rather uses the idea of such a trial as a means of exploring what we mean when we say that an artist is "of his time." Faulkner was both a contemporary of W.E.B. DuBois and D.W. Griffith, so who of these three is "of their time" and what do we mean by that?
This is not a book about whether or not Faulkner should be "canceled" but about how politics functions in art, what we can expect from our great artists, and how moral purity and political rightness have nothing to do with artistic excellence. In fact, Gorra implicitly argues, moral complexity and even moral shortcomings might make for more interesting and enduring art. He jokes towards the end of the book that DuBois would have destroyed Faulkner in a debate and that Faulkner probably knew that.
To really enjoy this book, you probably need to have read at least four Faulkner novels or have a deep familiarity with the era. Even if you are casually well-read on Faulkner and/or his era, the long digressions on his relationship with Sherwood Anderson and the speculations on how his screenwriting career helped or hindered his work will likely only appeal to real fans. But, I doubt anyone expects the casual reader will pick this one up.
As a fan of American history and a devotee of Faulkner, I am probably close to an ideal reader for Gorra, at least among his readership that does not hold an advanced degree in history or literature. And on those terms, "The Saddest Words" is a complete success.
I only hope that you can find as good a book about an author you love as much as Faulkner fans have in "The Saddest Words."
January 20, 2025
This is one of the best review books I have read in a long time. I was immersed in a reflection on my favourite author and his struggles with the history of the South and the lives lived there. Centering on the poignant and unforgivable battle between the deep and inseverable ties to the land and culture, and the horrors of slavery, he revisited key moments in Faulkner's writings. This is a book that deserves to be read by students of history and literature. I only gave it four stars for two reasons. 1.) One of its best qualities is also a major flaw: Gorra's writing flows so well and drowns us in his thoughts so well, that we cannot easily understand where he is going when he both criticizes and praises Faulkner's books, and life, and contributions. Gorra writes in a stream of consciousness fashion that makes it appear, at least, that he wishes he were Faulkner and that he could rewrite Faulkner to fix his wrongs. 2.) More tellingly, Gorra's last few chapters make it more obvious that he wants the reader to be assured that no praise of the South can be warranted, in the final analysis, because nothing should stand in the way of condemnation of slavery and those who practiced it. William Faulkner was so much more complicated and more of a natural honest human than the man Gorra wishes he had been, and thus I cannot get over the feeling that nobody would want to read Faulkner after reading this book by Gorra. I suspected most readers of Gorra's book will have already read Faulkner though, so maybe they will appreciate the gradual dismissal of Faulkner and his compatriots that they grow to understand is Gorra's final message? It's so peculiar, really, to have such a fine book flawed by a lack of confusion and nuance. Surely anyone who is such an expert on Faulkner could see that there the insistence on correct historical analysis is just a little beside the point as it misses the main quality of Faulkner - namely, his need to both praise and condemn the South. Faulkner was equivocal about the South. Indeed, for much of Gorra's book that point us made well. But as Gorra continues in his reflections, he becomes more and more obviously worried that he will be seen as an apologist for the South and its inability to rid itself of a sense of past glory. The failure to read Faulkner's extraordinary prose as ambivalent and therefore as an amazing window on the South is also the failure we see enduring in America today, the divide that is tearing that nation apart. Such a tragedy - and such a wonderful but terribly flawed tribute by Gorra of Faulkner.
November 29, 2023
"The Saddest Words" is an important companion for even casual (like me) readers of Faulkner. There are no great revelations here. Gorra comes to the conclusion, like others, that Faulkner's views on the war between the states were complicated. He was born and bred a Southerner. His friends and family were from the South, he grew up in a segregated society getting a distorted view of history from his schoolbooks, so it's natural that Faulkner would, at least in part, defend his heritage. But he also spoke out about slavery and the stain it made on his homeland. Gorra paints a nuanced picture of Faulkner, neither adulating or condemning him. What Faulkner wanted, perhaps less than anything, was to become a public voice, representative of the South, but he was thrust into that role as he gained more fame. It's interesting to wonder how his writing would've been different if he'd been an expat or from the North, like Hemingway or Fitzgerald. "The Saddest Words" suffers a bit from lack of focus, since Faulkner wasn't even writing until 75 years after the Civil War, so he didn't focus extensively on that war. There are a few stories and a few characters here and there. Gorra is forced to make a somewhat tortured argument that because characters like Quentin Compson and, by extension, their author, were snagged by the past, they were therefore shaded by what happened during the war. I think Gorra's book is most useful for its description of the families--the Snopeses and Compsons--that make up Faulker's oeuvre, how they fit together, etc. Faulker was creating an entire county, as described elsewhere. He populated it with generations of characters. Their views on race were their own and can't be confused for the author's. "The Saddest Words" is also a great biography of Faulkner. If that's how you approach it, I think you'll be pleased. Just don't expect the whole thing to focus on the Civil War, because very little of it actually does.
October 29, 2021
Faulkner always bothered me. I was told to treat his fiction as a work of modern art, just enjoy the colors and take from it what you want. Well, I guess I am not that bright because I hate stream of consciousness writing- because the only person who knows what the author is saying is the author. The rest of us cannot make heads or tails of it. I find that most of these kinds of books are exactly what critics love because it gives them a sense of elitism, as the rest of the population are philistines who are incapable of figuring it all out. However, after reading Michael Gorra's book I have a greater sense of Faulkner's fiction. Wrapped up in the "Lost Cause" belief that blanketed the south, Faulkner was a typical person of that era. He was cut from that Jim Crow cloth like so many other people of his generation. However, instead of glorifying the "Lost Cause" with the midnight and magnolias type of fiction - think Gone With the Wind, Faulkner wrestled with Jim Crow society in his books. Ghosts of the south's past haunted Faulkner. Contemporary societal mores would make his fiction that much more interesting and intriguing. I will give it another go-this time, remembering what was said in this book. The author gave me much insight into Faulkner's mind, i.e. his prejudices, his views of American, and how his community shaped these things. I wish I had this book when I was taking literature courses that included some of his fiction in their syllabi. It would have given me an appreciation of Faulkner, at the least an understanding of where he was coming from.
October 15, 2022
How do we read William Faulkner in the 21st century? the author asks. Short answer: in graduate school, which probably is also where one should tackle THE SADDEST WORDS. Very close familiarity with Faulkner’s opus is a prerequisite to grasping the historical, sociopolitical and literary perspectives that Michael Gorra brings to bear on the recipient of the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. Mister Liberryhead, who long ago wrote a master’s thesis on Faulkner, struggled mightily to remember character bios, plot points and themes germane to fully appreciating Gorra’s meticulous discussion in THE SADDEST WORDS. Deep immersion in Yoknapatawpha County is advised before tackling this book. Analyzing what Faulkner’s works tell us about the dreadful legacy of slavery and the Civil War (and what can be known about Faulkner’s own feelings about both) is an organizational challenge that Gorra meets. Gorra applies knowledge of key Civil War battles to the biographies of Faulkner and of his fictional characters, exhaustively teasing out “the way that [Civil War] history helps shape his fiction” (p131). Insights like “Space and time in Faulkner are always interchangeable” (p181) are mind-blowing to this former grad student. Basically, Gorra concludes of Faulkner’s total oeuvre : “such books are why we read at all” (p28). But, by examining the real world of Oxford, Mississippi, and the fictional Yoknapatawpha County of Faulkner’s novels – giving both equal weight – Gorra argues that both are still relevant and instructive today.
October 15, 2022
How do we read William Faulkner in the 21st century? the author asks. Short answer: in graduate school, which probably is also where one should tackle THE SADDEST WORDS. Very close familiarity with Faulkner’s opus is a prerequisite to grasping the historical, sociopolitical and literary perspectives that Michael Gorra brings to bear on the recipient of the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. Mister Liberryhead, who long ago wrote a master’s thesis on Faulkner, struggled mightily to remember character bios, plot points and themes germane to fully appreciating Gorra’s meticulous discussion in THE SADDEST WORDS. Deep immersion in Yoknapatawpha County is advised before tackling this book. Analyzing what Faulkner’s works tell us about the dreadful legacy of slavery and the Civil War (and what can be known about Faulkner’s own feelings about both) is an organizational challenge that Gorra meets. Gorra applies knowledge of key Civil War battles to the biographies of Faulkner and of his fictional characters, exhaustively teasing out “the way that [Civil War] history helps shape his fiction” (p131). Insights like “Space and time in Faulkner are always interchangeable” (p181) are mind-blowing to this former grad student. Basically, Gorra concludes of Faulkner’s total oeuvre : “such books are why we read at all” (p28). But, by examining the real world of Oxford, Mississippi, and the fictional Yoknapatawpha County of Faulkner’s novels – giving both equal weight – Gorra argues that both are still relevant and instructive today.
February 13, 2021
The “civil war” in the title is multilevel—the war itself, the war as Faulkner experienced it growing up and informing his work as a writer, and the war within the man as a man of his time in the South. Gorra points out that despite the fact that particular or actual events of the Civil War and slavery are not regular or large presences in Faulkner’s novels and stories, both the war and slavery loom in their linked legacies large and indispensably over the geographic region (Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha County), family histories, and individual characters Faulkner created. In this book Gorra traces the region, its families, and their characters in great and fascinating detail presenting the connections in the novels and stories and between imagined and actual realities. He also shows how the postwar white South’s visions of itself evolved from the losing side’s dispossessed engaging in Klan and other domestic terrorism against former slaves during Reconstruction to later “Lost Cause” academic revisionists and Jim Crow racism, which visions provided the context for Faulkner’s development and work and his own “civil war” within, his own “human heart in conflict with itself.” A very enjoyable, readable, and stimulating book that reminded me of Maya Jasanoff’s work The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, which I enjoyed a few years ago (Jasanoff provides a cover blurb for The Saddest Words).
March 7, 2022
At the sentence or even the paragraph level, there was a lot to like about this book. I learned a lot of interesting stuff about Faulkner the man, his works, and about the Civil War. Gorra is a phenomenal Faulkner scholar, and I can’t wait to continue my study of Faulkner with all the new tools I picked up in this book.
Zooming out, however, I never could grasp what this book was really about. It seems to have that curse of books written by academics for other academics, where they’re constantly trying to find something new and novel to say about topics that have already been discussed ad nauseam, so they’re constantly applying new “lenses” to the same information, reframing and recontextualizing things until the point they’re trying to make is lost in a mist of jargon.
Which means that while there were lots of great sentences about Faulkner, and lots of great sentences about the Civil War, they never really added up to a great book. After reading 400 pages, I still couldn’t tell you what Gorra’s central thesis was.
And about 100 of those 400 pages were unnecessary — lengthy digressions about the era of “Local Color” writing, and repetitive side-by-side descriptions of historical battles and their fictional counterparts in Faulkner’s books, which I often had to read several times to untangle to no great benefit.
Overall a good but not a great book.
Zooming out, however, I never could grasp what this book was really about. It seems to have that curse of books written by academics for other academics, where they’re constantly trying to find something new and novel to say about topics that have already been discussed ad nauseam, so they’re constantly applying new “lenses” to the same information, reframing and recontextualizing things until the point they’re trying to make is lost in a mist of jargon.
Which means that while there were lots of great sentences about Faulkner, and lots of great sentences about the Civil War, they never really added up to a great book. After reading 400 pages, I still couldn’t tell you what Gorra’s central thesis was.
And about 100 of those 400 pages were unnecessary — lengthy digressions about the era of “Local Color” writing, and repetitive side-by-side descriptions of historical battles and their fictional counterparts in Faulkner’s books, which I often had to read several times to untangle to no great benefit.
Overall a good but not a great book.
January 9, 2021
I won a copy of this book through Goodreads Giveaways and am voluntarily leaving a review.
I feel like I don’t have enough familiarity with Faulkner to really appreciate this book. I read As I Lay Dying in college, thought it was weird and not good, and therefore never really wanted to touch Faulkner again. After reading this incredibly in-depth look at the works and place of the man’s creations, and also at the man himself, I’m intrigued and want to try again. This work is very comprehensive and focuses on the South, the Civil War, and racism through the lens of Faulkner’s fictional place and people. It’s fascinating and Gorra does a great job of looking at the full picture honestly and unflinchingly. There is no beating around the bush of the South’s racist past, the myth of the Lost Cause and dispelling it, and of Faulkner’s own somewhat complicated but ultimately racist ideas. There is no apologizing for the complication of those ideas, but there is an argument for reading the works in the context of their time and with this book (and maybe others) as a guide to where they are problematic. I would probably give this book 4 stars if I had any deeper background in Faulkner’s work; it’s well-written and in-depth.
I feel like I don’t have enough familiarity with Faulkner to really appreciate this book. I read As I Lay Dying in college, thought it was weird and not good, and therefore never really wanted to touch Faulkner again. After reading this incredibly in-depth look at the works and place of the man’s creations, and also at the man himself, I’m intrigued and want to try again. This work is very comprehensive and focuses on the South, the Civil War, and racism through the lens of Faulkner’s fictional place and people. It’s fascinating and Gorra does a great job of looking at the full picture honestly and unflinchingly. There is no beating around the bush of the South’s racist past, the myth of the Lost Cause and dispelling it, and of Faulkner’s own somewhat complicated but ultimately racist ideas. There is no apologizing for the complication of those ideas, but there is an argument for reading the works in the context of their time and with this book (and maybe others) as a guide to where they are problematic. I would probably give this book 4 stars if I had any deeper background in Faulkner’s work; it’s well-written and in-depth.
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