I often fantasize about the halcyon days before CTRL+F, when a conspicuous word like “implacability” could appear ten times in a single manuscript and live on for eternity, as it gambols the pages of Light in August, galvanizing and overt.
Born under the long umbra of the Civil War, grandson to a fabled Confederate colonel, William Faulkner took on a Homeric, Balzacian task, eulogizing almost three centuries of colonization, folklore, and brutal banality in the southern U.S. Immaculate prose aside, his twenty-odd tomes construct a universe of sin and grandeur, pathos and logos, the critical Yoknapatawpha history, hellscape of postbellum legend.
While his counterparts plodded through psychoanalysis, existentialism, and industrial malaise, pathologizing the middle class, and victimizing themselves on behalf of World Wars I and II, Faulkner chose instead to focus on the least scrutinized, the least diagnosed, and perhaps the most traumatized corners of society. One can, from an anachronistic standpoint, identify the collective PTSD following the War Against Northern Aggression and failed Reconstruction. An entire social structure burned to the ground. The poison of slavery’s legacy mixed with the horrors of unrestricted warfare left a massive portion, rich and poor, old and young, white and black, ruthlessly alienated from reality, physically and mentally deranged, lacking context, resources, or honor to guide them.
And still, just years before his death, he published in Ebony, “If I were a Negro, I would say to my people: ‘Let us be always unflaggingly and inflexibly flexible. But always decently, quietly, courteously . . . We must learn to deserve equality.’”
This “Letter to the Leaders in the Negro Race” is now nearly impossible to find online without academic credentials, and triumphs as a footnote to an implacable oeuvre, a new Modern disease: contaminated without awareness, abject in absence of an imagined alternative, cowed to despondency and despair leading only to deeper darkness, no matter the cure: Faulkner’s tales become Freud’s worst nightmare, and the two drift further apart across the same riveted plane.
-David Fishkind