A Rose for Emily
I have a confession: I used to love William Faulkner. His long, wandering, kudzu-like sentences. His frequent use of negation circling round and round like a whirlpool dragging one inevitably to his central affirmative point. His ability to create a complex world in Yoknapatawpha County that mirrored both the old and new South, a world that was at once realistic and a grotesque parody. He was someone that every writer of my generation tried to imitate and, having failed miserably, went on to become whatever sort of writer they were going to be, sometimes giving up entirely because they couldn’t come close to his style (my first and still—thankfully–unpublished novel was a pathetic homage to As I Lay Dying). As both writer and literature professor, I had placed him in the small pantheon of American fiction writers, up there with Hemingway and Melville and Twain, Morrison and O’Connor and Baldwin, a writer of unparalleled genius who cut a wide swath through the literary landscape and whose powerful gravitational pull was felt by all writers of my age.
But over the years, his stock has fallen for many, myself included. Too wordy, we felt. His plots, like his prose style, too convoluted. Most of his characters too unabashedly Jim Crow white and male, and all-too-often apologists for the antebellum South, as if the Civil War and Emancipation had never taken place. Every Faulkner aficionado is familiar with his infamous quote: “If it came to fighting I’d fight for Mississippi against the United States even if it meant going out in the street and shooting Negroes.”
The reverence I’d once had for his work slowly and inexorably (a Faulknerian word if ever there was one) began to crumble. For me and other writers and readers, he was almost like one of those Civil War-era monuments so many fought so hard to remove. He checked too many boxes that, politically and culturally, as well as aesthetically, I could no longer accept, let alone enjoy. The last work of his I’d read was “Barn Burning,” some thirty years ago.
But unlike writers themselves, literature, great literature anyway, often has a way of surviving changing tastes and political and cultural attitudes. Melville’s greatness was almost lost for a century; the same is true of Poe until the French Symbolists revived him for a new generation of readers. Huckleberry Finn was again deemed permissible to read once Percival Everett breathed new life into it by writing James.
Right before bed recently, I happened to come across the following quote on my iphone: “I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then.” Perhaps it was my age, my own sense of time’s winged chariot hurrying near, but the ineffable–another Faulknerian word–beauty of this line stopped me in my tracks and brought me back to the first time I tried reading The Sound and the Fury. A neophyte in regard to Faulkner, I could recall struggling through that confounding and beautiful first part told “by an idiot, full of sound and fury”– the mentally challenged Bengy Compson. As a sophomore literature major, I could recall sitting somewhere in the moldy-smelling stacks of the university library, slogging through the novel, trying to comprehend what Faulkner was up to: it was like trying to break the code of some sort of Rosetta Stone. The novel was at once difficult, frustrating, and infuriating, as well as exhilarating, elegant, and exquisite. I, the illiterate farm-boy I was then, slowly began learning that literature could be all of those things, and much more. Reading Faulkner’s masterpiece, I felt myself being initiated into the world of fiction, a world that would one day connect my younger self to the old man reading that quote before bedtime.
So I thought, why not give Faulkner another try that very night. I didn’t have time for a novel, but I did find a copy of “A Rose for Emily” lying about. It was a story I’d taught fifty times to my freshman lit classes, one which I’d always admired for its brevity and depth, for how much it packed into a few pages. Before I began, I wondered if it would bring back to me the same sort of complex joy I’d once had when opening a Faulkner book, or would it merely confirm the attitude I’d developed that he was passé, a writer whose time had come and gone?
So I dove in. The opening paragraph immediately grabbed me and pulled me headlong into it:
When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man-servant–a combined gardener and cook–had seen in at least ten years.
In a short paragraph, Faulkner establishes why he’s the master of Southern gothic. Or a few paragraphs later on, the manner in which he describes Miss Emily: “bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue.” The writer in me was fascinated by his craft, how his narrator’s voice could be both intimate and distant. Through the brilliant choice of the point of view, of that “we,” Faulkner manages at once to be inside the head of the narrator as well as outside, both an individual and a community. I was fascinated once more by the structure and time sequence, by Faulkner’s ability to cover the life of one woman, as well as the history of a whole community—the entire South–in just a few pages.
But the reader in me, that child in all of us listening to a bedtime tale, soon put down my critical lens, overlooked the political and cultural flaws inherent in Faulkner, and simply enjoyed the story. And though I knew it was coming, the final lines still astonished and surprised me:
Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair.
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