THE SADDEST WORDS

An exploration of the South’s greatest novelist and his fiction’s complicated relationship to the Civil War.

Though William Faulkner’s legacy is as an author obsessed with the interplay of the South’s shameful past and haunted present, shaped by slavery and the Civil War, he didn’t write much about the war as such. Aside from a handful of scenes that evoked moments like Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, he tended to write about its prehistory and aftereffects. That approach, argues Gorra, a longtime American literature scholar, is a central strength of Faulkner’s fiction. By addressing violence and slavery obliquely, he blurs incidents in ways that allow them to stretch across time. (The “saddest words” of the book's title are “was” and “again," terms that spotlight the inescapability of violence and racism that serve as the war’s grim legacy.) Gorra’s shifts among biography, Civil War history, and literary analysis can make readers feel whipsawed, but they’re always engaging and purposeful. The author takes a close look at the history and literary texts of Faulkner’s time to show how slavery’s role in the war was soft-pedaled, explaining his sometimes embarrassingly racist pronouncements about his native Mississippi. But Faulkner’s literary mind was more open and nuanced. He “couldn’t keep from remembering what other people wanted to forget,” Gorra writes, arguing that signature works like The Sound and The Fury, Light in August, and (especially) Absalom, Absalom! encompass the private fears of white Southerners about mixed-race relationships and Southern honor. Much as Malcolm Cowley’s Portable Faulkner (1946) demystified the complexities of Yoknapatawpha County for Americans still willing to ignore Jim Crow, this book looks at Faulkner in an era in which Confederate statues are at long last getting pulled down. Faulkner had his flaws, Gorra writes, but he “gets the big things right.”

A magisterial, multidisciplinary study of Faulkner that shakes the dust off his canonization.