Intro to Faulkner's The Unvanquished

We're opening with William Faulkner's novel, The Unvanquished, as a way to kind of rethink the American geographies of the South and its meanings in terms of the literary culture, as well as the kind of larger culture in the United States. This may not be Faulkner's greatest novel in some ways or most polished novel, but I kind of like the roughness of it because some interesting things kind of emerge within its points of fragmentation and in the jumps that it makes and in the story that it tells. Basically, for Faulkner, he understood the South's history as a saturated history. It was defined by three central things prior to the Civil War that continue to define it up into this day, really. The first of these was the displacement of indigenous populations in the South, the removal, the genocide against Native American tribes, their removal to spaces further west as European settlement moved in. The second of these was the ecological disruptions and devastations that occurred with this, with the development of commercial culture in the South. As economic power developed in the South, lands were deforested, a one-crop economy developed within the South as cotton became the central crop in ways that maybe perhaps pushed the South into a corner in terms of the Civil War in the end. And the greatest of these for Faulkner was the exploitation of labor through slavery and how it impacted the way that Southerners thought of race within the South, not only in the days of the war itself, the Civil War, but also into his own day and beyond. And so these three things kind of set up a saturated history that defined the South for Faulkner. However, despite the violence of these things and how it defined the South, Faulkner still saw the South as a classical culture, the best hope for the Americas in a lot of ways, in terms of long-term stability. That the South was an inheritor of the classical world of Greece and Rome for Faulkner, that the South embodied elements of kind of the culture of chivalry from the medieval world, and that the South took on these things in ways that the American North as well as Europe had not taken on these marks of the classical world, that the North and Europe had retreated into industrialism, which became kind of savage for Faulkner in a way. And that set up the way that he saw the Civil War to some degree, that the Civil War was fought over slavery, yes, but also it was more kind of a war between the states, and not a war between the North and South for many Southern historians, but a war between East and West. The question for these historians there was not about slavery, but about economic control. Would the banking interest of the of the Northeast and Europe control the economic resources of a developing country in the mid-19th century? So who would control the agricultural resources of the Great Plains and Midwest? Who would control the mining resources of the American West and all the other resources there? And so that's a very different way of thinking about the war. And so for Faulkner, the South becomes kind of a noble but lost cause in the end, that the South was not going to win in the face of Northern industrialism and Northern financial interests, but it becomes a celebrated lost cause that defines his characters and his perspective on the Americas. So Faulkner's South becomes a space of personal and regional myth, and it sets the kind of prevailing moods and conflicts that are present within his novel, and it kind of sets up a way in which we can read these novels, as well as the way that they've been read in the larger Americas. Faulkner had a tremendous influence on a lot of Latin American writers and how they saw their own histories and cultures, particularly Gabriel Garcia Marquez, winner of the Nobel Prize, and how he understood South America and its cultural, commercial and personal relationships. Now, one of the things true with this novel is that it does seem fragmented at times. Faulkner wrote this novel as a series of short stories at a time when he needed to make some money, and so at points it may seem like there are jumps and gaps within the story, but I want to want to invite you to kind of think about the novel and its fragmentation as perhaps a way of telling the story and telling the South's history here. How do you tell a history of these kinds of violences, and how these violences have been covered over perhaps in some ways, you know, can you cover over the past? Now Faulkner's position on this was always set down in the dictum that the past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even the past. His characters are always wrestling with the past, and in some ways you've got a young adolescent Bayard Sartorius who is narrating this novel and is trying to come to grips with received sense of the past in some ways. So when you look at the fragmentation within this novel and the jumps and gaps that it has, you know, kind of think about what's told and what's untold about the war's impact on Bayard, or you know, in what ways does race leave its, the way that race is understood in the South in this moment, the end of the Civil War, in what ways does that leave a mark on on young Bayard as he moves from adolescence into young manhood. You could read this novel in this way as a performance of consciousness in a very clearly defined space of trauma, you know, the end of the war, the disintegration of the culture around him, the changes that are overwhelming in terms of the ways that he relates to others, in terms of race, in terms of economic class, etc. So how does this space at the end of the war become a traumatic space in which Bayard is narrating its violences and changes? So you can read this novel as a coming-of-age tale or Bildungsroman in some ways as well, right? You've got Bayard Sartorius and you kind of think about what's left unsaid in the way that he sees this disintegrating world around him, his sense of place within family and home, his relationship to Granny and to his father John. How those things seem to be coming apart in some ways. On page 24 and 25, you know, he and Ringo are in the woods and Bayard reflects, it was cool and shady there, about two-thirds of the way down the page, and quiet and Ringo slept most of the time and I slept some too. I was dreaming it was like I was looking at our place and suddenly the house and stable and cabins and trees were all gone and I was looking at a place flat and empty as the sideboard and it was growing darker and darker and then all of a sudden I wasn't looking at it. I was there, a sort of frightened drove of little tiny figures moving on it. They were Father and Granny and Joby and Lavinia and Luge in Philadelphia and Ringo and me and we were wandering around on it, lost in it, getting darker and darker and we were forever more without any home to go to because we were forever free. And that's what it was and then Ringo made a choke sound and I was looking at the road and there in the middle of it, sitting on a bright bay horse and looking at the house through a field glass was a Yankee. So you see young Bayard's like world coming apart here, right? And part of that is about the war and part of it is about his relationship with Ringo and how he is coming to a sense of who he is as a white young southern man. And how that you know the country around him, the region around him is coming to the realization of that. Part of that comes out of how he is told the story of race by his father and the relationship between him and Ringo. There, this is revealed kind of on pages 80 and 81, the bottom 80, where he's thinking about the idea of the railroad. And that was how he traveled for the next six days. Ringo lying on his back in the wagon bay with his hat over his eyes, sleeping or taking his turn, holding the parasol of her granny and keeping me awake by talking of the railroad, which he had never seen, though which I had seen that Christmas we'd spent at Hawkhurst. That's how Ringo and I were. We were almost the same age and father always said that Ringo was a little smarter than I was. But that didn't count with us any more than the difference in the color of our skins counted. What counted was what one of us had done or seen that the other had not. And ever since that Christmas I had been ahead of Ringo because I had seen a railroad, a locomotive. Only I know now it was more than that with Ringo, though neither of us was to see the proof of my belief for some time yet. And we were not to recognize it as such even then. It was as if Ringo felt it too and that the railroad, the rushing locomotive, which he hoped to see symbolized it, the motion, the impulse to move which had already seethed to a head among his people, darker than themselves, reasonless, following and seeking a delusion, a dream, a bright shape which they could not know since there was nothing in their heritage, nothing in the memory even of the old men to tell the others this is what we will find. He nor they could not have known what it was yet. It was there, one of those impulses inexplicable yet invincible, which appear among races of people at intervals and drive them to pick up and leave all security and familiarity of earth and home and start out, they don't know where, empty-handed, blind to everything but a hope and a doom. So we think about race and and displacement and migration in that sense, right? How does that change your sense of Bayard's jumps and gaps in the narration? What does he leave unsaid as he kind of tries to puzzle out this relationship with Ringo, you know, a relationship that's defined by the fact that as his father John tells him he's not as smart as Ringo. And I would invite you to kind of think about The Unvanquished from this standpoint, you know, what if this was a tale told not by Bayard but by Ringo? How would you understand the world there? How would you understand this novel if Ringo and Bayard are brothers? This is not a strange thing in the Americas, right? You know, the ways in which races has been mixed and the ways, the complicated ways in which we see race. Thomas Jefferson here, you know, who fathered his own slaves, who took Sally Hemings as a mistress and did not release those slaves until after he was dead. You know, the complications of the ways in which race are seen in the Americas might be reflected here in Faulkner's tale of a young adolescent Southerner coming into adulthood, you know, and how do you see this novel if you read it, you know, if you read the relationship between the two boys here as a familial bond in the end. So in the end you have these two twelve-year-old boys, you know, in what ways is lineage and origin is obscured here as they come into adulthood. Do you read the Unvanquished as Bayard's story or Ringo's story or both their stories in some ways? And as you read, what Mississippi and larger America emerges from your choices there? Look forward to hearing your comments. Thank you.