A new book by Michael Gorra, The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War, traces Faulkner’s literary depictions of the military conflict in the nineteenth century and his personal engagement with the racial conflict of the twentieth. The latter struggle, within the novelist himself, is the real war of Gorra’s subtitle. In The Saddest Words, Faulkner emerges as a character as tragic as any he invented: a writer who brilliantly portrayed the way that the South’s refusal to accept its defeat led to cultural decay, but a Southerner whose private letters and public statements were riddled with the very racism that his books so pointedly damned ... Gorra’s argument, however, depends on close readings of everything from individual sentences to symbols and characters and themes across the author’s novels, which collectively make the case that a racist person can be a radical writer. 'Faulkner the man shared many of the closed society’s opinions and values,' Gorra writes. 'But when the novelist could inhabit a character—when he slipped inside another mind and put those opinions into a different voice—he was almost always able to stand outside them, to place and to judge them.' ... In The Saddest Words, Gorra posits that Quentin represents Faulkner’s view of tragedy as recurrence. 'Again' was the saddest word for the character and the author alike because it 'suggests that what was has simply gone on happening, a cycle of repetition that replays itself, forever.' Both the real and the fictional Southerner were trapped in that cycle, aware that the fall of the Confederacy was right and just but unable to shed their sympathy for the antebellum South. 'What was is never over,' Gorra writes, pointing out that the racism that ensnared Faulkner in the last century persists in this one ... Gorra argues that the racism and the failures in moral reasoning that characterized Faulkner’s life refract brilliantly in the work: 'They speak to us of a riven soul; of a battle in which the right side doesn’t always win.' Rather than separating the artist from his art, Gorra suggests that the two are entwined; Faulkner’s racism informed his devastating portrayals of it.
... rich, complex, and eloquent ... In setting out to explore what Faulkner can tell us about the Civil War and what the war can tell us about Faulkner, Gorra engages as both historian and literary critic ... Gorra endeavors to unknot and clarify Faulkner’s oeuvre by reconstructing it himself, but his act of literary explication is also one of participation—a joining in the Faulknerian process. Gorra renarrates these Civil War stories as he seeks to come to terms both with America’s painful racial legacies and with William Faulkner ... Gorra struggles to come to terms with the distressing views Faulkner frequently articulated on questions of racial progress and racial justice. Gorra does not look away from Faulkner’s troubling public statements or from some disconcerting stereotypes and assumptions in his literary work that became newly jarring as social attitudes shifted ... Gorra assembles quite a bill of failings, especially if we view Faulkner with the assumptions of our time and place rather than his own. Yet having meticulously acknowledged all of this, Gorra makes his claim for Faulkner the writer by reproving Faulkner the man...As Gorra presents it, the act of writing bestowed an almost mystical clear-sightedness. Yet that clarity was always challenged in the fetid Mississippi air that Faulkner, like all his characters, had to breathe. And it is that very tension, the combination of the flaws and the brilliance, that for Gorra makes his case.
In spending relatively little time with the literary aspects of Faulkner’s novels — the astounding characterization, his brilliance with metaphor and his dazzling descriptions of perception and physicality — Gorra misses an opportunity to tell a fuller story of the sublime interplay of aesthetics and theme in Faulkner’s work. This is doubly unfortunate because Gorra writes so beautifully when he turns his attention to Faulkner’s artistry ... But these are relatively small complaints. Gorra’s well-conceived, exhaustively researched book probes history’s refusals ... In his urgency to make the case for Faulkner’s merits, however, Gorra overcorrects with regard to his faults...Gorra isn’t an apologist, but he does go to great lengths to avoid saying the obvious. He mentions Faulkner’s infamous alcoholism as a factor that may have influenced his more incendiary comments ... Gorra mounts a further defense by separating the man from the writing, as though the writing 'made him better than he was; it made the books better than the man.' But that’s a dodge — and, most significantly, it’s not the point. Of course William Faulkner, Mississippi-born in 1897, great-grandson of a slave-owning Confederate colonel, was a racist. But in Faulkner, as is the case in all of America, racism is not the conclusion to any argument. It does not preclude further discussion; it demands it ... This tangle aside, Gorra’s book is rich in insight ... Gorra’s book, as he writes in his preface, is 'an act of citizenship,' timely and essential as we confront, once again, the question of who is a citizen and who among us should enjoy its privileges.
... spectacular ... [a] bracingly combative opening chapter ... surely among the most dexterous, dynamic, and consistently surprising studies ever written about an English-language novelist ... This is surely the first account of Faulkner’s work that provides a systematic reading of Confederate historiography—the version that Faulkner would have imbibed growing up. And yet The Saddest Words, for all its peculiar accents, also serves as a kind of one-stop-Faulkner-shop, offering all the traditional lore ... in composing a granular portrait of his subject’s psychic agility, he has performed a master class in a mode of reading he was under the impression he despised.
... provocative and engrossing ... Toward the end of The Saddest Words, Gorra quotes W.E.B. Du Bois’s famous declaration that 'the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line' and contends that 'no white writer in our literature thought longer and harder about that problem' than Faulkner. Yet in his zeal to show us that he thought about it, Gorra sometimes overrates what he thought about it ... While Gorra is keen to separate Faulkner from more racist and revanchist Southern writers, he does not argue that he was a progressive, exactly. His thesis is both subtler and more tendentious ... Gorra seems to want to give Faulkner credit for consistently acknowledging a problem that he did virtually nothing about ... There was no better chronicler of white guilt than William Faulkner. His territory was the wrong side of history, and he knew every inch of it. But while Gorra wants to congratulate Faulkner for exposing Southern racism, Baldwin suggests that he in fact mystified it, aestheticized it, thus making it even harder to overcome than it needed to be. There is a kind of tragic sublimity, in Faulkner’s work, to the white South’s wrongness, to the magnitude of the guilt, and the extent of the attempt to deny or forget it. But a tragedy only ever ends one way; or perhaps, as Faulkner thought, it never ends at all. If we want things to change—if we want justice—guilt is not enough.
Gorra could not have foreseen our current moment when he began this work of biography, history and literary criticism. Yet his extended meditation on whether and why we should continue to read the work of a privileged White novelist from Jim Crow Mississippi often seems to describe exactly where we are ... Gorra does not shy away from [Faulkner's racist] failings, but he does try to soften them with regretful sighs about how such views were typical of most Mississippians in Faulkner’s day ... By creating characters like McCaslin, Gorra demonstrates, Faulkner 'became better than he was' and spoke in a voice we still need to hear. That voice tells us that slavery was. The Civil War was. Violent racist oppression was. And here we are again.
... transcendent ... Gorra expertly mines his own deep reading of the Faulkner oeuvre to serve as our Virgil and guide us through an exploration of how the Civil War influenced Faulkner’s work and how, in turn, Faulkner’s writing helped shape modern literature. Gorra adroitly and poignantly portrays Faulkner at war with himself, juxtaposed and entwined with the history of a cleaved nation, to provide a compelling and necessary reexamination of a towering literary figure.
... powerful ... Mr. Gorra demonstrates convincingly that this unshakable past for Faulkner came increasingly to involve race ... Mr. Gorra does not try to defend the indefensible. But he also refuses to reflexively 'cancel' Faulkner—to jettison Faulkner from the American canon because of his attitudes. Instead, the critic offers a reason to continue reading the novelist that will strike readers as either generous or misguided ... If writing enabled Faulkner to become a better person, at least while writing, why did this process fail to affect the rest of his life? And to what extent should we make claims for literature as a transformative force in a world in which systemic injustice can continue unabated?
... [a] meticulous works panning literary critisicm and history ... Faulkner once famously said, 'The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past,' and this exceptional study by Gorra lends credence to these words. A worthy addition to Faulkner studies, and for larger Southern literature and Civil War collections.
...penetrating and elegantly written ... This is only to touch the surface of this fine book which, while sharply focused on Faulkner’s writing, is broad in the scope of its research ... he writes with clarity and grace, producing a work that is deep and learned without being deformed by jargon or academic costiveness ... a revelation.
Gorra’s shifts among biography, Civil War history, and literary analysis can make readers feel whipsawed, but they’re always engaging and purposeful ... 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.
