Faulkner

Freedom already exists. Such is the implicit postulate in all the legislation of progress. The businessman, the worker, the child, the woman, the individual, the sum total of humanity-are we not all free, given that the Law claims this to be true? If freedom already exists, pace Rousseau and via the democratic revolutions of France and the United States, nothing is tragic. From Dostoevsky to Kafka, however, tragic writers tell us that this is not so. True freedom consists in the minimal possibility of making reality meaningful, and making the world realistic is always a task just beyond our reach. Freedom is not handed over to us. We must make it, and we make it by searching for it. Not even the somber (though ever-smiling) Machiavelli would have dared claim otherwise: "God does not want to do everything, so as not to take free will from us, and that part of His glory that falls to us."

We had to reach the twentieth century to consecrate totalitarianism and nihilism simultaneously, so that, in Kafkaesque legislation, the world would have a final meaning, defined by the Law. As a result, it is useless to seek another meaning for reality. Do you insist, Herr K.? If so, you will be eliminated insofar as the Law is concerned. The Enlightenment comes to an end with Kafka: you have the obligation to be happy, or else you run the risk of turning into an insect.

The most absurd aspect of freedom and the Law in Kafka reminds us, with extraordinary power, that the true meeting point between society and the human being requires a tragic vision- that is, a vision of conflict and reconciliation, which is opposed to the Manichaean vision that has governed modern history, the vision of sin and extermination. When a religion reclaims a historical basis, Nietzsche suggests, it does so to justify the dogmatism "beneath the severe gaze ... of orthodoxy." You must be guilty so that I may be innocent. In Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound, the chorus exclaims: "All that exists is at once just and unjust." Who embodies these realities in a more disturbing fashion than Ivan Karamazov when he crosses the threshold, fully resolved to remain on the side of Justice and against Truth, when Truth and Justice do not coincide?

This is the immoral decision that the tragic hero does not have to make. Tragedy does not sacrifice Truth to Justice or Justice to Truth because in the realm of tragedy, the forces in conflict with one another are equally legitimate, identically moral in the deepest sense: when defeated, they are able to bring value to defeat. Value, not sin. And one of the dimensions of value without sin, even when it is ignored and at times violated, is the value of the Other. This is the value that William Faulkner identifies so magnificently: the restoration of the community divided-not by history (in this case, the military and economic might of the North) but because men and women, long before the Civil War, had already divided their souls.

The literature of the United States reveals the constant tension between the optimism of foundation and the pessimism of the critical eye. Consecrated by the Constitution and the laws of North American democracy, this optimism becomes the credo of the country's social and economic life: "Nothing succeeds like success."

Progressive optimism transforms into the mask of imperial expansion. From the thirteen English colonies along the Atlantic, the United States expanded westward (French Louisiana), through the territories of the Gulf of Mexico (Texas), all the way to the Pacific (California) and the Caribbean (Spanish Florida, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and as far as Panama in Central America). All this in the name of the "manifest destiny" of a country designated by God to be, like ancient Rome, caput mundis (capital of the world).

The vitality of North American literature, to a large degree, lies in the critical opposition of its writers. Aside from the sugary literature of the Pollyanna ilk, "the happy girl," novelists and short story writers beginning with Hawthorne and followed by Poe, Melville, Henry James, and Mark Twain in the nineteenth century, then by Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Frank Norris, Fitzgerald, and Dos Passos in the twentieth, portray the other side of the coin. The nightmares of the American Dream, the ghosts by day and the prayers by night, the brutality of upward mobility, the mediocrity of the middle class, the disillusion of success, the emptiness of fame, are constant critical themes in the narrative of the United States.

William Faulkner places the roundest, most miraculous, brilliant, and somber crown upon this critical process, because he goes beyond criticism and achieves tragedy. This and so much more. Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett are, perhaps, the two other tragic writers of the past century. They are few, but that is natural. "The death of tragedy" declared by Nietzsche may well date back, as the German philosopher himself believed, to Socratic reasoning. But what seems irrefutable to me is that, primarily, Christianity is unable to coexist with tragedy if it is to promise eternal salvation.

Stripped of religious vestments, lay progress-beginning especially with Condorcet and the French Revolution-renounces Cod but not happiness. If, as Condorcet believed, the ascendant line of human being toward happiness is certain, then the tragic conscience remains excluded from the successive progressive visions of Saint-Simon, Comte, and Marx.

If transforming experience into destiny is a necessary trait of the tragic, it casts a shadow upon the philosophy of progress and the salvation of souls. Not to believe in the Devil is to give him every opportunity, wrote Andre Gide. And the Western world, by expelling tragedy from its history, allowed crime to take its place. Instead of the inevitable, happy progress heralded by the Enlightenment and its successor, the Industrial Revolution, the twentieth century became the century of historical horror, unpunished crimes, masked tragedy. Kafka and Beckett offer the greatest European cultural testimony to this fact. In Kafka, the traditional hero wakes up one day to find that he has become an insect, but an insect that knows he is an insect and thinks, "There is a chasm between me and the world," but the chasm manifests itself as filled with power. We have known the void that a usurping power creates and fills, but, even when we are aware of the lie, we remain dumbfounded, helpless observers of the farce that hides it. God is dead and it wasn't the enlightened atheists who killed him-it was a gang of tramps who, despite the existing evidence, are nevertheless waiting for Godot.

The Faulknerian tragedy enters this painful search for a world in which, risen from darkness, we can look with clarity upon the consequences of our "rebellious freedom," as Buchner called it in Danton's Death. Faulkner, of course, is writing from the most optimistic and forward-thinking of societies, the United States of America, where "nothing succeeds like success." This makes the

United States an eccentric country, given that the majority of the world's nations have experienced immediate and disastrous encounters with failure.

Faulkner rejects the foundational optimism of the American Dream and tells his countrymen: we too can fail. We too can bear the cross of tragedy. This cross is called racism. The North did not defeat the South, The South had already defeated itself by enslaving, humiliating, hunting down, and murdering the Other, the man, the woman, and the child who are "different" from white power. But the pain of tragedy can redeem us if, in the end, we
can recognize the humanity we share with others.

The Faulknerian tragedy is inscribed within a defined space-Yoknapatawpha County, which translated from the Chickasaw means "a land divided"-and based upon family roots that sink
deep into the land: the aristocratic Sartorises and Compsons, the social-climbing Snopes. Very often, however, the tragedy is touched off by the stranger, the "intruder in the dust" who arrives in Mississippi with another image, one that seems threatening because he or she is different, and that could apply as easily to Charles Bon in Absalom, Absalom! as to Lena Grove in Light in August-the foreigner from outside who shows us the foreigner from within: the black man, Joe Christmas. Whether they fan out
into great family trees or are set in great historical epochs, Faulkner's novels are the novels of a land-the South-but history, geography, society, and families find resolution and significance through two tragic elements: individual destiny and collective testimony. The serenity of Lena Grove, the bitter sexuality of Joanna Burden, and the inevitable fate of Joe Christmas are individual characters within the great collective chorus of Faulknerian tragedy. In the center of this chorus, one woman fights back and lives to tell of it: Miss Rosa Coldfield. Outside of the chorus, a descendant survives to remember: Quentin Compson.

Among all these people-protagonists and scene, chorus and choryphaeus-the Faulknerian tragedy, beyond the history of the South, like Sophoclean tragedy, beyond the history of ancient
Greece, becomes an integral part of the times we live in, an opportunity to transform experience into destiny. In the end, the center of the Faulknerian tragedy may very well be time. Its prodigious breadth, its incomparable receptivity, is patent in
Quentin's observation that the present began ten thousand years ago and the future is happening now. Joe Christmas defines his tragic fatality, his prison on earth, when he says, "I have been further in these seven days than in all the thirty years. But I have never got outside that circle. I have never broken out of the ring of what I have already done and cannot ever undo."

It is in this temporal tension between our way of living, understanding and suffering with the past, present, and future that the tragic modernity of William Faulkner achieves true narrative greatness.

Faulkner identifies his tragic theme: the restoration of the community divided, not by history but by men and women who have already divided both their land and their souls. Faulkner merges all the time periods of his characters into one narrative present. Because for the author of “Absalom, Absalom!” the unity of all times is the only possible answer to such division. What Faulkner proposes is the affirmation of the collective "I am" against the forces of separation. His novels acquire the form of "the ode, the elegy, the epitaph borne from a bitter, implacable reserve that refuses to yield to defeat." 

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