Faulkner, Hemingway, et al.: The Emersonian Test of American Authorship

Abstract

It is impossible to be a great Southern writer and a great American one, too; for very essence of America is a natural, victorious hypervisuality which has superseded hyperverbal pathology and failure of South. Here, Faulkner may be a greater writer or word-smith than Hemingway; but Hemingway will forever remind us of Faulkner's failure to transcend Southern lyricism and an aristocratic, Old-World diction for democratic prose-imagism of New-World aesthetics and perception. Indeed, Civil War, like Revolutionary War, was fought for a good deal more than political, economic and social self-determination. Emerson said it best in his early essay, American Scholar, when he declared we would listen no more to courtly muses of Europe (79, italics mine) because our unique manifest destiny was eye, not ear. In his journals, he simply noted: That which others hear, I (7:152, italics mine). And some half-century before, Thomas Paine had already put matter of our common sense thus: Independence is only bond that can tie and keep us together. We shall then see our object, and our ears shall be legally shut against schemes of an intriguing, as well as a cruel enemy. (Common 91, italics mine) Indeed, as a host of critics from Paine to Emerson to Tocqueville and D. H. Lawrence had quickly grasped, America thinks and acts upon a different systemwhat Tocqueville called a new science for a world: Americans like to discern object which engages their attention with extreme clearness...to view it more closely in broad light of day.... Hence, Americans have no need to draw philosophical method out of books, having found it within themselves. (2: 4, 5) The freedom to democratically see for oneself, without blinders of imported aesthetics or dependence upon a failed cultural historicism, is sine qua non of American authorship. Hemingway reaches for it; Faulkner doesn't. For Faulkner, galling realization that he could never embrace Yankee or wider American aesthetics no doubt made him epitome of Southern elegiac authorship. Faulkner thus notes same inconceivable difference in being that D. H. Lawrence recognized between Old World and New in his Studies in Classic American Literature. From North, outland, there looked down upon him countless row on row of faces whch resembled his face and spoke same language he spoke yet between whom and him there was no longer any real kinship and soon there would not even be any contact since very mutual words they used would no longer have same significance and soon after this would be gone because they would be too far assunder even to hear one another. (Intruder in Dust 243-44) As we shall now see, on a variety of comparative topics such as American nature, history, religion and human gender, Faulkner solves his personal and authorial crises by reliance upon ear or Wordsworthian Power of Sound, whereas Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolfe, Vonnegut, Updike and even Flannery O'Connor have come to terms with what Emerson, above, called our genius, with tyrannous eye. Brooks, Lewis and Warren, in their anthology, American Literature: The Makers and Making, have denominated Emerson as somehow, indispensable figure in American literary history (1: 670); and we now know this to be true in Emerson's ocular Americanhood: The eye is final; what it tells us is last stroke of nature. Beyond color we cannot go. (Journals 14: 166, italics mine) Carl Sandburg simply called this hypervisuality victorious Yankee colors: The fence zigzags and morning glory staggers on a path of sea-blue, sky-blue, Gettysburg Union blue. (66) Indeed, as we begin our discussion of Faulkner's innate and obsessive Southern lyricism-what he calls the thunder and music of prose (Interview 76)we should use as touchstones two great climaxes of Light in August and The Sound and Fury, moments so excruciatingly relevant for Faulkner that he even chose identical words to express themboth Joe Christmas's aural monument to Southern racial pathos and tragedy-the siren toward its unbelievable crescendo (Light 440)-and Benjy's Southern utter hiatus of familial and cultural failure, Ben's voice mounting toward its unbelievable crescendo. …