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We will get to as many as we can. And if youre interested in purchasing the book, and i hope that you do, you can find it at most major retailers but we like to point people towards bookshop. Org, where you can buy just about any book you are looking for and support independent booksellers across the country. Again, that is bookshop. Org. Please give them a look. I mentioned to someone the other day i was reading words in preparation for the event tonight and they said that is the new faulkner biography. I said well, you got the faulkner part right. The best way i can describe this book is military history, social commentary and literary criticism. I think it will appeal equally to fans of any of those subjects. What the book really did for me was force me to give some serious thought to where faulkner stands at a time when we are asking ourselves some difficult and longoverdue questions about our countrys historic difficulties when it comes to matters of race. Was he something of a pioneer on or was he or another white writer profiting of racist caricatures of black americans . Dr. Michael gorra has some thoughts on that. He is a professor of English Literature at Smith College in massachusetts. He is the author of several books including portrait of a novel, the making of an american masterpiece, which was a finalist for the pool surprise and biography. His essays have appeared in the atlantic, the New York Times book review, among others. Dr. Gorra, thank you for joining us tonight. Prof. Gorra thank you for having me. I want to think the library for for thate and steve introduction and for my friend for putting us together. I am going to share my screen, and that will take just a second. Then i will start talking. There we go. Ok. My title probably seems cryptic. Two words, was and again. They come from faulkners novelty sound and the fury. Ear burden will become clear is also first, what can faulkner tell us about the civil war . Then what can that war tell us about him . How can we use them to think about each other . And how can they help us understand this moment in our National Life . I have always read and taught faulkner, but this is not a subject i would have predicted for myself back when i was getting my teaching degree. So i want to say a bit about how i got here. In 2010 i was finishing a book about henry james and i was living abroad in paris. And i was reading the news from home. I was learning in that Midterm Election year about a new, and to me, inexplicable movement called the tea party. I was also reading a blog in the New York Times called this union. It was 150 years since lincoln had been elected, and they followed the week by week course of the civil war. I read, then i heard an echo. It seemed to call up so many of the same issues, as if our time rang off that one, as if nothing had ever stopped, changed, or gone away, which in itself is a very faulknerian thought. And then one afternoon i realized i wanted to write an american book. Most of my works so far had been on british things, like henry james. But living abroad had made me far more consciously interested in my own country than i had ever been before. It made me see that i needed to look more closely at our history and our literature, that i needed to sort out what i thought about the american past. I wanted to write as an american about america. And i came to see this as a act, an as a belated act. What better moment to focus on then civil war . I could say everything i want to do about that war, and above all, about its memory, by taking up the writer i already knew and loved. The project has taken me far beyond faulkners work itself. I let myself sink into the letters, speeches and memoirs of the war period, and other fiction about it. And into the way it was depicted in the historiography of faulkner even the schoolbook he used as a boy in mississippi. There were more than a few battlefield visits, a few memorials as well. Monuments to think about in this summer especially. The war is both everywhere and nowhere in faulkner. He rarely writes about it explicitly. He does not do battle scenes. And yet as causes and consequences, they provide an explanation for everything in his world. War also shapes the deep structure of his imagination. It is always there, even when it does not seem to be. That is how it will be in this talk as well. There will be some moments in what follows where i might not seem to be talking about the civil war itself. I am just focusing on the private lives of a few of faulkners characters. But i am talking about it, always. Many of you will know that he set most of his work in a place he called an imaginary realm in his home state. He often carried characters over from one book to another. Plot lines, too. As if what he had to say could not be confined to a single book. In particular, he wrote two novels about a character he called quinton. Oddly enough, each of them was set partly in massachusetts at harvard, where faulkner himself had not yet been when he first invented the character. One of those books is called absalom absalom. It was published in 1936, and it depends on the question quinton has been asked ever since he arrived at harvard in the fall of 1909. Tell about the south. What is it like there . What do they do there . Why do they live there . Why do they live at all . That is what faulkner says the other Harvard Students want to know. Quinton tries to answer those questions by telling a story that goes back to 1830, a piece of history that turns inevitably upon race and inheritance. Second novelkners about him. The sound in the fury came first. There, quinton kills himself at the end of his freshman year. Himself to the charles. Whatever he says, its the testimony of somebody who is already dead. I am not going to start with quentin, or even with faulkner. Instead im going to start with novelistes, my other and with a character from his 1886 novel the bostonians. I am going to start there because basil, too, also comes from mississippi. He is a lawyer and he goes to boston on business. He gets taken to see a new building on the harvard campus, a place called Memorial Hall was built in 1974, a monument to the use. N because ca basils hostess wonders if it might be indelicate to bring him there, because after all, he fought for the confederacy. He even agrees with a prescription on the wall that reads the dead were brave. So they were, he says. I must be brave enough to face them. It is not the first time. The Memorial Hall is divided into three, with the theater on one side in the dining hall on the other. But its real business happens between them, a high arch on its walls are a set of tablets with the names of harvards civil war dead. Most of them. Listing them first by their class year and then by the battle and date of the death. James writes that the hall speaks of duty and honor and sacrifice. But he does not tell us the particular meaning the place had for him. Two of his cousins are listed there. So was a man named robert shaw, a colonel from massachusetts, in which his brother was a junior officer. That was a regiment of black troops with white officers, one of the first such units in an army that was first reluctant to accept them. They took heavy casualties in their first major battle, fort wegner near charleston. They were defeated. In defeat they showed his showed a skeptical white america. Date no 12 names, over 12 of its number. 11 men on that wall died at gettysburg. Reversee seems the very of a challenge or taunt. He was capable of being a generous omen and he forgot. The whole question of size and parties remembering only that he too had been a soldier. That is what the building commemorates, arching over friends and enemies the victories of defeat. Materialized in and a magazine. Its editor fought for the union. But he hoped to find a way to heal the division between the different parts of white america. Many of the magazines pages in the 1880s were devoted to battles and leaders of the civil war. Instead of first person memoirs, how to survive commanders on either side. They claim to look at the conflict on a strictly Military Point of view. To analyze neither the wars causes or its consequences. For many men like him, that soldiers sense of shared suffering would override all sectional or ideological differences. And establish a sacrifice and its memorialization on the ground which they would ultimately reunite. Its that sense of a common loss. That emerged only after the end of reconstruction. It was not in the spirit in which it was built. In a dedicatory carving on the wall, it tells us the building marks the patriotism of those who served in the army and navy of the United States during the war for the preservation of the union. It was built for the union dead, the nations loyal citizens, and for them only. Harvards confederate dead were given no place at that memorial space. Memorial hall is a space of triumph, and frank about it. A few decades after the war was over, when this Reconciliation Movement was underway, Frederick Douglass found that he needed to remind people that there had been a right side to the civil war and a wrong side. Reconciliation, for him, had gone too far. Memorial hall does not forget such things. It insists that neither the confederacy nor its soldiers have any claim on the they sought to ruin. Still. Whenever i read the bostonians, i am stirred by basils openhearted emotion. And when i step inside Memorial Hall, i remember that during the Academic Year of 1909 to 1910, an equally fictional mississippian would have had to enter that Building Three times a day at least if you wanted to eat. There are other doors to the dining hall. In faulkners quentin would not have always had to walk past that line of dead union names, but maybe sometimes she did as this young southerner. What we have made of them . The sound and the fury began its short story about four children whose parents sent them outside to play. They are hoping to keep the kids from realizing that their grandmother just died

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