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 equal parts military history, social commentary, and literary criticism. And i think it will appeal equally to fans of any of those subjects. What the book really did for me is 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 those issues or was he or another white writer profiting off of racist caricatures of black americans . Dr. Michael gorra, as you might imagine, 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 hosting me and steve for that 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. The saddest words. There were two of them, was and again. They come from faulkners novel sound and the fury. Their burden will become clear. This book tries to ask a few simple questions, simple yet terribly complicated. 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 beginning my teaching career. 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, living for a while 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 and the paper decided to follow the week by week course of the civil war. I read, and 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 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 or consciously International 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, and in some ways, a belated act. Citizenship as much as a scholarship. What better moment to focus on then civil war . I thought i could say everything i wanted to 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 and diaries, speeches ,nd memoirs from the war period into the fiction about it, and the way it was depicted in faulkners own day. Even the schoolbook he used as a boy in mississippi. There were more than a few battlefield visits, a few monuments and memorials to consider 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 it is causes and consequences, they provide an explanation for everything in his world, but more. It also shapes his deep construction structure of his imagination. But war. His deephapes 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 sent most of his work in a place, 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 thompson. 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. That was faulkners second novel about him. The sound in the fury came first. There, quinton kills himself at the end of his freshman year. He drowns himself in the charles. So whatever he says in this book, 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 henry james, my other novelist, and with a character from his 1886 novel the bostonians. I am going to start there because basil, too, also comes from mississippi. Originally 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, which was built in 1974, a monument to the union cause. Basils hostess wonders if it might be indelicate to bring him there, because after all, he fought for the confederacy. He is willing, though. He even agrees with the inscription 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 and the dining hall on the other. But its real business happens arch dialem, a high on a window. 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 kernel of the 54th massachusetts, in which his brother was a junior officer. That was a regimen of black troops with white officers. First an army that was in an army that was first reluctant to take them. They took heavy casualties in their first major battle, fort wegner near charleston. They were defeated. In their defeat, they showed a skeptical white america. Blackman had no souls. I will have more to say on that later. Over 12 of its number. 11 men on that wall died at gettysburg. The place seems the very reverse of a challenge or taunt. He was capable of being a generous omen and he forgot. Now, the whole question of size lyd parties, remembering on that he too had been a soldier. That is what the building commemorates, arching over friends and enemies the victories of defeat. The bostonians materialized in a magazine called the century. Is the best american magazine of the late 19th century. The executive editor, the owner, fought for the union. But he hoped to find a way to heal the division between the different parts of white america. So many many of the magazines pages in the 1880s were devoted to a series called battles and leaders of the civil war. Instead of first person memoirs, how the surviving commanders and other side memoirs of the surviving commanders on the others 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. Reconciliation is very much the it themselves. For many people like him, that soldier sense of shared suffering, it would override all sectionals or ideological differences and establish a sacrifice and its memorialization on the ground which north and south 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 which Memorial Hall was built. In a dedicatory carving on the 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 indeed 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 polity 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. Faulkners quentin, he would not always have to walk past that line of dead union names, but did as thismes he 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. The second child is curious. And her drawers under her dress had gotten muddy and wet. Now, she climbs a tree next to upstairs, looks in an window, is curious, once to see going see what is going on. Her brothers stare up at her from below. Caddie remained adventurous and soiled, ruled by a desire that led to her expulsion from the family. In older brother stays place, afraid to follow yet wanting to. And jason who threatens to tell on her. The youngest child walks without being able to speak. Hes the idiot in the lines faulkner takes its title, whos is full of sound sad and tale is full of lonely. Go first person narrations from moment to moment, back with back in his normal prison of 1928 and into childhood. Each period encased within another and the movement between triggered by association or repetition, he combines the events to which we first approaches Family History. Her promiscuity, her pregnancy by one man and marriage to another, her fathers fatal quentins suicide, and the ruins of family life that follow. Faulkner had later said that he tried to tell all of this through benji alone. It did not work until he started over, this time in sectioning quentins voice, set in 1910 on the last day of his life. Try again, fail again. He moved the narration back to 1928, anti gave it over to the vicious jason. But it still was not enough, he said. And so he said, i will let faulkner try with a concluding section written in the third person. Each of the three firstperson sections, each of those depends not on the narrators present, but rather on the past he cant escape. And in each case, that past is defined in terms of the siblings sibling whose voice we dont hear. Catty is an absent presence to whom the brothers cannot ever accommodate themselves and one none of them will ever get over her. To be traumatized as a cultural historian has written, it is precisely to be possessed by an image or event. An experience one cannot master, the unwitting reenactment of an nt one cannot simply cannot decouple. Trauma, trauma lies in our delayed response to a violence that our minds cannot encompass. Isnt unwritten memory, a repetition that forces us to relive our past. A faithful sense of dual reiteration. Those who suffer from it have no choice but to circle around the their own experience. Approaching the psychic space where they least want to be and yet must. Drawn by fascination and horror. Faulkner tells the constant story four times, hoping that each will be its last. The brothers himself, they always return to her memory, sniffing at it, unable to let it alone. For benji, she was comfort. To jason, she contains the future he had not had, but for my purposes quentin is the one , who matters here. On the last day of his life, most of what happens to quentin will happen in memory. Most of what counts, anyway. He knows what he will do that night, and he buys two flat irons to weight has way into the river. He sits next to a black man on the streetcar and is amazed at how easy he finds him. What is really determinative is the life that lies behind you. The life and memory, the past in which you could not stop catty from being who she is. What matters is his failure. So the day slips gears and he stands by the creek where they had played as children. She lies in the water, her skirt soaked against her, she climbs out. But she sits with her face tilted back, the smell of honeysuckle. Push it in, she tells him, push harder, i want you to. He asks her to touch it. To put out her hand and got his way. Her hand upon the night that he holds at her throat. And she is willing, she says, willing to die as she says she did when the other men touched her. Have you ever done that . She asks. How many there have been, and she only says too many. Neurologists have identified a disorder called hyper thien identified a disorder in which a memory presents itself unbidden for the totality of sensory decay. Those afflicted with a can see their own tasks, as if it were a film, a continuous shell, reruns of unforgettable reruns. Such memories seem more real than ones at the very present conversationss would continue throughout the day. Big moments on why she seems to lose his presence, he steps fully into his past. Moments that cause particular intention. After he fails with a knife, he goes looking for a man. He is not her first lover, but he is the man who has gotten her pregnant. And when they meet, quentin orders him to leave town. I say he must go, not my father, not anybody, i say it. If dalton does not, i will kill you. Amused andth concerned. He tells quentin not to take it so hard. When he tries to hit him, the man does have to stop him. Only then does he realize that he is holding a wet, bloodstained rag and his face feels cold. He is not in mississippi at all, but rather in massachusetts still. And without realizing it, he has picked and lost a fight with another harvard student, and another man who has been talking too casually about women. He has gone into a feud, and which the present seems to bend, the fight triggered by the memory, the memory by the fight. And the present has vanished for us as well. We read in this part of the novel, we read for a dozen pages. Without quite knowing where quentin is physically, and only only faulkners broken syntax, the unpunctuated lowercase lines of dialogue spilling down this page, that is the only thing here to remind us that we are really inside quentins mind. The day remembers itself for him. Betty too, he snaps back into the present. His roommate tells him hes going to have a shiner. So too a critical conversation with his father replace in his mind, a conversation about his own inability to accept the fact that she is no longer a virgin. Your anguish, his father says, your anguish grows out of a purely temporary state. That is what virginity is, both cattys and his own. It is something to move on from, something we are meant to lose. So is pain itself. But the boy will have none of it. And i, temporary, and he, you cannot bear to think that someday it will no longer hurt you like this. Was theemporary, and he saddest road of all. There is nothing else in the world. It is not despair until time, it is not even time until it was. Was. Something that was lies in the past. It is fixed and unchanging, concluded and therefore temporary indeed. He is, in contrast, ongoing and permanent. Is with his trauma, an ever present Family History that defines him. The only thing worse would be the belief that he might someday get over it, that it would not it would indeed be temporary. Was allows survival, to discard that trauma, to believe he might outlive it, that dismisses the the very wound that has come to constitute itself. Quentin would rather die than imagine that someday it will no longer hurt. Mr. Thompson recognizes that. Was is the saddest word. It is the past that one cannot mend. Quentin will find a different word. The full memory of this talk returns to him only at the very end of the evening, the very end of the chapter faulkner devotes to. It returns to just a little while before he kills himself. That conversation has been at the edge of his mind all day. That morning, he stood along the charles, and with a stiff envelope with his suicide note cracking through his coat. For a second, he imagines himself in the future, as if hes going to live, but then his fathers word comes back to him. When spoken in mississippi the summer before, was. Be, was, soon will past tense. But here, that timeladen syllable floats on the page without explanation. Quentin has already had that conversation with his father. We have not. Not yet. We have not read it yet. For us, it lies 50 pages on, so cannot know what that word means to him. , at thisxt thought moment in his narrative, seems rather cryptic. Again, sadder than was. Again, saddest of all. Again. We wont understand a claim until it becomes literally true. Until that exchange with his father runs through his head once more. We will hear those words again. We will remember catty again. Sadder than was, saddest of all. Excuse me, i need a little liquid. What is all this have to do with does all of this have to do with the war . All of this excursion into the veracity of these characters . Thats a question i want to now. Historians have argued that faulkners subject is the brief grief and unfulfilled desire to which his characters are forever subject. And anguish is never really personal. There is a congruity between the groove in faulkners mind with a anof an in the sacral inescapable family trauma, so deep it hardly seems possible to distinguish between them. From 1930, he believes his life had already ceased before it began, that he is but a single instance of darkness, which a horse galloped and a gun crashed. And his confederate grandfather fell in the desk. Or take a later novel from 1948. That book tells us there is a place in the mind of every southern white boy where it is not yet 2 00 on the third day of gettysburg. The failed charge against the union has not yet begun. That is what quentin wants, a past that is still not yet. To becomet has yet was. A moment in which it all still is. A moment before the past becomes irrevocable and in which he can stay forever. Someday, all of this will no says. Hurt, mr. Constance that is something he cannot accept. He cannot accept the idea of outliving his own pain. In ann believes afterlife, and what he believes to tell us about the south, is that it all happens over and over again. The same troubles and events, the same corals, memories, generations repeating themselves. There are many ways to understand this. Andme, the most useful, pushing our sense of trauma beyond the bounds of the individual psyche, as indeed freud suggested we should, because different people recall past in common, so they may share the same wounds. He also suggests the traumatic event remains under a presentable. The event itself as opposed to its memory. Faulkner likes to work up to and then away from the moment of climax. He almost never presented directly. We never actually see catty for example, we know only her remembered presence, only her present in the narratives her brothers tell. Only the pain of her loss. And so it is with the civil war itself, it is everywhere felt and yet in faulkners work, it is nowhere fully presented. Hisreaders walk around pages, here the past as a cries out for quentin, and perhaps for his creator, too. A trauma induced by a pain they have never not known, their voices marked by the compulsions to repeat. Part of the pleasure principle that endures even in pleasures absence. Again. If this raises a question. The sound and the fury ends with a scene on the town square. With a statue of a confederate soldier gazed with ntis beneath his marble hand in wind and weather. If you look closely, this one does not have his hand up to his eyes. That is because faulkner fused two statues into one. This one in the square and the one on the campus of the university of mississippi, where the soldier does indeed hold his hand over his eyes to shade them. Monuments, monuments remind us that we must always remember. Memorials that we should never forget. What does such a statue ask us to remember . What does that memory require we forget . In faulkners day, the white south filled its public spaces with mementos to its own cause. They mastered the rhetoric of victimhood and indeed, its people were victims, victims of what they had done to themselves above all. They were also perpetrators. Their insistence on their own sense of loss effectively denied the greater trauma with which the land was stained, the trauma that lincoln described in his second inaugural as 250 years of bloody and unrequited toil. But that denial did not belong to itself. It belonged to most of white america, the country in which the blue and the gray have reconciled themselves and become and meanwhile, the marble man one. Stands century in the courthouse triumph. Nd silent the books last page makes that literally true. On that page, the teenage servant tries to take the carriage to the statues left rather than to the accustommed right, and gets a beating in consequence. Nevertheless, the pastor will speak despite that statue. Here, i am going to make a jump in both time and space. One night, i was walking with my family down a residential street in a german city, a city i knew well, but as i looked ahead to me, i saw something new on the sidewalk for me. I saw a brass plate with i got way ahead of myself, im sorry. My powerpoint jumped, and i have to get it back. My mouse has lost its connection and will come back in second. In a second. Im so sorry for that. Hang on. I got it. Sorry about that. My mouse had lost power. I was walking down the street in the german city, and i saw right, new, metallic streetlights. When i went to look, we saw a breastplate the size and shape of the cobblestone had replaced. It was engraved with a name and some dates. In front of the next house, we saw another, and then another down the block. All the surnames were jewish. But though their birthdays had varied, everyone listed on those stones had died in 1942 or 1943, at places whose names we knew too well. Stumble stones, and they mark the last address at which the person they named had lived freely. Remembers a particular person at a particular place. Not an abstract mass of victims. There are now many thousands of these stumble stones installed throughout germany and indeed the whole of europe. Local groups, schoolchildren, sometimes the current household. That to doople like the Necessary Research to find out who had once lived at a given address, and then the artist who conceived of the project. He makes the stone by hand with the brass attached to the concrete cube. Here is a picture of one of them. Germany has many memorials to the holocaust, they are often quite cerebral. Installations for which the visitor usually needs some explanation, a bit of text to tell them what he is seeing. Such places avoid the legibility of a statue. You need to work at what they say, to puzzle over them. Halt at an impasse of meaning rather than moving directly from a rep or a Representational Image for some unexpected emotion, some expected moment of sorrow or loss. You have to think before you get there. Is genius of demings work that its burden seems immediately clear. You can tell what the stones are you might almost literally stumble if you bend to look. You will look as if you are stumbling. You look, you pause, you think. ,hat forces you to stop short without looking for it. It then forces itself upon you and atrocity happens here. These are the best examples i what germans call the process of working through the past. It is what one does, must do with their difficult history. It is a struggle that may last for generations. Even to those individuals who carry no personal share of the burden. Work, that work is unfinished and indeed unfinished double and indeed unfinishable. Nevertheless, the process itself has become a central part of modern Germanys National identity. And for many nongermans, the seriousness of that engagement stands as a model to emulate. It took a generation fully to begin. In the American South, it took a century. Profoundlyt is anachronistic to amend the inability of the confederacys immediate survivors to overcome their past. To note their failure, to engage in anything like it. I say it is anachronistic because the very concept depends upon a psychoanalytical language that did not then exist. What did exist was a religious vocabulary that might have gotten them to the same place. A vocabulary of justice and atonement. If only the southern churches of of not long before made their peace with slavery. Many germans felt sorry for themselves. Few of them insisted they were perfectly within their rights, and that is with the richmond journalist did in his 1866 book called the lost cause. John meacham recently written has written an essay on this. A lost cause 1866. , secession might have proved a practical impossibility, but the south had nearly bowed toward robert e lee called the norths superior numbers and resources. Their soldiers had lost, their principles, they thought, remained unvanquished. But ilogy was perfect, have never, in germany, seen a memorial like that of the second world war. I noticed in a recent book called learning from the germans which pursues the analogy, the one i am making now, at length. No carved or cast figure of or cast figure. Hitler himself looms above a german city as lee has done above virginias capital. Of course, the statues of richmonds monument avenue were not meant to honor their novel subjects. They went up around the turn of the 20th century to remind us once more who is in charge. Now, of course, that is changing. In this very summer, as we have all seen in the news. They have decided to remove the confederate memorials, stonewall jackson, and Jefferson Davis. An injunction against the removal has been thrown out, the removal proceeds and may now be done. The enormous statue of robert e lee remains because the state owns thats, and the legal work is not yet done. But many of us have seen pictures of the changes made to it this summer, and know that the circle around it has become a space where africanamerican dance troops have been performing. And where graffiti artists have been at work. The souths own work in confronting is past and is present, that eventually took public firm in selma and birmingham, at a greensboro lunch counter. Even at jimmy carters church in planes. It happens now in montgomerys new National Memorial for peace and justice, which tries to record every mention of the director, but also in dutch also spoken of series of contextualizing plaques placed next to the sites associated with the confederacy , including plaques that document the labor of slaves. That school has also decided to remove its own confederate memorial, the statue memorializing an army unit that was raised on the campus. To move it from the place where everybody in. The campus must see it to a cemetery. I think some of this work of confronting the past, though, some of it had to have been in print before it could happen in public. Be fiction ran just a little bit ahead of its time because faulkners own books, they are in themselves and furys the sound and the stands as the greatest of them, the greatest of the texts. The greatest because the most entrapped in it, the book most marked by a sense of its own failure. Mastering the past, that is precisely what they have not been able to do. No matter how much he struggles in fights, you cannot do it because the past he still lives in the moment of loss. It simply goes on happening. Yet the novelist account of that , very impossibility, that stands itself as an instance of that never finished process. I will move toward a conclusion and change my focus again and in doing so. Marked thepoet centennial with an essay. Embraced what he called the great alibi, in which justifies every failing. Poverty, laziness, to excuse he war was held to excuse them all. That relief allowed to evade his reckoning with what we can call the offense of american slavery. It stands is one reason why we have not done the work. But the yankees had a corresponding myth. Trapped by felt history, but the northerners believed in themselves redeemed by it. They might stay i forgot how , many yankee fortunes depended on slavery owned cotton. Victory underlined this of its own righteousness. Left it free to enjoy its own prejudices. It whenever i stand inside the Memorial Hall, i feel just a little bit smug, as though i were drawing on that treasure. My side was right. But the building wants to persuade us that the victory proves it was right, and it seems all too effective in doing so. That makes me recall for my own northern reflexes. It makes me think for a moment that maybe this century magazines belief and reconciliation, maybe that was not such a bad thing. And that cysto which emphasis to which they spoke, the emphasis on reunion, sense of shared suffering. Yet, an emotional appeal, like the one i described, an emotional appeal to reconciliation, thats no substitute for a historical or political judgment. In richmond, we can still drive down memorial avenue, we drive around the grand equestrian sculpture of lee, 60 feet high from the stone base to the top of his head. Of for century, the one Jefferson Davis stood down the road, a tall man standing before a column. It usually marks victory. There have been moments in our the meaning of the civil war had seemed silent. Of 2020 is not one of them. And remembering that the thought provokes, they seem to lie again at the heart of our National Life, and this summer has made it all alive again. I will only secondguess myself. But i think that Memorial Hall is finally a legitimate exercise of public memory. Of unitedhe victory states, but its active right,ration is just and partly because it focuses on the names of the dead. The confederate statues do not have that legitimacy. The one to me was erected in 1890, and it spoke of the time to the tyranny of virginias majority opinion. But has never served a morally valid purpose and its presence was always a great wrong. It was a monument always intended as an insult. To a large portion of virginias citizens. The fury does not say anything about Memorial Hall. But it does provide a curious relic of the war in the form of a minor character called deacon. He is a black man that has met every training at the start of school for the last 40 years. He runs errands, lives on tips. He has been in and out of clintons room all year. Ametimes he appears in costume of patches, dressed like uncle tom. And talking like uncle remus. In others, he wears a Brooks Brothers suit, speaks and code form gentleman to another. One the details of his biography are never clear. Quentin does not even know where he comes from. 40 years takes us back to when 1870, the memory of the fighting was new. Is deacon a southerner . Was he born a slave . He likes parades and ceremonies. Quentin sees him a few days before stepping out for Decoration Day armed with the uniform of the grand army of the republic. The dar was a Fraternal Organization whose members had served in the union forces. Its posts were integrated and during reconstruction it fought for black voting rights. Many of deacons clothes were other peoples castoffs. But i would like to think that the uniform was his from the start, that he might once have been a soldier. Uniformster the source, a man with deacons sense of occasion would tell you it was real. Boston, may, 1897, there for the unveiling of the bronze relief in honor of the 54th massachusetts. Side up longer than i anticipated, but there it is, the particular relief im talking about. This is new englands most stirring work of civil war memory. It sits at the top of beacon hill across the street from the , statehouse. Many things make it powerful. Perfectg them is the fusion between the artist skill and the Ethical Imperatives of his subject. Nothing here is abstract. Canteens and shoes, the seam of a trousers leg, the stripes on a soldiers arm, the rolls creased by the straps that hold them on each soldiers tack. No other work of civil war statuary can match the perfection of its detail. Not a gettysburg or shiloh, not in any city square in the north or south. But that alone is not the source of its power. God chose these individual men and they are individuals. Every face here is different. It shows these men at the start of the journey that would lead to their defeat near charleston. His work implies a story. It has the narrative of a great history painting. That force reminds us why the civil war is necessary. Was necessary. The work was intended as a memorial to shaw himself, rather than to his regimen. It is true his figure is the first we see. But the faces of the soldiers are modeled with equal care. The work in our minds, making the individual moment into a collective one. The statue actually captures the parade, the ceremonial parade the regiment made through boston right before the embarked. During that parade shaw , positioned himself outside his men, riding his horse alongside them. Time has renamed the work in our minds, as i said. You make the individual work into a collective one. I do not think many people in boston think of it now as the shaw memorial. It is the memorial of the 54th. The dedication was a great ceremony with speeches by the governor and the mayor. Though not by any of the surviving soldiers. Booker t. Washington was asked to talk instead. And the harvard philosopher william james. Brothers henry, and more importantly, loki james, the 54th adjutant who died in 1883, never quite recovering from the war and its wounds. Already james notes that this memorial is not for shaw alone. But the care with which Saint Gaudens depicted in a group of ordinary soldiers that sure makes it exceptional. Except, of course, they were not ordinary soldiers. They were the first black regimen recruited in the north. And as such an embodiment of the , war itself. Eminder come in james thatder, in james words, there are americans of all colors and conditions. That is why he says massachusetts, why massachusetts has honored the regimen that lost its fight. In describing both a monument and the troops on march, he seems to echo the battle hymn of the republican. Saint gaudens work is a version of that great hymn. He gives us the terrible swift sword, let us die to make men free. And that is the resolution the sculptor has placed in each mans eyes. War but not make this , they have accepted it. And they will not call retreat. Thank you. Thank you that was fantastic. Thank you, that was fantastic. We have a time for a few audience questions, but we want to start with one of my own. Dr. Gorra im sorry without my mouse i cannot get rid of this screen share. I think i can do that. Dr. Gorra thank you. Thank you so much. No problem. So there are a lot of moments in the book that stood out to me. But the first one actually came early on, 35 words in to be exact, when you called faulkner the most important novelist of the 20th century. Not among the most important, not arguably the most important, but the most important. I wonder if you can make your case for faulkner over hemingway, steinbeck and lee. Dr. Gorra sure. The most important american novelist. I think that hemingway, the i think that the comparable case perhaps would be hemingway. Although we have yet to see how bellow and Toni Morrison plays out over the decades. Hemingway is sentence by sentence. That hemingway is an innovator on the level of sentences. He is not an innovator in the form of the novel. He tells chronological narratives. With a heavy reliance on dialogue. They do not do much in the way of formal innovation. Gatsby obviously is manyormous influence on ofple, but is only one fitzgeralds novels that had that type of influence. With faulkner there is a huge shelf of works. There is a huge shelf. And that it influence has gone many ways. So the American Literature of the American South and the in the decades and generations that follow has been about faulkner. Everyone is following him or running away from him as fast as they can. I think you have heard that wonderful Flannery Oconnor line , when somebody asked would you , like to write in faulkners shadow, when the dixie wind is coming down the tracks you get out of the way. You do not want to get caught doing the same thing he does because he would overwhelm you, yet there is an attraction to the train. He has been an enormous influence on africanAmerican Literature, too. Speaks to hislf great presence. Right now younger writers, they might be fighting him, but they are engaging with him. Beyond that, i think that also, also the innovations of faulkner plays with time and memory, with , the writerw outside of himself. They have been influential for writers. This year ambition of his sentences, his willingness to try new things in every novel. There is also the fact that our sense of the past is an inescapable thing. He gives voice to this more than i think any other american novelist, 19th or 20th century. Hawthorne may be the possible exception. That is part of the way we are learning to think about our american past. Beyond that, i know this answer is going on, but i have passion about it. Faulkners had an influence abroad. In french fiction, in about 1930swriting from the on is heavily influenced by faulkner. Beyond that, my books got one review abroad, from a spanish newspaper this book has not been translated, but in the newspaper el pais. That falconerte has been crucial for spanish and latin american writers. Gabriel Garcia Marquez took one of his inspirations for 100 years of solitude from faulkner. He thought that faulkner showed how you can write about what looks like a cultural backwater. An isolated place, cut off from great cities, and make great literature out of that. Garcia marquez thought of that as an inspiration for what he wanted to do writing about colombia. I will stop there. Because i want to have other questions. But thank you for that one. An audience question here. One, given that we are week and a half out from banned books week. How would you respond to a request to not include faulkner in a College Level western civilization course . Would an instructor be justified removing him from a syllabus . I have a complicated answer to that question because i think that in a western civ course, you have an enormous range of material. You can deal with. I am not certain that there is any single 20th century novelist who has to be on that list. Yeah, there is no single 20th century novelist that has to be on that list. You have to have some example of international modernism. To be on that list. , whethert is faulkner it is virginia woolf, whether it is the portrait of the artist, you need a 20th century modernist. I am not saying you need faulkner. If it is an American Literature course, you absolutely do need faulkner. And in doing that, in some instances people might want to remove him because he can be controversial. His characters use the n word all the time. He writes about racially fraught topics. I do not like the word trigger warnings, but i do give my students in my faulkner class, i give them what Movie Reviews call a content advisor. I say, we are going to have that rape,we are going to have murder, and one novel, beastie beastiality. Violent death. We are going to have every crime imaginable. I just want you to know that. The way a movie review will say why this movie got an r rating. I think youve got to be in an American Literature class that does not say you have to admire everything that is on that page. I myself think that literature becomes most alive, not when is is presented as something to bow down before, but something to wrestle with, to engage with. Sometimes to admire and argue with. To fight with. You know, i think that thats when literature for me is most alive, when you are engaged when you are correlating with quarreling with it. What africanamerican writers have been doing with faulkner. What southern writers like Flannery Oconnor will do. There is an agonistic relationship. They fought him. I would like to encourage that in my students. Another audience question. Do you have a sense of how people in the south felt about the way faulkner wrote about the south . Any instances where may be he revealed things that they would rather he not talk about . Dr. Gorra absolutely. This is a story in the book. Uncle, who was a tough lawyer, half a century older, did not think much of him when he was young. He was welln after on into the 1930s, he said, i do not think very much of billys books. I do not read them much. I guess he makes money off them. He wrote dirty books for yankees. That is how he was regarded by a lot of those in mississippi. He is writing dirty books for yankees. To the degree that the Publishing Industry was in new york, they were being published there. He wrote books that did spill secrets. Sometimes he exaggerated things. Some College Libraries in the south in the 1930s did not want to have his books. This is the kind of, this is the thing that often happens to writers from groups that are perceived as marginalizing. The politico your thing here is the peculiar thing is that falconer rights as a member of the dominant class, white southerners, that is nevertheless marginalized within u. S. Culture as a whole. He gets accused of saying things we should keep in the family, as it were. This is something that writers from other marginalized groups run into all the time. Philip as a young man was told, you shouldnt say those things about our people in front of christian readers. Ellison got the same kind of complaints. Do not show us in that way. So this is sort of, sort of a frequent thing. But, yes, faulkner got a lot of criticism. As time went on, younger writers began to realize there was something pretty special going on in oxford. And began to write critical essays about him. But it took a while for that kind of, any kind of wide acceptance to come. I am not even certain the nobel prize was appreciated fully in his hometown. They liked the fact that eventually he would bring the tourists there based on one of his books. That brought business. But they had reservations about the work. That is a great question. Thank you. Two more here. Over the course of his work, is there a particular character that most closely represents faulkner, not so much in terms of a biography but in terms of a belief system . Dr. Gorra i want to say yes and no. There is a character in some of his later books, in intruder in the dust. And then figures in some other books, a country, the meeting leading lawyer in jefferson. A man named gavin stevens. Who will often explain things. Explain the meaning of southern history, he will explain the relations between different parts of the county. That is probably as close as it comes, except faulkner also presents him ironically, skeptically as a kind of windbag in places. He said, there is no character who really is like the faulkner persona. It is not like if you read hemingways a farewell to arms, and we know that hemingway and creating frederick henry, the narrator, has drawn very much on his own experience own love affairs. There is a lot of the author in him. Faulkners somebody moore who re who has a lot of different voices and characters, people inside him. And he wants to let them out. I would say stevens talks a lot, much more than faulkner ever did in person. Faulkner talked only on the page. But there are moments when he seems a little close to the author. And then moments would faulkner hen faulkner washes his hands of him and makes us see he is a little bit of a fool. Has faulkner taken any criticism for the sound of the fury, for the depiction of benji, a differently abled character from members of that community . If so, is that criticism warranted . Dr. Gorra right. That is a good question. This is, of course, a new strain in faulkner criticism. That people tended to sort of much of the critical history of the novel, people just tended to read benji as what the quotation is as, an idiot. They might say that he has down syndrome and so on. Disability studies in critical literature is a growth area. I have seen more recent readings that suggest that benji is in some ways autistic. However one wants to define that. The criticism is more directed at other critics. At earlier critics further narrow for their version of benji. Not so much at faulkner himself. This may change. This is an area where there is a lot of critical literature being written about benji from the disability studies point of view. But the criticism is more directed at earlier critical traditions than at faulkner himself. I will say here that he did have an actual person in mind when he created benji. It was a young man that lived in town in a large white house with a history to the house. A wrought iron fence around its yard. If you visit oxford, people will take you into drive you by and say that is the model for the thompson house. Faulkners first teacher. He would run along the fence looking at people. Faulkner was, he was, this bored young man was often teased by others. And faulkner himself was very upset by the way people would tease and bother him. And when he even after writing , the sound and the fury, he , and henfant daughter would often take his daughter jill and go for walks and they would visit edwin chandler. So that is a biographical story i love. Thats great. I am going to close here. I mentioned before we got started that one of my favorite books is our declaration by danielle allen. In that book, she parses the declaration of independence line by line, word by world. D. And parses every possible meaning based on the context to a change in comma placement. You do not go quite that far but there are examples of your book of how do we interpret this particular line, in particular the old man follows the example you use where he is asked what , they are fighting for . He says, be damned if i ever did know. You asked the question. Is that he never knew or is that he thought he knew and now he realizes he never did know . But i wonder is there a line in particular that stands out to you that may be been misinterpreted by readers over the years . Dr. Gorra yeah, well, this lines thatot of could have been misinterpreted, but this question is really a test of my memory, how much i can remember particularly , faulkner lines. I remember details of plot and character. I have never been able to memorize a poem. So i am going to cheat. I am going to say the shortest chapter where the character is eight years old, his mother has just died. And simultaneously he has caught a big, big fish down the creek. And somehow the two events get confused in his mind and he says, this is the entirety of the chapter. My mother is a fish. Some early readers took that line to mean as an indication that bartelman himself was an idiot, that he was crazy, that he was unstable in some way. But no, his mother just died. Later in the novel he becomes an entirely reliable witness. He doesnt understand everything, but he is a reliable witness. This my mother is a fish. My students always laugh because that is the entire chapter. But it is what faulkner does to suggest that these two things have become associated in his mind in this moment of trauma and gotten themselves confused with each other. But early readers, who would not gotten yet a handle on what faulkner was doing, they often did not see that. Excellent. Thank you so much for joining us. This is great. Good luck with the rest of your virtual book tour. Dr. Gorra and i hope my mouse comes back. Good night, everybody. Announcer American History tv is on social media. Follow us cspan history. Announcer the 1918 flu pandemic altered American Life in ways that are familiar to those living through the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. Conflicting information left people wary and fearful. College classes were held outside, sports were canceled, masks were challenged as unamerican, and fines imposed on those who refuse to wear them. Next, Christopher Mcknight nichols recounts how the country experienced the events of a century ago and the lessons we might learn. He directs the oregon university