Please give them a look. I mentioned to some of the other day, i was reading the words in preparation for tonight and thats the new faulkner biography. You have the faux fur part right. The best way i could describe this book is equal parts. Military history social commentary and literary criticism. I think all appear equally to fans many of those subjects. What the book really did for me, was forced me to get some serious thought to his fans where at the time we are asking ourselves difficult questions about our countrys history on issues of race. Was he a pioneer it was another white wire that was profiting off of the characters of black americans. Is a professor englishman literature at Smith College in massachusetts sits which was a finalist for the pulitzer prize. Is essays have come up in the New York Times book review. Thank you for joining us tonight. Thank you very much for having me. I want to thank the library for hosting and my friends that live right for putting us together. I am going to share my screen and i will take just a second and i will start talking. Here we go. Okay. My title seems cryptic. The saddest words. There is two of them was and again, they come from William Faulkners 1929 novel the sound in the fury. It will become clear as we go along. And there is the title of this new book, for which the that tries to ask a few simple questions. So simple, but terribly complicated. First what can faulkner tell us about the civil war. And what can that war tell us about him . How can we use them to think about each other . And how could they help us understand, this moment in our national life. Ive always read and taught faulkner. This isnt a subject that i wouldve predicted for myself and i began my teaching career. I want to say a bit about how i got here. In 2010 i was finishing a book on henry james, and i was living abroad. I was living awhile in paris. And i was reading the news from home. I was learning in that Midterm Election year, about a new enemy inexplicable movement called the tea party. And i was reading a blog in the New York Times called this union. It was 150 years since lincoln had been elected, and the paper decided to follow a week by week course of the civil war. I read, and then i heard an echo. It seemed to call out so many of the nations as soon as if our times rang off that one. As if nothing had stopped or change or gone away. Which is itself is a very faulkner in thought. And then watson and i realized i wanted to write an american book. Most of my scholarly articles had been on british things like henry james. Living abroad had made me far more cautiously interested in my own country than i had ever been before. It may be see a need to look more closely to our history, in our literature, and i need to sort out what i thought about the american past. I wanted to write as an american about america. I came to see this as an act in some ways of belated act, an active citizenship as well scholarship. Whats better to focus on the civil war. And then i saw that i could say everything i wanted to about that war, and above all about its memory. By taking up a writer that i already knew and loved. The project has taking me far beyond faulkners work itself. I had myself sink into the letters and diaries, the speeches and members of the war, and the other fiction about. It and the ways it was depicted in the historiography of faulkner. Even the schoolbooks that he used as a boy. In his native of oxford mississippi. He had a few battlefield visits, a few monuments in visits. Monuments to think about in the summer especially. The war is both everywhere and nowhere in faulconer. You she rarely writes about a explicitly, he doesnt do battle scenes. And yet it causes and consequences, they provide an explanation for everything in his world. But more, it also shapes the deep structure of his imagination. Its always there. Even when it doesnt seem to be. Thats how its going to be in this top as well. There will be some moments to follow, where were not talking about civil war self. Its as if im focusing on private life, and a few faulkners character. Many of you will know, that he set most of his work in a place he called county. You often carried characters over from one book to another. Hotlines to. As if we had to say, wouldnt be confined to a single book. And particular, he wrote two novels about a character called quentin thompson. Oddly enough, each of them was set partly in massachusetts at harvard. Where faulkner himself had not yet been when he invented the character. One of the books was published in 1936, and it depends on the question that what quentin had asked ever since he arrived at harvard. Tell about the south. What is it like there. What do they do their . Why do they live there . Why do they live it all . Thats whats the other Harvard Students want to know says walker. Clinton tries to answer those questions, i tell a story that goes back to 1830, with twists and turns inherently upon race. But that was faulkners second novel. The sound in the fury came first. So he drowned some self in the charles at the end of his freshman year. This is testament to somebody that was already dead so were not gonna start with clinton. Or even with faulkner. Im going to start with henry james. The other novelist. In a character called basil ransom. Im going to start there because basil to, originally comes from mississippi. He is a lawyer, he goes to boston on business. He gets taken to see a new building on the harvard campus. A place called Memorial Hall, that is built in 1870 for a monument to the union cause. So he fought for the confederacy. And he is willing. And he agrees that the inscription on the wall, the dead were brave. And i must be brave enough to face them. It is not the first time. Memorial hall, is divided into three. The cedar on one side, dining hall on the other. Its real business happens in between them. High arch, and on its walls or tablets, with the name of harvard civil. They listed by the class year, done by the battle and the day of the death. So james writes, he writes that the hall speaks of duty and honor, and sacrifice. But he does not tell us the meaning that i had for him. Two of his cousins are listed there. And so is a man named robert moon shaw. That was a regiment of black troops, with white officers. One of the first such units that the army was reluctant to step them to accept them. They took many casualties in the first major battle near charleston. They were defeated. But in defeat they showed a skeptical white america. That blackmon would make good soldiers. A lot more to say about that later. The flax for the class of 1860, they now 12 names. More than 10 of its number. 11 men on that walt died at gettysburg. But to basil, place is the reverse of a challenger taunt, he was capable of being a generous full men. He forgot now, the whole question of signs in parties. Only that he too had been a soldier. That is whats to him, the building commemorates. Arching over friends as well as enemies. The victims of defeat as well as the sons of triumph. Boston eons were serialized in a magazine called the century. The best magazine at the end of the 18 century 19th century the 18 story. He fought for the union, and he helped a way to feel division of white america. Many of the pages in the 18 eighties, they were devoted to a series called battles and leaders of the civil war. To set some memoirs, of the surviving commanders on either side. A claim to look at the conflict, from a strictly Military Point of view. To analyze neither of the causes, nor the consequences. Vessels note of reconciliation is that this is very much the note of the magazine itself, the place where historians first published. From anyone like him, as the historian guilt, that soldier scent of shared suffering, will override all sectional, or ideological differences. And establish a sacrifice and its memorialization. And the ground which struck itself would ultimately reunite. If that sense of a common loss, that emerged only after the reconstruction. It was not the spirit in which Memorial Hall was built. And a carving on the wall, tells us that 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 oils loyal citizens, and for them only. Harvards confederate dead, had no place not memorial space. Memorial hall, was a space of triumph. 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 our rights line to the civil war, and a wrong one. Reconciliation for him that hes gone too far. Memorial hall does not forget such things. It insists that the confederacy or soldier had any on the claim they made. Still whenever i read the boston eons, i am stirred by basils open hearted emotion. When i stood inside imMemorial Hall, i remember during the Academic Year of 1999 to 90 ten, and equally fictional mississippi and would have to have entered that Building Three times a day, if you want to eat. There are other doors to the dining hall, and he thought as clinton, he would always want to walk by that line of dead union names, but maybe sometimes he did. What would he have made of them . Now this began as a short story of four children, who parents had set them outside to play. Hoping to keep the kids from being aware that their grandmother just died. And theres a girl called caddie from candice, and her drawers under her short dress had gotten medium wet. Nash clumps tree next to the house, she looks in an upstairs window, she used her if she wants to see what is going on. And her brother these stare up at her from below. That moment will fix them forever. Counting the names in the soils ruled by an expulsion from the family. Clinton stays in place, afraid to follow, but wanting to. Then jason, who threatens to tell on him. The youngest child, benji he walks without being able to speak. Hes the idiot in the lines of which faulkner takes his title. Were foresee caddie, in his eyes. They cannot distinguish between past and present. The first person narration, such from moment to moment, to his mom in the present, 1928, then back again and each period encased within another. The movement between them triggered by association, a reputation. When suicide followed, and the ruins of family life that followed. The author leader said he was trying to tell all this through benji. It didnt work, and so he started over, this time questioning quentins voice. He said 1910 was the last day of his life. Try again, failure in, and he moves in the rationed back to 1928. You can on his vicious vicious jason. But still wasnt enough he said. So he said i will let faulkner try it. The concluding section written in the third person. Each of the three first person sections, each of those depends not on the narrator present, but rather on the past he cant escape, and in each case that passed is defined in terms of force we dont hear. Caddie is both missing, and gone. She has an absolute presence and her brothers cannot ever accommodate themselves. None of them will ever get over it. To be traumatized, as a cultural historian wrote, is precisely to be possess, by an image or event. And experience one cannot master. The unwitting reenactment of an event, that one cannot seem to leave behind. Trauma, trauma lies in our debate to a violence that our minds cannot encompass. Its a non yielded memory. A repetition that forces us to live our past relive our past. Those who suffer from it, have no choice but to circle around their own experience, and approaching the psychic space with a least want to be, yet lost. Drawn by its fascination, and its horror. Faulkner tells the constant story, four times. Hoping that each will be its last. And the brothers themselves, they always return to caddies memory, and sniff it it. Unable to let it alone. For benji she was comfort, to jason she contains the future that he has not had. And for my purposes, clinton is the one who. On the last day of his life most of what happens to quit and will happen in memory. Most of what counts anyway. He knows what he will do that night, and he buys to flat irons to weight himself in the river. He sits down to a man on the street are, and it is amazed as to how easy he finds them. But what is interesting is a life that lies behind him. The life in memory. The past which he could not stop caddie from being who she is. What matters is his family. So the days slips two years, and he stands by the tree. Catalyze in the water, her skirt soaked and flopping against or she climbs out. Then she says with her face, tilted back in the gray light, pushy didnt she tells a, push harder. I want you to. And he asked her to touch it. To put out her hand, and guide his way. Her hand upon the knife that he holds at his throat. And shes willing she says. Willing to die as she says she did when the other man touched her. Have you ever done that she asks and he esther how many men have she bed she only says too many. Neurologist have identified in which a disorder cold. A memory presents itself, unbidden. With the totality of sensory detail. Those afflicted with it and see their past as if it was a film and continue to show reruns of unforgettable reruns. Such memories feel more real than those present. So clintons conversation would return to him throughout the day. Two moments in which he loses his present and steps will into his past. To such moments call for particular attention. After he feels with a knife, he goes and he is not caddies first lover but he is the man who got her pregnant. They meet at a bridge, i say he must go not my father not anybody i say. And it dealt in doesnt i will kill him. Games is both amused and concerned. When the war repeatedly tristate him, he tries to stop him. Only then he realizes hes holding a wet bloodstained rag, with his face feeling cold. Hes isnt in mississippi at, all all rather in massachusetts. Still without realizing, it is picked a fight with another young man who he has been talking to casually about women. He has gone into a fume, in which the president s seems to vanish. A fight triggered by the memory, the memory by the fight. The president is vanished for us as well. Well read for a dozen pages, without quite knowing where clinton physically is. And only faulkners broken syntax, and punctuated in lower case lines spilling down the stage, that is the only thing to remind us that we are really inside clintons mind. The day remembers itself for him. That he snaps back into the president , and his roommate tells him hes gonna have a shining. And a crucial conversation with his father plays in his mind, a conversation about his own inability to accept the fact that she is no longer a virgin. Your anguish, your anguish rose out of a purely temporary state. Thats what virginity is of caddies and his own. Its something we are meant to move on from, something we are meant to lose. And so is pain itself. But the boy will have none of it. And i, temporary and he you cannot bear to think that someday we will no longer hurt you like this. And i temporary and he was, the saddest word of all. There is nothing else in the world. It is not despair until time, its not even time until it was. Was. Its fixed unchanging. Concluded, and therefore temporary indeed. It is in contrast, is ongoing and permanent. Is for clinton is trauma, is the everpresent Family History that defines him. No nothing worse than the pain is the belief that he might someday get over it and it might indeed be temporary. Was allow survival, and it to discard that trauma, to believe he might not live it, that dismisses the very room for what constitutes itself. Clinton would rather die than imagine someday it will not hurt. Was is the saddest its the pass that one cannot mend. Clinton will find a different way. It returns into the very end of the evening, the very end of the chapter faulkner devotes to. It goes to a little while before he killed himself. Thats conversation is been on the edge of his mind all day. That morning he stood along the charles, and with a stiff envelope was a suicide note cracking through his coat. For second imagine some selfin the future, as if he is going to live. That his fathers word comes back to him, on spoken in mississippi this summer before. Was. Thats what he soon will be, was. Past tense. Here that time that syllable floats on a page without explanation. He has already had that conversation with his father. We havent. Not yet, we have not read it yet. For us it was 50 pages on. So we dont know what that word means to him. So is next thought in this early thought in this narrative is rather cryptic. Again. Sater then was, again. Saddest of all. Again. We wont understand that claim until it becomes literally true. Until that exchange with his father runs through his head once more. Youll hear those words again. You remember caddie again, satyr than was. Saddest of all. Hes me i need a little liquid. What does all this have to do at the war . All this . Thats the question i want to explore before returning to Memorial Hall at the end of my top. Faulkner body of subject is the wreath and unfulfilled desire to which his character is forever subject. Anguish is never purely personal. Theres a deep between the movements of faulkners mind, with a sense of an inescapable family trauma. And a history of culture of this region. So deep it hardly seems possible to distinguish between them. The high tower in light of august from 1930, he believes his life has already seized before it began. He is in a single instance of darkness, a horse gallop and a gun crashed, and its confederate grandfather fell in the dust. Or take a later novel from 1948, that book tells us there is a place in the minds of every southern white boy, when it is still not 2 00 on the third day of gettysburg. And the failed charge against the union has not begun. Thats what clinton wants. A past that is still not yet. That is yet to become was. A moment in which it all still is, a moment before the past becomes irreparable. In which he could stay forever. Someday all this will not burden. That is precisely what he cannot accept. You cant accept the idea of outbidding his own pain. He lives in an afterlife. He has to tell us about the south, is that it all happens over and over again. The same troubles and events, the same quarrels, the same memories and generations from cheating themselves. Theyre in many ways to understand this the most useful lines in pushing our sense of trauma beyond the bounds of the individual psyche. He also suggested traumatic event remain underrepresented will. The event itself as opposed to its memory. Wagner works to he almost never presented directly. He prefers to right around a gap instead. Only the president s in the narratives from brothers town. Only the pain of loss and so it is with the civil war itself, it is felt and yet in faulkners work it is nowhere fully presented. They hear the past as it cries out for quentin and perhaps for his creator, too. A trauma induced by the 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. 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 empty eyes beneath his marbled hand in wind and whether. If youre looking closely youll see that this one doesnt have his hand up to his eyes because in the novel faulkner used to statues he fuse them into one. This one in the square in 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. 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 as 250 years of bloody and unrequited toil. It belongs to most of white america, the country in which the blue and the gray over consult them selves and become one. And meanwhile the marble man stands century in the courthouse square, in solid triumph over a black body. The books last page makes that literally true. On that page teenage servant lester, he tries to take the carriage to the statues left rather than to the accustomed left. He gets a beating in consequence nevertheless, the past 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 the german city of hamburg. A city i knew well but as i look ahead of me, i saw something new on the sidewalk before me. I saw black a brass plate, i away ahead of myself. Im sorry my powerpoint jump. I have to get it back and my mouse has lost connection. It will come back in a second. Im so sorry for that. Hang on. I got it, sorry about that, my mouse has lost power. I was walking down the street in the german city and i saw a bright new metallic beam in the street light. When i looked we saw harass plate size and shape of the cobblestone had been replaced. It was engraved with a name and some dates. In the front of the next house we saw another, and then another down the block. All the surnames were jewish. But the birthdays had very, everyone listed on those stones had died in 1942 or 1943, at places whose names we knew too well. Who called stumble stones. They marked the last address and which the person they named had lived freely each of them remembered as a particular person at a particular place. Not an abstract massive victims. There are now many thousands of these stones installed throughout germany and indeed the whole of europe. Local groups, school children, sometimes the current household. People like that do 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. Heres a picture of one of them. Germany has many memorials to the holocaust, they are often quite cerebral. Installations for which the visitor usually need some explanation, a bit of tax to see 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. A moment of sorrow or loss. They have to think before you get there. The burden seems immediately clear. You can tell the stones are about. Yet one stumbles anyway. You might literally stumble if youve been to look. You will look as if your stumbling. You look, you pause and you think. And it forces you to stop short. You come upon it casually, without looking for it. And then forces itself upon you. Atrocity happened here. These are the best examples i know of what germans call. Its a long awkward word, its a word made by putting lots words together. Its a process of working through, working through the past, its what one does, and must do with a difficult history. Its a struggle that may last for generations. And it extends even to those individuals who carry no personal share of the burden. Not work that work is unfinished, and unofficial. Many on that countries right, resent it but nevertheless the process itself, has become a central part in modern Germanys National identity. For many nongermans, the seriousness of that engagement stance as a model. It took a generation fully to begin, in the american self it took a century. Of course its profoundly anachronistic, to look at the confederacy, and see how it survives to overcome its past. To note the failure, to engage in anything like it and the very concept depends upon a cycle psycho analytical language that did not exist, or did exist or what did exist was a religious vocabulary of vocabulary of justice, and atonement if only the sudden southern churches made their peace with slavery. Many germans felt sorry for themselves when the shooting was over a few of them insisted that they were perfectly in their rights. And thats what edward pollers did in 1866, and jean meacham has done an essay on this book. A lost cause, and that was in 1866. Succession might have proved the fact the possibility that the south had near had bowed, to what they call the norths superior numbers and resources. Their principles they thought, remained and vanquished. No analogy is perfect, but i have never in germany seen anything like the conventional memorial of the second world war. The philosopher susan ayman, had a book called learning from the german. Which foresees this analogy that im waking that im making now at length. No cast figure, or novel or even if hitler himself, looms above a german city as lee orgy ev stalwart, has historically done above virginias capital. Of course the statue of richmond in monument avenue, they were knocked around the turn of the 20th century, to remind us all of what was in charge. But that is not changing in this very summer as we have seen on the news. Richmond itself has decided to remove the confederate memorials, stonewall jackson, Jefferson Davis and an injection against this has been thrown out, the removal proceedings and i think now weve been done. The statue of robert e. Lee remains, because the state owns that. But many of us have seen pictures of the changes made to it this summer i know that the circle around it becomes space were African American dance troops have been, and graffiti artists. Souths own work in confronting its past, and its present but eventually took public form, in birmingham and in greensboro at a lunch counter, and even in jimmy carters church and planes it happen in montgomery the, National Memorial for peace and stress this. And tries to record every lynching, where Brian Stevenson has spoken of the german analogy its happening in faulkners hometown of oxford. Were many plaques, are placed next two sites associated with the confederacy. Including tablets and documents in the language of the slaves. That school has also decided to remove its own confederate memorial, the statue memorializing. They moved it from a place where everybody seeing it walking in there to a cemetery. The statue. I think some of us work of confronting the past though i think some of that work had to happen in print before it could happen in public and maybe fiction then just a little bit ahead of its time because faulkners own books, they are in themselves. And perhaps the stand of the fury stands as the greatest of them. The greatest because the most entrapped. The book most marked by the sense of its own failure. Mastering the past, that is precisely what quentin has not been able to do. No matter how much he struggles and fights he cannot do it because the past for him has not even past because he still lives in the moment of loss and simply goes on happening, and if the novel is an account of that very impossibility well that sense in itself as an instance of that never finished process. I will move toward a conclusion, and change my focus again in doing so. In 1961 the novelist and poet marked centennial, with an essay called legacy of the civil war. The legacy he defined in terms of different psychological costs if the war hadnt posted on the other side. He causes the great alibi which the reference to defeat shows every feeling but the war was held to excuse the wall, and after we allowed south in what lincoln calls the offense of american slavery, it stands one reason why it cannot do the work it should. Southerners felt trapped by history, but northerners believe himself redeem by it. Then perhaps i might say i, have forgot how many yankee fortunes depended on the war. Saw the drudgery of virtue. Victory underline the sense of its own righteousness. Left free to enjoy, the own prejudices its own prejudices. Whenever i stand inside harvards Memorial Hall. I feel a little bit smug. As though i were drawing,. My side was right, but the building wants to persuade us that they can prove it was right. And the play seems all too affected are effective in doing so. That means that makes me recoil from my own northern reflexes. Makes me think for a moment, that maybe century magazines belief in reconciliation, maybe that was not a bad thing. And that emphasis to which through foulest have spoken, the emphasis on reunion and sheer suffering. Yet unemotional peel, like the one i just described unemotional peel, of reconciliation. That is no substitute for historical, or political gesture. In richmond we can indeed still drive down memorial avenue, and drive around the grant equestrian sculpture of lee, 50 feet high. From the stone base to the top of his head. For a century, the one of Jefferson Davis stood further down the road. A tall man, standing before column. That usually marks a victory. There been moments in our past, when the meaning of the civil war has seemed. This now in 20 wheny is not one of them. The question of race, region and remembrance, of the thought of that war they seem to lie again at the heart of our national life. This summer has made them all vivid again. I will always second guess myself. But i do think that Memorial Hall, is finally illegitimate exercise in public memory. It shows the victory of the united states, but its act of commemoration, is just and right. In part because its focus on the individual names of the dead. The confederate statues do not have that legitimacy. The one to be, was erected in 1890. But he spoke at the time, to virginias majority opinion. But he has never served a more invalid purpose, and its presence was always a great wrong. It was a monument, that was always intended as an insult, to a large portion of virginia citizens. The sound of 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. Hes a black man, who has met every train for the last 40 years. He runs errands, luzon tips and he has been in and out of quentins room for a long year. Sometimes he appears in costume, just like uncle tom, and talking like uncle remiss. And sometimes he wears a Brooks Brothers soup, he speaks also from as one gentlemen to another. A brooks brother suit he was wearing. And clinton does not even know where he comes from. Years back to 1870, when the memories of the fighting was new. Was deacon born a slave . He likes parades, and ceremonies. Clinton has seen him just a few days before. Stepping out for decoration day, in the uniform of the grand armory of the republic. And the g. A. R. , was it infernal organization. All its members serve to the union forces. During reconstruction, it fought for black rose voting rights. Many of deacons close, our other peoples casts off. I would like to think uniform was his from the start. That he might have been once a soldier. No matter that uniform source. A man with deacons sense of occasion would if you are real. That we lost in may 1987. I put this lineup earlier, and i dissipated thats where it is, thats the particular relief im talking about. This is new englands most stirring work of silver memory. This it sits at the top of is beacon hill. Across the street from the statehouse. Many things make it. Powerful. Among it is a perfect 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 roles creased by the straps that hold them on each soldiers tack. No other work of civil war statuary can match the perfection of this in 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. 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 was necessary. The work was intended as memorial to shock more than itself. The figure is the first we see. The faces of the soldiers are modeled with equal care. Making the individual moment into a collective one. The statue actually captures the parade, the ceremonial parade the regiment made through boston right before it embarked. During that parade, shaw position himself outside of his men alongside of them. Time has rename the work in our minds. It makes the individual work into a collective one i dont think many people in boston think of it now as the sean memorial. Its 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. But more importantly, loki james, the 54th adjutant who died in 1880 three, never recovering from the war and its wounds. Already james notes that this memorial is not for shaw alone. But the care with which saint gardens was 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 regiment to be recruited in the north. And in such an embodiment of the war itself. Reminder, in james as words, that there are americans of all in all colors and conditions. That is why he says, massachusetts is an honor regiment that lost its fight. In this scribe in both a monument and the troops on march seems to echo the battle of the republic. He gives us the terrible swift sword, let us die to make men free. And that is the resolution sculpture placed in each mans eyes. They did not make this war, but they have accepted it and they will not call retreat. Thank you. Thank you doctor gore that was fantastic. Time for a few audience questions. But i want to start with one of my own. I am sorry without my mouse i cant get rid of the screen share. I think i could do that. Perfect thank you so much. No problem. There are a lot of moments in the book that stood out to me. The first one came early on. 35 words in to be exact. When you say you called volker the most important novelist of the 20th century. Not among the most important but the most important. Could you make your case for faulconer over people like fits gerald hemingways time back and lee . We youre. I think that hemingway the comparable taste would be hemingway. Although we have yet to see how the influence of bellow and Tony Morrison plays out over the decades. Hemingways influence is stylistic. Its sentence by sentence. Hemingway is an innovator and a level of a sentence. He is not an innovator in the form of a novel. He tells chronological narratives. With heavy reliance on dialog. They dont do much in the way of formal innovation. A great gatsby is an enormous influence on many people. But i think thats one of faulkners novels or fitzgeralds novels that has influence. Theres a with faulkner is a huge shelf of works. And that influence has gone in many ways. Southern americans the literature of the American South in the decades the generations of follows as inconceivable without faulkner. Everyone is either running is or either following him or running away from him. Its like to write in faulkner shadow when hes coming down the tracks you get out of the way. He was inescapable. You want to be caught doing the same things he does. Theres an attraction to the train. He has had an enormous influence on American Literature as well. Morrison herself to be in a great presence. Right now younger writers he might be fighting him but they are engaging with him. The innovations of faulkner, in time and memory like point of view his willingness to try new things in every novel. Theres also the fact that our sense of the past is an inescapable thing. Hes the one that gives voice to that, more than any other american novelist the 21st century. That has become part of the way we are learning to think about our american past. Faulkner has had an enormous influence. And french fiction a lot of french writing from the 1930s on is heavy lee influenced by faulkner. Beyond that, my book has gotten one review abroad its in a spanish newspaper. It was in the madrid newspaper he wrote that faulkner has been crucial for spanish and latin american writers. Took one of his inspirations from 100 years of solitude from partner. He thought that faulkner showed how you could write about what looks like a cultural background. An isolated place cut off from great cities, and make great literature out of that. Garcia marcus thought of that as an inspiration for what he wanted to write about columbia. I could go on but ill stop there and see if theres other questions thank you for that one. A nice question here its a good one doctor gore how would you respond to quest that did not put faulkner i have a complicated answer to that question. Because because i think that western severe course, we have an enormous range of material you can deal with. Im not certain theres any single 20th century novelist was to be on that list, theres no single 20th century novels that has to be on the list. You have to have some example of International Modernism to be on that list. Whether its faulkner or virginia wulf, whether its the portrait of the artist, you need the 20th century novelist. Im not saying you need faulkner. If its in American Literature course i think absolutely need faulkner. In doing that, somebody might want to get this he can be controversial. His characters use the nword all the time, he writes about racial fraught topics. I dont like the word trigger warnings but i do give my students in my talking class i give content advisories. More gonna have that word, were gonna have rape murder and incest. In one book bc ali, or gonna have violent death. Were gonna have every crime imaginable. I want to know that, the way the Movie Reviews will say why this movie got an all rating. I think it has to be an American Literature class that doesnt say have to admire everything thats on that page. I myself think that literature becomes most alive not when its presented as something to bow down before, but something to wrestle with. Something to engage with. Sometimes to argue with and admire. To fight with. I think that is whats literature for me is most alive. When you are engaged and sometimes when you are quarreling with it. Thats why say writers and the African American writers still follow poker. Whats some southern writers were doing. Theres an agnostic relationship. They fought him. I like to encourage that in my students too. Heres another audience question. Given the sense of how people in the south felt away faulkner wrote about the south, were there any instances that many revealed things that maybe they would rather not talk about . Absolutely. This is a story in the book, faulkners uncle who was a tough lawyer, half a generation older. Didnt think much of of billy when billy was young. Thats what they call them in the family. Even after 12 out into the 1930s, i dont think very much abilities books. I dont read them much. I guess he makes money off them for those Journey Books for yankees. That is how he was regarded by a lot of people in mississippi. Hes writing Journey Books for yankees. The Publishing Industry new york they were being published by yankees. He has wrote books that did spill secrets. Sometimes exaggerated things. Some libraries in the south in the 1930s did not want to have his books this is a thing that often happens to writers two groups that are conceived as marginalized and nothing is here for care rights as a member of a dominant class. 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 will. This is something that writers from other marginalized groups run into all the time. He was told that you shouldnt say those things about our people in front of christian readers. Richard wright got the same kind of complaints. Dont show us in that light. This is sort of a frequent thing. Putnam got a lot of criticism. As time went on, younger writers his own age started realizing there was Something Special going on. It took a while for that kind of white acceptance to come. Im not even certain that the nobel prize new fully in his hometown. They like the fact that eventually he was bringing tourists there, or a movie based on one of his books was shot in oxford. Its good for business. They had reservations about the work. Thats a great question thank you. Well do more here. Over the course of all as work, because theyre putting a character that most closely resembles faulkner himself . Not in terms of biography but maybe in terms of a belief system . I want to say yes and no. There is a character in some of presents him ironically. Skeptically like wind bag. There is no character who really is like the faulkner persona. Its not like if you read hemingways and creating the narrator of that novel was drawn very much of his own experience and world war i and has gone beyond him theres a lot in him. Faulkner is more to have more characters, and people inside him. Stephens talks a lot and much more than faulkner did in person he only talked on page. But there are moments when he seems a little close to the author. And then moments would faulkner started to wash his hands of him and makes us see he is a little bit of a fool. I change my mind or to do two more. Has faulkner taken any criticism criticism for the sound of the fury depiction of benji, i differently abled character and member of the community. 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 of people just tended to read benji as what the quotation is as in idiot. They might say that he has down syndrome. 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 anyone wants to define that. Flip the criticism is more directed at other critics. At earlier critics than for their narrow version of benji. Not so much at faulconer him self. 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 conditions then faulkner himself. I will say he had an actual person in mind when he created benji. It was a young man who lived in town, in a large white house with a history to the house. With the wrought iron fence around its yard. Its very much like the house if you visit oxford, people take you around that is the model for the thompson house. This guys name is ed wen chandler. His older sister had been faulkners teacher. You would run along the fence looking at people. Faulkner was, this young man was often teased by others, and fall karen selfwas very upset by the way people with ease and bother him. Even after writing the sound and the fury, he had an infant daughter he would often take his daughter jill, and go for walks and they would visit edward chandler. So that is a biographical story i actually 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 daniel allen the book she goes to the declaration of independence line by line, word by word. She parse is every possible meaning from context to change in camel placement. You dont go quite that far, but there are examples in your book on how we interpret this particular line, particularly the old man follows the example you use where he is asked what are they fighting for and he says be if i ever did know. You asked the question, is that he never knew . Or is that he thought he knew and i realizes he never did know . But i wonder, is there a line in particular that stands out to you that has been misinterpreted by readers over the years . Yeah, well, this question has tested my memory of how much i can remember, particularly faulkner lines. I have i remembered details of plotting character. I have never been able to memorize a poem. So i am going to cheat. And i am going to say the shortest chapter where the character is eight years old, his mother has just died. And simultaneously he is 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 bartel man himself was an i diot, that he was crazy, that he was unstable in some way. But no. He suffered a traumatic event. His mother had just died. Later he becomes a completely well reliable authoritative witness. It doesnt understand everything he is seen but he is a reliable witness. His mother is a fish, my students always laugh because when they get to this chapter. But it is wet falcons 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 had not yet gotten a handle on what faulkner was doing, they often misread that. Excellent. Doctor thank you so much for joining us. This was great. Good luck with the rest of your virtual book tour. I hope my mask comes back. All right and everyone. Look at whats coming up tonight beginning at eight eastern, a couple of programs from our American History tvs real america series. First all the way home, a 1957 film looking at changing racial thats the american look this looks at the start of mass goods in the 19 fifties including classic american cars. At 9 pm we will show you the cable tv pioneers induction ceremony, honoring 22 men and women who have made lasting contributions to todays cable and broadband industry. At 9 55 more from real america, with crisis and levitation, a film about racial issues in american suburbs during the 19 fifties. Our districts in the triangle district in north carolina. Im in three counties. The county where i live is orange county, which is chapel in hillsborough. There is a strip