The Enemy Within

Abstract

THE 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature left William Faulkner with an increased appreciation of responsible heredity. Receipt of this international legacy raised issues both as to his personal profile and as to the repute of his ongoing literary bequest. Faulkner’s response to these concerns, especially his compliance in fulfilling ambassadorial duties, has led to an almost singular interpretation of his subsequent novels: obedience toward governmental summons spells a conservative withdrawal from Modernist principles. This critical tenor, however, is mistaken. At one level, as Kevin Railey argues, “Faulkner’s career had really only one motivation right from the beginning—the desire and drive to be a natural aristocrat both in terms of art and life” (44). Faulkner attempted to inhabit this role through an ideology resembling that first articulated in America by Thomas Jefferson. This view constructs society not according to title or wealth, but in a hierarchy “whose most powerful figures are men who are, in theory, naturally better and more superior than others.” Hence, rather than altering Faulkner’s evolutionary sensibilities, the Nobel Prize actualized them. He “had, in his own eyes, indeed become a natural aristocrat” (43). At another level, Faulkner understood his international recognition as a demand for continued intellectual resilience.

One recent summer I myself was having a literary talk at a cocktail party with an obliging Russian. I asked if there were many Snopeses in the Soviet Union. “There are none,” he replied sharply. “Under the Soviet system it is impossible to have Snopeses.”

Willie Morris, “Faulkner’s Mississippi” (327)