★ 09/14/2020

Smith College English professor Gorra (Portrait of a Novel) examines the Civil War as the “all-determining absence” at the center of William Faulkner’s life (1897–1962) and work in this immersive and enlightening account. Blending history, travelogue, biography, and literary analysis, Gorra treats the Yoknapatawpha novels and stories as a “single enormous text” spanning the 1830s to the 1930s, and moves back and forth between Faulkner’s fictional universe and real-world events during the same time frame. Gorra visits the battlefield at Gettysburg to walk the path of Pickett’s Charge, notes that Faulkner’s most fecund period (from the late 1920s to the early 1940s) coincided with “the heights of Confederate hagiography,” and finds parallels between W.E.B. Du Bois’s views on race and Reconstruction and those expressed in Faulkner’s fiction. Gorra sees characters including Ike McCaslin, Bayard Sartoris, and Quentin Compson as reflective of Faulkner’s personal attempts to reconcile his Southern heritage with his rejection of the principles behind slavery, though he remains clear-eyed about the novelist’s “incoherence” on the civil rights movement. Fluidly written, expertly researched, and brilliantly conceived, this is an essential reckoning with Faulkner’s art and the legacy of the Civil War. (Aug.)

"Eloquent analysis. . . . Graceful. . . . A nimble hybrid that blends literary analyses with history, biography, and personal narrative. . . . [Gorra] movingly narrates the debacles at Bull Run and Gettysburg and effortlessly slides from astute analyses of Faulkner’s best stories, like ‘Mountain Victory,’ to such novels as The Sound and the Fury, The Unvanquished (1938), and Go Down, Moses (1942).”"

"As esteemed literary scholar Gorra informs us in this transcendent study, European audiences had long considered Faulkner one of the leading modernists . . . Gorra expertly mines his own deep reading of the Faulkner oeuvre to serve as our Virgil and guide us through an exploration of how the Civil War influenced Faulkner’s work and how, in turn, Faulkner’s writing helped shape modern literature. Gorra adroitly and poignantly portrays Faulkner at war with himself, juxtaposed and entwined with the history of a cleaved nation, to provide a compelling and necessary reexamination of a towering literary figure."

"Where did William Faulkner go? The preeminent Southern novelist of the twentieth century, Faulkner was born and died in Jim Crow Mississippi. He was as preoccupied with race as most white Mississippians, and not in ways that make for a comfortable fit with our attitudes today. Michael Gorra’s The Saddest Words is a deeply learned, deeply felt, unflinching reconsideration of Faulkner, which ought to bring his life and work back into the twenty-first century conversation, where it deserves to be."

"The Saddest Words confirms Michael Gorra’s place as one of the most creative and readable literary critics working today. . . . Provocative and poignant, it delivers a rich, discomfiting sense of why the legacies of the war, and of Faulkner himself, remain such unsettled topics in our nation still."

"Powerful... Mr. Gorra demonstrates convincingly that this unshakable past for Faulkner came increasingly to involve race.... For Mr. Gorra, Faulkner’s fiction should be read these days for 'the drama and struggle and paradox and power of his attempt to work through our history, to wrestle or rescue it into meaning.' Reading Faulkner today we discover just how much imagination and courage can be required to face the past."

"Gorra’s well-conceived, exhaustively researched book probes history’s refusals... Rich in insight... Timely and essential as we confront, once again, the question of who is a citizen and who among us should enjoy its privileges."

"Michael Gorra is one of the finest critical minds at work in literature today, and this masterly reassessment of William Faulkner could not be more timely. Faulkner is a central figure in American fiction and, indeed, in American history, a voice as resonant in today's troubled world as it was in his own time. Gorra asks hard questions about the novelist and the man, and is unflinching in answering them. This is a momentous and thrilling book."

"Spectacular.... Surely among the most dexterous, dynamic, and consistently surprising studies ever written about an English-language novelist.... This is surely the first account of Faulkner’s work that provides a systematic reading of Confederate historiography—the version that Faulkner would have imbibed growing up. And yet The Saddest Words, for all its peculiar accents, also serves as a kind of one-stop-Faulkner-shop.... At once diligent and path-breaking, focused and multifactorial, The Saddest Words rivals Joseph Blotner’s single-volume Faulkner and Philip Weinstein’s terser critical biography, Becoming Faulkner (2009), as the first book on this subject to which newcomers might wish to turn..... A master class."

"Michael Gorra, an English professor at Smith, believes Faulkner to be the most important novelist of the 20th century. In his rich, complex, and eloquent new book, The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War, he makes the case for how and why to read Faulkner in the 21st by revisiting his fiction through the lens of the Civil War, 'the central quarrel of our nation’s history.' In setting out to explore what Faulkner can tell us about the Civil War and what the war can tell us about Faulkner, Gorra engages as both historian and literary critic. But he also writes, he confesses, as an 'act of citizenship.'"

"Faulkner’s enduring, ubiquitous quote that ‘the past is never dead’ might be a fitting epitaph for this new book. In this timely re-examination, Gorra considers how Faulkner should be read in the 21st century, with a focus on the depiction of Black people and racism in his fiction."

"The audacity of Michael Gorra’s The Saddest Words takes my breath away. Each of his bold wagers would be sufficient risk for most writers: treating all of Faulkner’s dazzling works as a single enormous book; using the Civil War to illuminate Faulkner’s work, and Faulkner, in turn, to illuminate that harrowing, never-quite-ended war; treating Faulkner’s very limitations as an unsparing key to our own enduring dilemmas. The rich weave of Gorra’s book, shuttling nimbly among biography, history, criticism, social commentary, and travel, is so complex that you think it couldn’t possibly yield a coherent pattern. And yet, the uncanny result of this perfectly pitched and exquisitely written book is that Faulkner, that multifaceted genius, has never come across so clearly and so powerfully before."

"Michael Gorra’s provocative and engrossing new book, The Saddest Words, [is] an entry point into one of the secret themes of Faulkner’s oeuvre: the Civil War, and the collective madness that underlay the Southern resistance to abolition."

07/10/2020

In this meticulous work spanning literary criticism and history, Gorra (Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English Language & Literature, Smith Coll.; Portrait of a Novel) explores the thoughts and beliefs of the Nobel Prize—winning author of such prominent novels as The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930) and Absalom, Absalom! (1936). All three of these books take place in the fictional Southern U.S. county of Yoknapatawpha and deal with themes indirectly addressing the Civil War and its aftermath. As Gorra demonstrates, writing allowed Faulkner (1897–1962) to clarify his thinking and create characters who were often a reflection of himself, in many ways depicting the people of the South as unable to move on from the past. Biographical portions of the narrative show how the author's own life mirrored these behaviors and sentiments, especially revealing is Gorra's examination of Faulkner's later career in Hollywood. VERDICT Faulkner once famously said, "The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past," and this exceptional study by Gorra lends credence to these words. A worthy addition to Faulkner studies, and for larger Southern literature and Civil War collections. —David Keymer, Cleveland

★ 2020-04-20
An exploration of the South’s greatest novelist and his fiction’s complicated relationship to the Civil War.

Though William Faulkner’s legacy is as an author obsessed with the interplay of the South’s shameful past and haunted present, shaped by slavery and the Civil War, he didn’t write much about the war as such. Aside from a handful of scenes that evoked moments like Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, he tended to write about its prehistory and aftereffects. That approach, argues Gorra, a longtime American literature scholar, is a central strength of Faulkner’s fiction. By addressing violence and slavery obliquely, he blurs incidents in ways that allow them to stretch across time. (The “saddest words” of the book's title are “was” and “again," terms that spotlight the inescapability of violence and racism that serve as the war’s grim legacy.) Gorra’s shifts among biography, Civil War history, and literary analysis can make readers feel whipsawed, but they’re always engaging and purposeful. The author takes a close look at the history and literary texts of Faulkner’s time to show how slavery’s role in the war was soft-pedaled, explaining his sometimes embarrassingly racist pronouncements about his native Mississippi. But Faulkner’s literary mind was more open and nuanced. He “couldn’t keep from remembering what other people wanted to forget,” Gorra writes, arguing that signature works like The Sound and The Fury, Light in August, and (especially) Absalom, Absalom! encompass the private fears of white Southerners about mixed-race relationships and Southern honor. Much as Malcolm Cowley’s Portable Faulkner (1946) demystified the complexities of Yoknapatawpha County for Americans still willing to ignore Jim Crow, this book looks at Faulkner in an era in which Confederate statues are at long last getting pulled down. Faulkner had his flaws, Gorra writes, but he “gets the big things right.”

A magisterial, multidisciplinary study of Faulkner that shakes the dust off his canonization.