I don’t always know where my ideas come from. I often just sit silently–virtually or actually–and watch my thoughts. Things just pop into my head sometimes. The title of this post just popped into my head this morning.
I was thinking about William Faulkner. I got to visit his home, Rowan Oak, in Oxford, Mississippi, a week or two ago. I went an hour or two out of my way to make it happen. For whatever reason, I have long had a somewhat romantic idea of him, in some grass covered small town in the Deep South, sitting down and writing great novels.
At the same time, in recent years, I have wondered about the failure of the artists of the World War One era to really write works that would have helped us process that tragedy, that cataclysm. Faulkner is not so much known, in my understanding, for telling great stories, but for telling good stories in structurally, morphologically distinct ways. He is known for sentences that go on forever.
It seems to me there is a difference between the task of telling universally relevant stories in better ways, and of telling what amount to prosaic–if dramatic–stories in what I would term quantitatively unique ways. The words are arranged differently, but any difference in the affects thereby created are strictly aesthetic, generally superficial and intellectual, and non-mythic.
This may or may not be true of Faulkner particularly. I’ve only read one book by him, “Absolom, Absolom”.
More generally, though, this is the point I want to make, and it does appear to apply to Faulkner: the role of art, in my view, is to integrate us into a larger meaning system, which is to say a reason for living, for enduring pain, for stoically bearing “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”; any art which does not set this as the PRIMARY task is in my view decadent.
Consider the epics of the Vikings. They had a system by which the stories of their old heroes could be told in innovative ways by innovative people, but without ever losing the basic points of the stories: the courage, the betrayals, the loyalty–the expression of virtues they thereby learned to value.
Shakespeare is great because he both created great prose,but also great opportunities to deepen one’s life experience. Read, really READ, and pay attention to, Hamlet’s justly famous soliliquy:
To be, or not to be–that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep–
No more–and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. ‘Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep–
To sleep–perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprise of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action. — Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia! — Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remembered.
Faulkner, in my understanding, was if I may put it this way, a generic intellectual of the Paris of the 1920’s. He was part of what is sometimes called cultural ferment, and what I would term articulate cultural and self-destructiveness. What good came out of all that? When you think of Hemingway, you think of muscular sentences. Do you think of a man who lived happily, or who was able to teach others how to do so? He put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger with his toe.
You get into that melancholic mood in high school, reading all this stuff. I was long ago given Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech as an antidote, by an English teacher.
As I read it as an adult, it still sounds good: man is not doomed; writers suffer to tell stories about authentic human emotions and conflicts; that the writers job is to help people endure and prevail.
Faulkner deserved the Nobel Prize, but I have to ask if his words ring true. Was his own life dedicated to writing about transcendance, or simply about endurance? Can a life philosophy whose pinnacle is getting by inspire us to the heroism that characterizes healthy cultures? I don’t think so. We need more.
These writers had a chance to help us process the horror of World War One, and they skipped it. They themselves seem to have been traumatized, and simply expressed that trauma. We need builders, not cultural journalists.
This brings me to the title. As it came to me, a “Sullivan” is simply someone who does their job quietly, lives a normal, pedestrian life, and dies and is buried in a plot somewhere not far from where they lived their entire life.
A “Homeby”, a word I invented, is someone who is plain, not particularly clever or creative, who lives in a slot in the world that they never leave. It combines “homely” with a focus on Home.
True cultural creativity is rare. This is the realm of myth, and generative myths are hard to come by. Destructive myths are quite easy–we are surrounded by them in our modern world.
In important respects, Faulkner was actually a Sullivan who was talented with words the same way some stone-masons are talented with stone. He has a brick walkway in front of his home. Had that work been done superlatively, in my view it would not have been in any respect inferior to the work of Faulkner, except to the extent that it was lesser known. Writing as a “trade” is in no qualitative respect superior to any other trade, such as plumbing, carpentry, architecture, elecrical work, etc.
Cultural creation is. This is what enables people to self organize in new and better ways. This is what Shakespeare did. Most of our cannon we read in high school and college English classes is the equivalent of brickwork. It is not important, and not worth reading except for aesthetic purposes.
The story of “It’s a Wonderful Life” is culturally creative: it helps support ordinary people in living ordinary lives, happily. Would-be cultural elites like to attack the bourgeois, the ordinary. These are the people by whom terms like “Sullivan” are applied.
Yet as I thought about it, those who oppose Jimmy Stewart’s character and lifestyle would logically be on the side of Potter. Nonsense, you say: they would be the free spirited, enlightened, freed bohemians.
But where do such people typically wind up politically? If they are, approximately, Libertarians, they are simply individualists, with whom I have no problem. But if they wind up as typical leftists–who are normally the people speaking in contempt of normality–then they want power, just like Potter.
Seeking unified, undiluted power is the enterprise of the Left. It has no other. It does not try to help anyone. Nobody is drawing, for an example, the obvious lesson from the failures of Detroit and Washington, D.C., that social spending often accomplishes the opposite result of that stated as intended. To draw this lesson would require drawing the further lesson that moral choices matter, that families are an important institution economically, and that in the end we choose our lives, approximately.
Bit rambling, as often, but about what I wanted to say. There may be some contradictions in here. So be it. I’ll keep moving.