End of the Line

Summer ended yesterday.  Convocation was this morning.  Time to change to Semester-Mode.

But, first:  one of my summer goals was to read Faulkner’s Snopes trilogy.  Finished it Sunday night.  Mission Accomplished.  I didn’t make it to every book I wanted to read this summer—Emile, poor Emile, will have to sit forlorn for another year.  Hopefully that won’t stunt his educational prospects.  Not sure why Emile is always a low-grade “Probably should read that book” but never gets to the level of, “I’ll read the first page.”  Always a bridesmaid, I guess.  Maybe, if it is lucky, it will eventually graduate from bridesmaid to Plane Book.

But, Snopes.  The final volume of the trilogy, The Mansion, seemed not just a wrap up of the trilogy but a wrap up of Faulkner’s career.  When Jason Compson shows up for a perfectly gratuitous scene, you know Faulkner is just tying up loose ends before he ends his career as a chronicler.  (The book was published in 1959; Faulkner died in 1962.)  (And, Faulkner did write one more novel after this, so while the book does feel like a summation of his career, he wasn't quite done yet.)

In one of those strange moments when the time in which you are reading a book coincides with the book you happened to be reading, the end of the Chronicle of Flem Snopes had the same sort of finality as the end of the summer.  Both end with the thought that while it is the end of the line, somehow, oddly, what just ended becomes a part of what comes next.  Our lives sink “down and down into the ground already full of the folks that had the trouble but were free now.”  The parts of our lives do the same thing, and stepping back to see the Snopes clan evolve over these three novels is a lot like stepping back to see your own life evolving in semi-predictable ways bringing you to the place where you are now.  Why should  you should be here now reading these thoughts?  Why should your life be the way it is?  In the end, does the path of your life really make sense?

In the second best author preface I have ever read, Faulkner explains:

This book is the final chapter of, and the summation of, a work conceived and begun in 1925. Since the author likes to believe, hopes that his entire life's work is a part of a living literature, and since "living" is motion, and "motion" is change and alteration and therefore the only alternative to motion is unmotion, stasis, death, there will be found discrepancies and contradictions in the thirty-four-year progress of this particular chronicle; the purpose of this note is simply to notify the reader that the author has already found more discrepancies and contradictions than he hopes the reader will—contradictions and discrepancies due to the fact that the author has learned, he believes, more about the human heart and its dilemma than he knew thirty-four years ago; and is sure that, having lived with them that long time, he knows the characters in this chronicle better than he did then.

When I ran into that at the outset of the novel, I thought it was admirably bold.  Having finished the novel, I realized it is not as much bold as making a statement about the way we put together our own lives.  I tell a story to give my life meaning and a narrative.  Decades later, I tell a story to do the same thing.  Those stories will not be the same.  Why not?  Because the story I tell now, having lived with myself for that many more years than when I told the story the first time, involves knowledge I simply did not have decades ago.  I like to think I know myself and those with whom I interact better now than I did decades ago.

But, do I?  If we take the three novels in this trilogy as an example—which one is accurate?  Are the contradictions there because mistakes in earlier books are corrected in the later telling?  Or was the original correct and the later books introduced inconsistences because memory fades and facts are invented to create a narrative storyline when there is none.  This is not an idle rumination when it comes to these books.  The central figure in this trilogy is Flem Snopes.  But there is nowhere in any of the three books a chapter which gets inside Flem’s head.  We see Flem only thought the narrators which surround him.  How well do we know Flem?  We speculate about what motivates him, we see his actions, or at least things we are told are his actions, and from that, we, and the narrators, infer motives and a story of Flem’s life.  Is it the right story?  How would we ever know?

In the end, the South Faulkner has created throughout these novels, throughout his whole life’s work, is dissolved into dust.  And what emerges?  It’s not clear—but whatever comes next will certainly bear no resemblance to the South which Faulkner created and destroyed and not even like the South which the destroyers intended, but rather it will be a South unimaginable from either the South before the destroyers or the South of the destroyers or even the wreckage of the South which was destroyed or the wreckage of the South as it was being destroyed.  Flem lives and dies (not much of a spoiler there—there was really no way to end this trilogy before the end of Flem Snopes’ life) and it isn’t clear at the end what changes were caused by his life—it isn’t even clear if the arrival of the Snopes in the county had a measurable effect or whether the changes—what is to come—were going to happen Snopes or no Snopes.  Ratcliff and Gavin spend much time trying to figure out and guard against Snopism—but in the end, do their efforts matter?  Young Charles grows up and it isn’t clear who he will be other than that he will be, in some strange way, the future, but what sort of future?

Part of me wants to make sense of this trilogy.  Part of me realizes that if I tried to do so, I would just be falling into the trap of providing an authoritative narrative which simply isn’t there.  I don’t know why Flem and Eula and Linda and Mink and Gavin and the host of minor characters act the way they act.  Why did I ever think I could understand them?

So, why do I pretend I know the reasons I act the way I act?

But, it’s Convocation Day.  New chapter.  Same unreliable narrator.