Here is part 4 in a series of "Notes on the Making of A New Literary History of America," drawn from a talk given by co-editor Greil Marcus at the International Conference on Narrative in Cleveland last month. In a previous post (part 3, found here), Marcus talked about the deep continuities and themes that emerged, seemingly of their own accord, to lend structure to the book. In this post, he discusses instead a significant decision the editors made—inviting Carolyn Porter to write a single essay on both Absalom, Absalom! and Gone with the Wind—that shaped the book. Porter’s essay may be read here. Part 1 of the series is here; part 2 is here. The next post will conclude this series.
Photograph of the Pharr Plantation house near Social Circle, Georgia, built in 1840, taken by Dorothea Lange in 1937 for the U. S. Farm Security Administration. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
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It was a kind of accident that John Rockwell’s essay on Porgy and Bess, Carolyn Porter’s on Absalom, Absalom! and Gone with the Wind, and Adam Bradley’s on the meeting between Ralph Ellison and Langston Hughes in Harlem fall together—and speak to and through each other. Certainly no one said, let’s put them together—not even to see what happens. We went through the history of the country, debated year by year, event by event, and those three emerged out of 1935 and 1936. Their particular dates—the premiere of the opera, the publication of the books, the encounter outside the Apollo Theater—came together as other possibilities were put aside. No one was thinking about race, let alone synchronicity, let alone the great social movement that would be the spine of the book. But making a single essay out of Absalom, Absalom! and Gone with the Wind wasn’t throwing cards up in the air—it was playing a hand.
We wanted writers to surprise us, to surprise readers, but also to surprise themselves, as they dove into the question they’d been asked. Did Carolyn Porter know, when she started her essay on Gone With the Wind and Absalom Absalom!, that both William Faulkner and Margaret Mitchell would describe their stories in the same way, in almost exactly the same words? People imagine the South, Porter quotes Faulkner as saying, as “a makebelieve region of swords and magnolias and mockingbirds that perhaps never existed anywhere”—even as, Porter says, he was “intent on understanding it, committed to getting at the truth behind the legend.” And Mitchell said of her book—her only book:
I have been embarrassed on many occasions by finding myself included among writers who pictured the south as a land of white-columned mansions
—in the book, Tara has no columns—
whose wealthy owners had thousands of slaves and drank thousands of juleps. I have been surprised, too, for North Georgia was certainly no such country—if it ever existed anywhere… But people believe what they like to believe and the mythical Old South has too strong a hold on their imaginations to be altered by the mere reading of a 1,037 page book.
Absalom, Absalom! was Faulkner’s ninth novel. He was a more than established literary figure. The book had a first printing of 6000 copies, while Gone with the Wind sold 1,700,000 copies in its first year. Porter notes that when Faulkner, working in Hollywood, heard that Mitchell had been paid $50,000 for the film rights to her book—readers were casting Clark Gable as Rhett in their imaginations before the producers did—Faulkner announced he expected $100,000 for his. He later tried to sell it to other screenwriters, for $50,000, playing up the sensationalistic angle: “It’s about miscegenation.”
But Faulkner was playing a different game, too. Porter begins with a conversation in Absalom, Absalom! between Mississipian Quentin Compson and his northern Harvard roommate Shreve McCannon: “Tell me about the South,” Shreve says. “What it’s like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.”
“Lacking the millions of readers Mitchell would command,” Porter writes, “Faulkner simply situated Quentin and Shreve as readers of the Southern past inside the covers of his novel, thereby representing an audience he knew his novel would never have.”
“An audience he knew his novel would never have”—that phrase rings down through all of American literary history, capturing the writer who knows it is his or her obligation to speak to everyone, fearing he or she will be heard by no one, and so creating characters to represent an audience he knew he would never have. But in that obscurity, that darkness, is safety—that is where the writer goes when he or she is afraid he or she may be afraid of the noise of his or her own words.
Gone with the Wind, Porter writes, was anything but a match for the South depicted in the works of the southern historians who, from the end of Reconstruction on, up to the 1960s, in essence won the Civil War for the Confederacy by rewriting it—and by playing on the racism of America, that legacy of slavery, as a whole. The fall of Tara and Scarlett’s return to it was, Porter writes, a Depression allegory—and the book had a “miraculous power to disrobe and then re-enshrine the South”; it “enabled its readers... to see through the sham of the aristocratic legend but to see it miraculously revived at the same time.” But “if it was a shared racism that enabled the nation as a whole to unite around the irresistible story of Scarlett O’Hara, it was the same racism that Faulkner set out to excavate in Absalom, Absalom! In the chaotic decades before the Civil War in northern Mississippi, a black and white marriage, an abandoned wife and a spurned black and white son who returns, unknowingly, to marry his white half-sister—it was a trap set for readers, and for the nation itself.
“What had not been faced prior to Absalom, Absalom! Porter says, “is the fact that at the source of the American Dream”—of striving, of opportunity, of nothing is impossible, of each American remaking and inventing him or herself as the nation itself was invented and made up, each individual standing for and embodying the nation itself, re-enacting its whole drama, its whole tragedy—“at the source of the American Dream itself lies slavery.” It was only on the backs of slaves that so-called, self-named Americans could affirm their uniqueness, their mission, their superiority over all the rest of the world and their fellow citizens as well—America, in Lincoln’s words, “the last, best hope of earth.” And that, too, with nothing left out, with no irony—with no scare quotes—was the language of the last entry in the book.
The first of nine images Kara Walker created for A New Literary History of America’s final entry, “2008, November 4: Barack Obama is elected 44th President of the United States.”
