The Saddest Words

Starred review from May 15, 2020
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.

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Starred review from July 1, 2020
The Portable Faulkner, published in 1946, is widely credited with reviving Faulkner's reputation and bringing him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949. Yet as esteemed literary scholar Gorra informs us in this transcendent study, European audiences had long considered Faulkner one of the leading modernists, along with Joyce, Proust, and Woolf. Faulkner was a complex man of many contradictions. He lacked an advanced education but displayed a profound understanding of the human condition. He did not decamp to Paris like so many artists of his era, but instead repaired to Hollywood, where he worked on screenplays, including those for To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep. He didn't leave behind a vast personal library, yet he was immersed in the southern storytelling tradition, which he mined to alchemically render the world building of fictional Yoknapatawpha County and produce works of near incomparable artistry. Similarly, 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

Starred review from September 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.

July 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

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2020

Given the "Lost Cause" romanticism and unenlightened portrayal of black characters and race relations in the works of Wiliam Faulkner, how are we to read him today? Gorra, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece, offers biography, literary criticism, and travelog as he rethinks Faulkner, revealing a "civil war" within that we all still fight today.

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.