Reading literature that offends can awaken us, can shock us with the textures and trials of lives not like our own; books can be, as Kafka said, “The ax for the frozen sea within us.” They may even shine their light on our own time.

Closed Minds, Great Books

International New York Times | 21 June 2015

William Faulkner lecturing at the University of Virginia in the late 1950s. Credit University of Virginia Library

Today’s academic culture is both wonderfully alert and overly sensitive to the sins of the past — systemic abuses of race, class and gender are found and studied throughout the American canon in literature departments everywhere — but passing political judgment is not the optimal way to read books. Often enough, literature that is admired in one time was banned in another. Joyce’s “Ulysses” had to be smuggled into the United States during the first half of the 20th century; it is now regarded as the pinnacle of Modernist fiction.

There is a key lesson here, one I’ve seen time and again in over 40 years of teaching: What we condemn today may be prized tomorrow; what we praise today may look silly in a hundred years. And there is another lesson as well: Books show us where we have been, and, more crucially, what it felt like to be there.

There is much media ado these days about the rise of political correctness in university life, the emphasis on campus “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” meant to alert students to the possibility that they may find certain learning materials “offensive.” Much of this talk is overdone, but it does raise an interesting question: Can a book with “bad politics” still be a great book?

To answer this question — and to show why it matters — let me turn to one of my favorite “politically incorrect” authors, William Faulkner, a writer who has something to offend everyone: blacks, feminists, Christians, Jews, Southerners, Northerners, you name it. His greatest books were essentially written between 1929 and 1942, but he had no readers then; they were out of print, and only became fashionable after he received the Nobel Prize in 1949. When I was in college a decade later, he was star material. We read him religiously, and mourned his death on July 6, 1962.

Two decades later, professors and critics became acutely aware of his deficiencies in the representation of both blacks and women, and advocating the study of his work became dicey academic politics. Today, his stock is, at best, mixed.

Having grown up in the South in the 1940s and ’50s, as the crisis point of the civil rights movement was unfolding, I saw the racism that is ubiquitous in what Faulkner termed his “postage stamp of native soil” — Mississippi’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County, where most of his novels are set. My home town, Memphis, was a place of segregated public schools, bathrooms and water fountains, with a still-echoing history of the lynching and violence. Even today, I can see, in my mind’s eye, one of my 11th-grade science teachers pointing through the classroom window toward the poor neighborhoods where black people lived, warning us that if we weren’t careful they would soon be flooding our schools. I knew, even then, how ugly the words he used were.

Faulkner, who was on record defending Mississippi’s ways, knew it nonetheless far more deeply than I did. As a “son of Mississippi” he was testy about government efforts to force school integration — maintaining that Southerners would be better off resolving their racial problems themselves. In one drunken newspaper interview, which he later regretted, he was quoted as saying: “If it came to fighting, I’d fight for Mississippi against the United States even if it meant going out into the streets and shooting Negroes.” Yet in the same breath he declared, “I will go on in saying that the Southerners are wrong and their position is untenable.” It is this political ambiguity that many people today find unfathomable.

Yet it is a mistake to conflate the flaws of an artist with his near-flawless art. Faulkner’s ambiguous stance was radically at odds with what one finds in his novels: a deeper, more tragic understanding of race crimes as the fault line of Southern culture. This distinction between political slogans and the ethics of art is what Ralph Ellison understood perfectly when he pointed to Faulkner’s work as the right “barometric” for understanding the region: “If you want to know something about the dynamics of the South, of interpersonal relationships in the South from, roughly, 1874 until today, you don’t go to historians; not even to Negro historians. You go to William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren.”

So what can students today learn from this problematic writer? Let me answer that by saying a few words about one of his finest but most offensive books, “Light in August” (1932). This novel traces the fates of two outsiders: a nine-months-pregnant white country girl, Lena Grove, looking for the man who abandoned her, and a stranger of uncertain parentage, Joe Christmas, who thinks he has “black blood.” In due course, Lena will be tended to by the community, have her baby, find another man to be its father, and move on; hers is the life story. But Joe Christmas — taciturn, violent, explosive in matters as elemental as food and sex — will murder the older white (Northern) woman who beds him, and will (when his putative “blackness” is known) be tracked, shot and castrated, as if to flesh out the Christian symbolism on show in his name; his is the death story.

The book is Faulkner unleashed — and my years of teaching it echo with angry students’ laments: Lena is a mindless birthing machine; Christmas is a misogynistic killer; the community is deadly racist; the symbolic uses of both Jesus and Mary are tasteless and grotesque. And it’s hard to read, to boot. All true enough, I suppose.

Yet, in Faulkner’s hands, these are the materials of poetry and vision. After Christmas’s brutal death, Faulkner writes of his “black blood” rushing “like a released breath” into the sky, yielding something on the order of a miracle: “The man seemed to rise soaring into their memories forever and ever.” And Lena? She and her baby and her stand-in husband — Faulkner’s version of Joseph — leave for parts unknown, an incarnation of the Family that will not die.

It is as if the racial and misogynist venom of the culture (of 1930s Mississippi) must be faced — a scapegoat offender/victim will be produced — so that a vision of life and continuity might then become possible. None of this is spelled out, but it breathes in the architecture of the novel, and it reminds us that the very logic of sacrifice can have its beauty as well as its horror. Does the Bible not show as much?

Yes, “Light in August” is awash in racial and sexist venom. Yet, it also demonstrates why literature matters: Faulkner’s novel obliges us to dive into the wreck — to map the human and experiential dimensions of violence, both racial and sexual. And Faulkner’s magical threading together of the death and the life stories is his way of being true at once to the carnage of his moment and to the faith in something better. An old Mississippi saying has it that mares who give birth in late summer become “light in August.” The fates of Lena Grove and Joe Christmas produce “light.”

I teach Faulkner’s difficult fictions in order to make my students discover that the liberal views they themselves may have on race (and on gender and much else) did not exist in the town or region where I grew up, and that they may not exist in many if not most parts of the world in which we live. But Faulkner makes us sense the dreadful human price exacted by such arrangements.

Victimization by either skin color or gender (or religion or much else) is neither old nor new. Faulkner’s novel of 1932 resonates powerfully when we read about still-fraught race relations in America, whether it be Ferguson or elsewhere. Reading literature that offends can awaken us, can shock us with the textures and trials of lives not like our own; books can be, as Kafka said, “The ax for the frozen sea within us.” They may even shine their light on our own time.

Arnold Weinstein is a professor of comparative literature at Brown University, and the author, most recently, of “Morning, Noon and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life’s Stages.”