William Faulker at the Wikipedia
Dry September:
That Evening Sun (video summary)
WILLIAM FAULKNER, by Glòria Torner
William
Faulkner is one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century in American literature.
And he is also one of the fundamental names with influential narrative techniques,
especially the use of interior monologue, following the experimental tradition
of European writers as James Joyce, Virginia Wolf, Marcel Proust and Frank
Kafka. Faulkner’s writing diverges from that of his realistic contemporaries such
as Ernest Hemingway.
Faulkner, and other
American writers called “the lost generation”, influenced Latin American
writers as Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Juan Rulfo, etc.
BIOGRAPHY
William
Faulkner was born in 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi. He came from an old Southern
family.
He grew up in
Oxford, Mississippi, where the Faulkner family settled in 1902 and where he
lived on and off for the rest of his life. His family, particularly his mother
Maud, his maternal grandmother, Lelia Butler, and Caroline Barr, the African
American nanny who raised him from infancy, influenced the development of
Faulkner’s artistic imagination. Both his mother and his grandmother, who were
avid readers as well as painters and photographers, educated him in visual
language and also exposed him to literary classics such as the works of Charles
Dickens.
Faulkner spent
his boyhood listening to stories told by his elders, stories about the Civil War,
slavery, the Ku Klux Klan and the Faulkner family. The young Faulkner was
greatly influenced by the history of his family and the region in which he
lived, Mississippi, that marked his sense of the tragic position of “black and
white” Americans and his characterization of Southern characters.
He began his
academic instruction and, as a schoolchild, he got early successes, but later he
became somewhat indifferent; then at high school his decline continued, and at
the end he never got graduated. He abandoned his studies in 1915 to work in his
grandfather’s bank.
He joined the
Canadian and later the British Royal Air Force during the First World War, but
he did not serve in combat. After the war he returned to the United States and,
for a short period of time, he studied literature at the University of Mississippi
(1919-1921).
He temporarily
worked for a New York bookstore and a New Orleans newspaper.
In 1920, he
married Estella Oldham Franklin, with whom he had been in love since he was a
teenager. After Estella’s divorce from her first husband, the writer wasted no
time in getting her to accept his marriage’s proposal.
Faulkner began
writing poetry. He made his debut as a writer in 1924 by publishing the poetry
book The Marble Faun (1919) and Poems of Youth (1924). He declared: “Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry
first, finds he can’t, and then tries the short story, which is the most
demanding form after poetry. And failing at that, only then does he take up
novel writing.”
Except for some
trips to Europe and Asia, and a few brief stays in Hollywood as a scriptwriter,
he worked on his numerous novels (nineteen), screenplays, poems and short
stories on a farm in Oxford.
In an attempt
to create a saga of his own, Faulkner has invented a crowd of characters
typical of the historical growth and subsequent decadence of the South. Each
story and each novel contribute to the construction of a whole portrait of the
south of his country, creating an imaginary name called Yoknapatawpha County
and its inhabitants.
The six most
important novels are:
1. The Sound and the Fury (1929). The theme,
the downfall of the Compson family seen through the minds of several characters,
and the technique, the use of the inner monologue, are fused with particular
success.
2. As I Lay Dying (1930). It’s a difficult
book because it’s a masterpiece of
modernism literature. It is the story of the death of Addie Bundren and her
poor rural family’s quest and motivations to satisfy her wish to be buried in
her hometown of Jefferson, Mississippi.
3. Sanctuary (1931) is about the
degeneration of Temple Drake, a young girl from a distinguished Southern family.
4. In Light in August (1932), prejudice is
shown to be most destructive when it is internalized, as in Joe Christmas, who
believes that one of his parents was black.
5, Absalom, Absalom! (1936) is about the racial prejudice in which a young man
is rejected by his father and brother because of his mixed blood.
6. In Wild Palmers (1939) he explains two
different stories together in one book.
His last novel,
The Reivers, a picaresque tale of a
young boy with great many similarities to Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, appeared
in 1962, the year of Faulkner’s death.
Faulkner got
different prizes as the Pulitzer Price in Fiction in 1955 for A Fable, and in 1963 for The Reivers. In
1949, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his powerful and
artistically unique contribution to the modern American novel.
Nowadays, he is
best remembered for his novels about the Southern American States.
DRY SEPTEMBER. ANALYSIS
Dry September was first
published in the magazine Scribner in
1931 and reprinted in Faulkner’s
Collected Stories (1950) and in the Selected
Short Stories of William Faulkner (1961).
The title is
very important because it suggests that the lack of rain through the hottest
part of the Mississippi summer will be the symbol of a terrible problem.
The story is
divided in five parts, and it begins “in medias res” (in the middle of events).
Part I. THE RUMOUR
This first part
opens with a short description of the dry weather and the season, presenting
the setting of the story: “Through the bloody September twilight, aftermath of
sixty-two rainless days.”
And also introduces
the first conversation, the rumour that they are talking about “something that happened
between the black man, Will Mayes, and Miss Minnie Cooper, the white woman.”
After this
first descriptive and presentative paragraph, this first part goes on with a
long dialogue in direct style with short sentences between six people: the main
character, the barber, Henry Hawkshaw, a calm, quiet and just man, who objects
the rumour that serves for the story; and the intolerant people: the second
barber, the young client Butch, the second speaker and Jack, the drummer.
In the middle
of this section, John McLendon arrives at the barbershop and encourages the men
to take action against Will Mayes, because for McLendon it is more important to
increase the racial conflict than discover the truth. He begins and increases the
racial tension.
The only thing
everyone seems to agree with is the race of the two people. It would seem that
Will Mayes is a murderer simply for being an African American. Nobody really
knows what happened between the “negro” and Miss Minnie Cooper, but the town
reaction to the rumour is that Miss Minnie, a spinster, has been harmed and
attacked in some way by Will Mayes. Only the barber, Henry Hawkshaw, claims
that Will Mayes is a good man and, in this part, he repeats several times this
sentence that means the voice of the raison and the truth: “I know Will Mayes. Will
Mayes never done it.”
PART II. THE RACE. Minnie Cooper
This part is a
long description in a third person about Minnie Cooper, the “white woman”, She
is almost forty years old, unmarried, without occupations and any intellectual
interests. She lives with her mother and her aunt.
Minnie’s life
is idle and full of empty days, but it’s also full of mystery, rumour and
gossip. She chooses to distance herself from the social events she used to go when
she was young.
Every paragraph
begins with the feminine pronoun “she”, but nearly at the end, there is a
paragraph that begins with the masculine “he” that introduces her relationship
with the widower. This relationship stirs controversies; when Minnie is
together with the widower, the town began to say “poor Minnie,” and she becomes
a topic of two public opinions, with some people pitying her and other people
accusing her of adultery.
Part III. THE POWER OF THE VIOLENCE.
It’s the most
important section because it uncovers the truth: the group of white men show
the injustice and real racism to the “niggers”. It is a vindictive act because they
decided to murder the innocent black man, but the very act of killing is not
explained in the story.
Like the first
part, after a short description presenting the barber walking alone in a dry
and oppressive atmosphere, there is another long dialogue where we know that
McLendon, who seeks violence everywhere, and the three other men, who want
revenge, decide to carry out a hate crime.
The group of
white men decide to look for Will, they find him and take from the factory
where he is working as a night watchman, and he is killed with violence. The
real crime is done.
At the
beginning McLendon’s group think that Hawkshaw has changed his mind and has come
to join the revenge, but he continues trying to convince them to stop the
crime. Again, the barber will try to repeat his opinion about the innocence of
Will Mayes, but in vain. Is his behaviour a coward one?
Part IV. RETURNING TO THE DAILY LIFE: Minnie Cooper
This is a short
part where there is a new description of the daily life of Minnie. It’s
Saturday night and she is preparing to go downtown with her friends. But we
notice her loneliness, her unhappy life. Now we got familiar with Miss Minnie’s
history and we can see an inside view of her emotional state and her own sexual
frustration. At the end, their friends examining her grey hair is a sign of
sadness.
Part V. THE ENDING. THE MESSAGE
The protagonist
is McLendon. Now there is a short glimpse of McLendon’s home life and his
cruelty and tyranny over his wife. When he returns home, he’s still got the
same deep violence, hate and rage.
You will notice
that no section is dedicated to Will Mayes, the victim. And along the story, he
only speaks a few moments.
CONCLUSION: I want to highlight
some aspects:
Style: Some words are repeated several times “bloody”, “dust”, “dry”,
“rainless”, associated with the weather. And also, there are some words in
slang as “durn”.
Themes: The truth will not win because it is clear that they will never be
punished for it.
This story
describes the racial segregation (“equal but separate” politics) at the time. Faulkner
wants to write about the relationship, the prejudices and the problems between black
and white people.
Nowadays, in
the 21st century, the relevance of this problem is still relevant,
and not only in the USA.
QUESTIONS
Who was Minnie Cooper? What was she like? What did she
look like?
Describe the barber's personality.
What kind of person was Will Mayes?
Talk about Maclendon.
The name of the village is Jefferson; it's fictious.
But do you know anything about Thomas Jefferson? Do you think there is a
relation between this man's name and the village's name?
Why do you think the drummer went with the gang?
And what about the barber? Why did he go too?
What did the narrator mean with "the air had a
metallic taste"?
What is "snobbery"? What is for you the best
definition of "snob"? Can you give examples?
What does it mean: "the pleasure of snobbery -
male - retaliation - female? Is this a cliché?
Who was the cashier in the bank and what was his
relation with Minnie?
Do you think the weather, or the climate, can
influence the people's behaviour or character? Or is it only a cliché?
How does the image of the moon increase the tension in
the story?
Why did the barber strike Will inside the car? Do you
think it is always possible to keep one's control?
How did the barber get out of the car?
What happened to Will?
What was the Spanish word for "little trip"?
What did Minnie do on Saturday evening?
Tell us about Maclendon's way with his wife.
VOCABULARY
aftermath, frothy, drummer, (poises on) the balls of
his feet, rove, prone, lief, riled, sallow, unflagging, frame house, haggle, haggard,
runabout (car), over-the-way, paired, serried, twice-waxed moon, nimbused, rutted,
ridge, running board, brick kiln, vat, tingle, welled
