William Faulkner, past and future

IN THE early 1990s, the South was an engine of America's economy. In the mid 1990s, southern politicians—the president,the vice-president, the Senate leader, the speaker of the House—dominate American government. Just possibly, the late 1990s will witness yet another form of southern dominance. You can glimpse this amidst the Mississippi Delta's cotton plants and kudzu vines; and in the hills that rise out of the marsh to support elegant Greek-revival houses and unhurried, drawling courtesies. This is the land that produced the blues, Elvis Presley, and some of America's best literature. “Everybody got the blues”, the sad songs say. It may just be that everybody—or a good many Americans, at least—will soon get southern culture.

This premonition is especially strong in Oxford, Mississippi, a pretty university town that was home to William Faulkner. On the campus at Ole Miss, a southern studies centre has grown up around Faulkner's legacy, and its conferences on Faulkner, as well as on Elvis, southern cooking and other local themes, attract visitors from all over the country. The centre has compiled a monumental encyclopedia of southern culture, explaining everything from the importance of iced tea to the proper preparation of a catfish dinner. The encyclopedia is prefaced by a passage from Faulkner himself: “Tell about the South. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.”

Faulkner travelled the world as a young man. But in 1925, when he was 28 years old, he returned to Oxford to write about his “postage stamp of native soil”; and between that year and his death in 1962 he wrote 16 books and innumerable stories about a mythical Mississippi county called Yoknapatawpha. This was something of a revolt. Other American writers had fled their provincial roots: Tennessee Williams left Mississippi for New York; Truman Capote left Louisiana for Connecticut and, ultimately, Manhattan. The South seemed inhospitable to literature. It was, as H.L. Mencken wrote in 1917 from the rarefied heights of Baltimore, “almost as sterile, artistically, intellectually, culturally, as the Sahara desert.”

Faulkner proved Mencken wrong; indeed, the years after the first world war witnessed a flowering of southern literature. The Yoknapatawpha novels demonstrated that a provincial focus could sharpen an artist's grasp of universal themes, and so impress an international audience. In 1950, accepting the Nobel prize, Faulkner spoke in a southern accent impenetrable to many who strained after his words. But his message was aimed at writers everywhere. Literature's only worthwhile subject, he declared, is “the human heart in conflict with itself”. It must struggle with “the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honour and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.”

But Faulkner did more than prove Mencken wrong; for Mencken's view was, and to some extent still is, shared by most Americans. Even now, when its record on integration is somewhat better than many northern cities, the South still bears traces of those years when it was the heart of darkness to Americans elsewhere: at sports events, the Confederate anthem and flag appear like ghosts of past white bigotry. More than that, the South's parochialism—its immobility, its stress on ancestry and soil—seems like an affront to America's restlessness. Americans leave home, build a new life far away, pursue opportunity wherever it beckons. Fond as they are of saying where they are from, they do not typically wallow in sentimental localism.

Faulkner stayed home, and there he found opportunity to be great. In a modest way, the southern studies centre at Ole Miss echoes his achievement. It was founded by William Ferris, a Mississippian who travelled in his youth, then left a job at Yale to return to his home state. Just as Faulkner walked about Oxford barefoot as a young man, rode horses, and protested (even when he won the Nobel prize) that he was a “mere farmer”, so too Mr Ferris likes to recall his barefoot, bareback-riding farm-boy youth. And, by forsaking Yale to study his own native postage stamp of soil, Mr Ferris has won a surprising national eminence.

This month, the hundredth anniversary of Faulkner's birth, the Senate is likely to confirm Mr Ferris as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, which hands out grants for cultural and historical endeavours. He is an unusual choice: the endowment's outgoing head, Sheldon Hackney, had been president of two universities before his elevation. But Bill Clinton chose Mr Ferris nonetheless: partly because a southerner's appointment would appease powerful southern senators, and partly because America sees new virtue in the South's once vilified parochialism.

Since the southern studies centre was set up in 1979, it has attracted several imitators. There is a centre for New England studies in Maine; there are similar institutions devoted to the Pacific coast, the mountain West, and the south-west; Stanford University is mulling an encyclopedia of the West, which would complement Mr Ferris's southern one. Meanwhile, communitarian intellectuals lament the loss of local bonds that characterised a former age; politicians talk about the need for a new sense of neighbourly responsibility.

In sum, America seems tired of rushing forward all the time; it would like occasionally to look backwards. This is something that the South, more by the accident of defeat in civil war than by design, manages to do; unlike the rest of America, it has retained an almost European sense of history. Faulkner appreciated this: “No man is himself,” he wrote, “he is the sum of his past”. And Mr Ferris appreciates this too: the goal of the National Endowment for the Humanities, he says, is “to bring America home”, to remind its people of their roots and, as a result, of what they have in common. It is a large ambition, and it may not work. But in its romantic purpose, its gallantry despite all odds, it is a very southern mission.