Gorra’s eclectic critical method here is not original, neither to himself nor others. The author deployed it successfully in his previous book, Portrait of a Novel (2012), which provided an intellectual biography of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. This in turn followed a model executed successfully by writers such as Christopher Benfey and Maya Jasanoff, who have attempted deliberately to extend the rarefied realms of literary criticism by engaging a broader readership. But The Saddest Words is in many ways more ambitious than the James book, since it treats not just one particular novel but Faulkner’s whole oeuvre, reading it against the aftermath of the American Civil War.

William Faulkner, 1954 (Carl Van Vechten/Van Vechten Collection at Library of Congress)

Gorra’s work could hardly be more timely, considering as it does the implications of Faulkner’s treatment of race in light of the history of Reconstruction and Civil Rights in the United States. All of the recent controversies around the Black Lives Matter movement are relevant here, and Gorra aptly describes his work as ‘an act of citizenship as much of scholarship’.

There is much to admire about this book. It is beautifully written (not something that can be said about every work of literary criticism) and it covers a wide range of material, both cultural and historical. It also makes some of the characters who crossed Faulkner’s path come alive in ways that enable us to understand more fully the role they played in his life and work. I have read many times in standard literary histories, for example, of how an encounter with Sherwood Anderson in New Orleans helped to shape Faulkner’s idiosyncratic modernist idiom, but, by reconstituting the human dimensions of this exchange, Gorra makes it seem much more vivid and intelligible.

There are, nevertheless, a few things I found irritating. Gorra’s might be described as a peregrinative style, where he visits sites that were important to the novelist and uses those as a starting point for his critical meditations. Clearly this is meant to add a popular touch, but it also leads on occasions to tiresomely garrulous interludes. Driving to Faulkner’s ancestral home in Ripley, Mississippi, for example, Gorra laments that he ‘didn’t see a spot for a coffee or even a Coke when I drove through one July afternoon’. Pause, as in ‘I want to pause here’, is one of his favourite words, and this always introduces a contextual circumlocution to fill in the reader on the history or geography of a particular location.

All of this is well done, but it does become slightly mechanical, as though this accomplished critic were carefully following the advice of his Liveright editor, Bob Weil – handsomely thanked in the book’s acknowledgments – on how best to interest a readership bringing many different levels of expertise. More substantively, Gorra does not actually have too much to say about Faulkner’s novels themselves. Most of the critical commentary is chatty or assertive rather than analytical: thus, The Sound and the Fury (1929) is described as depicting ‘the relation between time and consciousness with a depth that no American has ever matched’, while Go Down, Moses (1942) is ‘never quite the novel one wants it to be’. There seems to be a kind of structural vacillation at the heart of this book, whereby Gorra approaches detailed critical insight but then characteristically backs away from it, just as he carefully avoids polemic in his discussion of Faulkner’s life and art.

Any minor blemishes this book might have are, however, far outweighed by its multiple virtues. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of both Faulkner criticism and the chequered historiography of the US South, Gorra does an excellent job in suggesting ways in which the novelist has often been misrepresented, and why his work is so important now. Old-style historians of the Reconstruction era in America tended to downplay the significance of slavery itself, claiming that it was merely a subsidiary concern in the Civil War, whose major concern in their eyes was the abstract question of states’ rights. By revivifying the unholy mixture of power and sexuality that was integral to the old plantation cultures, Gorra, like Faulkner himself, effectively demystifies these more anodyne American myths and suggests how Faulkner’s fictional narratives grapple with violence, both physical and psychic. Gorra argues that the ‘sheer confusion’ and incoherence of Faulkner’s texts made him a better writer, and this also stands as an implicit rebuke to the advocates of ‘cancel culture’, who, operating according to the most old-fashioned critical principles, would prefer to obliterate an artist’s work based on what they conceive as his (or her) biographical intentions. Gorra is clear enough on how ‘there was a right side’ to the Civil War (and that it wasn’t the Confederacy), but he is more evasive on contemporary cultural politics, saying that while some of Faulkner’s most extreme statements of racial prejudice might be ‘reason enough not to read him’, he himself chooses to ‘read him for or because or on account of his difficulty’. It is worth recalling in this context that Toni Morrison wrote her Master’s thesis at Cornell on Faulkner, and that her own novels of psychological and racial division from an African American perspective would hardly have been possible without his pioneering example. Indeed, one of the things Gorra’s book indicates is how literature (and literary studies) can reveal the inconsistencies that permeate any given culture more incisively than the flatter, sometimes pedantic methods of social science.

In this sense, the fact that ‘Faulkner believed in failure’, as Gorra puts it, became its own reward. Faulkner’s books are aesthetically masterful precisely because of the way they internalise irreconcilable tensions and impulses. Faulkner experts in previous generations would often attempt to domesticate his genius, trying to excuse his occasional blatant (usually inebriated) declarations of overt racism, such as his claim to an interviewer in 1932 that ‘Southern Negroes would be better off under the conditions of slavery than they are today.’ Gorra, by contrast, demonstrates how Faulkner’s novels are important precisely because they expose and engage creatively with the multifaceted and often unconscious racism that has always been embedded at the heart of the American Dream.

This book may not be the most clinical analysis of the paradoxes and contradictions that underwrite Faulkner’s fiction, but it exemplifies better than any other the way the novelist speaks to the affective aspects of white supremacy as it became memorialised in American society. Michael Gorra’s powerful work draws on Faulkner’s art to explain the complex and often psychologically convoluted legacies of racial conflict that still haunt us today.