Told By An Idiot Full of Sound and Fury

The common misinterpretation is that Faulkner loved the South the way Midwesterners seem to love their home states: as idealized, elysian fields of milk and honey. That is obviously not the case with much of today’s South, but I don’t think it ever was. Faulkner loved the South the way I love New Jersey. Not the vulgar sprawl of pizza and Hyundais, but the arena of infinite, highly charged interactions between good and evil. In Faulkner’s South if you weren’t careful, you could accidentally find yourself banging your sister, executing a whole bunch of white people, or turning your mother into a fish. In New Jersey, you are faced with….essentially the same problems.

How characters react in the situations their environments force them into helps the author, and us as readers, measure them up. Their measures of greed, empathy, cruelty, and soul surface easily. Faulkner’s south and my New Jersey are good literary landscapes because they contrive an inordinate number of situations through which these definitions can be established. This breeds rugged identities, often centered around single dominant traits. This makes our characters easy to use in metaphors and allegories without having to get them run over by trains.

So, would Faulkner still love this South? It’s a lot denser than in his day, and displays a lot of cultural necrosis in the form of chain restaurants and strip malls. In Faulkner’s time the South was still Frontier-ish. It wasn’t the easiest thing to just stay alive. That certainly isn’t the case anymore. I see a lot of people drifting though life.almost completely untested. A lot of mediocre happiness, moderate comfort, and could-be-worse justification. That leads to poor decision making at all levels of society because there is less cultural/organizational experience in taking the necessary steps to make high-pressure decisions correctly. Take all of these bankers throughout NC and the like, whose lives are lived in these ivory towers of stratified risk decisions that mean essentially nothing when real chips are on the line. I often wonder why we don’t send the NYC homeless down to run Arkansas or something. They’ve all fucked up big time shit in their lives. That makes them way more qualified. Sort of like how Bush honed his skills while running the Texas Rangers into the ground, perfectly preparing him for….and my argument is fucked.

So yeah, I think they might be coasting down here. Some are coasting good. Some are costing bad. I don’t see a lot of quality decision makers, in large part because I don’t see an environment that fosters them by forcing tough decisions day after day. I see a lot of golf courses and weed.

For what it’s worth, I think Faulker might like New Jersey better.