William Faulkner is the greatest American writer of the 20th Century. On the face of it, this doesn’t seem to be the kind of profound statement one could build an entire column around, and yet after finishing The Collected Stories of William Faulkner last week, I was so moved by the thorough mastery and brilliance of the writing that I feel I must express my admiration. But, really, it’s not the unobjectionable obviousness of Faulkner’s standing in American literature that makes me hesitate to gush over him here as much as it is the inadequacy I see in the designation “Greatest American Writer…”
There is a disconnect for me between titles such as “Best” and “Greatest” and the state of existence they connote. Part of this is attributable to the fact that the “best of” label is applied so loosely in the season of praise we are passing through—beginning with the innumerable best-of-the-decade lists that began this year [Editor’s note: Please visit the We have Beards archive section for must-read best of the '00s posts by both Black Beard and Red Beard], then the Golden Globes, the SAG Awards, the Grammies, the celebration of football and football players that is the Super Bowl, and finally, the Academy Awards—that words like “Best” and “Great” have lost their weight.
More generally, I am dissatisfied with calling Faulkner the Greatest because of the arbitrary nature of such labels. In every discussion about the best this or that of all time, I will at some point inject the opinion that such distinctions are impossible to justify and worthless to argue over in the arts. I agree with Wolfgang Iser’s version of Reader-Response criticism, which states (more or less) that the true meaning of a piece of art exists somewhere between an artist’s intentions and the consumer’s interpretation of a piece of art, and so based on belief, I see no reason to argue about the best novel or film or whatever. My high opinion of Faulkner, in this instance, is based on my personal reaction to a combination of technical achievements and emotional and intellectual affectations in the text which are specific to me and cannot be fully imparted to anyone.
That being said, I do believe there’s value in a conversation about great books, for in discussions of this kind, we are only using books as rhetorical devices through which we articulate the tendencies and attributes that attract us to a work of art. In other words, when I write that Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily is a great story what I’m actually expressing are my own tastes, which are exemplified in this particular piece.
This then leads me back to the pedestrian nature of words like “Greatest”. When I write that Faulkner is the Greatest American Writer of the 20th Century, it is a limited expression of the opinion I’m seeking to deliver. The words do nothing to describe the beauty I find in the perfect balance he strikes between colloquial and formal, nor the well-crafted structure of his stories, nor the expansive yet economical scope of the narration, nor the simple intellectual and emotional insights that open worlds of feelings within his characters, nor his concisely exquisite characterization, nor the inevitable surprise one often finds on the final page. And beyond that it’s a personal statement, a confession of my values as an artist and, as seen through my connection to the characters one encounters in the work, an affirmation of my values as a person. So with all of that on my mind, simply calling Faulkner the greatest doesn’t seem to do him justice.
