Faulkner’s Family Life in William Faulkner: a Life on Paper

Faulkner’s Family Life in William Faulkner: a Life on Paper The presence of the father – The Father? – haunts William Faulkner, a Life on Paper; daughters play a supporting role. Mothers, curiously enough, are noticeable in their absence. On both the spoken and unspoken levels, the film suggests that the power of genesis derives from the male alone. The creative power passes from father to son to grandson, or from father to daughter, and it is from this lineage that the artist is endowed to â€Å"create a cosmos of his own,† as Faulkner said of his novel, The Sound and the Fury. First, there is the matter of the movie’s tone. Early camera shots of the Mississippi countryside, its forests and swamps, are accompanied by a melancholy melody played by oboe, piano and French horn; composed in a minor key, this music offers an aural equivalent to the text of the narration, a passage of Faulkner’s, in which the author describes the region’s autumn as â€Å"gallant, evanescent and forlorn.† This is an evocative description, unique in its assigning to the natural world a quality associated with the male, gallantry. To be gallant is to be noble and brave in service to an ideal; the word specifically indicates chivalry toward women, and in this context it conjures most certainly the dual spectres of the southern gentleman and the Lost Cause. Thus, in Faulkner’s imagination, the age-old mythos of nature as Mother is recast in the light of the male/Father; his South, his Mississippi, his fictional county, is a land not of sunlight and f ecundity, but of dark, primordial forests, swamplands, things forgotten and fading away. Again and again in William Faulkner, a Life on Paper, images of the countryside are repeated with this same â€Å"forlorn† chamber ... ...s been reborn in daughter; the role of Mother, Estelle, is seemingly bypassed. We see or hear little of Estelle after her marriage to Faulkner; what interests the filmmakers is her alluring persona as a vivacious southern belle who drew boys to her like â€Å"bees to honey,† one interviewee remarks. Post-marriage, she returns to the film’s hazy background. â€Å"Mrs. William Faulkner† exists onscreen primarily as an open hand demanding money for food and bills; their daughter, Jill, functions in the film as a repository of less-than-pleasant memories, recited in thin-lipped reminiscence. â€Å"If I had gotten in his way Pappy would have walked on me,† she notes, a point that is painfully underscored later in the film when she recalls his words to her: â€Å"No one remembers Shakespeare’s child.† If there was much tenderness between father and daughter, we see little of it in this film.