"Walking in Breath and Air":

Orality and the Presence of the Past in the Fiction of William i

Faulkner
John Lamiman
Guilford College
The boy would never question him; Sam did not react to
questions. The boy would just wait and then listen and Sam

would begin, talking about the old days and People

The boy is Isaac McCaslin and he is waiting to hear Sam Fathers, "the
old dark man sired on both sides by savage kings," (GDM p. 165)talk of
the Chickasaws and "those old times and those dead and vanished men
of another race from either that the boy knew." As Isaac listened,
those old times would cease to be old times and would
become part of the boy's present, not only as if they had
happened yesterday but as if they were still happening, the
men who walked through them actually walking in breath
and air and casting a shadow on the earth they had not
quitted...(GDM, p. 171).
These passages from "The Old People" are not only a wonderful
metaphor for Faulkner's vision of the relationship among art, artist and
audience, but they also provide a place from which to observe a strong provincial source for his integrating vision of time and his use of it in his fiction.
In 1925 William Faulkner "'thanked whatever gods may be' that he
was a provincial whose roots were planted in his native soil."2 Scholars
have looked hard, most notably at Henri Bergson, for sources of the strange
time schemes in the Mississippian's novels and his stated belief that "there
is only the present moment in which I include both the past and the future." 3
There is a source, however, in Faulkner's native province of rural Mississippi
in the first decades of this century. It is, ironically, illiteracy.
One reason that Faulkner understood past, present and future as one
realm in his art is that he grew up in what was largely an oral folk culture
in which many people were illiterate and where the written word and print

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were, anthropologically speaking, a new or unknown experience to half of
the culture, the black half, one generation out of slavery.
Faulkner's fiction echoes or recreates the time constructs he heard in
the voices, "the tales and the talking" that were around him as a child,
and som~ of the most important voices in Faulkner's youth could not read
or write.
R.W .B. Lewis lists some comparisons between The Adventure of
Huckleberry Finn and "The Bear," but he overlooks the fact that Sam
Fathers and Nigger Jim, who teach and watch over two of the most important young men in American fiction, know nothing of Europe, and more
important for this paper, both are innocent of the written word. Isaac listening to Sam in the woods is a bit reminiscent of Huck and Jim alone on
the raft, but Huck and Jim, as they discuss royal lineage and the things
Huck reads to Jim, are finally a much more literate pm than Sam and the
seven to nine year old Isaac in "The Old People." In short, one ofthe best
places to look for William Faulkner's sense oftime, which he rediscovered,
recreated and "felt right" about in his novels, is in what Walter Ong would
call the "orality" of the South early in this century.
Cleanth Brooks speaks of the oral culture of the post-Civil War South,
as he carefully points out that Henri Bergson's concept of "the fluidity of
time" confirmed more than influenced or created Faulkner's sense of time
and history.' Brooks, in a wonderful bit of lucid good sense on this subject, points out that when he and Faulkner grew up in the South early in
this century it was politically, economically, and culturally, "a real folk
culture" and "like nearly all folks societies there was a live tradition of
story-telling, folk songs and oratory..." (p. 266).They talked to Confederate
veterans and understood that the South's defeat, while quickly forgotten
in the North, "had affected and continued to affect us" (p. 265). According to Brooks, Faulkner and his contempories did not learn this present
and affecting history from books and the written word. It was passed down
from parents to children, heard from participants "or simply absorbed
through a process of cultural osmosis" (p. 266).
For Faulkner the Civil War was" a living memory in which he had
not participated but which was his nevertheless" (Brooks, p. 266).Brooks
points out that Faulkner does get some dates or details confused because
"it did not occur to him to get out a book and look up the episode" (p.
266). These were not matters history books could contain. History was not
a chronological "collection of verified facts" distant from daily life but
was a "meaningful story as immediate as other aspects of lived experience."
What Brooks does not point out is that many of young Faulkner's sources
for this " lived experience" of the past had no other way of knowing the
past except orally and as "meaningful story."

Oxford, Mississippiis in Lafayette County, and in 1902, when William

Faulkner was about five years old and Murry Faulkner moved his family
to Oxford, "nearly 10,000of the county's 22,000inhabitants were Negro. ",
One of them, Caroline Barr, came to help care for the Faulkner boys. Better than half the state's population was Negro, and according to The
Statistical Abstracts of the United States for the first 20 years of this
century from 29% to 35% of those Negroes over the age of ten in Mississippi
were, like Caroline Barr, illiterate. This is important because Ong, who has
been persistent in observing the profoundly different world views of oral
and literate societies, points out that oral cultures are homeostatic. "That
is to say oral societieslivevery much in a present.'" They attend to memories
which have present relevance and ignore those which do not.
According to the same statistical abstract figures, illiteracy among
Whites over ten years of age in Mississippi from 1900to 1920ran between
3% and 6%. This last figure might give an eighty-year-old native pause,
or it might simply confirm his long standing suspicion that the U.S. government couldn't count its own toes. An old native of rural Mississippi can
probably remember a fair number of white sharecroppers, field hands and
mill workers who had difficulty understanding simple written instructions
or contracts. In fairness to the U.S. census, the figures for the first decades
of this century were taken before there was any notion of functional illiteracy. One was supposed to be counted as literate if he or she could write
something more than a name.1 (You can amuse yourself for some time imagining the life of a government census taker asking that socially sensitive
question of white folks in rural Mississippi in 1920.) A white-haired friend
and historian remembers in 1920, eight years before the first radio entered
Sumter County, South Carolina, trying to teach the family maid and cook
to write. She told him that she did not know one Negro among the families
that still lived and worked on the farm that could read and write. Later,
functional illiteracy became defined as an inability to read and follow instructions, and the "selective serviceruled that all examinees with less than
five years of schooling were functional illiterates. ". The definition of a year
of schooling also gets murky when looking at the rural South. For Negroes
and poor whites, a year of school often consisted of four months' attendance during the agricultural off-season between November and March.
In 1940,the median number of years of schooling for Mississippi Negroes,
twenty-five and over, was 4.7. In 1911 less than half the children in the
state between five and eighteen attended on anyone of the 120school days,
and over 100,000 were not even enrolled.
All this is to say that functional illiteracy in the rural Mississippi of
Faulkner's province as he grew up probably approached 50% among Blacks
and Whites combined. Even among those who were not functionally illiterate

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it is probable, given the poverty of rural Mississippi at that time, that a

minority owned one book more than a Bible or could afford much time
or oil light to read. Like the past of the American Civil War, the Bible itself
was, according to Faulkner, not really a thing one "read." "I grew up with
that. I assimilated that, took that in without even knowing it. It was just
there."(I.Unlike the New England tradition "which assumes a free library
must be available for the townspeople," Ward Milner points out that as

of 1949,Oxford, Mississippihad "no town library."

In many ways the exact number of literate, illiterate and semi-literate

in Mississippi or Lafayette is not as important to this paper as a kind of
family literacy history. In 1902 there were still a fair number or Negroes
inthe South, and in the United States, who, like Faulkner's nurse and cook,
Caroline Barr, had been born into slavery. Most of the rest over the age
of say 40 had parents who had been slaves. A few had parents, many more
had grandparents and great-grandparents who had been captured or bought
in Africa. The American Negro slaves were people who had spoken a
language with profound syntactical differences from English, and most of
them came from oral cultures, without abstract chirographic symbols for
sounds, words and things. They were bound into slaveryin a foreign culture
that rarely encouraged, and often discouraged or forbade them from, learning the chirography of English.
It is important also that, wherever they may have interacted, Negro
and White cultures in the South were essentially separate. So around 1910
better than one-half of the population of Mississippi consisted of a race
and a culture that, even if half technically literate, had just begun to internalize abstract chirographics into their daily livesand their ability to engage
the world and time. They still had, using Walter Ong's term, "a massive
oral residue." (0 & L, p. 37). While Brooks connects Faulkner's sense of
time with his experience of history, David Minter, essentially agreeing with
Brooks, emphasizes the oral aspect of the conveyance of that history, saying that most of what Faulkner "knew about his region and its past, certainly about his family and its past, he learned from 'old tales and talking.'" This, Minter says, without explanation, accounts "for the remarkable
fluidity, the fundamental seamlessness, of time as we experience it in his
fiction, where history always includes present and future as well as past"
(p. 13). It is the written word, according to Ong, that creates seams betweenthe knower and the known, betweenthe past and the present experience
of that past. While Minter says that Faulkner heard the old stories from
his father's friends and the old men at the courthouse and his grandfather,
he emphasizes that Faulkner's greatest source of stories was Caroline Barr,
the illiterate Mammy Callie. Ong notes that among oral cultures

Knowledge is hard to come by and precious and society

regards highly those old men and women who specialize
in conserving it, who know and can tell the stories of the
days of old (0 & L, p. 41).
Caroline Barr was such a one, respected and loved by young William, who
listened to her vast store of stories "about the old days about slavery, the
War, the Klan and the Faulkners" (Minter, p. 13).
As Ong suggests, "by storing knowledge outside the mind, writing and,
even more, print downgrade the figures of the wise old man and the wise
old woman" (0 & L, p. 41). But there was, as yet, no written accessto
the world of the slave, whose descendents were only beginning the rudimentary education by which we internalize the written word into daily life. So,
most of what Faulkner heard and knew in his province he knew from the
story telling of people, Black and White, who were more or less distant
from the written word--people who, for the most part, either did not know
or were not interested in telling tales of the past that did not bear on the
present. This, I believe, is an important source for the rich integration of
time that so confuses my students, in Faulkner's narrative. Walter Ong
himself notes that "Faulkner wrote a prose that achieves beautiful literary
effects by echoing specifically oral discourse."..When , for Isacc, "those
old times would cease to be old times and become part of the boy's present...as if they were still happening" and "as if some of them had not
happened yet but would occur tomorrow" . Faulkner not only creates a clear
performance of a character experiencing time, as Faulkner has experienced it, but he gives us, in Sam Fathers, a model of his source for his temporal perception.
Isaac's experiencemay indeed echo young William Faulkner's own experiences of listening to Caroline Barr, and there are a couple of reasonable
parallels between Sam and Mammy Callie. Although neither acted like a
servant, both were born into slavery. While his "face and bearing were still
those of the Chickasaw chief who had been his father," Sam "had been
a Negro for two generations now" (GDM p. 164). He held the same status
as Caroline Barr, and like her he was non-literate and like her he was an
oral historian of "the old times." Caroline Barr, like Sam Fathers, had
a devoted listener.
For Isaac, listening to Sam Fathers, history passes "over into myth,"
to use Cleanth Brooks' pointed description of the Southerner's experience
of history. Ong recalls Brooks' description of history as present when he
points out that in oral cultures there is no container of knowledge outside
of the knower, no abstract external set of chirographic symbols:

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The psyche in a culture innocent of writing knows by a

kind of empathetic identification of knower and known
in which the object of knowledge and the total being of
the knower enter into a kind of fusion...(1 of W.. p. 18).
This fusion begins to describe young William Faulkner's possession
of the Civil War. the past. as "living memory" which was essentially his.
though he had not participated in it. Isaac McCaslin's experience of the
past echoes Faulkner's. as it is introduced in "Was" at the start of Go Down
Moses. After the introduction. we seem to receive the story out of Isaac's
consciousness. even though the story was "not something he had participated in or even remembered except from the hearing. the listening
(GDM. p. 4). To use Brooks' words again. it was "his nevertheless."
Remember that Sam himself spoke of people whom he had never had time
to know and so could not remember "
This is not a phenomenon restricted to Faulkner and the South. Concerning another essentially oral culture. N. Scott Momaday observes this
about his Kiowa grandmother:
Though my grandmother lived out her long life in the
shadow of Rainy Mountain. the immense landscape of the
continental interior lay like memory in her blood. She could
tell of the Crows. whom she had never seen. and of the

soaking up existence. unresponsible to abstract demands such as a 'job'

[or a farm] that entails commitment to routines organized in accordance
with abstract clock time (as against human. or lived. 'felt,' duration (p. 18)."
Sam Fathers personifies the unresponsiveness to abstract clock time.
Cass Edmonds asks Isaac if he ever knew "anybody yet...that ever told
him [Sam]to do or not to do anything that he ever paid any attention to?"
Isaac recalls that indeed "even with the shop cluttered with work which
the farm waited on. Sam would sit there doing nothing ...and no man ever
to say to him 'I want this finished by sundown'" (GDM. p. 168). Sam also
"did not react to questions." but when he spoke. Isaac entered into the
world of his words. Faulkner would like us to have the same experience
with his art. He says that the aim of the artist "is to arrest motion. which
is life. by artificial means and hold it fixed so that 100 years later when
a stranger looks at it. it moves again since it is life." .. This is the way
he had experienced the past event and the way it was experienced in the
South. as a lived experience as immediate as other aspects of lived
experience.
If the oid times "cease to be old times" when we read Faulkner, and
the art and the men and the women walk "in breath and air" casting a
shadow on our consciousness which they shall not quit, then he will have
created an art/life that moves again by imitating, with the written word.
some of the time integrations of oral cultures.

Black Hills. whereshe had neverbeen. 12

At issue here is not simply the ability to retell well what one has been
told. but a kind of acceptable. even criticallyimportant, confusion between.
or integration of. what was then and there and what is here and now and
me. It is, as Walter Ong points out, a homeostatic way of knowing and
experiencing, strange and even difficult for anyone born into a culture where
the majority of citizens have for hundreds of years been understanding
themselves in written language outside the mind.
This goes a long way toward explainingOlga Vickery'sreaction to Isaac
in the The Novels of William Faulkner. "By invoking the past until 'those
old times would cease to be old times' ." Vickeryclaims. Isaac tries to escape

from history. I J GivenBrooks' points, it is easyto say that quite the opposite happens. Isaac is entering into history, the old times. as a present
and affecting experience. Ong further explains Vickery's reaction when he
says that literate cultures find this engagement of knowledge "unsatisfying. vague and garbled and somehow too intense and participatory" (I of
W, p. 18). It is certainly not a knowing credited by history department curriculums. Ong goes on to echo some of both Brooks' and Bergson's language
when he says that, to literate people. oral folk appear to be "given to simply

'William Faulkner, "The Old People," Go Down Moses (New York: Random House.
Inc., 1942), p. 171. All future references to this work will be cited in the text as GDM.
'David Minter, WOllam Faulkner: His LIfe and Work (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1980), p. 75. Future references to this work will be cited in the text as Minter.
'Loic Bouvard, "Conversation with William Faulkner, "Modem Fiction Studies (Winter
1959-60). p. 169.
'Cleanth Brooks, WUllam Faulkner, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 255.
Further references to this work will be cited in the text as Brooks.
'Joseph Blomer, Faulkner: A BIography, (New York: Random House, Inc.. 1974) I, p. 73.
'Walter Ong, Orality and LIteracy, (New York: Methuen and Co., 1982), p. 46. Future
references to this work will be cited in the text as 0 " L.
'Historical StatistIcs of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970, pt. 1 (U.S. Department of Commerce, U.S. Bureau of the Census), p. 365.

'Ibid.
'Faulkner In the UnIversity (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1959), p. 86.
"Ward Milner, The World of WOllam Faulkner (New York: Cooper Square Publisher,
Inc., 1963), p. 12.
""Walter Ong,lnterfaces
of the Word (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 282.
Future reference to this work will be cited in the text as I of W.
"N. Scott Momaday,
Mexico Press, 1969), p.7.

The Way to RaIny Mountain

(Albuquerque:

University of New

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I'Olga Vickery, The Novels of William Faulkner (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1964), p. 132.
I'From interview with Jean Stein, Lion in the Garden, ed. Meriweather and Millgate,
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), p. 253.