Previously Undiscovered Faulkner Manuscript ("Sons of the South") To Be Published This Week

JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI—An academic conference, "Incest, Murder and Mutes in Faulkner’s Early Fiction" was held here last week to discuss the greatest development in the history of Faulkner scholarship—the chance discovery of a previously unknown Faulkner manuscript entitled Sons of the South. The novel is scheduled to be published this month by the University of Mississippi Press.

The conference, held at the University of Mississippi, covered topics such as "Faulkner’s Early Unintelligibility 1926-1931," "Stream-of-Consciousness and Faulkner’s Alcoholism," and "Faulkner and Ovid: A Stylistic Comparison". But the most pressing debates concerned the literary quality of Sons of the South, whether it merited a place alongside such acknowledged masterpieces as The Sound and The Fury, or Light In August.

Sons of the South

Sons of the South, believed to be written early in Faulkner’s career, perhaps during the years 1926-1928, concerns four generations of a great southern family, the McAlisters. During the course of their epic history, the McAlisters settle in Mississippi, steal a small plot of land, develop it into a mighty plantation, sleep with each other and their slaves frequently, fight the Civil War, duel at the slightest pretext, and in the process fashion a family tree bizarre enough to rival Faulkner’s other epic Mississippi families.

As the novel opens, young Ben McCalister, an illiterate mute, is visiting the rotting cabin of his Uncle Slokum, who lies on his deathbed. Uncle Slokum, who appears to be babbling in a fit of delirium, is telling his nephew the most unspeakable secrets about McCalister history despite—or because of—Ben’s inability to relay the stories to another human being. It is clear in his delirium that Slokum—a Catholic convert—sometimes mistakes Ben for a young father-confessor, there to absolve him.

Yet Uncle Slokum on death’s door is an expansive narrator, and so is willing to confess the most appalling incidents from his own life. We soon learn that Uncle Slokum himself is an eccentric and cad of regional reputation, whose own sexual predations rival even those of the great family patriarch, Slokum’s grandfather, Colonel Robert Louis McAlister.

Uncle Slokum tells Ben about the McAlister’s initial settlement in Mississippi. Colonel Robert Louis McAlister challenges an aging and heirless plantation owner to a duel, dispatches him with one shot, and assumes his plantation and property. Colonel McAlister, his long-suffering wife, Sarah, and their entourage, take up residence in the plantation, which Colonel McAlister uses as a base for his insatiable philandering. His first cousin Laura Jean ("stout, buck-toothed, but ripe as a peach") is his first Mississippi conquest. She gives him his nickname used by all his future mistresses ("Sweet Bobby Lou") bears him his first son (Bobby Lou), while an unusually docile Sarah makes no mention of this development.

This is only the beginning of Sweet Bobby Lou’s brief but spectacular philandering career, which yielded him ten sons and three daughters from eight different women (none of them his wife) in a fifteen year span. Uncle Slokum narrates Bobby Lou’s tireless sexual exploits among his cousins, his slave women, two of his own daughters, and various prostitutes and passers-by. Uncle Slokum even believes that Bobby Lou’s seed ended up in more than one animal ("cloven-footed critter"), though despite the rumors and the birth of a calf that shared an uncanny resemblance to Bobby Lou, there was never any evidence that an immaculate conception occurred. Sarah’s quiet response to his serial philandering was outliving Bobby Lou by 54 years.

Sweet Bobby Lou makes the mistake of his life when he impregnates Mary Rose Tomlinson, the young wife of a prominent but elderly banker, who had earlier convinced her husband she was barren, and refused sexual relations. Her pregnancy incites her husband, Zachary Tomlinson, the victor of more than seven-five duels, to challenge Bobby Lou. During the duel, Bobby Lou attempts to shoot him in the back—missing—and the banker whirls around and perversely shoots him repeatedly in the groin and watches him bleed to death.

The death of Colonel McAlister causes a family crisis, as he left behind ten young illegitimate sons, but no legitimate heirs. Seven of the sons were named Bobby Lou by their adoring mothers in tribute to the great man, and here Uncle Slokum’s narrative reaches a point of hopeless confusion. Faulkner’s choice of names stands as one of the novel’s main weaknesses. With four generations of patriarchs and sons named Bobby Lou, and Slokum’s erratic digressing through nearly 100 years of family history, it is sometimes impossible to determine even in which century certain incidents take place.

Bobby Lou’s oldest illegitimate son, Bobby Lou takes over the helm of the family in this characteristic sentence fragment:

The McAlister saga continues through the Civil War (wherein Bobby Lou II is killed at the siege of Fort Henry), and Juan Roberto Salvador ("Chico") McAlister, Sweet Bobby Lou’s illegitimate son through a Mexican prostitute, asserts his rights to the McAlister empire. But Chico is soon deposed by the short-lived alliance of a slave woman Jo JoLinda (who seduces him) and Uncle Slokum’s father, Rufus McAlister, a distant cousin with vain designs on the McAlister property (who pole-axes him).

Uncle Slokum emerges as one of the most challenging narrators in all literature, and his eight-hundred pages of McAlister family history (told in a heavily apostrophe’d dialect) clearly stands as a direct challenge to Joyce’s Ulysses as the most challenging read of the 1920s, if not the century. Slokum relates several key events (Sweet Bobby Lou’s fatal duel, his own whiskey-induced conversion to Catholicism) many times, and each telling varies in critical details. Things are further confused by the author’s periodic intrusion in the narration (such as the above fragment), which so closely resembles Slokum’s style, and we are never quite sure whether the author or Slokum is addressing us. In a now famous passage, a senile Uncle Slokum even believes that he himself is long-dead Sweet Bobby Lou McAlister, and relates events in the first person of which he had only third-hand knowledge.

In Sons of the South, Faulkner suggests profound insights about the role of the narrator in literary fiction. By having Slokum relate the entire McAlister history to dumb and illiterate young Ben, Faulkner elegantly comments on the one-sided nature of the writer-reader relationship: how every reader is an end-in-himself, despite his inability to further propagate or even comprehend the tale being told.

Only time will tell whether Sons of the South is studied with the same devotion as Faulkner’s avowed masterworks, but this new discovery sheds great light on the development of one of America’s great writers.