The Genius of Belonging

It is Spring, and every Spring--for reasons that remain obscure to me--I return to the writings of William Faulkner. Among American authors, Faulkner is probably compared most often to Hawthorne. Among non-Americans, he would seem to correspond best, perhaps, with James Joyce. Both Joyce and Faulkner experimented obsessively with language (a Modernist preoccupation) and both obsessed about the quintessential genius of humanism: what I call the "genius of belonging."

The genius of belonging arises from the human conviction that we all belong somewhere or to something or someone. In terms of place we, as human beings, belong primarily to the earth. In terms of finding something to contain us, we belong to our humanity. In terms of finding another to whom we may belong, there are always our neighbors and ourselves. And for the theistic humanist, the humanist who senses that there is some place, or thing, or person beyond even these things to which we may belong, there is always God or the gods.

Though Joyce decided that he could not live in Ireland, in exile he became ever more Irish. Faulkner, on the other hand, hunkered down in his defeated South and struggled to fashion from its red clay a place he could continue to live in and with. These are not opposite impulses but, rather, different strategies designed to achieve the same end.

The genius of belonging is also the genius of the dervish: the self-exile, the homeless wayfarer, the one who forsakes worldly comforts for the sake of his or her longing to be-long--somewhere, to something or someone. The dervish belongs to the Beyond in the same way that Joyce belonged to a lost Ireland and Faulkner to Yoknapatawpha county. As Robert Penn Warren observed, "James Joyce went forth from Ireland to forge, as he put it, in the words of his hero Stephen Dedalus, the conscience of his race, Faulkner did a more difficult thing. To forge the conscience of his race, he stayed in his native spot and, in his soul, in vice and in virtue, re-enacted the history of that race" (Warren, "Faulkner: The South, the Negro, and Time"). Whether Faulkner made the "more difficult" choice is debatable; what seems most clear is that each embarked upon a life of struggle with his native place: one as an exile within, the other, an exile without. Either way, it is dervish-genius they exhibited: the genius of one who longs to be-long but who, for reasons Romantic and, perhaps finally, tragic, can do so on terms acceptable to himself alone.