William Faulkner, Albert Camus
William Faulkner
Foreword to Requiem for a Nun, 1957
The goal of this foreword is not to present Faulkner to the French public. Malraux undertook that task brilliantly twenty years ago, and thanks to him, Faulkner gained a reputation with us that his own country had not yet accorded him. Nor is it a question of praising Maurice Coindreau’s translation. French readers know that contemporary American literature has no better nor more effective ambassador among us.
One need only imagine Faulkner betrayed as Dostoevski was by his first adapters to measure the role Monsieur Coindreau has played. A writer knows what he owes to his translators, when they are of this quality. I wish only, since I brought Requiem for a Nun to the stage, to make a few remarks for the benefit of those who are interested in the problems that making a stage adaptation poses. The publication of the two texts the novel and Camus’s adaptation now makes possible a comparison I would like to encourage.
It will be seen first of all that the original novel, although it is divided into acts, includes, along with the scenes In dialogue form, chapters that are lyrical and historical describing the origin of the buildings in which the action proper takes place. These structures are the court house, the capitol, seat of the governor of the state, and the prison. Each of them serves to introduce an act and the place where the scenes occur. The dialogues of the first act take place in the living room of the young Stevens family, but they occur just after the trial and concern the death sentence that has just been pronounced.
The great scene of Temple’s confession, the main point of the second act, takes place in the governor’s office, in the capitol at Jackson. Finally, the meeting between Temple and the condemned woman, in the third act, takes place in the prison. Faulkner’s intention is plain. He wanted the Stevens drama to be knotted and unknotted in the temples built by man to a painful justice that Faulkner does not believe is of human origin.
From this point of view, the courthouse can be seen as a temple, the governor’s office as a confessional, and the prison as a convent in which the condemned Negro woman atones for her crime, and Temple’s. To breathe life into these sacred buildings, Faulkner has had recourse to poetic evocations that lay the human and historical foundation for the events that take place in them.
It goes without saying that these chapters could not be used on the stage, except for a few details. I cut them, therefore, aware of what I was losing, but resigned to confide to the scene designer and the director the task of discreetly making evident the religious nature of the places where the play would unfold. Only the scenes in dialogue, then, could furnish the raw material of a dramatic action.
The reader of this book will quickly see that they could not be lifted as is; in many respects, they remain scenes in a novel. Here one senses how different dramatic and fictional time can be. Terseness, condensation, the alternation of tension and explosion are the laws of the former, free development and a certain musing quality are inseparable from the latter.
It was necessary, therefore, to redistribute the dialogue in an appropriately dramatic continuity that would permit the action to move forward without ever ceasing to leave it in suspense, that would underline the evolution of each character and lead it to its conclusion, that would clarify motives without throwing too crude a light on them and, finally, that would bring together in the last elevation all the themes touched upon or orchestrated during the action.
From a practical point of view, this meant eliminating the prologue to the trial, rearranging the scenes in the first act, developing the character of Gowan Stevens—to whom I gave one whole scene with the governor and whom I had reappear in the final scene to bring to a conclusion the matter of the blackmail letters. In addition, for reasons of dramatic effectiveness, it was necessary to rework the scene with the jailkeepers.
With this new framework established, the most difficult problem, the problem of language, remained. Despite appearances, Faulkner’s style is far from resistant to dramatic transcription. After reading the Requiem, I was even sure that Faulkner had resolved in his manner, and without even being aware of it, a very difficult problem—the problem of a language for modern tragedy.
How can characters in business suits be made to speak a language ordinary enough to be spoken in an apartment and unusual enough to sustain the high level of tragic destinies? Faulkner’s style, with its staccato breathing, its interrupted sentences, its repeats and prolongations in repetitions, its incidences, its parentheses and its cascades of subordinate clauses, gives us a modern, and in no way artificial, equivalent of the tragic soliloquy. It is a style that gasps with the very breathlessness of suffering.
An interminably unwinding spiral of words and sentences that conducts the speaker to the abyss of sufferings buried in the past. Temple Stevens to the delicious hell of the Memphis bordello she wanted to forget, and Nancy Mannigoe to the bund, stunning, ignorant pain that will make her a murderer and a saint at the same time.
It was necessary to retain these effects of style at any cost. But if this breathless, agglutinated, insistent language can bring something new to the theater, it can do so only when used sparingly. Without this language the play would certainly be less tragic. But by itself it could destroy any play by a monotonous effect that would tire the most well-disposed spectator, and it would also run the risk of reducing the tragedy to the melodrama it always threatens to become. What I had to do was make use of this language and at the same time deliberately neutralize it.
I am not sure that I succeeded. In any case, this is what I decided: during all the scenes in which the characters refuse to surrender, when the action hangs on a kind of apparent mystery, during all the transitions, also, that serve to bring forward a development, to expose new facts, or to change the rhythm of the scene briefly, in anything that is not suffered directly
by the character, and therefore by the actor, but simply experienced and enacted on the exterior—I chose to simplify Faulkner’s language, and to make it as direct as I could, adding only, for unity of composition, a few echoes, a few touches, of his “breathless” style.
To compensate, in everything that concerned naked irrepressible suffering, and particularly in Temple’s confession and her husband’s reactions, I have imitated Faulkner’s style in French.
One further word that will doubtless interest those who, after having listened to the last scene in which Nancy proclaims her faith, asked me if I had been converted (please note that if I translated and staged a Greek tragedy, no one would ask me if I believe in Zeus). I did considerably rework the last scene. One will be able to see in this book that it consists above all of long speeches by Nancy Mannigoe and Gavin Stevens on faith and Christ.
Faulkner reveals herein his strange religion, developed still further in A Fable, a religion less strange in its substance than in the symbols he proposes for it. Nancy decides to love her suffering and her own death, like many great souls before her; but, according to Faulkner, she thus becomes a saint, the strange nun who suddenly invests the bordellos and prisons in which she has lived with the dignity of a cloister. This basic paradox had to be preserved.
The rest—that is, the long enlightening speeches—are liberties a novelist may take, if he really wishes to, but prohibited to the dramatist. I therefore cut and tightened these speeches and made use of Temple instead in order to challenge the paradox that Nancy illustrates and throw it into stronger relief. I can therefore accuse myself of abbreviating Faulkner’s message. But in so doing I only responded to dramatic necessities, and I believe that I respected the essentials.
On Faulkner
In his preface to Sanctuary, André Malraux wrote that Faulkner had introduced the detective story into classical tragedy. This is true. There is, moreover, something of the detective story in every tragedy. Faulkner, who knows this, didn’t hesitate to choose his criminals and heroes from daily newspaper stories. In my opinion this is what makes his Requiem one of the very few modern tragedies we have.
In its original form, Requiem for a Nun is not a play. It is a novel in dialogue form. But it has a dramatic intensity. First of all because it gradually discloses a secret and sustains throughout an expectation of tragedy. Secondly, because the conflict that brings the characters face to face with their destiny, centering around the murder of a child, is a conflict that cannot be solved except through the acceptance of this destiny.
Faulkner has contributed then to hastening the time when the tragedy at work in our history can also take its place in our theater. His characters are our contemporaries and yet they are confronted with the same destiny that crushed Electra or Orestes. Only a great artist could attempt to introduce the noble language of pain and humiliation into our public rooms this way. Nor is it accidental that Faulkner’s strange religion is experienced in this play by a Negro woman who has been a prostitute and is a murderer.
On
