Requiem for a Nun, William Faulkner

Requiem for a Nun

First published in 1951, Requiem for a Nun is a sequel to Sanctuary, which introduced the characters of Temple Drake, her friend and later husband Gowan Stevens, and Gowan’s uncle, Gavin Stevens.

Once more set in Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County, the novel takes place in November 1937 and March 1938, eight years after the events of Sanctuary. The book is part novel, part play, offering a unique narrative technique in the author’s oeuvre. The main narrative, presented in dramatic form, is interspersed with prose sections recounting the history of Yoknapatawpha County.

Each prose section focuses on a specific institution (the courthouse, state house, and jailhouse respectively), serving as the setting for the following dramatic section of the story. The major theme of the novel is spiritual redemption for past evil deeds through suffering and the recognition of one’s guilt. The protagonist Temple, who is now married with a child, must learn to deal with her violent and turbulent past, as related in the earlier novel.

The word “nun” in the title refers to the character Nancy, a prostitute convicted of murder, playing upon the Elizabethan era-slang meaning of the word, as well as playing upon its contemporary meaning of a woman that sacrifices herself to save sinners.

At the time of publication, Requiem for a Nun received mixed reviews. The New York Herald Tribune described it as “a drama conceived on a level of moral consciousness” that made it “genuinely tragic”, and “in that respect it is vastly superior to Sanctuary, where the only morality was in the dim background of the author’s mind.” Several critics were intrigued by the novel’s experimental combination of novel and drama.

However, Faulkner’s writing style was criticised by some as clumsy and tedious, particularly in the dramatic sections, where the action was largely narrated rather than shown. In later decades, Requiem for a Nun was not considered marketable by publishers and for a time it went out of print.

Nonetheless, more recent scholarship has recognised its innovative qualities, influencing other key modernist authors, including Albert Camus, who adapted it for the theatre in 1956 under the title Requiem pour une nonne. Interestingly, the novel is the source for one of Faulkner’s most celebrated lines, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

The first edition
Contents
Act I
Scene I
Scene II
Scene III
Act II
Scene I
Scene II
Scene III
Act III
Scene I

Albert Camus in 1957, close to the time of his adapting ‘Requiem for a Nun’ for the stage.

Act I

THE COURTHOUSE (A Name for the City)

THE COURTHOUSE IS less old than the town, which began somewhere under the turn of the century as a Chickasaw Agency trading-post and so continued for almost thirty years before it discovered, not that it lacked a depository for its records and certainly not that it needed one, but that only by creating or anyway decreeing one, could it cope with a situation which otherwise was going to cost somebody money;

The settlement had the records; even the simple dispossession of Indians begot in time a minuscule of archive, let alone the normal litter of man’s ramshackle confederation against environment — that time and that wilderness — in this case, a meagre, fading, dog-eared, uncorrelated, at times illiterate sheaf of land grants and patents and transfers and deeds, and tax- and militia-rolls, and bills of sale for slaves, and counting-house lists of spurious currency and exchange rates, and liens and mortgages, and listed rewards for escaped or stolen Negroes and other livestock, and diary-like annotations of births and marriages and deaths and public hangings and land-auctions, accumulating slowly for those three decades in a sort of iron pirate’s chest in the back room of the post-office-trading-post-store, until that day thirty years later when, because of a jailbreak compounded by an ancient monster iron padlock transported a thousand miles by horseback from Carolina, the box was removed to a small new lean-to room like a wood- or tool-shed built two days ago against one outside wall of the morticed-log mud-chinked shake-down jail; and thus was born the Yoknapatawpha County courthouse: by simple fortuity, not only less old than even the jail, but come into existence at all by chance and accident: the box containing the documents not moved from any place, but simply to one; removed from the trading-post back room not for any reason inherent in either the back room or the box, but on the contrary: which — the box — was not only in nobody’s way in the back room, it was even missed when gone since it had served as another seat or stool among the powder- and whiskey-kegs and firkins of salt and lard about the stove on winter nights; and was moved at all for the simple reason that suddenly the settlement (overnight it would become a town without having been a village; one day in about a hundred years it would wake frantically from its communal slumber into a rash of Rotary and Lion Clubs and Chambers of Commerce and City Beautifuls: a furious beating of hollow drums toward nowhere, but merely to sound louder than the next little human clotting to its north or south or east or west, dubbing itself city as Napoleon dubbed himself emperor and defending the expedient by padding its census rolls — a fever, a delirium in which it would confound forever seething with motion and motion with progress.

But that was a hundred years away yet; now it was frontier, the men and women pioneers, tough, simple, and durable, seeking money or adventure or freedom or simple escape, and not too particular how they did it.) discovered itself faced not so much with a problem which had to be solved, as a Damocles sword of dilemma from which it had to save itself;
Even the jailbreak was fortuity: a gang — three or four — of Natchez Trace bandits (twenty-five years later legend would begin to affirm, and a hundred years later would still be at it, that two of the bandits were the Harpes themselves, Big Harpe anyway, since the circumstances, the method of the breakout left behind like a smell, an odour, a kind of gargantuan and bizarre playfulness at once humorous and terrifying, as if the settlement had fallen, blundered, into the notice or range of an idle and whimsical giant.

Which — that they were the Harpes — was impossible, since the Harpes and even the last of Mason’s ruffians were dead or scattered by this time, and the robbers would have had to belong to John Murrel’s organisation — if they needed to belong to any at all other than the simple fraternity of rapine.) captured by chance by an incidental band of civilian more-or-less militia and brought in to the Jefferson jail because it was the nearest one, the militia band being part of a general muster at Jefferson two days before for a Fourth-of-July barbecue, which by the second day had been refined by hardy elimination into one drunken brawling which rendered even the hardiest survivors vulnerable enough to be ejected from the settlement by the civilian residents, the band which was to make the capture having been carried, still comatose, in one of the evicting wagons to a swamp four miles from Jefferson known as Hurricane Bottoms, where they made camp to regain their strength or at least their legs, and where that night the four — or three — bandits, on the way across country to their hide-out from their last exploit on the Trace, stumbled onto the campfire.

And here report divided; some said that the sergeant in command of the militia recognised one of the bandits as a deserter from his corps, others said that one of the bandits recognised in the sergeant a former follower of his, the bandit’s, trade.

Anyway, on the fourth morning all of them, captors and prisoners, returned to Jefferson in a group, some said in confederation now seeking more drink, others said that the captors brought their prizes back to the settlement in revenge for having been evicted from it. Because these were frontier, pioneer times, when personal liberty and freedom were almost a physical condition like fire or flood, and no community was going to interfere with anyone’s morals as long as the amoralist practised somewhere else, and so Jefferson, being neither on the Trace nor the River but lying about midway between, naturally wanted no part of the underworld of either;

But they had some of it now, taken as it were by surprise, unawares, without warning to prepare and fend off. They put the bandits into the log-and-mud-chinking jail, which until now had had no lock at all since its clients so far had been amateurs — local brawlers and drunkards and runaway slaves — for whom a single heavy wooden beam in slots across the outside of the door like on a corncrib, had sufficed. But they had now what might be four — three — Dillingers or Jesse Jameses of the time, with rewards on their heads.
So they locked the jail; they bored an auger hole through the door and another through the jamb and passed a length of heavy chain through the holes and sent a messenger on the run across to the post-office-store to fetch the ancient Carolina lock from the last Nashville mail-pouch — the iron monster weighing almost fifteen pounds, with a key almost as long as a bayonet, not just the only lock in that part of the country, but the oldest lock in that cranny of the United States, brought there by