I therefore perked up tremendously back in 2016 during Tim Kaine's concession speech, when he dropped a line from Faulkner on the crowd -- "They killed us, but they ain't whupped us yet." To my glee, not only was he not booed off the stage -- not only did it fail to elicit groans and eye-rolls from the audience at this display of needless and irrelevant erudition. Instead, he actually got a rapturous cheer.
Aha! I thought. Here at last is proof that literary quotation can actually still find a place in our contemporary life. It can actually be used to serve a cause outside itself-- outside the mere gratuitous display of learning on the part of the writer. I was not born too late after all. There's still room, still hope, for me.
The line's use has given rise to some spurious hypotheses about the role the line plays in the context of Faulkner's novel -- the original source being Absalom, Absalom in this case -- and what exactly "Tim Kaine" might have meant by using it. Having had my own limited experiences ghost-writing a speech or two, and in reading Barton Swaim's delightful memoir of his time as a writer in the employ of the Mark Sanford administration (remember that guy?), I think I know exactly how this quote's appearance came about.
In Swaim's book, he talks about the sheer, the utter triumph he felt during his first few weeks on the job as a speechwriter, when Sanford not only used a full draft of something he'd written as a speech -- he actually left in a quote from Winston Churchill that Swaim was dying for him to use. (This -- we soon learn -- was an unrepeatable early coup in Swaim's career).
Anyone who's drafted anything else in another's person voice and byline will know the feeling. When it comes time for one's precious creation to be marked up by one's superiors, the elevating quotation from Langston Hughes or whomever that one sought to squirrel away at the end of the last page is almost always the first thing to go.
No! You shriek. My babies! As Jessica Mitford once wrote, the editing process is a "veritable Herod's graveyard of slaughtered innocents." (Mitford immediately follows this up by acknowledging that it is precisely the kind of sparkling bon mot that probably ought to be axed for space -- just as my quoting it here would be struck out as irrelevant or redundant if anyone was ever editing these posts besides me.)
Thus -- here's what I think happened. Some speechwriter in the Clinton campaign happened to be reading and enjoying Absalom, Absalom. And they came across this one line, which -- lifted from and stripped of its context -- seems totally perfect for encapsulating an experience of abject defeat and yet, rebirth. I suspect they filed it away mentally -- if they know their business -- as "for future potential concession speech."
And this is what makes it so beautiful. The quote's appearance itself proves the point that the content of the quote is trying to make. This is truly snatching victory from the jaws of defeat. They didn't get to air the rousing "We Won!" speech that they surely also wrote in advance of the night's events. But all was not lost. This way, at least -- if nothing else -- they finally got to use that Faulkner quote they'd been saving up.
The emotional force of the quote derives from its use of paradox. If it had been written only slightly differently -- if the wording had been reversed, for instance -- it would be bereft of its power. If Wash Jones -- the speaker of this line in Faulkner's novel -- had said "They whupped us, but they ain't killed us," then the line would have just been a variant of the old bromide "We'll live to fight another day."
But here, the words are swapped. They killed us, but they haven't whupped us yet. This defeat feels so bad, in other words, it's like we're actually dead. We're done for. We're toast. But in spite of that, in the very face of death, there's life still. There's hope still. We'll live to fight again.
This is what drew the crowds into a round of applause at Kaine's speech. The quote did justice to the sheer magnitude of the disappointment and terror of losing the 2016 election. While still suggesting that there is hope for the future, that we will have a future.
Brilliant! Well done unknown and unsung speechwriter!
The other reason this quote works is that it genuinely has the flavor of something discovered in private reading years before and filed away mentally for good use. I am a believer, deep down, that authorial virtue is always rewarded and vice punished, and so I believe (perhaps without reason or evidence) that an audience can always tell in some subtle way when a quote has been "looked up" or "Googled" for an occasion -- mined through some cheater's search engine formula along the lines of "quotes about defeat" -- rather than found to legitimate reading.
Just as it is iniquitous and unforgivable in my mind to google a quote and pass it off as the creature of your own prior erudition, however, you also have to avoid the opposite sin of having a particular quotation in mind ahead of time, and therefore bending the trajectory of one's thoughts or argument in order for the sole purpose of leading to the foreordained quotation. As Peter Gay remarks in his biography of Freud, referring to a well-known tag from Goethe with which the Viennese master ends his Totem and Taboo: "[I]t is tempting to wonder whether he [Freud] had not gone all this distance in order to close his text with Goethe's famous line."
Of the two quotation vices just named, the latter is the one to which I am far more prone. More than a few times, I fear, I have been guilty of the sin of procrustean prose -- the needless paragraph inserted and re-shaped just to fit the a priori quotation I wanted us to get to. Maybe I even did this in the last paragraph, in order to build up to the interesting passage I wanted to cite from Peter Gay in which he warns against precisely this vice. Which would be rather ironic. Oh well. I'll leave that all for you to judge.
The point is that Tim Kaine's quote succeeds, to my mind, on both counts. For whatever reason, this Faulkner quote -- whether because it's abstruse enough or specific enough to pass muster -- just has the feel to me of something the writer actually found through their private reading, that stayed with them, and that came to mind when they sought to capture the despair of the historical moment. It seems both apposite and inspired -- like, sitting in their darkened office staring at a computer screen and having to crank out the concession speech that they -- and no one else in the world -- ever thought they would have to write, it just came to them. They just remembered the passage. And it fits. That is how it should be. Again, well done Tim Kaine and staff.
Nothing is perfect, however, and some of this quote's sheen comes off after examining it, pawing it, and rotating it in the light. Like most of the best quotations, for instance, it is best if one knows nothing at all of the context in which it originally appeared.
I got around to reading Absalom, Absalom at last this week. And while the desire to track down this quotation and read its original source and thus not have to consider myself less well-read than Tim Kaine or his anonymous staffer was not the sole motivating factor that led me to do so -- it did perhaps play more of a role in that decision than would entirely make sense from the non-obsessional point of view. In any case, though, I did read Faulkner's masterwork this week, and I loved it. After a few prior unsuccessful forays into the great Mississippian's work at various times in my life, now, finally, something in the Faulkner oeuvre really clicked for me. Ah, I thought, I get it now! This guy is a great story-teller!
What we learn about the "killed, not whupped" line in context, however, is less encouraging. In the case of Faulkner's novel, of course, it refers to the defeat of the Confederacy. And not only would most of us regard that defeat as a good thing, it's also -- as has been remarked elsewhere -- particularly ironic to invoke this testimony of Neo-Confederate "lost cause"-ism in the context of losing an election to someone who is the closest thing to an out-and-out white supremacist presidential candidate since George Wallace. Oops!
I'm sure the speechwriter was banking on people not paying that close attention, and basically, we didn't -- myself included.
The other reason why the quote has been somewhat diminished for me of late, however, is not political, but rather linguistic.
I was reading another novel -- Maria Edgeworth's 1800 Anglo-Irish classic Castle Rackrent -- and discovered something therein that kind of flips the switch on the whole thing. And indeed, this is what reminded me of the 2016 Tim Kaine concession speech to start with, and sent me down this whole "killed, not whupped" rabbit hole.
Edgeworth's short novel is a wonderful tale of eighteenth century moral dissolution on a Hogarthian scale -- except with fewer moralizing overtones. The chief character is defeated at last by his own vices of laziness, impecuniousness, etc. (at one point he stands for election to parliament and wins, after being assured by his friends and supporters he won't have to lift a finger in order to do so, and after they all make pledges to his campaign committee that never actually materialize, pushing him even further into debt); but he is lovably generous and open-hearted -- if stupid -- in the profligate spending and wastrelism that leads to his destruction. All of which makes the book more tragicomic tale of human foibles than sermon on the wages of sin. Despite Edgeworth's winking gestures toward the conventional morality of the day in the book's preface, Rackrent is ultimately far more Barry Lyndon than it is "Rake's Progress."
One important episode in the gradual self-ruination of the family at the center of the novel, I add, occurs when the main character's wife is run off the road and severely injured (eventually leading to her death). She falls victim to this fate in part because she and her husband have already been forced to pawn the larger coach they had owned, forcing her to attempt long distances in some lesser and more unstable vehicle.
The relevant detail here, however, is what occurs when a servant rushes in to explain what has just happened to her mistress. "My Lady Rackrent was all kilt and smashed," she informs Lord Rackrent, and thus, the reader. Which sounds like a rather amusingly bathetic way of putting it --until Edgeworth intervenes in the voice of an omniscient "editor" to explain this Anglo-Irish linguistic oddity to her readers on the mainland. She writes:
Our author is not here guilty of an anti-climax. The mere English reader, from a similarity of sound between the words ‘kilt’ and ‘killed,’ might be induced to suppose that their meanings are similar, yet they are not by any means in Ireland synonymous terms. Thus you may hear a man exclaim, ‘I’m kilt and murdered!’ but he frequently means only that he has received a black eye or a slight contusion.Uh oh, I thought. I was immediately put in mind of the Tim Kaine concession speech. Could this linguistic knowledge explain away the apparent delightful paradox in the "killed, but not whupped" line, thus robbing it of its power?
Wash Jones, after all -- the speaker of the line in Faulkner's novel -- is a Southern poor white, many of whom were descended from Scotch-Irish folk who migrated over to the future United States in the eighteenth century and could well have carried with them these same speech patterns. And indeed, when we go back to Faulkner's novel, we discover that he didn't say "killed," he says "kilt."
By my count, a variant of the phrase occurs four times in the course of the novel. Using the 1990 Vintage International edition, we first find: "Well, Kernel, they kilt us but they aint whupped us yet, air they?" on p. 150); "They mought have kilt us, but they aint whupped us yet, air they?" on p. 152; and then "Well, Kernel, they kilt us but they aint whupped us yit, air they?" on p. 223.
These first three repetitions of the phrase are spoken by Wash Jones himself, in Quentin Compson's retelling. The fourth variant of the phrase is spoken by Quentin's Canadian roommate Shreve, as he is poking fun at Jones and Southern poor whites in general. Because Shreve is unfamiliar with the local speech patterns, he unconsciously reverses the wording of the phrase, thus rendering it less apparently paradoxical: "Well, Kernel," he says, "they mought have whupped us but they aint kilt us yet, air they?"
All of which suggests that in Wash Jone's utterance, we are faced with a linguistic quirk that we are simply misreading as the paradoxical "killed," from our and Shreve's outsider's perspective, but that it actually means something different.
If we apply Edgeworth's footnote, then -- and strip away Shreve's and our misunderstanding -- then all Wash Jones is really saying is: "They wounded us, but they haven't defeated us entirely yet."
Which is a lot less interesting and powerful a line for a concession speech! Now we're just back in the realm of cliché. "We lost the battle, but we will win the war." That kind of thing.
So yeah... no literary quotation is perfect. And we shouldn't expect them to be. Plainly, this one worked for its audience. It accomplished what it needed to in the moment. What more can we ask?
Discovering the Edgeworth note, however, got me trying to think about of great rousing literary evocations of the experiences of defeat and recovery. The only one that came to mind right away were the opening sections of Paradise Lost, when Lucifer and his rebel angels have to take stock of their situation after their exile from heaven. As Lawrence Freedman notes in his mammoth book on the history of strategic thought, "A set of options [is] described," during this scene, "that might have been put to any group trying to respond to a major setback."
Quoting from this passage, however, raises certain political difficulties of its own. I for one would prefer any day to be seen as a member of Satan's party before being seen as a Neo-Confederate, but in the eyes of the broader American public, I'm not sure that comparing oneself to Lucifer is more likely to endear one to them than a comparison to Wash Jones.
You will recall how Fox News and their ilk tried to demagogue the fact that Hillary Clinton had been influenced by Saul Alinsky, who in turn cites the literary figure of Lucifer as an inspiration for all rebels at the opening of his Rules for Radicals. With their usual exhausting philistinism, the right decided this fact could be forcibly spun as: "Here's the proof -- Hillary likes [and maybe is?] the devil!"
(This is one of these moments in American life when you realize -- oh right -- a lot of those people on the right think the devil is actually like, a real thing. Or at least pretend to do so on occasion for political purposes.)
Orwell once described in his great essay on his school days how, of all figures in literary and religious history, it was always Satan with whom he identified the most: " I understood to perfection what it meant to be Lucifer, defeated and justly defeated, with no possibility of revenge."
This certainly speaks to what I felt like the night of the 2016 election. If there's any passage in English prose that best captures the catatonic helplessness, self-doubt, and failure many of us experienced that night, it might well be this. The Orwell quotation feels so apposite, in fact, I probably would have tried to sneak it into a draft of the concession speech.
So yeah, there's a reason people don't hire me for these things.
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