18-] American Literature
William Faulkner 1897 –1962
William
Faulkner (1897-1962), who came from an old southern family, grew up in Oxford,
Mississippi. He joined the Canadian, and later the British, Royal Air Force
during the First World War, studied for a while at the University of
Mississippi, and temporarily worked for a New York bookstore and a New Orleans
newspaper. Except for some trips to Europe and Asia, and a few brief stays in Hollywood
as a scriptwriter, he worked on his novels and short stories on a farm in
Oxford.
In
an attempt to create a saga of his own, Faulkner has invented a host of
characters typical of the historical growth and subsequent decadence of the
South. The human drama in Faulkner’s novels is then built on the model of the
actual, historical drama extending over almost a century and a half Each story
and each novel contributes to the construction of a whole, which is the
imaginary Yoknapatawpha County and its inhabitants. Their theme is the decay of
the old South, as represented by the Sartoris and Compson families, and the
emergence of ruthless and brash newcomers, the Snopeses. Theme and technique –
the distortion of time through the use of the inner monologue are fused
particularly successfully in The Sound and the Fury (1929), the downfall of the
Compson family seen through the minds of several characters. The novel
Sanctuary (1931) is about the degeneration of Temple Drake, a young girl from a
distinguished southern family. Its sequel, Requiem For A Nun (1951), written
partly as a drama, centered on the courtroom trial of a Negro woman who had
once been a party to Temple Drake’s debauchery. In Light in August (1932),
prejudice is shown to be most destructive when it is internalized, as in Joe
Christmas, who believes, though there is no proof of it, that one of his
parents was a Negro. The theme of racial prejudice is brought up again in
Absalom, Absalom! (1936), in which a young man is rejected by his father and
brother because of his mixed blood. Faulkner’s most outspoken moral evaluation
of the relationship and the problems between Negroes and whites is to be found
in Intruder In the Dust (1948).
In
1940, Faulkner published the first volume of the Snopes trilogy, The Hamlet, to
be followed by two volumes, The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959), all of them
tracing the rise of the insidious Snopes family to positions of power and
wealth in the community. The reivers, his last – and most humorous – work, with
great many similarities to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, appeared in 1962, the
year of Faulkner’s death. William Faulkner died on July 6, 1962.
Life
During
William Faulkner’s upbringing in Mississippi, his mother Maud, grandmother
Leila and the family’s African-American nanny, Caroline “Callie” Barr, played
an important role in his artistic development. Maud and Leila painted,
photographed and read, and Faulkner’s lifelong relationship with “Callie”
opened his eyes to injustice, racism and sexism. Yoknapatawpha County, his
fictional literary universe, resembled the surroundings in which Faulkner grew
up. Writing about a familiar environment helped him find his voice and become
an experimental writer, prepared to take literary risks.
Work
William
Faulkner generally is regarded as one of the most significant American writers
of all time. Faulkner wrote 13 novels and many short stories but started as a
poet. With his breakthrough novel, The Sound and the Fury, he began to use
stream of consciousness to portray a character’s flow of inner thoughts. His
books often are told from the point of view of several characters and contain
accurately rendered colloquialisms combined with long sentences full of imagery
and language that is sometimes surreal.
The major novels
Faulkner
had meanwhile “written [his] guts” into the more technically sophisticated The
Sound and the Fury, believing that he was fated to remain permanently
unpublished and need therefore make no concessions to the cautious
commercialism of the literary marketplace. The novel did find a publisher,
despite the difficulties it posed for its readers, and from the moment of its
appearance in October 1929 Faulkner drove confidently forward as a writer,
engaging always with new themes, new areas of experience, and, above all, new
technical challenges. Crucial to his extraordinary early productivity was the
decision to shun the talk, infighting, and publicity of literary centers and
live instead in what was then the small-town remoteness of Oxford, where he was
already at home and could devote himself, in near isolation, to actual writing.
In 1929 he married Estelle Oldham—whose previous marriage, now terminated, had
helped drive him into the RAF in 1918. One year later he bought Rowan Oak, a
handsome but run-down pre-Civil War house on the outskirts of Oxford,
restoration work on the house becoming, along with hunting, an important
diversion in the years ahead. A daughter, Jill, was born to the couple in 1933,
and although their marriage was otherwise troubled, Faulkner remained working
at home throughout the 1930s and ’40s, except when financial need forced him to
accept the Hollywood screenwriting assignments he deplored but very competently
fulfilled.
Oxford
provided Faulkner with intimate access to a deeply conservative rural world,
conscious of its past and remote from the urban-industrial mainstream, in terms
of which he could work out the moral as well as narrative patterns of his work.
His fictional methods, however, were the reverse of conservative. He knew the
work not only of Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Charles Dickens, and
Herman Melville but also of Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Sherwood Anderson, and
other recent figures on both sides of the Atlantic, and in The Sound and the
Fury (1929), his first major novel, he combined a Yoknapatawpha setting with
radical technical experimentation. In successive “stream-of-consciousness”
monologues the three brothers of Candace (Caddy) Compson—Benjy the idiot,
Quentin the disturbed Harvard undergraduate, and Jason the embittered local
businessman—expose their differing obsessions with their sister and their
loveless relationships with their parents. A fourth section, narrated as if
authorially, provides new perspectives on some of the central characters, including
Dilsey, the Compsons’ Black servant, and moves toward a powerful yet
essentially unresolved conclusion. Faulkner’s next novel, the brilliant
tragicomedy called As I Lay Dying (1930), is centred upon the conflicts within
the “poor white” Bundren family as it makes its slow and difficult way to
Jefferson to bury its matriarch’s malodorously decaying corpse. Entirely
narrated by the various Bundrens and people encountered on their journey, it is
the most systematically multi-voiced of Faulkner’s novels and marks the
culmination of his early post-Joycean experimentalism.
Although
the psychological intensity and technical innovation of these two novels were
scarcely calculated to ensure a large contemporary readership, Faulkner’s name
was beginning to be known in the early 1930s, and he was able to place short
stories even in such popular—and well-paying—magazines as Collier’s and
Saturday Evening Post. Greater, if more equivocal, prominence came with the
financially successful publication of Sanctuary, a novel about the brutal rape
of a Southern college student and its generally violent, sometimes comic,
consequences. A serious work, despite Faulkner’s unfortunate declaration that
it was written merely to make money, Sanctuary was actually completed prior to
As I Lay Dying and published, in February 1931, only after Faulkner had gone to
the trouble and expense of restructuring and partly rewriting it—though without
moderating the violence—at proof stage. Despite the demands of film work and
short stories (of which a first collection appeared in 1931 and a second in
1934), and even the preparation of a volume of poems (published in 1933 as A
Green Bough), Faulkner produced in 1932 another long and powerful novel.
Complexly structured and involving several major characters, Light in August
revolves primarily upon the contrasted careers of Lena Grove, a pregnant young
countrywoman serenely in pursuit of her biological destiny, and Joe Christmas,
a dark-complexioned orphan uncertain as to his racial origins, whose life
becomes a desperate and often violent search for a sense of personal identity,
a secure location on one side or the other of the tragic dividing line of
colour.
Made
temporarily affluent by Sanctuary and Hollywood, Faulkner took up flying in the
early 1930s, bought a Waco cabin aircraft, and flew it in February 1934 to the
dedication of Shushan Airport in New Orleans, gathering there much of the
material for Pylon, the novel about racing and barnstorming pilots that he
published in 1935. Having given the Waco to his youngest brother, Dean, and
encouraged him to become a professional pilot, Faulkner was both grief- and
guilt-stricken when Dean crashed and died in the plane later in 1935; when
Dean’s daughter was born in 1936 he took responsibility for her education. The
experience perhaps contributed to the emotional intensity of the novel on which
he was then working. In Absalom, Absalom! (1936) Thomas Sutpen arrives in
Jefferson from “nowhere,” ruthlessly carves a large plantation out of the
Mississippi wilderness, fights valiantly in the Civil War in defense of his
adopted society, but is ultimately destroyed by his inhumanity toward those
whom he has used and cast aside in the obsessive pursuit of his grandiose
dynastic “design.” By refusing to acknowledge his first, partly Black, son,
Charles Bon, Sutpen also loses his second son, Henry, who goes into hiding
after killing Bon (whom he loves) in the name of their sister’s honour. Because
this profoundly Southern story is constructed—speculatively, conflictingly, and
inconclusively—by a series of narrators with sharply divergent self-interested
perspectives, Absalom, Absalom! is often seen, in its infinite open-endedness,
as Faulkner’s supreme “modernist” fiction, focused above all on the processes
of its own telling.
Later
life and works of William Faulkner
The
novel The Wild Palms (1939) was again technically adventurous, with two
distinct yet thematically counterpointed narratives alternating, chapter by
chapter, throughout. But Faulkner was beginning to return to the Yoknapatawpha
County material he had first imagined in the 1920s and subsequently exploited
in short-story form. The Unvanquished (1938) was relatively conventional, but
The Hamlet (1940), the first volume of the long-uncompleted “Snopes” trilogy,
emerged as a work of extraordinary stylistic richness. Its episodic structure
is underpinned by recurrent thematic patterns and by the wryly humorous
presence of V.K. Ratliff—an itinerant sewing-machine agent—and his unavailing
opposition to the increasing power and prosperity of the supremely manipulative
Flem Snopes and his numerous “poor white” relatives. In 1942 appeared Go Down,
Moses, yet another major work, in which an intense exploration of the linked
themes of racial, sexual, and environmental exploitation is conducted largely
in terms of the complex interactions between the “white” and “Black” branches
of the plantation-owning McCaslin family, especially as represented by Isaac
McCaslin on the one hand and Lucas Beauchamp on the other.
For
various reasons—the constraints on wartime publishing, financial pressures to
take on more scriptwriting, difficulties with the work later published as A
Fable—Faulkner did not produce another novel until Intruder in the Dust (1948),
in which Lucas Beauchamp, reappearing from Go Down, Moses, is proved innocent
of murder, and thus saved from lynching, only by the persistent efforts of a
young white boy. Racial issues were again confronted, but in the somewhat
ambiguous terms that were to mark Faulkner’s later public statements on race:
while deeply sympathetic to the oppression suffered by Blacks in the Southern
states, he nevertheless felt that such wrongs should be righted by the South
itself, free of Northern intervention.
Faulkner’s
American reputation—which had always lagged well behind his reputation in Europe—was
boosted by The Portable Faulkner (1946), an anthology skillfully edited by
Malcolm Cowley in accordance with the arresting if questionable thesis that
Faulkner was deliberately constructing a historically based “legend” of the
South. Faulkner’s Collected Stories (1950), impressive in both quantity and
quality, was also well received, and later in 1950 the award of the Nobel Prize
for Literature catapulted the author instantly to the peak of world fame and
enabled him to affirm, in a famous acceptance speech, his belief in the
survival of the human race, even in an atomic age, and in the importance of the
artist to that survival.
The
Nobel Prize had a major impact on Faulkner’s private life. Confident now of his
reputation and future sales, he became less consistently “driven” as a writer
than in earlier years and allowed himself more personal freedom, drinking
heavily at times and indulging in a number of extramarital affairs—his
opportunities in these directions being considerably enhanced by a final
screenwriting assignment in Egypt in 1954 and several overseas trips (most
notably to Japan in 1955) undertaken on behalf of the U.S. State Department. He
took his “ambassadorial” duties seriously, speaking frequently in public and to
interviewers, and also became politically active at home, taking positions on
major racial issues in the vain hope of finding middle ground between
entrenched Southern conservatives and interventionist Northern liberals. Local
Oxford opinion proving hostile to such views, Faulkner in 1957 and 1958 readily
accepted semester-long appointments as writer-in-residence at the University of
Virginia in Charlottesville. Attracted to the town by the presence of his
daughter and her children as well as by its opportunities for horse-riding and
fox-hunting, Faulkner bought a house there in 1959, though continuing to spend
time at Rowan Oak.
The
quality of Faulkner’s writing is often said to have declined in the wake of the
Nobel Prize. But the central sections of Requiem for a Nun (1951) are
challengingly set out in dramatic form, and A Fable (1954), a long, densely
written, and complexly structured novel about World War I, demands attention as
the work in which Faulkner made by far his greatest investment of time, effort,
and authorial commitment. In The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959) Faulkner
not only brought the “Snopes” trilogy to its conclusion, carrying his
Yoknapatawpha narrative to beyond the end of World War II, but subtly varied
the management of narrative point of view. Finally, in June 1962 Faulkner
published yet another distinctive novel, the genial, nostalgic comedy of male
maturation he called The Reivers and appropriately subtitled “A Reminiscence.”
A month later he was dead, of a heart attack, at the age of 64, his health
undermined by his drinking and by too many falls from horses too big for him.
Legacy
By
the time of his death Faulkner had clearly emerged not just as the major
American novelist of his generation but as one of the greatest writers of the
20th century, unmatched for his extraordinary structural and stylistic
resourcefulness, for the range and depth of his characterization and social
notation, and for his persistence and success in exploring fundamental human
issues in intensely localized terms. Some critics, early and late, have found
his work extravagantly rhetorical and unduly violent, and there have been
strong objections, especially late in the 20th century, to the perceived
insensitivity of his portrayals of women and Black Americans. His reputation, grounded
in the sheer scale and scope of his achievement, seems nonetheless secure, and
he remains a profoundly influential presence for novelists writing in the
United States, South America, and, indeed, throughout the world.
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