WILLIAM FAULKNER (C.A.)
1897-1962
Personal Information: Surname originally Falkner, later changed to Faulkner; born September 25, 1897, in New Albany, Mississippi, United States; died July 6, 1962, in Byhalia, Mississippi, United States; son of Murry Cuthbert (a railroad worker, owner of a cottonseed oil and ice plant, livery stable operator, hardware store employee, secretary and business manager at University of Mississippi) and Maud (Butler) Falkner; married Lida Estelle Oldham Franklin, June 20, 1929; children: Alabama (died, 1931), Jill (Mrs. Paul Dilwyn Summers, Jr.); (step-children) Victoria, Malcolm Argyle. Education: Attended University of Mississippi, 1919- 20. Avocational Interests: Aviation, raising and training horses, hunting, sailing. Military/Wartime Service: British Royal Air Force, cadet pilot, 1918; became honorary second lieutenant. Memberships: American Academy of Arts and Letters, Sigma Alpha Epsilon.
Education: Entry updated: 02/25/2004
Career: First National Bank, Oxford, MS, clerk, 1916; Winchester Repeating Arms Co., New Haven, CT, ledger clerk, 1918; Lord & Taylor, New York, NY, bookstore clerk, 1921; University of Mississippi, Oxford, postmaster, 1921-24; worked as roof painter, carpenter, and paper hanger, New Orleans, LA, 1925; deckhand on Genoa-bound freighter, 1925; full-time writer, 1925-62. Coal shoveler at Oxford Power Plant, 1929. Screenwriter for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1932-33, and for Warner Bros., 1942-45, 1951, 1953, and 1954. Chairman of Writer's Group People-to-People Program, 1956-57. Writer in residence, University of Virginia, 1957-62.
Award(s):
Elected to National Institute of Arts and Letters, 1939; O. Henry Memorial Short Story Awards, 1939, 1940, and 1949; elected to American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1948; Nobel Prize for Literature, 1949; William Dean Howells Medal, American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1950; National Book Award, 1951, for Collected Stories; Legion of Honor of Republic of France, 1951; National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize, both 1955, both for A Fable; Silver Medal of the Greek Academy, 1957; gold medal for fiction, National Institute of Arts and Letters, 1962; Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Columbia University, 1963, for The Reivers, a Reminiscence.
Each of Faulkner's novels has been translated into at least one other language, and several have been translated into as many as thirteen languages.
Short fiction anthologized in Post Stories, 1957 ( "The Waifs"), Random House, 1980.
Also author of Faulkner on Love: A Letter to Marjorie Lyons, limited edition edited by Richard Lyons, Merrykit Press (Fargo, ND), 1974; and Faulkner's Ode to the Louver, Speech at Teatro Municipal, Caracas, 1961, edited by James B. Merriwether, State College of Mississippi, 1979. Featured on sound recordings: William Faulkner Reads Selections from His Novel: The Sound and the Fury--Dilsey, Listening Library, 1976; William Faulkner Reads a Selection from His Novel: Light in August, Listening Library, 1979. Also contributor of poems, short stories, and articles to magazines and newspapers, including New Orleans Times-Picayune, New Republic, Saturday Evening Post, Scribner's, and Sports Illustrated.
Media Adaptations:
Requiem for a Nun was adapted by Ruth Ford for the stage (first produced on Broadway, January 30, 1959, Hart Stenographic Bureau, 1959), A Rose for Emily, read by Tammy Grimes, Caedmon, 1980, Tomorrow, by Horton Foote, Dramatists Play Service, 1963, Maddow, Ben, Intruder in the Dust, 1978. The following novels by Faulkner have been adapted for movies: "Intruder in the Dust," Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1949; "Tarnished Angels" (based on Pylon), Universal, 1957; "The Long Hot Summer" (based on The Hamlet), Twentieth Century-Fox, 1958; "The Sound and the Fury," Twentieth Century-Fox, 1959; "Sanctuary" (also includes parts of Requiem for a Nun), Twentieth Century-Fox, 1961; "The Reivers," Cinema Center Films, 1969. The Sound and the Fury was adapted for television in 1955, and several of Faulkner's short stories have been adapted for television, including "An Error in Chemistry" and "The Brooch."
William Faulkner is considered one of America's greatest twentieth-century novelists. He spent most of his literary career in the South, which both inspired and informed his fiction. Many critics have expressed amazement that Faulkner, in many ways such an isolated and provincial artist, was able to produce such impressive, universal work. Perhaps John W. Aldridge put it best when he wrote, "Working alone down there in that seemingly impenetrable cultural wilderness of the sovereignly backward state of Mississippi, he managed to make a clearing for his mind and a garden for his art, one which he cultivated so lovingly and well that it has come in our day to feed the imagination of literate men throughout the civilized world."
Most of the biographical facts about Faulkner have been thoroughly documented. He was born into a genteel Southern family that had played a significant part in the history of Mississippi. His great-grandfather, William Clark Falkner, was a colorful figure who had built railroads, served in the Confederate Army, and written a popular novel, The White Rose of Memphis. An indifferent student, Faulkner dropped out of Oxford High School in 1915 and then worked for a time as a clerk in his grandfather's bank. During this period he wrote bad imitative verse and contributed drawings to the University of Mississippi's yearbook, Ole Miss. When the United States declared war on Germany, Faulkner tried to enlist but was rejected because of his small stature.
Instead of going to war, Faulkner went to New Haven, Connecticut, to visit his friend Phil Stone, then a student at Yale. Stone had recognized Faulkner's talent early on and had encouraged his literary bent. The two men read and discussed Balzac and the French Symbolist poets. Although some critics have pointed to Stone as the determining factor in Faulkner's success, Michael Millgate theorized that the "apparent passivity of the younger man [Faulkner], his willingness to accept the position of listener, learner, recipient, and protege, undoubtedly led Stone to exaggerate in his own mind, and in public and private statements, the real extent of his influence.... Inevitably, Faulkner grew beyond Stone." At this time, however, Stone and Faulkner were still close friends. With Stone's help, Faulkner hatched a scheme to get admitted into the Royal Canadian Air Force. By affecting a British accent and forging letters of recommendation from nonexistent Englishmen, Faulkner was accepted into the RAF.
The war ended before Faulkner saw combat duty. He returned to his hometown, where he intermittently attended Ole Miss as a special student. His dandified appearance and lack of a stable job led townspeople to dub him "Count No' Count." On August 6, 1919, he surprised them when his first poem, "L'Apres-midi d'un faune," was published in New Republic; later in the same year the Mississippian published one of his short stories, "Landing in Luck." After Faulkner dropped out of Ole Miss, he went to New York City at the invitation of Stark Young, a Mississippi novelist and drama critic. While he was there, Faulkner worked for Elizabeth Prall as a bookstore clerk.
Back at Oxford, Faulkner was hired as university postmaster, but his mind was rarely on his duties. Before putting magazines into the proper subscriber's post office box, he read through the issues. He brought his writing to the post office with him and became so immersed in what he was doing that he ignored patrons. Eventually his laxness came to the attention of the postal inspector, and he resigned rather than be fired. Faulkner remarked that he quit the job because he "didn't want to be at the beck and call of every son-of-a-bitch with the price of a two-cent stamp."
His career in the postal service over, Faulkner called on Elizabeth Prall in New Orleans. She was now married to novelist Sherwood Anderson, and the two men struck up a friendship. The association with Anderson helped Faulkner realize that his true metier was not poetry but the novel. Faulkner's first book, The Marble Faun, a collection of verse, was published after he arrived in New Orleans in 1924. Sales were so poor that most of the five hundred copies were sold to a bookstore for a mere ten cents a volume. Acting upon Anderson's advice, Faulkner wrote a novel and set it in the South. Anderson told Faulkner he would recommend the book, entitled Soldiers' Pay, to a publisher as long as he didn't have to read it. Although the two men were very close for several months, a rift developed between them. Millgate postulated that "Faulkner's early realization that Anderson's way was not to be his way must always have been a source of strain in their relationship." During this period in New Orleans, Faulkner also contributed short stories and sketches to the Times-Picayune.
In 1925, Faulkner joined the American literary expatriates and went to Europe. He did not remain there long, however, and after a brief stay in New Orleans, he returned to Oxford, where he finally settled down. While he had been in Europe, Soldiers' Pay had appeared on the bookstands. It attracted some favorable notices but was not a commercial success. Years later, Robert Penn Warren, also a Southern writer, remembered his own reactions when he first read Soldiers' Pay in the spring of 1929: "As a novel, Soldiers' Pay is no better than it should be, but it made a profound and undefinable impression on me." Mosquitoes, a mildly satirical novel on literary life in New Orleans, came out in 1927. Faulkner then penned Flags in the Dust, the first of his novels to be set in Yoknapatawpha County.
Early in 1928 Flags in the Dust was being shuffled from one publisher to another without success, and Faulkner had grown disgusted with the entire publication process. Abruptly, he decided to stop worrying about whether or not others liked his manuscripts. "One day I seemed to shut a door," he recalled, "between me and all publishers' addresses and book lists. I said to myself, Now I can write. Now I can make myself a vase like that which the old Roman kept at his bedside and wore the rim slowly away with kissing it. So I, who never had a sister and was fated to lose my daughter in infancy, set out to make myself a beautiful and tragic little girl." The story that Faulkner sat down to write was, of course, The Sound and the Fury, and "the beautiful and tragic little girl" was Caddy Compson. It was The Sound and the Fury that helped Faulkner establish a solid reputation among critics. Stirred by Faulkner's novel, Lyle Saxon wrote, "I believe simply and sincerely this is a great book." A reviewer for the Boston Evening Transcript called The Sound and the Fury a novel "worthy of the attention of a Euripides."
When writing his next novel, As I Lay Dying, Faulkner did not experience the same rapture he had felt when he was working on The Sound and the Fury. As I Lay Dying was written in a six-week period while Faulkner was working the night shift at a powerhouse. The constant humming noise of a dynamo serenaded him while he wrote his famous tour de force on the nature of being. By the time As I Lay Dying came out in 1930, John Bassett observed that "Faulkner's name, if not a household word, was at least known to many critics and reviewers, who spoke of him no longer as a neophyte, or a new voice in fiction, but as one either continuing his development in fruitful ways or floundering after several attempts, in either case as a writer known to the literary world."
Faulkner was not recognized by the general public until Sanctuary, one of his most violent and shocking novels, appeared in 1931. When he wrote Sanctuary, Faulkner later admitted, he had one purpose in mind: to make money. By this time he had a family to support, and out of desperation he concocted a book he thought would sell to the masses. Faulkner was ashamed when he saw the printer's galleys of the book and extensively rewrote his potboiler so that it would have a more serious intent. The scandalous subject matter of Sanctuary appealed to the reading public, and it sold well. For a brief time Faulkner became a minor celebrity, but the rest of the decade did not go as well. Many reviewers had favorable comments to make about Sanctuary--Andre Malraux declared it "marks the intrusion of Greek tragedy into the detective story"--but in the view of others, the novel proved that Faulkner was merely a purveyor of the monstrous, the gory, and the obscene, and they judged his subsequent books in the same light. Faulkner was also a victim of the times. The Depression caused book sales in general to plummet, but his novels were particularly unpopular because they were not in keeping with the nation's mood. Warren speculated that critics and the public became disenchanted with Faulkner because his books offered no practical solutions to the pressing problems of the day--feeding the hungry and providing jobs for the millions of unemployed. Some readers were offended by Faulkner's novels because they were not written in the optimistic spirit of the New Deal, while still others discerned fascist tendencies in his work.
During the 1930s and 1940s Faulkner wrote many of his finest books, including Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, The Wild Palms, The Hamlet, and Go Down, Moses. They brought in very little revenue, however, and he was forced to work in Hollywood as a screenwriter. Faulkner worked on and off in Hollywood for a number of years, but he was never happy there. He fled from the movie capital as soon as he had amassed enough money to pay his bills.
It should not be assumed that Faulkner was completely unappreciated during this time period. Bassett pointed out that the majority of reviews were positive, and that between 1939 and 1942 several important examinations of Faulkner appeared in literary journals and in literary histories. Although hardly noticed by the public, Faulkner was esteemed by many of his fellow writers. His work had also attracted a substantial following in France. Maurice Coindreau translated several of Faulkner's novels and short stories into French, and his fiction received perceptive treatment from such critics as Andre Malraux, Maurice LeBreton, Jean Pouillon, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Despite Faulkner's stature in literary circles at home and abroad, in the 1940s his books gradually began dropping out of print, partly because of lack of popular interest, partly because of the war effort. By 1945 all seventeen of his books were out of print. In 1946 the publication of The Portable Faulkner, edited by Malcolm Cowley, created a resurgence of interest in Faulkner. Cowley's introduction to the volume, with its emphasis on the Southern legend that Faulkner had created in his works, served as a springboard for future critics. "Faulkner performed a labor of imagination that has not been equaled in our time, and a double labor," Cowley asserted. "First, to invent a Mississippi county that was like a mythical kingdom, but was complete and living in all its details; second, to make his story of Yoknapatawpha County stand as a parable or legend of all the Deep South."
Fifteen of Faulkner's novels and many of his short stories are set in Yoknapatawpha County, which bears a close resemblance to the region in northern Mississippi where Faulkner spent most of his life. Faulkner defined Yoknapatawpha as an "Indian word meaning water runs slow through flat land." The county is bounded by the Tallahatchie River on the north and by the Yoknapatawpha River on the south. Jefferson, the county seat, is modeled after Oxford. Up the road a piece is Frenchman's Bend, a poverty-stricken village. Scattered throughout the countryside are ramshackle plantation houses, farmhouses, and the hovels of tenant farmers. Depicted in both the past and the present, Yoknapatawpha is populated with a vast spectrum of people--the Indians who originally inhabited the land, the aristocrats, those ambitious men who fought their way into the landed gentry, yeoman farmers, poor whites, blacks, carpetbaggers, and bushwhackers. Faulkner was proud of the kingdom he had erected in his imagination. On a map of Yoknapatawpha County he prepared for the first edition of Absalom, Absalom!, he wrote, "William Faulkner, Sole Owner & Proprietor."
Although there are some inconsistencies in the Yoknapatawpha novels and although the books are certainly not arranged in a neat chronological order, the saga does have unity. Millgate called this unity "a unity of inspiration, of a single irradiating tragi-comic vision." In order to appreciate Faulkner's vision fully, one must read the entire saga, which Yardley described as "a tapestry of incomparable intricacy, past and present woven together in a design that can be comprehended through one book but that gains astonishing richness when seen as a whole." The greatness of Faulkner's design led critics to recognize that he was not just a provincial writer. Like the works of such famous regional authors as Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, and William Butler Yeats, Faulkner's novels have a universal appeal. Faulkner created, Arthur Edelstein remarked, a "hallucinated version of the Deep South which has escaped its local origins to become a region of the modern consciousness."
Those who investigated the Yoknapatawpha legend began exploring other aspects of Faulkner's fiction. Warren Beck observed that Faulkner's reiteration of certain words and his habit of piling one adjective upon another sometimes help to create a mood or to accentuate a particular character trait. For examples, Beck turned to Absalom, Absalom! In that novel, Miss Rosa's persistent use of the word "demon" indicates her crazed obsession, while the description of the "long still hot weary dead September afternoon" when Quentin hears Miss Rosa's story emphasizes not only the muggy weather but also the spiritual malaise of the characters. Joseph Blotner noted that sometimes Faulkner followed James Joyce's lead and "would omit all punctuation to denote the flowing stream of consciousness." This technique was used in Benjy's and Quentin's sections in The Sound and the Fury. As for Faulkner's vague pronoun references, Helen Swink surmised that he used them because he wanted to adapt the art of the oral storyteller to the written page. In attempting to sound like he was spinning yarns aloud, Faulkner used vague pronoun references because this is a characteristic of oral speech.
Most often, Faulkner's style is keyed to his themes. One of Faulkner's chief thematic preoccupations is the past, and this theme is also reflected in his form. In a famous analogy, Jean-Paul Sartre compared the Faulknerian character's point of view to that "of a passenger looking backward from a speeding car, who sees, flowing away from him, the landscape he is traversing. For him the future is not in view, the present is too blurred to make out, and he can see clearly only the past as it streams away before his obsessed and backward-looking gaze." Faulkner's pages are filled with characters who are fettered to the past. Millgate pointed out that in The Sound and the Fury the suicidal Quentin Compson searches "for a means of arresting time at a moment of achieved perfection, a moment when he and Caddy could be eternally together in the simplicity of their childhood relationship." The Reverend Gail Hightower in Light in August is also locked in the past, endlessly reliving the glory of his grandfather's cavalry charge. Robert Hemenway believed that in As I Lay Dying Faulkner is showing "that the South, like the Bundrens, must bury the past; that it cannot remain true--without courting tragedy or absurdity--to the promises given to dead ancestors or to the illusions of former glory." In "A Rose for Emily," Emily Grierson's embracing of her dead lover becomes a gruesome symbol of what happens when one clings to the past.
The stylistic methods most closely associated with Faulkner's treatment of the past are his use of long sentences, flashbacks, and multiple viewpoints. Aiken suggested that Faulkner utilizes complicated sentence structures because he wants "a medium without stops or pauses, a medium which is always of the moment, and of which the passage from moment to moment is as fluid and undetectable as in the life itself which he is purporting to give." Swink posited that the confusing sentences that withhold meaning from the reader "intensify the emotional experience," while Millgate claimed that these sentences enable Faulkner "to hold a single moment in suspension while its full complexity is explored." The flashbacks are even more clearly related to Faulkner's interest in the past. Edward Murray pointed out that in Light in August the minds of Joe Christmas, Gail Hightower, Joanna Burden, and Lena Grove frequently revert back to the past, but "the flashbacks are not there merely to supply expository material for the actions in the present that need further explanation. Since the past is Faulkner's subject--or a large part of it--the flashbacks are not simply `functional': they are thematically necessary."
By telling a story from several points of view, Faulkner adds a further dimension to his concept of time. The past is part of the present; thus, it is subject to re-evaluation and re-interpretation. Faulkner's view of time as a continuum has certain moral implications, Millgate explained: "The all important point consisted in the idea that there could be no such thing as `was': since time constituted a continuum the chain of cause and effect could never be broken, and every human action must continue to reverberate, however faintly, into infinity. Hence the all-importance of conduct, of personal responsibility for all one's actions." This belief partially accounts for Faulkner's frequent allusions to the Bible. "Faulkner's true domain is that of the eternal myths, particularly those popularized by the Bible," Maurice Coindreau observed. "The themes that he prefers, his favorite images and metaphors, are those which ornament the fabric of the Old Testament." Like the writers of the Old Testament, Faulkner believes that the sins of the fathers are visited upon their children. Many of his characters are plagued by guilt, precipitated by their own sins as well as by the actions of their forefathers, who had callously shoved aside the Indians, enslaved the blacks, and laid waste the land.
Perhaps the greatest moral burden borne by Southerners was slavery. Much of Faulkner's fiction shows the evil that results from the failure to recognize the humanity of black people. Certainly many of the slave owners he depicts are cruel to their human property. In Go Down, Moses, Carothers McCaslin seduces Eunice, one of his Negroes. Years later he seduces the daughter who resulted from that union, thus driving Eunice to suicide. One of the reasons that Thomas Sutpen's grand design fails in Absalom, Absalom! is his acceptance of racism. When Sutpen leaves Haiti to found a dynasty in Mississippi, he abandons his black wife and infant son because their color would not be acceptable to Southerners. That deed comes back to haunt Sutpen and the children from his second marriage, Judith and Henry. Sutpen's mulatto son shows up and wants to marry Judith. As horrified by the thought of miscegenation as he is by the possibility of incest, Henry guns down his half brother. This is only one incident in Absalom, Absalom! that demonstrates, as John V. Hagopian pointed out, how "the novel as a whole clearly repudiates Southern racism."
Men do not only exploit one another, Faulkner points out; they also exploit the earth. Cleanth Brooks noted that "Faulkner seems to accept the Christian doctrine of original sin. Men are condemned to prey upon nature. The only question is whether in doing so they will exercise some kind of restraint and love the nature that they are forced to use, or whether they will exploit nature methodically and ruthlessly, in a kind of rape."
Another important aspect of Faulkner's fiction is love between family members. Cowley observed that Faulkner's books "have what is rare in the novels of our time, a warmth of family affection, brother for brother and sister, the father for his children--a love so warm and proud that it tries to shut out the rest of the world." But family life has eroded in Faulkner's fiction, at least partially because society is debilitated. "Faulkner's recurrent dramatization of the decay of families," Philip Momberger reflected, "e.g., the deterioration of the Compson, Sutpen, and Sartoris lines--is an expression in the domestic sphere of a more general, public disintegration: the collapse of the ideal of `human family' in the modern world and the resulting deracination of the individual." Momberger went on to say that the social ideal that underpins Faulkner's work is "a state of communal wholeness within which, as within a coherent and loving family, the individual's identity would be defined, recognized, and sustained."
Although a person's ties to the community are important, Faulkner suggests that men must never let the community become the sole arbiter of their values. Brooks stated that the "community is at once the field for man's action and the norm by which his action is judged and regulated" and further indicated that Faulkner's "fiction also reveals keen awareness of the perils risked by the individual who attempts to run counter to the community. The divergent individual may invite martyrdom; he certainly risks fanaticism and madness." For examples of divergent individuals, Brooks turned to Light in August. In that novel, many of the characters are social outcasts--Joe Christmas because of his suspected Negro blood, Joanna Burden because of her abolitionist background, Gail Hightower because he does not conform to the conventional behavior of a minister, Percy Grimm because he did not serve in World War I.
Established religion also comes under close scrutiny in Faulkner's fiction, and his characters are often deeply disturbed by the rigid attitudes of the church-going populace. In Sanctuary, Horace Benbow is taken aback when the Christian community refuses to help a man who is falsely accused of murder. Waggoner declared that in that novel "Southern fundamentalist Protestantism is pictured as selfrighteous moralism." Calvinist righteousness is also attacked in Light in August, where Hightower comes to realize that rigid religious attitudes encourage people to crucify themselves and others. One of the people they feel compelled to crucify is Joe Christmas, who is clearly an outcast in the community. The major significance in Christmas's name, O'Connor noted, "is the irony of Joe Christmas' being pursued and harassed throughout his life by voices of Christian righteousness."
Allied with the theme of the individual running counter to the community and its values is the theme of a young boy's initiation into manhood. This initiation process usually involves some ritualistic gesture or task that a youth must perform in order to achieve knowledge and manhood, and a choice, as Brooks observed, "between a boy's ties with his community--his almost fierce identification with it--and his revulsion from what the community seems committed to do." After he kills his first deer, Ike McCaslin is initiated into manhood by Sam Fathers, who anoints his forehead with the deer's blood. This initiation process is the first step in Ike's decision to eschew the values of society. The Unvanquished consists of a series of short stories recounting the growth of Bayard Sartoris. In the final story, Bayard refuses to avenge the death of his father. By so doing, he defies the community, for the townspeople think vengeance is honorable. Chick Mallison in Intruder in the Dust is another sensitive adolescent who is forced to choose between the community's standards and what his heart tells him is right. Faulkner's last novel, The Reivers, a Reminiscence, and winner of the 1963 Pulitzer prize for fiction, also deals with a young boy's initiation into manhood. When he runs away to Memphis with Boon Hogganbeck and Ned McCaslin, Lucius Priest is forced to grow up.
M.E. Bradford pointed out that the thematic corollary to Faulkner's consideration of a young man's coming into his majority is the question of pride, "or pride's proper role in the formation of good character and of its necessary limitation in contingency. The gentleman, the exemplar of ordinate pride and enactor of a providentially assigned place, sums up in his person the possibility of a civil and religiously grounded social order. In him either presumption or passivity is communal and spiritual disaster." Closely linked to pride is the Faulknerian concept of honor, the need for a man to prove himself. In Faulkner's novels, exaggerated notions of honor lead to trouble. Quentin Compson's fanatic defense of his sister's honor is narcissistic; his "insistence upon honor and dignity have become extreme, forms of self love," O'Connor noted. In As I Lay Dying, the Bundren family's attempt to honor Addie's dying wish is ludicrous, yet Brooks pointed out that Cash and Jewel "exhibit true heroism--Cash in his suffering, Jewel in his brave actions." The scruple of honor is also of great significance in The Hamlet. After Eula Varner becomes pregnant, her honor is ironically preserved when her father pays Flem Snopes to marry her. Even Mink Snopes has a warped sense of honor that compels him to kill Zack Houston. But Mink discovers that his cousin Flem is so devoid of honor that he won't even help Mink when he is arrested. Mink evens this score in a later novel, The Mansion. When he is released from prison, Mink kills Flem for the sake of honor.
When Faulkner's characters are initiated into manhood, they lose their innocence and are forced to face reality. The world they discover is one in which good and evil are intermingled. The "Snopes Trilogy," Stanley Edgar Hyman claimed, that is "Faulkner's fullest exploration of natural evil." In The Hamlet, the heartless Flem Snopes is pitted against V. K. Ratliff, an itinerant sewing machine salesman. Flem is almost the perfect embodiment of evil, whereas Ratliff, John Lewis Longley demonstrated, is a man "who is willing to actively commit himself against evil, but more important, to form actions of positive good." Although Flem is depicted as the incarnation of evil in The Hamlet, commentators have noted that he is portrayed more sympathetically in the succeeding two books in the trilogy. This treatment is in keeping with Faulkner's view of the nature of man. "I think that you really can't say that any man is good or bad. I grant you there are some exceptions, but man is the victim of himself or his fellows, or his own nature, or his environment, but no man is good or bad either. He tries to do the best he can within his rights," the novelist once said.
From today's perspective, it is difficult to understand the outcry that arose when Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1949. The preponderance of criticism has shown that his concerns are ultimately moral, but at that time many readers still considered Faulkner a naturalistic monster. Reflecting the views of many other small-town newspapers, the editor of the North Mississippi Herald declared that Faulkner was a member of the "privy school of literature." Even the New York Times expressed the fear that the rest of the world might consider Yoknapatawpha County an accurate depiction of life in America. Faulkner's reply to those who accused him of promoting immorality was contained in his acceptance speech. He explained that it is the writer's duty and privilege "to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars, to help him endure and prevail."
Faulkner's stirring acceptance speech caused many to change their opinion of him overnight. Suddenly he became a moral hero. As Herman Spivey pointed out, the truth is that Faulkner's outlook had undergone no dramatic change; from the beginning of his writing career he had concerned himself with "the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed." Faulkner's later books became didactic, however, often seeming to be mere echoes of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Spivey contended that in Faulkner's later novels "there is a major and regrettable shift from mythic and symbolic and implicit communication to allegorical and explicit communication." In A Fable, which Faulkner hoped would be his masterpiece, allegory is used to convey a moral message. Few critics were happy with the book's general and abstract statements. Brendan Gill called A Fable "a calamity," while Charles Rolo termed it "a heroically ambitious failure." Regardless, the book won two of the most prestigious literary awards, the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, both in 1955.
Though Faulkner occasionally failed greatly, he usually succeeded mightily. Whatever the faults of his later books, few would dispute the general excellence of his canon. Even Faulkner seemed overwhelmed by his achievement. Toward the end of his life, he wrote to a friend: "And now I realize for the first time what an amazing gift I had: uneducated in every formal sense, without even very literate, let alone literary, companions, yet to have made the things I made. I don't know where it came from. I don't know why God or gods or whoever it was, elected me to be the vessel. Believe me, this is not humility, false modesty: it is simply amazement."
Source: Contemporary Authors Online, Thomson Gale, 2007.
Source Database: Contemporary Authors Online
PEN (Permanent Entry Number): 0000030817
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