The Origins Of Faulkner S Art

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1996. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived

Essays by Susan V. Donaldson, Lael Gold, Adam Gussow, Martin Kreiswirth, Jay Parini, Noel Polk, Judith L. Sensibar, Jon Smith, and Priscilla Wald William Faulkner once said that the writer “collects his material all his life from everything he reads, from everything he listens to, everything he sees, and he stores that away in sort of a filing cabinet . . . in my case it's not anything near as neat as a filing case; it's more like a junk box.” Faulkner tended to be quite casual about his influences. For example, he referred to the South as “not very important to me. I just happen to know it, and don't have time in one life to learn another one and write at the same time.” His Christian background, according to him, was simply another tool he might pick up on one of his visits to “the lumber room” that would help him tell a story. Sometimes he claimed he never read James Joyce's Ulysses or had never heard of Thomas Mann—writers he would elsewhere declare as “the two great men in my time.” Sometimes he expressed annoyance at readers who found esoteric theory in his fiction, when all he wanted them to find was Faulkner: “I have never read [Freud]. Neither did Shakespeare. I doubt if Melville did either, and I'm sure Moby-Dick didn't.” Nevertheless, Faulkner's life was rich in what he did, saw, and read, and he seems to have remembered all of it and put it to use in his fiction. Faulkner's Inheritance is a collection of essays that examines the influences on Faulkner's fiction, including his own family history, Jim Crow laws, contemporary fashion, popular culture, and literature.

In this exploration of Faulkner's creative process, Sensibar discovers that the relationships that Faulkner had with three particular women were not simply close; they gave life to his imagination. The author brings to the foreground, as Faulkner did, this 'female world', an approach unprecedented in Faulkner biography.

The overview of William Faulkner‟s scholarship shows certain obvious limitations in concern to his treatment to his fictional female characters. Critics have concentrated on the male characters the outmost. The first limitation is that the critics have not paid the needed attention to his treatment of the female characters in their totality. Critics have taken up Faulkner‟s characterization but their concentration is more on the male figures only. If at all they discuss women characters, they are seen as figure only. If at all they discuss women characters, they are seen as subordinate figures to their male counterparts. The second limitation is that the bulk of Faulkner scholarship treats Faulkner‟s individual works, in these studies also the concentration is mainly on the themes and techniques, and the discussion on female characters is again scanty. Quite a few studies concentrate deeply on his individual works and explain Faulkner‟s larger themes but they, too, are specifically male oriented. The next limitation is that a large number of articles, appearing in various decades, also, cover individual aspects of Faulkner‟s themes and characters, and give only partial treatment to his women characters. The fourth limitation is that even while discussing Faulkner as moralist the concentration is more on the male figure than the female figures. The last limitation of Faulkner scholarship is that mostly it concentrates on his craftsmanship; a large number of studies on Faulkner assess his stylistics and technique. Tracing technical aspects, thematic patterns, and stylistic devices used by him critics establish Faulkner scholarship, but are oblivion to the central thrust of women characters. Thus Faulkner scholarship treats women characters, either as secondary characters, or, at the most, in relation to their male counterparts only. They have been treated less as individuals than as common commodities; the critics have been casual in their approach towards women characters and taken them for granted. This nonchalant view may lead us to conclude that women in Faulkner are „a silent sex‟. For that a complete survey has been done as mentioned in “Introduction” of the study to trace scope on full length study in context to Faulkner‟s women characters. At times, the survey let to conclude that Faulkner himself is not projecting as pleasant pictures of women in his novels as he does in the case of male figures. In fact, Faulkner was accused of being hostile to women. At times, Faulkner may strike us as a misogynist. These points led to give a kind of impulse to start working on the women characters in Faulkner. His imaginary fictional world – Yoknapatawpha- explains the intertexuality, so sometimes the same women character in different types of roles in his novels, or shows amelioration and redemption in his other text. Keeping all these points in consideration as his indispensable women characters fascinate to study in-depth and I could got the form under the heading Faulkner’s Treatment of Women. It is a humble attempt; I do not claim it to the last word on the issue. -Dr. Vibha Manoj sharma

To say that the entirety of human experience can be a novelist’s theme is to voice an absurdity. But, as Peter Swiggart convincingly argues, Faulkner’s work can be viewed as an extraordinary attempt to transform the panorama of man’s social experience into thematic material. Faulkner’s two-dimensional characters, his rhetorical circumlocutions, and his technical experiments are efforts to achieve a dramatic focus upon material too unwieldy, at least in principle, for any kind of fictional condensation. Faulkner makes use of devices of stylization that apply to virtually every aspect of his successful novels. For example, the complex facts of Southern history and culture are reduced to the scale of a simplified and yet grandiose social mythology: the degeneration of the white aristocracy, the rise of Snopesism, and the white Southerner’s gradual recognition of his latent sense of racial guilt. Within Faulkner’s fictional universe, human psychology takes the form of absolute distinctions between puritan and nonpuritan characters, between individuals corrupted by moral rationality and those who are simultaneously free of moral corruption and social involvement. In this way Faulkner is able to create the impression of a comprehensive treatment of important social concerns and universal moral issues. Like Henry James, he makes as much as he can of clearly defined dramatic events, until they seem to echo the potential complexity and depth of situations outside the realm of fiction. When this technique is successful the reader is left with the impression that he knows a Faulkner character far better than he could know an actual person. At the same time, the character retains the atmosphere of complexity and mystery imposed upon it by Faulkner’s handling of style and structure. This method of characterization reflects Faulkner’s simplifications of experience and yet suggests the inadequacy of any rigid interpretation of actual behavior. The reader is supplied with special eyeglasses through which the tragedy of the South, as well as humanity’s general inhumanity to itself, can be viewed in a perspective of simultaneous mystery and symbolic clarity.

A bold book, built of close readings, striking in its range and depth, The Signifying Eye shows Faulkner's art take shape in sweeping arcs of social, labor, and aesthetic history. Beginning with long-unpublished works (his childhood sketches and his hand-drawn and handillustrated play The Marionettes) and early novels (Mosquitoes and Sartoris), working through many major works (The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!), and including more popular fictions (The Wild Palms and The Unvanquished) and late novels (notably Intruder in the Dust and The Town), The Signifying Eye reveals Faulkner's visual obsessions with artistic creation as his work is read next to Wharton, Cather, Toomer, and—in a tour de force intervention—Willem de Kooning. After coloring in southern literature as a "reverse slave narrative," Waid's Eye locates Faulkner's fiction as the "feminist hinge" in a crucial parable of art that seeks abstraction through the burial of the race-defined mother. Race is seen through gender and sexuality while social fall is exposed (in Waid's phrase) as a "coloring of class." Locating "visual language" that constitutes a "pictorial vocabulary," The Signifying Eye delights in literacy as the oral meets the written and the abstract opens as a site to see narrative. Steeped in history, this book locates a heightened reality that goes beyond representation to bring Faulkner's novels, stories, and drawings into visible form through Whistler, Beardsley, Gorky, and de Kooning. Visionary and revisionist, Waid has painted the proverbial big picture, changing the fundamental way that both the making of modernism and the avant-garde will be seen. A Friends Fund publication

These ten essays from the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, held in 1989 at the University of Mississippi, explore the religious themes in William Faulkner's fiction. The papers published here conclude that the key to religious meaning in Faulkner may be that his texts focus not so much on God but on a human aspiration of the divine.