Flux and the Frozen Moment: The Imagery of Stasis in Faulkner's Prose

PMLA ◽  
1956 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 285-301 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karl E. Zink
Keyword(s):  
Sentence Structure ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Light In August ◽  
As I Lay Dying ◽  
Sound And The Fury ◽  
The World ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Multiple Meanings ◽  
Complex Structural ◽  
Formal Statement

William Faulkner is a poet—not a philosopher, nor an essayist, nor a businessman who writes articles for Harper's. Many readers have been baffled and annoyed and have even hated Faulkner personally because his novels have always demanded critical, curious reading. As an artist, he speaks through form. As a novelist, he has always exercised the privilege and the gift of symbolic discourse. If Faulkner were a philosopher, he would perhaps be more systematic about arranging and ordering his meanings. But he is an artist whose genius is for meaningful form rather than formal statement; his meaning, therefore, is legitimately diffuse, complex, and resistant; and the sensitive reader enjoys a continuous awareness of the multiple meanings of his form. Through form the artist interprets or criticizes the world in which he lives; through form the reader senses the artist's philosophical outlook on the world. The philosophical assumptions that underlie Faulkner's novels and largely determine their distinctive “shape” do not come to us as direct statement. As with most original artists, Faulkner's most deeply felt ideas are manifest in his symbols and his imagery; they are implicit in his peculiar and much maligned sentence structure, and in the experimental and complex structural patterns he gave to such remarkable books as The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Requiem for a Nun, and Absalom, Absalom! One can defend successfully, I think, the proposition that when Faulkner has spoken in the novel as philosopher or essayist or sectionalist he has failed. When he attempts debate, as he does in parts of Intruder in the Dust, his voice is ordinary, in some respects shrill and small. He is angrier, indeed despairing, in Sanctuary; but Sanctuary, for all its weaknesses, is a novel superior to Intruder in the Dust because it more consistently dramatizes and restrains and diffuses its despair through form. In the bitterest of his early novels, As I Lay Dying, the “outrage” is beautifully restrained and patterned into art, with no hint anywhere of the direct voice of argument or rationality that we hear with the later Gavin Stevens of Intruder in the Dust and Requiem for a Nun. Darl and Addie Bundren (As I Lay Dying) are poetic and persuasive; Gavin Stevens and the recreated Temple Drake (Requiem for a Nun) are prosaic, literal and dull.

“William Faulkner”

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allen Tate
Keyword(s):  
William Faulkner ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Light In August ◽  
The Public ◽  
As I Lay Dying ◽  
Sound And The Fury ◽  
The Hamlet

This chapter is aimed as an obituary of William Faulkner. It describes Faulkner as an arrogant and ill-mannered individual in a way that is peculiarly “Southern”: in company he usually failed to reply when spoken to, or when he spoke there was something grandiose in the profusion with which he sprinkled his remarks with “Sirs” and “Ma'ms.” No matter how great a writer he may be, the public gets increasingly tired of Faulkner; his death seems to remove the obligation to read him. Nevertheless, the chapter regards Faulkner as the greatest American novelist after Henry James since the 1930s. It cites five masterpieces written by Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, and The Hamlet.

“William Faulkner: An Impression”

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Crowe Ransom
Keyword(s):  
William Shakespeare ◽  
William Faulkner ◽  
Ben Jonson ◽  
John Webster ◽  
Light In August ◽  
As I Lay Dying ◽  
Sound And The Fury ◽  
John Crowe Ransom

In this chapter, John Crowe Ransom offers an impression of William Faulkner's achievement, an impression that he says has not changed much during the years that followed his reading of The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Light in August. According to Ransom, these three early novels are proof of the narrative power and the detailed poetry of Faulkner's creations. He argues that Faulkner's books are unequal, and that the style is less than consistently sustained. Faulkner is therefore not Ben Jonson, he is not even William Shakespeare; he is John Webster. The chapter concludes with the opinion that there are imperfections in Faulkner's work, but that his perfections are wonderful, well sustained, and without exact precedent anywhere.

Faulkner, William (1897–1962)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda Gradisek
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Air Force ◽  
William Faulkner ◽  
Heart Attack ◽  
American South ◽  
Light In August ◽  
As I Lay Dying ◽  
Sound And The Fury ◽  
The American South ◽  
American Authors

William Faulkner was one of the best-known American authors of the twentieth century. Experimenting with form, chronology, and language, Faulkner developed a strikingly personal style while exploring the complexities of life in the American South. He was especially interested in crafting stories that explored the effects of the Civil War’s destruction and the ways in which it revealed the breakdown of plantation-based aristocracy, the effects of the exaggerated chivalric code of the Old South, and the complex racism of a society once based on slavery. He is most famous for novels such as Absalom, Absalom!, Light in August, The Sound and the Fury, Sanctuary, and As I Lay Dying. Many of his novels are set in fictional Yoknapatahpha County, a county of his own design that resembled his own birthplace, Lafayette County. A native of Oxford, Mississippi, Faulkner lived most of his life there; he also joined the Canadian Air Force during World War I and spent time in Hollywood later in his career writing screenplays. He struggled with alcoholism throughout his life, but eventually died from a heart attack following a fall from his horse.

scholarly journals The “Kirghiz Fairy Tale” in The Gift: Nabokov, Folklore, and Orientalism

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 266-299
Author(s):  
Alexander A. Panchenko
Keyword(s):  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Human Vision ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Central Theme ◽  
Alexander The Great ◽  
The World ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Russian Literary

In the second chapter of The Gift, Fyodor Konstantinovich Godunov-Cherdyntsev recalls a “Kirghiz fairy tale” about a human eye that wants “to encompass everything in the world.” The plot of the story goes back to a Talmudic parable about Alexander the Great. The parable was retold in Russian by a number of writers and scholars in the 19 th and early 20 th centuries. However, it seems unlikely that Nabokov did use in any original piece of Inner Asian folklore in his novel. More probable is that he invented the “fairy tale” proceeding from one of the Russian versions of the parable. At the same time, Nabokov’s version is based on a number of international literary and folkloric motifs and is related to the “Kalmyk fairy tale” in Pushkin’s novel The Captain’s Daughter and to 19 th century Russian literary fairy tales in verse. While the central theme of Nabokov’s parable is the insatiability of human vision and the frailty of life, its con- and subtexts allude to some other recurrent themes of the novel — death and immortality, the quest for paradise, closed doors and exile, sources of love and poetical inspiration. The Oriental coloring of the tale (and the second chapter of the novel in general) appears to be a literary play with a limited number of texts, in particular with The Captain’s Daughter and A Journey to Arzrum. This allows discussing the “Kirghiz fairy tale” as an intratextually meaningful part of the novel rather than a marginal encrustation. It seems that Nabokov’s literary work with “migratory” plots and folklore texts was in a way close to the methods and ideas developed in Alexander Veselovsky’s school of comparative literary studies.

“The Narrators”

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Luis Borges
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Air Force ◽  
William Faulkner ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
Light In August ◽  
As I Lay Dying ◽  
Sound And The Fury ◽  
Yoknapatawpha County ◽  
Royal Canadian Air Force

This chapter discusses the work of William Faulkner, describing him as a man of genius, although a willfully and perversely chaotic one. Faulkner was born in Oxford, Mississippi; in his vast work the provincial and dusty town, surrounded by the shanties of poor whites and Negroes, is the center of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. During World War I, Faulkner enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force. He then became a poet, a journalist connected with New Orleans publications, and the author of famous novels and movie scenarios. In 1950 he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Faulkner represents in American letters that feudal and agrarian South which lost in the Civil War. Among his works are The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and Intruder in the Dust.

“William Faulkner: The Novel as Form”

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Conrad Aiken
Keyword(s):  
William Faulkner ◽  
Sentence Structure ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sound And The Fury

This chapter focuses on what it calls William Faulkner's genius for form and his continued exploration of its possibilities, as against the unusual concern with his violence and dreadfulness of his themes. It discusses Faulkner's uncompromising and almost hypnotic zeal with which he insists upon having a style, which is evident in novels such as Absalom, Absalom!, The Wild Palms, and The Sound and the Fury. It argues that Faulkner's style, though often brilliant and always interesting, is all too frequently downright bad. It also comments on Faulkner's passion for overelaborate sentence structure and concludes that despite the bad habits and the willful bad writing, Faulkner's style as a whole is extraordinarily effective.

scholarly journals Heteroglossia and Fragmentariness in the Absent Therapist by Will Eaves

2016 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 53-65
Author(s):  
Wojciech Drąg
Keyword(s):  
Mikhail Bakhtin ◽  
The Novel ◽  
1 Corinthians ◽  
Experimental Fiction ◽  
Sound And The Fury ◽  
Essential Properties ◽  
The World ◽  
Alternative Version ◽  
The Waves ◽  
Entire Text

Abstract In “Discourse in the Novel” Mikhail Bakhtin argues that heteroglossia - a diversity of voices or languages - is one of the essential properties of the novel. The distinct languages spoken by individual characters (referred to as “character speech”), he maintains, inevitably affect “authorial speech”. In experimental fiction, where “authorial speech” is often eliminated altogether, one can speak of the most radical instance of novelistic polyphony. Whereas in The Sound and the Fury, The Waves and B.S. Johnson’s House Mother Normal in place of the narrator the reader is presented with several parallel voices which offer an alternative version of some of the same incidents, Will Eaves’s The Absent Therapist (2014) comprises 150 one- or two-page monologues, each of which is delivered by a different nameless speaker. The book, described by reviewers as an “experimental novella”, a “miniature novel”, and an “anti-novel”, is devoid of any frame that would account for the coexistence of so many stories. The only interpretive clues are provided in the paratext: the title and the dedication from 1 Corinthians (“There are, it may be, so many kinds of voices in the world, and none of them is without signification”). They appear to invite the reading of the entire text as an amalgam of disparate (but also, in large part, desperate) voices united by their addressee - the figure of the therapist who is not there. The aim of the article is to examine Eaves’s assemblage of voices and outline the tenuous relationship between the sections. The analysis of common themes and motifs that provide a degree of qualified unity to the book’s multiple monologues is situated in the context of fragmentary writing (as practised, among others, by Burroughs and Barthes) and its postmodernist aesthetics of the collage.

scholarly journals FOUNDATIONS OF THE NOVEL WORLD OF IRIS MURDOCH

2021 ◽  
pp. 212-237
Author(s):  
Olha Aliseienko
Keyword(s):  
Ethical Relativism ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Iris Murdoch ◽  
The World ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Established Relationship

Iris Murdoch enters the wide space of literature and culture, conducts intertextual roll-over with various proto-texts, modalities, archetypes, philosophical concepts that have developed in literature, seeking to penetrate into the essence of man and the world. As a writer of the “transition”, Iris Murdoch’s work is not associated with an outright deformation of the world in its spatial and temporal coordinates, with the hypertrophy of conventional elements, with demonstrative deconstructive game stylization, with a violation of lifelikeness and ethical relativism inherent in “mature” postmodernism. An important feature of the poetics of “transition” in Murdoch turns out to be organic, devoid of contrast, both because of the objectively established relationship between modernism and postmodernism, and because of the subjective nature of her artistic thinking, marked by the gift of contamination.

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