WILLIAM FAULKNER

WILLIAM FAULKNER

(1897-1962)

BACKGROUND

Born:
- 9/25/97
- New Albany, Mississippi
- "Falkner"
  - "u"???
  - more British?
  - more aristocratic?
  - editorial misspelling?
Great-Grandfather:
- William Clark Falkner
- was an important figure in northern Mississippi
- served as a colonel in the Confederate Army
- founded a railroad
- gave his name to the town of Falkner in nearby Tippah County
- wrote several novels and other works
- Colonel Falkner = Colonel John Sartoris
Father:
- Murry Cuthbert
- railroad worker, owner of a cottonseed oil and ice plant
- livery stable operator, hardware store employee, secretary
- business manager at U.of Mississippi
Mother:
- Maud (Butler) Falkner
1915:
- dropped out of school
- worked as bank clerk
- visited Yale friend, Phil Stone
1918:
- Canadian & British Royal Air Force pilot
  - denied by USAF b/c of his height
    - affected British accent
    - forged letters of recommendation
  - saw no war-time action
  - war ended before he saw any combat
"Count No' Count"
- dandified appearance
- lack of stable job
JOBS:
- bank clerk, grandfather's bank (pre-war)
- book store clerk (post-war)
- U. of Mississippi postmaster
- roof painter, carpenter, paper hanger, deckhand
- full-time writer (1925-62)
- coal shoveler (1929)
Alcoholic

BACKGROUND

Sherwood Anderson:
- New Orleans, 1924
- WF struck up a friendship with the writer
- through SA's wife, WF's boss of NYC bookstore
- *influences WF's writing
  - novels over poetry
    - The Marble Faun (poetry collection) sold poorly
  - Anderson's recommendation of Soldier's Pay
  - short stories & sketches to the Times-Picayune
1925:
- briefly joined the American ex-patriots in Europe
- returned to Mississippi & settled down
1929:
- married Lida Estelle Oldham Franklin
1929:
- The Sound and the Fury
- WF was disgusted with the publication buisiness
  - "One day I seemed to shut a door 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."
- Caddy Compson
- established his literary reputation
1930:
- As I Lay Dying
- written in 6 weeks
- while working nightshift in powerhouse
1931:
- Sanctuary
- popular success
  - pulp fiction
  - written to make money for family
- violent, monstrous, gory, obscene novel
Depression Era:
- low book sales
- disappointed public (A+B=little $$$)
- books lacked optimism of New Deal
- books lacked practical applications (jobs)
- Sanctuary, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, The Wild Palms, The Hamlet, and Go Down, Moses
- WF = forced to write for Hollywood
Resurgence:
- by 1945, all books out of print
  - lack of popularity
  - war effort
- Portable Faulkner, 1945
AWARDS:
- Noble Prize for Literature (1949)
- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
  - A Fable (1955)
  - for The Reivers, a Reminiscence (1963)
- National Book Award
  - Collected Stories (1951)
  - A Fable (1955)

THEMES

the PAST
- characters = tied, chained, fettered to the past
- the South itself
- trapped in, clinging to
- past glory (Glory Days)
- childhood innocence
book by its cover
- fiercely intelligent people dwelled behind the façades of good old boys and simpletons
slavery
- shameful
- Southern guilt
- repudiation
exploitation
- of people
- of the land
  - "eco-feminism"
  - Original Sin
    - dependent upon land, how it's treated
decay of & in the family
- affection, disintegration
- reflects society's decay
- the "human family"

THEMES

community
- bi-valence
- identification with & revulsion from
- be a part of it, let it measure the moral norm
- BUT
- be your own guide
- even to destruction
religion
- institutionalized religion
- heavy scrutiny
- self-righteousness
- moral superiority
boy's initiation into manhood
- a ritualistic gesture
- choice between community & self
- honor
  - to prove himself
  - too much honor = bad
  - narcissism
  - warped sense of honor

STYLE

multiple POV, viewpoints
flashbacks
long complicated sentences
- (combined, create a sense of ever-presence, no past, all now, past is present)
Biblical allusions
- Old Testament
- sins of the father visited upon sons/children
- --> guilt (burdened by the Past)
- guilt of own sins
- guilt of past sins
  - Indians, slaves, land
GENRES:
- crime fiction
- pulp fiction
- mysteries
- screen plays
  - Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep
  - Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not
- poetry
- novels
- short stories
the oral storyteller:
- vague pronoun reference
- repetition of words
- piling adjectives
- long sentences
- literary devices
Literary Devices:
- stream-of-consciousness (James Joyce)
- multiple, varying points-of-view
  - 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." (CA)

Faulkner on writing:
- 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."
  - from his Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
  - qtd. in C.A.
- "Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him"
  - in a 1956 The Paris Review interview
  - qtd. by C.A.

STYLE

Yoknapatawpha County:
- his fictionalized county
- based heavily upon Lafayette, Mississippi
- of which Faulkner's Oxford, is the county seat
- perhaps the most elaborate fictional creation in literature
- name = "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."
  - CA

REGIONAL WRITER:
- influenced by his own family history
- MISSISSIPPI
  - his family history
  - slavery, race relations
  - sense of humor
  - Gothic themes
- Southern locations
- Southern speech, idioms
- Southern themes
- Southern history
  - Mark Twain
  - Kate Chopin
Southern Gothic:
- evil
- corruption
- Southern locale (Old South)
- death, decay, rot

STORIES

LINKS LINKS