6
1.1. Life and The major novels of
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner (/ˈfɔːknər/; September 25, 1897 – July 6, 1962) was
an American writer known for his novels and short stories set in the fictional
Yoknapatawpha County, based on Lafayette County,
Mississippi, where Faulkner
spent most of his life. Faulkner is one of the most celebrated writers of American
literature, and is widely considered one of the best writers of Southern literature.
Born in New Albany, Mississippi, Faulkner's
family moved to Oxford,
Mississippi when he was a young child. With the outbreak of World War I, he joined
the Royal Canadian Air Force but he did not serve in combat. Returning to Oxford,
he attended the University of Mississippi for three semesters before dropping out.
He then moved to New Orleans, where he wrote his first novel Soldiers' Pay (1925).
Returning to Oxford, he wrote Sartoris (1927), his first work which is set in
Yoknapatawpha County. In 1929, he published The Sound and the Fury. The
following year, he wrote As I Lay Dying. Seeking greater economic success, he went
to Hollywood to work as a screenwriter.
7
Faulkner's renown reached its peak upon the publication of Malcolm Cowley's
The Portable Faulkner and his 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature, making him the only
Mississippi-born Nobel laureate. Two of his works, A Fable (1954) and his last novel
The Reivers (1962), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
His economic success
allowed him to purchase an estate in Oxford, Rowan Oak. Faulkner died from a heart
attack on July 6, 1962 related to a fall from his horse the prior month.
In 1998, the Modern Library ranked his 1929 novel The Sound and the Fury
sixth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century; also on
the list were As I Lay Dying (1930) and Light in August (1932). Absalom, Absalom!
(1936) appears on similar lists.Singal finds that in the course of Faulkner’s literary
career neither identity achieves complete dominance. In the years before 1929,
according to Singal, Faulkner is making his way toward modernism. In the years
following 1942, Singal states, the momentum shifted toward more traditional ideas.
And from 1929–1942, the years of Faulkner’s greatest works, “the
Modernist
Faulkner was generally dominant”; however, even during this period, “the Victorian
Faulkner remained very much alive in his psyche.” For example, while The Sound
and the Fury’s stream-of-consciousness technique mirrors the flux and instability
characteristic of the modernist view, both Quentin and his father wistfully cling to
the Cavalier myth of a southern planter aristocracy. Light in August and Absalom,
Absalom! are triumphs of modernism, yet even in these novels Singal finds lingering
vestiges of a traditional world view. In the final version of Light in August, Joe
Christmas’s indeterminate race subverts the notion of racial identity, but in
manuscript drafts of the novel, the narrative voice occasionally lapses into language
(later deleted) that enforces racial difference. And in Absalom, Absalom!, a novel
driven by a modernist integrative impulse, Singal argues that “the
book begins with
an interpretive approach straight from the mid-nineteenth century, that of Miss Rosa
Coldfield.”
William Faulkner: The Making of a Modernist, which appears to be the
expanded version of a chapter devoted to Faulkner in Singal’s 1982 study, The War
8
Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919–1945, is a
welcome addition to Faulkner studies. Faulkner, as the author frequently professed,
was driven by “a
heart in conflict with itself,” and to interpret this Faulknerian
duality in terms of a conflict between Victorian and modernist values is appropriate,
even necessary. I have, however, two reservations. Occasionally Singal, a historian,
makes somewhat heavy-handed generalizations about Faulkner’s nuanced, multi-
layered texts. My other reservation is that ultimately Singal’s project, in the main,
does not lead us to read Faulkner’s texts in new ways. Rather, as Singal’s own
numerous citations acknowledge, [End Page 490] William Faulkner: The Making of
a Modernist assembles and systematizes insights about Faulkner’s representations
of race, gender, and Southern history that have been variously articulated by a
number of other scholars in other contexts. For example, a large number of critics,
James Snead, Donald Kartiganer, and André Bleikasten among them, have observed
that Joe Christmas’s ambiguous racial identity deconstructs
the notion of racial
difference. Similarly, Faulkner’s subversive exploration of gender difference,
another topic that Singal discusses as evidence of Faulkner’s modernist sensibility,
has been sensitively and intelligently analyzed by Deborah Clarke,
William Faulkner, in full William Cuthbert Faulkner, original surname Falkner,
(born September 25, 1897, New Albany, Mississippi, U.S.—died July 6, 1962,
Byhalia, Mississippi), American novelist and short-story writer who was awarded
the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
