Index for Print Edition
Acknowledgments
This book has been a long time in the making and like any book this long, which has gone through so many revisions, it owes a lot to its many devoted typists. I acknowledge them all with gratitude. Two of these recent typists have been heroic in their devotion to this manuscript: Gail English (with some help from Marie Henry), one of our secretaries in the English Department at SUNY/Geneseo, put the whole text on disks for me the year that I retired so that I would be sure to finish it after I retired; and my wife, Barbara, has reformatted it, printed it all out for me, proofread the printout against the original typescript, made all the corrections and revisions, typed the new parts and retyped some of the old ones, checked all of the quotations against the originals, and, in general like a good copy editor, has made sure that we had a manuscript that was as error-free as possible. She also printed the final copy that went to the press. Had it not been for these two and the miracle of the Mac Plus (I still work on a Hermes 3000 manual typewriter), this study of Faulkner would have died in its dusty box on the shelf in my study where I put it some years ago—in anger, frustration, disgust, and uncharacteristic critical apathy. My wife, in particular, became as obsessed with finishing this manuscript as I was. She learned everything she needed to learn in order to do what was necessary on the word processor; in addition, she gave me excellent advice about revisions, especially the best kind, deletions. I would never have finished without her help.
Many other people have also been a great help with this study. Chief among these are all the wonderful students who studied Faulkner with me at the University of Illinois, the University of Rochester, and the State University of New York at Geneseo. I have also discussed Faulkner with many of my colleagues and some have also been kind enough to read the manuscript. I wish to thank, especially, Frank Hodgins, who first taught me something about the greatness of “The Bear”; Milton Stern, a Faulkner enthusiast, along with Frank Hodgins, and later, a careful, thoughtful, incisive reader of an earlier version of this study; Sherman Paul, another careful and encouraging reader of an earlier version of this study; Howard Horsford, whose brilliant formalist reading of The Sound and the Fury provoked me to go beyond it in ways he could not have anticipated; Leroy Searle, with whom I team-taught modern American literature at Rochester and whose teaching of Absalom, Absalom! was a marvel to behold; Jay Martin, who read an early version of this manuscript and assured me that, though I did not yet, I might someday have here a “great” book on Faulkner; Clay Lewis, a great reader of Faulkner, a wonderful dialectician of a colleague; and John Michael, who kept assuring me that there was a lot of good stuff in there (in the dusty box) and that if I was not going to finish my Faulkner, would I please give it to him.
Numerous institutions, departments and friends have also helped in different ways. The University of Rochester and the English department there supported my work in many different and valuable ways during the nine years that I was there; while I was a Visiting University Fellow at Empire State College in Saratoga Springs, helping to get that college conceived and underway, I did a pilot study of Faulkner as one of their self-teaching “modules” that was really the genesis of the present book. The staff at Furness House, where we were housed, especially those responsible for putting the modules into finished form, was extremely helpful, as were my colleagues there. The State University of New York at Geneseo, especially the staff of the English department, helped me with this work in many ways too numerous to enumerate during my years there. Darla Penta, my secretary when I was chair, was especially helpful, as were Marie Henry and Gail English. Important parts of this study were written one summer in Maine when Stan and Judy Kahrl kindly loaned us their wonderful house on Kennebec Point. I want to thank them here for their hospitality and generosity, and for teaching me something about what friendship means. Finally, Theron Francis was a wonderful copy editor who improved the text in many important ways; and David Blakesley, who runs Parlor Press, is largely responsible for making sure this study of Faulkner became a book.
Introduction
I have been compelled by Faulkner since I first read Light in August in 1949 when I was an undergraduate at Williams College. Since that time, I have read and reread Faulkner more often, taught him more often, and read more about him than any other author I have encountered during my career—with the possible exception of Kenneth Burke, another career-long passion and, by an odd coincidence, born the same year as Faulkner. You could say, very accurately, that Faulkner was—or, rather, that his fictions were—one of the great passions of my adult and professional life. No amount of reading or rereading or reading about him has ever diminished this passion. I have known other passions: for D. H. Lawrence, for Conrad, for Melville, for Fitzgerald and Hemingway, for John Hawkes and Wright Morris, for W. S. Merwin and Whitman, for William Carlos Williams, for Thoreau and E. B. White, for Vonnegut and Gary Snyder—but no passion has been as strong nor lasted as long as this passion for Faulkner. It was inevitable that I would eventually write something long and substantial about him, which I have done in this book, and even the long ordeal of writing and rewriting this book has not diminished the force of my passion for Faulkner; in fact, it has only increased it.
Let me be accurate and exact here: it is Faulkner’s fictions, especially his novels, which have been my passion. The original title of this book was Faulkner, From Within—a title stolen from the French, who have always had a genius for getting inside the imaginative creations of an author and charting that territory for us. I had very little interest in Faulkner’s life until Joseph Blotner’s monumental two-volume biography came out in 1974.1 I finally read this wonderful work in 1978; but by then I had finished a whole first draft of this book and when I read Blotner’s Faulkner, A Biography, I was chiefly interested in trying to relate the inner imaginative life I had spent so much time studying and writing about to the outer life Blotner—and, later, others—chronicled in such minute detail (all 1,846 pages of it). It is still the inner imaginative life rather than the outer life that I find most compelling, though I admit to the usual fascination with the many mundane facts about the life of this genius that are now available to us. However, only a genius could have lived Faulkner’s amazing and unique inner imaginative life and created the novels and stories that he did. His genius, in other words, was not in the kind of life he led, as is sometimes the case, but in the fictions he created. If it were not for Faulkner’s genius, no one would have been much interested in his life anyway. Writing the life, as Blotner so lovingly did, is but one way of trying to understand and acknowledge the nature of this genius. Another way, is to go directly to the works of the genius; still a third way—as in the work of David Minter and Judith Wittenberg—is, to borrow Wittenberg’s subtitle—to try to discover how the life was “transfigured” into the fictions.2 My way was to go directly to the works, the novels, and to study them, in terms of themselves (the laws of the imagination and of fiction) more or less to the exclusion of everything else. I do not mean by this that my primary emphasis is aesthetic because it isn’t; only that, with very few exceptions, I found all of my evidence, all of the “facts” that I worked with, in the novels themselves and worked on the assumption, as I always have when dealing with literary works, that the work will reveal its intention to me from internal evidence if I study it hard enough.
I have used what Faulkner said about his novels somewhat sparingly because, once created, novels have a life of their own which even the creator of them does not, in retrospect, necessarily fully understand and maybe did not ever fully understand. History, though it does not change the text, changes the way in which we may read that text, and the huge accrual of readings of the novels adds dimensions to them not even Faulkner could possibly have anticipated. Faulkner certainly knew he was a genius; in fact, he was sometimes amazed at his own genius: but his word is not necessarily the definitive word on any novel or character—though what he says is certainly always worth paying attention to. Novels have intentions