Faulkner from Within

William H. Rueckert

Description

Faulkner from Within: Destructive and Generative Being in the Novels of William Faulkner is the culmination of William H. Rueckert’s lifetime of study of this great American novelist. Rueckert tracks Faulkner’s development as a novelist through eighteen novels—ranging from Flags in the Dust to The Reivers—to show the turn in Faulkner from destructive to generative being, from tragedy to comedy, from pollution to purification and redemption. At the heart of Faulkner from Within is Rueckert’s sustained treatment of Go Down, Moses, a turning point in Faulkner’s career away from the destructive selves of the earlier novels and—as first manifest in Ike McCaslin—toward the generative selves of his later work. Faulkner from Within is a wide-ranging, beautifully written appreciation and analysis of the imaginative life of a great American author and his complex work.

Informations

• Publié par: Parlor Press, LLC
• Date de parution: 14 novembre 2003
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781602357358
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Faulkner from Within
Destructive and Generative Being in the Novels of William Faulkner
William H. Rueckert
Parlor Press
Anderson, South Carolina
www.parlorpress.com


Grateful acknowledgment is made to the University of Virginia Library for permission to use the cover image from the William Faulkner Papers (#6074) in The Albert and Shirley Special Collections Library, University of Virginia Library.
Parlor Press LLC, Anderson, South Carolina 29621
© 2004 by Parlor Press
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2003115229
Rueckert, William H. 1926–
Faulkner from within : destructive and generative being in the novels of William Faulkner / William H. Rueckert.
Includes notes, bibliographical references, and index.
1. Faulkner, William, 1897–1962—Criticism and interpretation.
I. Title. II. Series.
ISBN 1-932559-02-7 (Paper)
ISBN 1-932559-03-5 (Cloth)
ISBN 1-932559-04-3 (Adobe eBook)
ISBN 1-932559-05-1 (TK3)
Printed on acid-free paper.
Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is also available in cloth, as well as in Adobe eBook and Night Kitchen (TK3) formats, from Parlor Press on the WWW at http://www.parlorpress.com. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 3015 Brackenberry Drive, Anderson, South Carolina, 29621, or e-mail [e-mail].


For My Sons
Theron, Quentin, Jordan, Morgan
And our Faulknerian life together


Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Abbreviations
I 1927–1932
1 Faulkner Discovers His Native Territory
Flags in the Dust (1926-1927; published 1973)
2 Faulkner’s First Great Novel: Anguish in the Genes
The Sound and the Fury (1929)
3 Destructive and Destroyed Being
The Coffin of Being
As I Lay Dying (1930)
A Grammar of Negative Being
Sanctuary (1931)
Demonic Incarnation and the Pestilential Word
Light in August (1932)
II 1935–1940
4 Verticality and Flight Passions
Pylon (1935)
5 Faulkner and the Civil War
Sutpen’s Vortex of Destruction
Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
Bayard’s Last Stand
The Unvanquished (1938)
6 Faulkner’s Dialectical Novel
The Wild Palms (1939)
7 Economic, Moral, and Sexual Passions in The Hamlet
The Hamlet (1940)
III 1942
8 Curing the Work of Time
Go Down, Moses (1942)
IV 1948–1962
9 Beginning the Work of Redemption
The Education of Chick Mallison
Intruder in the Dust (1948)
Redeeming the Earlier Works
Faulkner’s Paladin
Knight’s Gambit (1949)
10 December 1950
10 Cleansing the Temple
—Requiem for a Nun
Requiem for a Nun (1951)
11 War, Power, and The Book: Faulkner’s Fable for Tomorrow
A Fable (1944-1953; published 1954)
12 Social Comedy in Yoknapatawpha County
— The Town
The Town (1957) and The Mansion (1959)
13 Serene and Comic: The Joyful Act of Closure
The Reivers (1962)
Notes
Bibliography
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