英美文学选读学习笔记 William Faulkner

William Faulkner (1897-1962), simultaneously original and assimilative, is regarded as one of the leading American writers in the literary history of the United States, and has become the most frequently and intensely interted writer of modern American literature. Difficult as it is, his work is a text endlessly searched for meanings.

Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi and raised in nearby Oxford, and lived there almost all his life. His great-grandfather, Colonel William Faulkner who had fought in the Civil War, had been a local legend and was the kind of dynamic personality around whom Faulkner's fiction developed. His father, a business manager of the University of Mississippi, was a reclusive man, while his mother, ambitious, sensitive and literary, was a more profound influence on him. As a poor student, Faulkner left school in his teens and had no further formal education beyond a year (1919-1920) as a special student at the University of Mississippi. However, fond of literature, he was increasingly motivated to become a writer.  In 1918 he enlisted in the British Royal Flying Corps and was sent to Canada for training. After the war, with the help of his friends Phil Stone and Sherwood Anderson, Faulkner published a volume of poetry The Marble Faun (1924) and his first novel Soldiers' Pay (1926). At the end of the year 1926, a trip to Europe widened his vision still further. He learned the experimental writing of James Joyce and of the ideas of Sigmund Freud.  In writing Sartoris (1929), Faulkner began to see and feel the dignity and sorrow of what was to become his most frequently used subject matter. Before long, The Sound and the Fury was published, which was considered as the work of a major writer. In June, 1929 Faulkner married and a flow of major works came out: As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Wild Palms (1939) and The Hamlet (1940). In addition, there were collections of short stories, and two novels consisting of stories which are thematically interwoven: The Unvanquished (1938) and Go Down, Moses (1942). Faulkner also worked on movies for the Hollywood. However, Faulkner's national reputation did not receive a significant boost until the publication in 1946 of an anthology of his writings, The Portable Faulkner, edited by the critic Malcolm Cowley. In 1950, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for the anti-racist Intruder in the Dust (1948). Afterwards, many other prizes followed. Though Faulkner brought forth a number of remarkable novels in the second phase of his career, such as Requiem for a Nun (1951), The Fable (1954), The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959), none of them reached the level established by his best earlier work. On July 6, 1962, he died of a heart attack in Oxford, Mississippi.

Most of Faulkner's works are set in the American South, with his emphasis on the Southern subjects and consciousness. Of the nineteen novels and seventy-five short stories, fifteen novels and many of his stories are about people from a small region in Northern Mississippi, Yoknapatawpha County, which is actually an imaginary place based on Faulkner's childhood memory about the place where he grew up, the town of Oxford in his native Lafayette County. With his rich imagination, Faulkner turned the land, the people and the history of the region into a literary creation and a mythical kingdom. The Yoknapatawpha stories deal, generally, with the historical period from the Civil War up to the 1920s when the First World War broke out, and people of a stratified society, the aristocrats, the new rich, the poor whites, and the blacks. As a result, Yoknapatawpha County has become an allegory or a parable of the Old South, with which Faulkner has managed successfully to show a panorama of the experience and consciousness of the whole Southern society.

The Yoknapatawpha County series have an overall pattern in which the fate of a ruined homeland always focuses on the collision of Faulkner's intelligent, sensitive, and idealistic protagonist with the society of the twentieth century. Most of the major themes are directly related to this confrontation. First of all, Faulkner exemplified T. S. Eliot's concept of modem society as a wasteland in a dramatic way. He condemned the mechanized, industrialized society which has dehumanized man by forcing him to cultivate false values and decrease those essential human values such as courage, fortitude, honesty and goodness. The man who has adapted to the modern society is a kind of cash register like Jason Compson in The Sound and the Fury, who has lost his natural response to life, become incapable of love, mean, money-minded, and spiritually dead. Besides, the past and the sent, nature and society are always juxtaposed in his novels and stories. A careful study of his protagonists will reveal a vailing truth, that is, almost all his heroes turn out to be tragic. They are tragic because they are prisoners of the past, or of the society, or of some social and moral taboos, or of their own introspective personalities. By describing his protagonists the way he does, Faulkner suggests that society, which conditions man with its hierarchical stratification and with its laws and institutions, eliminates man's chance of responding naturally to the experiences of his existence. Against this imprisoned, confused, fragmented social being is the primitive man who, not conditioned by the civilization and social institutions, accepts the life-death pattern of human existence unquestionably, hence, attains an enviable strength and peace, as we may find in Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury and Sam Fathers in "The Bear." According to Faulkner, the life-death cycle, the spring and winter of the earth, the birth and death of the animals is reality. Man, by turning away from reality, by alienating himself from truth with his attempts to explain the inexplicable, becomes weak and cowardly, confused and ineffectual.

Of Faulkner's literary works, four novels are masterpieces by any standards: The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom! and Go Down, Moses. Faulkner once said that The Sound and the Fury is a story of "lost innocence," which proves itself to be an intensification of the theme of imprisonment in the past. The past that Faulkner uses in this book to set off the sent is not the past of an earlier society or historical period, but the immediate past -- the world of childhood, innocent and idealistic. Faulkner develops the theme of deterioration and loss by juxtaposing the childhood of the Compson brothers with their sent experience, with Caddy as the focal point of the juxtaposition, to emphasize the theme of loss. As a result, the novel not merely relates Quentin's nostalgic feeling about the past, or a Southern family that remains trapped within its past, but conveys a strong sense of grief over the deterioration of the South from the past to the sent. It is the "mood" that imsses us.

The major concern of Light in August is primarily about the South as a state of mind. In this novel, the mental landscape of the South is portioned into three separate fields on which operate resentatives of three different attitudes towards life. Two of the attitudes are plainly obsessions, resented by the male characters as main protagonists, with Reverend Hightower obsessed with the past, the defeat of the South and Joe Christmas with blood or race. The third attitude contrasts with the other two in almost every aspect, resented by Lena Grove, who is concerned solely with bringing forth and serving life.

Absalom, Absalom! is a novel entirely of intertation, the attempts of several characters -- Miss Rosa, Mr. Compson, Quentin, and Shreve -- to explain the past, characterized by involutions of  narrative structure which exss corresponding complexities of meaning. It is immensely complex, for it is two kinds of novels at once: a "historical novel" and, at the same time, a novel about history as an epistemological problem. As a novel of history it is about the South, the Civil War, or more specifically, about the fate of Thomas Sutpen, who tries to establish himself among the social elite of the South; as a novel about history, it discusses history as a problem of the mind, with Quentin as the resentative voice who tries to reconstruct the story of what happened to Thomas Sutpen, and why Sutpen's son Henry shot his friend when they came back from the war.

Go Down, Moses is in a sense a companion piece to Absalom, Absalom!, but at the same time another and very different attempt to handle the Southern reality of land, family and the plantation as a form of life. A serious and moving examination of the shame and sadness of white and black relationships, the book is composed of seven closely related stories, in which family clans resenting different social groups are involved in Faulkner's complex of themes about the South, the Sartorises, the Compsons, Thomas Sutpen, and the McCaslins. In this book, Faulkner illuminates the problem of black and white in Southern society as a close-knit destiny of blood brotherhood. The best story to highlight Faulkner's concern is "The Bear," in which the view of the moral abomination of slavery and the human entanglements which result from it goes beyond history, to the beginnings, to the mythic time. In this story, Faulkner skillfully employs an old crafty bear as a symbol of the timeless freedom of the wilderness.

Faulkner has always been regarded as a man with great might of invention and experimentation. He added to the theory of the novel as an art form and evolved his own literary strategies. To him, the primary duty of a writer was to explore and resent the infinite possibilities inherent in human life. Therefore a writer should observe with no judgment whatsoever and reduce authorial intrusion to the lowest minimum. The range of narrative techniques used by Faulkner is remarkable. He would never step between the characters and the reader to explain, but let the characters explain themselves and hinder as little as possible the reader's direct experience of the work of art. The most characteristic way of structuring his stories is to fragment the chronological time. He deliberately broke up the chronology of his narrative by juxtaposing the past with the sent, in the way the montage does in a movie. The modern stream-of-consciousness technique was also frequently and skillfully exploited by Faulkner to emphasize the reactions and inner musings of the narrator. And the interior monologue Faulkner used helps him achieve the most desirable effect of exploring the nature of human consciousness. Moreover, Faulkner was good at senting multiple points of view, which gave the story a circular form, wherein one event is centered, with various points of view radiating from it, or different people responding to the same story. Thus a high degree of truth could be reached. The other narrative techniques Faulkner used to construct his stories include symbolism and mythological and biblical allusions.

Faulkner was a master of his own particular style of writing. Great writers such as Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James and James Joyce all had a part in influencing Faulkner. His prose, marked by long and embedded sentences, complex syntax, and vague reference pronouns on the one hand and a variety of "registers” of the English language on the other, is very difficult to read. It is not surprising to find in Faulkner's writings his syntactical structures and verbals paralleled, negatives balanced against positives, compounded adjectives swelling his sentences, complex modifying elements placed after the nouns, etc. In contrast, Faulkner could sound very casual or informal sometimes. He captured the dialects of the Mississippi characters, including Negroes and the redneck, as well as more refined and educated narrators like Quentin. As to the symbols and imageries, they are most of them drawn from nature.

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