Last Monday 25th of September, the American writer William Faulkner would complete 120 years old, so this post is a tribute to him. Besides being a Nobel Prize winner and an innovative writer, his activism for the right to privacy became his works more genuine, understandable and meaningful. This post is a summary of four articles. The first was published at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Faulkner. The second was published at http://www.findingdulcinea.com/guides/Education/Great-Authors-William-Faulkner.pg_. The third was published at http://www.semo.edu/cfs/teaching/4853.html. The fourth was published at http://www.vqronline.org/essay/faulkner%E2%80%99s-criticism-modern-america
William Cuthbert Faulkner (1897-1962) was an American writer and Nobel Prize laureate from Mississipi. Faulkner wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays, and screenplays. He is one of the most celebrated writers in American literature, Faulkner was relatively unknown until receiving the 1949 Nobel in literature. A Fable (1954) and his last novel The Reivers (1962) won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. He had three younger brothers. His family, particularly his mother Maud and his maternal grandmother Leila were avid readers and his mother valued education and took pleasure in reading, so she taught her sons to read before sending them to public school and she exposed them to classics such as Charles Dickens. Faulkner's prodigious output includes his most celebrated novels such as, The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), and Absalom! (1936). Faulkner was known for his experimental style with meticulous attention to diction and cadence. In contrast to the minimalist understatement of his contemporary writer Ernest Hemingway, Faulkner made frequent use of "stream of consciousness" and wrote often highly emotional, subtle, cerebral, complex, and sometimes Gothic stories of a wide variety of characters including former slaves or descendants of slaves, poor agrarian white or working-class southerners, and southern aristocrats.
William Faulkner, revered modernist writer, historian and sociologist, is known for capturing the raw beauty of the rural South in all its dark complexity. In new Orleans, Faulkner met Sherwood Anderson, a writer who would become his friend and mentor. He also became friends with John McClure, a journalist who helped edit a literary magazine. In 1929, he published, "The Sound and the Fury," an experimental novel that follows the destruction of the Compson family. The novel's first scene, which shows Caddy peering in at her grandfather's funeral from her perch in a tree. Faulkner wrote the book five times. In 2004, Faith Lapidus said that between 1929 and 1936, Faulkner reinvented the novel. The Sound and the fury, may have been Faulkner favorite, but most critics believe his best work and perhaps the best American novel is "Absalom!" Published in 1936, it tells the story of Thomas Sutpen, a Southerner who marries one woman in Haiti and another in the South. He then swindles an estate from the Native Americans. Recognition for Faulkner came slowly. During the Great Depression, he continued to rely on screenplays and short stories. Readers of Faulkner rely on emotional instincts to embrace and unravel the ambiguities woven into each passage. Robert Hamblin, an expert on Faulkner's literature, tells frustrated readers to think of themselves as members of a jury. Imagine sitting in court listening to and sifting through... contradictory testimonies of a parade of witnesses, and knowing that finally you'll have to make up your mind about what actually happened and who is and is not telling the truth.
Several novels and short stories wrtitten by Faulkner can be included on high school reading lists and if taught would enhance student experiences of American literature. Malcolm Cowley in his classic introduction to The Portable Faulkner said, "Faulkner's novels have the quality of being lived, absorbed, remembered rather than merely observed. And they have what is rare in the novels of our time, a warmth of family affection, brother for brother and sister, the father for his children, a love so warm and proud that it tries to shut out the rest of the world." It is difficult to imagine someone reading the final scenes of Light in August and not being moved by the fate of Joe. It is hard to imagine a reader can experience the journey with Bundren family to bury Addie in As I Lay Dying, and not be a better person for the experience. What student can experience Faulkner's encapsulation of the world in The Sound and the Fury and not come to a deeper understanding of himself and his place in that world? Literature allows students to understand the heritage of the past. Faulkner teaches us better than most writers what it means to be American, not just a American from the South. We must learn to share the heritage wrought by slavery and learn to understand the prejudice and greed that forged its development. More than most writers, Faulkner is able to lead us to a personal understanding of "man's inhumanity to man."
Faulkner did not at all mind speaking out about the world in which he lived. At one time or another he complained of many features of our American life style: of our haste, of our activism-though we all said that we approved of culture, we could not find the time to read a book or listen to music- of our commercialism, of business so often pursued merely for the sake of business, of our tendency to reduce nearly all human relations to the cash nexus. Closely allied to this fear of what your neighbors may think of you is something that sounds like its direct opposite: your own nagging desire to know the worst about your neighbor, the wish to find out all about his private life, and a willingness, if necessary, to violate his privacy. The modern vice that most outraged Faulkner, however, was the violation of one's private life. Its enormity had been brought home to him by attempted violation of his own privacy. These attempts came to a head in 1953 with the publication in Life magazine of, "The Private World of William Faulkner." Though Faulkner had begged the editors of Life to desist, they could not be persuaded to leave him. Faulkner took the matter to heart to devote to it one of his rare full-dress essays. It bears the title: "On Privacy." It constitutes his most elaborate and considered attack on the value system of contemporary America. In the essay, however, Faulkner undertakes to rise above his personal problem and take a large, overall view. What had happened to him, he tells the reader, was what had also happened on a level of much graver seriousness to more important figures such as, for instance, Charles Lindberg and J.Robert Oppenheimer. Though the nation had rejoiced in Lindberg's great achievement, it had not been able to protect his child, and when the child was kidnapped, it had not shielded his grief but had exploited it. Good manners and decency had been engulfed by the urge to make money by pandering to the public's greediness for the sensational. It is worth noting that Faulkner chose as a subtitle for his essay on privacy, "The American Dream: What Happened to it." Our republic had been born out of a dream. It had been founded to guarantee to every citizen freedom from oppression by the arbitrary power, whether of church or state; yet though the nation had been born out of a revolt against one kind of enslavement, it had capitulated to another, the individual's enslavement by a mindless and venal mob. Pushy newspaper men, in Faulkner's view, were no mere pimples on the body politic; rather, they evidence a deep and malignant growth. A long essay by Richard Goodwin, entitled, "Reflections: The American Condition." Though range over a great number of topics, the portion of this essay that is most pertinent to Faulkner's criticism of the modern world: that is, the individual's freedom considered as an absolute end in itself and freedom as an aspect of the individual's fulfillment of himself. Goodwin insists that the purpose of the true individual are not mere individual preferences and opinions, but purposes which are consistent with those of his fellows. The true individual seeks to satisfy his own wants and to cultivate his own faculties in a manner that is consonant with the well-being of others. Goodwin remind us that Plato, in "The Republic," asserts that the greatest good is the bond of unity in which there is community of pleasure and pains, in which all citizens are glad or grieved on the same occasions of joy and sorrow.
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