William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country, Cleanth Brooks, c. 1963

I don't recall having ever read anything by William Faulkner and that's saying a lot. Starting back in 2000, I voraciously started reading, ultimately putting together a reading program of which I am quite proud. Going through my journals (literally scores of journals devoted to literature) I have nothing on Faulkner except a listing of the top 100 best English novels as compiled by Time Magazine critics Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo back in 2009, from a list of novels dating back to 1923.

The list is alphabetical, not ranked in any order. Faulkner is on the list with Light in August and The Sound and the Fury.

It's time, I guess, for me to read a bit about, and perhaps read a bit of, William Faulkner.

I will start with William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country, Cleanth Brooks, c. 1963. The first thing I noted: what little I have read reminds me a lot of Rob Roy and Sir Walter Scott. Wow.

Nothing new under the sun.

I can't wait to really get into this book.

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Chapter 1: Faulkner the Provincial

William Faulkner: the South; with the past and the rural;
Thomas Hardy: Wessex
Robert Frost: northern New England
Dylan Thomas: Wales

Did Faulkner get his facts right?

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Chapter 2: The Plain People

Though the planter families of the Old South and the Negroes play a very important part in Faulkner's novels, the folk who dominate much of his fiction are descendants neither of the old ruling class nor of the slaves. They are white people, many of them poor, and most of them living on farms; but they are not to be put down necessarily as "poor whites" and certainly not necessarily as "white trash." It is with characters such as these that the non-Southern  reader of Faulkner is likely to have most trouble. he may too easily conclude that the McCallums and the Tulls are simply poor white trash. Hasty or unobservant readers may even see them all as allied to the infamous Snopes clan.

That was the opening paragraph and immediately reminded me of Sir Walter Scott and Rob Roy.

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Chapter 3: Faulkner as Nature Poet

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Chapter 4: The Community and the Pariah (Light in August)

From notes, p. 375.

A folk idiom: a cow that is expected to calve in August will be "light in August." The rather boving Lena who, at the beginning of the novel, is heavily pregnant, is to become "light" in August.

But Faulkner, when asked, said this:

In August in Mississippi there's a few days somewhere about the middle of the month when suddenly there's a foretaste of fall, it's cook, there's a lambence, a luminous quality to the light, as though it came not from just today but from back in the old classic times ... from Greece, from Olympus ... It lasts just for a day or two, then it's gone, but every year in August that occurs in my country, and that's all that title meant, it was just to me a pleasant evocative title because it reminded me of that time, of a luminosity older than our Christian civilization. Maybe the connection was with Lena Grove, who had something of that pagan quality.

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Chapter 5: The Old Order (The Unvanquished)

The Unvanquished has suffered more than any other Faulkner's novels through having been dismissed as a sheaf of conventional Southern Civil War stories.


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Chapter 6: The Waste Land: Southern Exposure (Sartoris)

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Chapter 7: Discovery of Evil (Sanctuary and Requiem for a Nun)

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Chapter 8: Odyssey of teh Bundresn (As I Lay Dying)

The author's fondness for As I Lay Dying is easily understood. The writing in this novel is as good as Faulkner has ever done, and the book constitutes a triumph in the management of tone. Faulkner has daringly mingled the grotesque and the heroic, the comic and the pathetic, pity and terror, creating a complexity of toe that has proved difficult for some readers to cop with.

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Chapter 9: Faulkner's Savage Arcadia: Frenchman's Bend (The Hamlet)

More than any other novel of Faulkner's, The Hamlet introduces us to a strange and special world.

The hamlet is a very small town, not the Shakesperian play.

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Chapter 10: Passion, Marriage, and Bourgeois Respectability (The Town)

The second part of the trilogy; the first was The Hamlet.

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Chapter 11: Faulkner's Revenger's Tragedy (The Mansion)

The third novel in Faulkner's trilogy.

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Chapter 12: The Story of the McCaslins (Go Down, Moses)

Could have been titled The McCaslins for that is all the book is about.

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Chapter 13: The Community In Action (Intruder in the Dust)

Intruder in the Dust represents a very curious mixture of literary excellence and faults.

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Chapter 14: History and the Sense of the Tragic (Absolom, Absolom!)

Absolom, Absolom!, in my opinion the greatest of Faulkner's novels, is probably the least well understood of all his books. The property of a great work, as T. S. Eliot remarked long ago, is to communicate before it is understood; and Absolom, Absolom! passes this test triumphantly. It has meant something very powerful and important to all sorts of people, and who is to say that, under the circumstances, this something was not the thing to be said to that particular reader?

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Chapter 15: Man, Time, and Eternity (The Sound and Fury)

The Sound and Fury proved to be Faulkner's first great novel, and in the opinion of many qualified judges it remains his best. It has attracted, more than any other of his books, a mass of detailed exegesis and commentary, some of it beside the point, some of it illuminating as well.

The salient technical feature of The Sound and Fury is the use of four different points of view in the presentation of the breakup of the Compson family. This special technique was obviously of great personal consequence to Faulkner, as evidenced by his several references to it in the last few years.

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Chapter 16: The World of William Faulkner (The Reivers)

The events that make up the story told in The Reivers take place in 1905. The world of mechnization comes into the dozing little county seat of Jefferson in its most romantic form -- as the improbable and exciting early automobile.


And then 76 pages of notes.

Compson genealogy.

McCaslin genealogy.

Stevens genealogy.

Sartoris genealogy.

Sutpen genealogy.

Snopes genealogy.

Character index.

General index.