KNIGHT’S GAMBIT
Gavin Stevens, the wise and forbearing student of crime and the folk ways of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, plays the major role in these six stories of violence. In each, Stevens’ sharp insights and ingenious detection uncover the underlying motives.
PYLON
One of the few of William Faulkner’s works to be set outside his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Pylon, first published in 1935, takes place at an air show in a thinly disguised New Orleans named New Valois. An unnamed reporter for a local newspaper tries to understand a very modern ménage a trois of flyers on the brainstorming circuit. These characters, Faulkner said, “were a fantastic and bizarre phenomenon on the face of the contemporary scene. . . . That is, there was really no place for them in the culture, in the economy, yet they were there, at that time, and everyone knew that they wouldn’t last very long, which they didn’t. . . . That they were outside the range of God, not only of respectability, of love, but of God too.” In Pylon Faulkner set out to test their rootless modernity to see if there is any place in it for the old values of the human heart that are the central concerns of his best fiction.
SANCTUARY
A powerful novel examining the nature of evil, informed by the works of T.S. Eliot and Freud, mythology, local lore, and hardboiled detective fiction, Sanctuary is the dark, at times brutal, story of the kidnapping of Mississippi debutante Temple Drake, who introduces her own form of venality into the Memphis underworld where she is being held.
THREE FAMOUS SHORT NOVELS
In this book are three different approaches of Faulkner, each of them highly entertaining as well as representative of his work as a whole. Spotted Horses is a hilarious account of a horse auction, and pits the “cold practicality” of women against the boyish folly of men. The law comes in to settle the dispute caused by the sale of “wild” horses, and finds itself up against a formidable opponent, Mrs. Tull. Old Man is something of an adventure story. When a flood ravages the countryside of the lower Mississippi, a convict finds himself adrift with a pregnant woman. His one aim is to return the woman to safety and himself to prison, where he can be free of women. In order to do this, he fights alligators and snakes, as well as the urge to be trapped once again by a woman. Perhaps one of the best known of Faulkner’s shorter works, The Bear is the story of a boy coming to terms with the adult world. By learning how to hunt, the boy is taught the real meaning of pride and humility and courage, virtues that Faulkner feared would be almost impossible to learn with the destruction of the wilderness.
UNCOLLECTED STORIES OF WILLIAM FAULKNER
This invaluable volume, which has been republished to commemorate the one-hundredth anniversary of Faulkner’s birth, contains some of the greatest short fiction by a writer who defined the course of American literature. Its forty-five stories fall into three categories: those not included in Faulkner’s earlier collections; previously unpublished short fiction; and stories that were later expanded into such novels as The Unvanquished, The Hamlet, and Go Down, Moses. With its introduction and extensive notes by the biographer Joseph Blotner, Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner is an essential addition to its author’s canon—as well as a book of some of the most haunting, harrowing, and atmospheric short fiction written in the twentieth century.
THE WILD PALMS
In this feverishly beautiful novel—originally titled If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem by Faulkner, and now published in the authoritative Library of America text—William Faulkner interweaves two narratives, each wholly absorbing in its own right, each subtly illuminating the other. In New Orleans in 1937, a man and a woman embark on a headlong flight into the wilderness of passions, fleeing her husband and the temptations of respectability. In Mississippi ten years earlier, a convict sets forth across a flooded river, risking his one chance at freedom to rescue a pregnant woman. From these separate stories Faulkner composes a symphony of deliverance and damnation, survival and self-sacrifice, a novel in which elemental danger juxtaposes with fatal injuries of the spirit. The Wild Palms is grandly inventive, heart-stopping in its prose, and suffused on every page with the physical presence of the country that Faulkner made his own.
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APPROACHING WILLIAM FAULKNER
As with any great literature, there are probably as many ways to read William Faulkner’s writing as there are readers. There are hundreds of books devoted to interpretations of his novels, numerous biographies, and every year high school teachers and college professors guide their students through one or more of the novels. But after all is said and done, there are the books themselves, and the pleasure of reading them can be deep and lasting. The language Faulkner uses ranges from the poetically beautiful, nearly biblical to the coarse sounds of rough dialect. His characters linger in the mind, whether for their heroism or villainy, their stoicism or self-indulgence, their honesty or deceitfulness or self-deception, their wisdom or stupidity, their gentleness or cruelty. In short, like Shakespeare, William Faulkner understood what it means to be human.
Much of Faulkner’s fiction is set in the fictional Mississippi county Yoknapatawpha (Yok’na pa taw pha) and most of his characters are southerners who, to one degree or another, are struggling with life in a country that has experienced defeat, resisting change, and dealing with a lingering nostalgia for a time that many of them never knew. Faulkner’s South is, of course, a segregated South, and most of his characters are white southerners, many of whom have not and will not accept the reality of racial equality. Faulkner himself became involved in the early Civil Rights struggle, but being a southerner who rarely left the small Mississippi college town where he grew up, he understood the difficulty of the racial divide, and in his writing we can find some of the most subtle explanations of the difficult relationship between blacks and white, as well as some of the most horrifying descriptions of the effects of racial hatred.
But if Faulkner were only concerned with
the lives of southerners in the long period after the Civil War and into the first half of the twentieth century, his writing would not have the appeal it does (and he might not have received the Nobel Prize for Literature). Faulkner deals with universal themes, and his characters, speaking in their own, sometimes barely articulate, sometimes profoundly insightful voices, express the fears, joys, and confusion of struggling with life: the voices of the Bundren family and their neighbors and acquaintances alternating in As I Lay Dying lend the narrative much more power than a simple telling of the plot would. Allowing the “idiot” Benjy to narrate the first section of The Sound and the Fury, in which time is confused and details accumulate slowly, makes the reader consider how events are interpreted and what the mind makes of memories. In Light in August, Joe Christmas never knows his true origins, but his assumptions, and the beliefs of others, lead to a dramatic portrayal of the effects of prejudice.
Often tragic, sometimes absurdly comic, Faulkner’s plots are frequently driven by forces that cannot be controlled by his characters: the definition of classic tragedy. In As I Lay Dying, the family set off on a journey to fulfill the dying wish of Addie Bundren, only to be stymied by an almost biblical series of events: fire and flood among them. Benjy, Quentin, and Jason Compton in The Sound and the Fury are each affected by something that happened to their sister, which they could not or did not prevent, and perhaps by the effects of history itself. In Light in August, the lives of two characters who never meet, Lena Grove and Joe Christmas, lead to both horrifying tragedy and a small but significant ray of hope.
So, how do we approach Faulkner? We approach him through his language, letting ourselves hear the poetry in it, stopping to savor a phrase (or look up an unfamiliar word!), or just reading until the sound becomes familiar. We approach him through his characters, hating them or loving them, fearing for them, hoping for them or merely wondering how they survive. We approach him through the stories he tells, because they are familiar or strange, because they sound like history or myth or just a good tale. We can even approach him through what we know about Faulkner’s own life and times or through what we read in the newspaper every day or what we have experienced in our personal lives. If the definition of classic literature is that it concerns things that we continue to want (and need) to read about, then we can simply read Faulkner.
Text © 2005 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., a division of Random House, Inc., New York
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