William Faulkner: The Critical Heritage John Bassett english

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A volume on William Faulkner in this series poses three small problems. The relationship of commentary on a modern writer to broader cultural and intellectual patterns of his century has not assumed quite the clarity that similar relationships have for Austen or Carlyle or Dickens. Second, immediate responses to modern literature, especially fiction, do not reflect prevailing critical attitudes. The term ‘criticism’ covers several levels of commentary—journalistic reviews and feature articles; interpretive analyses found in quarterlies and books; scholarship; and formal aesthetics. 1 Most commentary on a contemporary novelist, though a portion of this may come from the pens of professional critics and scholars, falls into the category of journalism. Thus a gap—sometimes large—between what is representative and typical among attitudes toward a given writer and what we can define as the critical mainstream of the same period. Among the main currents of criticism in the 1930s were the Marxist or quasi-Marxist commentary amplified by the Depression; the more formalistic essays sponsored by, among others, such Southern writers as Ransom, Tate, and Warren; and psychological biography and criticism. Though all show up in early Faulkner criticism, they are not dominant factors, not only because the Marxists often ignored Faulkner and the New Critics dealt more often with poetry than with fiction, but also because most commentary on Faulkner was being written by newspaper and magazine reviewers not part of a critical school, or by literary historians in academia who by and large rejected him for morbidity or obscurity, or by men of letters either praising or dispraising him but not on Marxist or ‘New’ or in any strict sense psychological grounds. The two dominant issues in Faulkner commentary of the 1930s being his obscurity and his morbidity, it can better be explained as a manifestation of first the difficulty even good critics had learning to read the modernistic work of Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Proust, and Woolf, and second the squeamishness and repulsion many ‘Humanists’ expressed toward a school of fiction they considered the ultimate extension of Naturalism. Yet a third complication in arranging a volume on an author still publishing prolifically for fifteen years after World War II is the great swell of critical-scholarly publishing after the war, especially in America, where the wave of doctoral students and scholars has flooded journals and publishers with their output. It has affected all authors living and dead, of course; but since Faulkner was writing novels up until 1962 it falls within the parameters of his ‘critical heritage.’ Because so many collections now available anthologize the best post-war criticisms on Faulkner, it seemed wise to emphasize here the crosscurrents of critical response prior to 1950, when he received the Nobel Prize. Therefore only a handful of reviews and articles represent the plethora of more recent Faulkner studies. Similarly the exclusion of foreign criticism must be noted. The at times very incisive French commentary that began in the 1930s would justify a separate volume in itself. The Japanese, ever since Faulkner’s visit in the 1950s, have studied his work avidly and written on it prolifically, a body of work calling for a separate and serious inter-cultural study. Still, despite minor problems and the necessity of certain lacunae, there is no other American prose writer of this century whose own ‘critical heritage’ reveals so much about literary, cultural, and social attitudes of his age. The context for this volume, to be sure, would consist in the record of comparable responses to Hemingway, Dos Passos, and West, Joyce, Woolf, and Powell, as well as modern attitudes toward writers of the past century. But with the quantity of significant fiction Faulkner wrote, covering five different decades by the way, and the multiplicity of matters in that fiction that invite commentary of so many different sorts, there is no better starting place for a review of twentieth-century literary attitudes than the reaction to William Faulkner