Discussion Questions and Tasks
William Faulkner
(1897-1962)
William Cuthbert Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi in an old prominent Southern family named Falkner. He changed the spelling of his last name to Faulkner later. The family moved into Oxford, Mississippi, in Lafayette County, where William spent his childhood. He was named after his great-grand father, William Falkner, the Old Colonel. The great-grand father had been an army officer, banker, railroad builder and had written novels besides. He, even in death, was as a large- than-life model of success for the whole family. (The theme of legendary ancestors is vividly shown in his novel "Sartoris"). Faulkner trained in Canada as a cadet pilot in the Royal Air Force (RAF) in 1918. Earlier, Faulkner had tried to join the U.S. Army Air Force, but he had been turned down because of his height. In his RAF application, he lied about numerous facts, including his birthdate and birthplace, in an attempt to pass himself as British. He also spelled his name Faulkner, believing it looked more British, and in meeting with RAP officials he affected a British accent. He began training in Toronto, but before he finished training, the war ended. He told many stories of his adventures in the RAF, most of which were highly exaggerated, including injuries that had left him in constant pain and with a silver plate in his head. He attended the University of Mississippi in 1919-20 (in spite of the fact he had not finished high school). After three semesters of study at the University he dropped out. Over the next few years, Faulkner wrote reviews, poems, prose pieces for The Mississippian and took different odd jobs, such as a shop assistant, postmaster. His first two novels were not mature. He came into his own when decided to make use of the world he knew best, the place, where he had grown up.. He began to write about the South region, which he transformed into the mythical Yoknapatawpha. "Sartoris", his third novel began the “saga” about Yoknapatawpha. In 1931 Faulkner bought a pre-Civil War mansion, "Rowanoak," in Oxford, Mississippi, where settled down till the rest of his life. In 1950 William Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.
He was buried at Sf. Peter’s Cemetery in Oxford. The press clamored for answers to their questions from family members, a family representative relayed to them a message from the family: “Until he’s buried he belongs to the family. After that, he belongs to the world.”
His best-known novels are Sartoris (1929), The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Unvanquished (1938), The Hamlet (1940), Go Down, Moses (1942), Intruder in the Dust (1948), A Fable (1954; Pulitzer Prize), The Town (1957), The Mansion (1959), and The Reivers (1962; Pulitzer Prize). In addition to his novels Faulkner published several volumes of short stories and collections of essays and poems.
Most of his novels are set in Yoknapatawpha County, an imaginary Southern area in Mississippi with a colourful history and a richly varied population. This mythical country with the main town Jefferson was patterned upon Faulkner’s real home in Lafayette Country, where he had grown up. Yoknapatawpha is a great vision of Southern history, from 1820 – 1940 and examining at the same time the history of human soul where passions, greed and guilt found their specific manifestation. In this county live such prominent clans as the Sartoris family, the Compson family, The Sutpen family, the Snopes family. The representatives of these families are traveling from one novel to other (for example, in “Sartoris” Snopes appears but as a minor character, in their own turn, the Sartorisses are main heroes of the trilogy “The Hamlet”, “The Town”, “The Mansion”. In “Town” and “Mansion” Benbow Sartoris (the son of the twin brother Bayard) appears). In his novel “Absalom, Absalom!” the sixth novel set in Yoknapatawpha County, Faulkner included a hand-drawn map of his imaginary county. In the map’s “key” he declares the geographical size of the county (2,400 square miles) and its population (Whites, 6298; Negroes, 9313), and he “signed” the map “William Faulkner, Sole Owner & Proprietor”. The map depicts how the general dimensions of the county resemble those of his actual Lafayette County, Mississippi. Faulkner marked the places where significant events from his novels took place, for example the Sartoris Plantation. The county is a microcosm of the South as a whole, and Faulkner’s novels examine the effects of the dissolution of traditional values of Southern society. One of his primary themes is the abuse of blacks by the Southern whites. Because Faulkner’s novels treat the decay and anguish of the South since the Civil War, they abound in violent and sordid events. But they are grounded in a profound and compassionate humanism that celebrates the tragedy, energy, and humor of ordinary human life. The master of a rhetorical, highly symbolic style, Faulkner was also a brilliant literary technician, making frequent use of convoluted time sequences and of the stream of consciousness technique. (The stream of consciousness is the literary technique which records the flow of thoughts without regards to logical argument or narrative sequence. It is a chaotic, illogical, associative, inner, endless monologue)
“Sartoris”(1929) is the first Yoknapatawpha novel. It was also the first attempt in American literature to project a new version of Southern society, avoiding traditional clichés. The novel deals with the Civil War as part of Southern consciousness. The memories of the Civil War still alive within the Sartoris family, which determine the mood and the fate of the whole family. The old Aunt Miss Jenny brings their memories into the twentieth century. Miss Jenny, a Civil War widow, has many times told her story of Civil War bravery and these stories turn into legends. The Sartorises are scared by the First World War and try to mask their fear behind the greatly exaggerated stories about their heroic relative, the Old Colonel who is dead and the Glory Civil War which took place in the previous century. For them time has stopped and they appear in “no men land” (мертвая зона), where Past is more actual and important than Present.
The contemporary Sartoris twins who serve in the First World War are also under the influence of family tales. During World War I Sartoris Bayard III joined the Royal Air Force and served in Europe, where his twin brother was shot down and killed in July 1918, and whose death he believes is his fault. Bayard III suffers because of a deep depression, as in heart of his hearts he thinks he is not courageous enough to be a Southerner and Sartoris. All is endlessly repeating in this family: children are given the same names “John” or “Bayard”, they have the same way of thinking, the same fates. This fact shows vividly the decline of the Sartoris family. While test-fly an aeroplane Bayard III is killed and that same day, his wife Narcissa gives birth to his son Benbow. Though Aunt Jenny has named him John prior to his birth, Narcisa rejects to give this name. She wants her child to have the other name hoping he will have the other destiny.
The plot of this novel is largely based on the inner conflict (man against himself). This novel is written in a simple, poetic manner enriched with various stylistic devices. “Sartoris” has not aesthetic abstraction from personal problems and extreme experiment which are features of Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury”.
“The Sound and the Fury” (1929) is called the best novel of William Faulkner. It demands as extraordinary effort on the part of the reader. It is the novel four times told by different narrators. Faulkner explained why, in an interview given to the Paris Review: “It began with a mental picture.... The picture was of the muddy seat of a little girl’s drawers in a pear tree, where she could see through a window where her grandmother’s funeral was taking place and report what was happening to her brothers on the ground below. I had already begun to tell the story through the eyes of the idiot child, since I felt that it would be more effective as told by someone capable only of knowing what happened, but not why. I saw that I had not told the story that time. I tried to tell it again through the eyes of another brother. That was still not it. I told it for the third time through the eyes of the third brother. That was still not it...”[1:88].
Faulkner presented the story in a unique way. He told it four times, in four different ways by four persons and at four different dates. There is a provocating disregard of the conventional time sequence to depict an individual experience of time.
Each of the first three sections of the novel is narrated by a different member of the Compson family; first is narrated by idiot Benjamin (Benjy), the second by Quentin, and the third by Jason IV. The fourth section is a third person narrative, although many readers see it as “narrated” by Dilsey, the Compson’s old black servant. Although narrated by the three brothers and the servant, the focus of the navel is really the sister Caddy. Each of the three brothers has a different view on Caddy and her promiscuity. The first chapter is the greatest challenge to the reader. The stream of consciousness of 33 year old Benjy presents as an uninterrupted flow. This flow of thoughts by the idiot presents the events without any attention to chronical order. By verbal association the idiot’s empty mind pick out particles of memory from his experiences of April 1928, when on his thirty-third birthday he watches the golf players course. The first scene establishes the basic mood and situation of the novel: the idiot looks through the fence into the golf course, laid out on land which was sold in order to pay for Quentin’s (his brother) Harvard education. He hears the players call for their caddie, and the sound mistaken for the name of his sister Caddy, evokes a string of memories about her, how gets her pants dirty while, being brave enough to climb the tree in order to look into the room and tell the other children what is going on.
To Benjy Caddy is a gentle caretaker whose absence – caused by her promiscuity and marriage – fills his adult life with a sense of loss. To Quentin Caddy’s sexuality is a sign of the dissolution of the antebellum Southern world of family honor and the event that spurs him to commit suicide. To Jason Caddy’s promiscuity means the loss of opportunity and is the reason he is stuck at a desk job that he finds demeaning, as well as the reason he is stuck at home with a hypochondriac mother, retarded brother, rebellious illegitimate niece and family of servants who are eating him out of house and home. The last section of the novel provides a less biased view of Caddy’s life and the downfall of the Compson family. Faulkner himself acknowledged the fact that the novel revolves around the absent center of Caddy and her story. For Faulkner Caddy is, as he called her, “his hearts darling”. She is a figure of a twentieth-century girl lost between Southern tradition and freedom.
Not much happens in the three days in which the novel is mainly set; instead the stream of consciousness narration allows the reader to experience the history of the Compson family and feel the decline of the South.
“The Hamlet” (1940), “The Town” (1957), “The Mansion” (l959) are the well known trilogy about the Snopes family. It is the most unpleasant clan of all Faulkner’s novels. It is a new type of people coming to the South. The Snopeses are traders, sharecroppers, bank clerks. Their “invading” is moving from a hamlet till mansion. They are much less likeable their predecessors (the aristocratic Southern families) who, for all their failings, have maintained standards of honour and pride. They are people without any feeling but with an uncanny sense of money is important. Flem Snopes establishes himself as a clerk in Varner’s store, marries Varner’s daughter Eula who is with child by another man, not in order to start a family life but only as a step on the social and financial ladder towards power. When he became vice president of the Sartoris Bank, his ambitions began to rise. Dreaming of respectability and stature, he began working to attain his goals, dreaming even of one day being bank president. When he is able to get Linda Snopes (his wife Eula’s illegitimate daughter) to sign over her shares of bank stock to him, he sets his sights on seeking revenge because of his wife’s eighteen-year affair. Eula commits suicide, leaving Flem to gaze upon her tombstone on which he has had engraved “A Virtuous Wife is a Crown to Her Husband.” Flem meets his end in “The Mansion”. Now president of the Sartoris Bank, he lived in the mansion. His only real concern now is the day when his relative, Mink Snopes will come to kill Flem to fulfill a deep desire for revenge for his treachery.
Discussion Questions and Tasks
1. Tell about the life of William Faulkner.
2. Tell about the creative activity of William Faulkner.
3. What is the role of Yoknapatawha in his novels?
4. What themes are shown in the novels?
5. What modernistic features do his novels carry?
6. Compare Joyce’s “Ulysses” with “The Sound and the Fury”.
7. Discuss the role of experimentalism in forming a new form and new contents.
SARTORIS
(EXTRACT)
Later they returned for the Jug in Bayard’s car, Bayard and Hub and a third young man, freight agent at the railway station, with three negroes and a bull fiddle in the rear seat. But they drove no farther than the edge of the field above the house and stopped there while Hub went on afoot down the sandy road toward the barn.... In the rear seat the negroes murmured among themselves.
“Fine night,” Mitch, the freight agent, suggested. Bayard made no reply. He smoked – moodily, his head closely helmeted in its white bandage. Moon and insects were one, audible and visible, dimensionless and without source.
After a while Hub materialized against the dissolving vagueness of the road, crowned by the silver slant of his hat, and he came up and swung the jug on to the door and removed the stopper. Mitch passed it to Bayard.
“Drink,” Bayard said, and Mitch did so. The others drank.
“We ain’t got nothin’ for the niggers to drink out of,” Hub said.
“That’s so,” Mitch agreed. He turned in his seat. “Ain’t one of you boys got a cup or something?” The negroes murmured again, questioning one another in mellow consternation.
“Wait,” Bayard said. He got out and lifted the hood and removed the cap from the breather-pipe. “It’ll taste a little like oil for a drink or two. But you boys won’t notice it after that.”
“Naw, suh," the negroes agreed in chorus. One took the cup and wiped it out with the corner of his coat, and they too drank in turn, with smacking expulsions of breath. Bayard replaced the cap and got in the car.
“Anybody want another right now?” Hub asked, poising the corn cob. Mitch drank again. Then Bayard took the jug and tilted it. The others watched him respectfully.
“Dam’f he don’t drink it,” Mitch murmured. “I’d be afraid to hit it so often, if I was you.”
“It’s my damned head.” Bayard lowered the jug and passed it to Hub. “I keep thinking another drink will ease it off some.”
“Doc put that bandage on too tight,” Hub said. “Want it loosened some?”
“I don’t know.” Bayard lit another cigarette and threw the match away. “I believe I’ll take it off. It’s been on there long enough.” He raised his hands and fumbled at the bandage.
“You better let it alone,” Mitch warned him. But he continued to fumble at the fastening; then he slid his fingers beneath a turn of the cloth and tugged at it savagely. One of the negroes leaned forward with a pocket knife and severed it, and they watched him as he stripped it off and flung ft away.
“You ought not to done that,” Mitch told him.
“Ah, let him take it off if he wants.” Hub said. “He’s all right.” He got in and stowed the jug away between his knees, and Bayard turned the car about. The sandy road hissed beneath the broad tires of it and rose shaling into the woods again where the dappled moonlight was intermittent, treacherous with dissolving vistas.... The road passed out of the woods and descended, with sand in shifting and silent lurches, and they turned on to the valleys road and away from town.
The car went on, on the dry hissing of the closed muffler. The negroes murmured among themselves with mellow snatches of laughter whipped like scraps of torn paper away behind. They passed the iron gates and Bayard’s home serenely in the moonlight among its trees, and the silent, box-like flag station and the metal-roofed cotton gin on the railroad siding.
The road rose at last into hills. It was smooth and empty and winding, and the negroes fell silent as Bayard increased speed. But still it was not anything like what they had anticipated of him. Twice more they stopped and drank, and then from an ultimate hilltop they looked down upon another cluster of lights like a clotting of beads upon the pale gash where the railroad ran. Hub produced the breather-cap and they drank again.
Through streets identical with those at home they moved slowly, toward an identical square. People on the square turned and looked curiously after them. They crossed the square and followed another street and went on between broad lawns and shaded windows, and presently beyond an iron fence and well back among black-and-silver trees, lighted windows hung in ordered tiers like rectangular lanterns strung among the branches.
They stopped here, in shadow. The negroes descended and lifted the bass viol out, and a guitar. The third one held a slender tube frosted over with keys upon which the intermittent moon glinted in pale points, and they stood with their heads together, murmuring among themselves and touching plaintive muted chords from the strings. Then the one with the clarinet raised it to his lips.
The tunes were old tunes... They played again, an old waltz. The college Cerberus came across the dappled lawn to the fence and leaned his arms upon it, a lumped listening shadow among other shadows. Across the street, in the shadows there, other listeners stood. A car approached and slowed to the curb and shut off engine and lights, and in the tiered windows heads leaned, aureoled against the lighted rooms behind, without individuality, feminine, distant, delicately and divinely young.
They played “Home, Sweet Home,” and when the rich minor died away, across to them came a soft clapping of slender palms. Then Mitch sang “Good Night, Ladies” in his true, over-sweet tenor, and the young hands were more importunate, and as they drove away the slender heads leaned aureoled with bright hair in the lighted windows and the soft clapping drifted after them for a long while, fainter and fainter in the silver silence and the moon’s infinitude.
The moon stood well down the sky. Its light was now a cold silver on things, spent and a little wearied, and the world was empty as they rolled without lights along a street lifeless and fixed in black and silver as any street in the moon itself. Beneath stippled intermittent shadows they went, passed quiet intersections dissolving away, occasionally a car motionless at the curb before a house.
The square opened spaciously about the absinthe-cloudy mass of elms that surrounded the courthouse. Among them the round spaced globes were more like huge, pallid grapes than ever. Above the exposed vault in each bank burned a single bulb; inside the hotel lobby, before which a row of cars was aligned, another burned...
They circled the courthouse, and a shadow moved near the hotel door and detached itself from shadow and came to the curb, a white shirt glinting within a spread coat; and as the car swung slowly toward another street, the man hailed them. Bayard stopped and the man came through the blanched dust and laid his hand on the door.
“Hi, Buck,” Mitch said. “You’re up pretty late, ain’t you?"
The man had a sober, good-natured horse’s face. He wore a metal star on his unbuttoned waistcoat. His coat humped slightly over his hip. “What you boys doin’?” he asked. “Been to a dance?”
“Serenading,” Bayard answered. “Want a drink, Buck?”
“'No, much obliged.” He stood with his hand on the door, gravely and good-naturedly serious. “Ain’t you fellers out kind of late, yo’selves?”
“It is getting’ on’, Mitch agreed. The marshal lifted his foot to the running-board. Beneath his hat his eyes were in shadow. “We’re going home now,” Mitch said. The other pondered quietly, and Bayard added:
“Sure; we’re on our way home now.”
The marshal moved his head slightly and spoke to the negroes. “I reckon you boys are about ready to turn in, ain’t you?”
“Yes, suh,” the negroes answered, and they got out and lifted the viol out. Bayard gave Reno a bill and they thanked him and said good night and picked up the viol and departed quietly down a side street. The marshal turned his head again.
“Ain’t that yo’ car in front of Rogers’ cafe, Mitch?” he asked.
“Reckon so. That’s where I left it.”
“Well, suppose you ran Hub out home, lessen he’s goin’ to stay in town tonight. Bayard better come with me.” “Aw, hell, Buck,” Mitch protested.
“What for?” Bayard demanded.
“His folks are worried about him,” the other answered. “They ain’t seen hide nor hair of him since that stallion throwed him. Where’s yo’ bandage, Bayard?”
“Took it off,” he answered shortly. “See here, Buck, we’re going to put Mitch out and then Hub and me are going straight home.”
“You been on yo’ way home ever since to’ o’clock, Bayard,” the marshal replied soberly, “but you don’t seem to get no nearer there. I reckon you better come with me tonight, like yo’ aunt said.”
“Did Aunt Jenny tell you to arrest me?”
“They was worried about you, son. Miss Jenny just phoned and asked me to kind of see if you was all right until mawnin’. So I reckon we better. You ought to went on home this evening.”
“Aw, have a heart, Buck,” Mitch protested.
“I rather make Bayard mad than Miss Jenny,” the other answered patiently. “You boys go on, and Bayard better come with me.”
Mitch and Hub got out and Hub lifted out his jug and they said good night and went on to where Mitch’s car stood before the restaurant. The marshal got in beside Bayard. The jail was not far.... They turned into an alley, and the marshal descended and opened a gate, and Bayard drove into the grassless and littered compound and stopped while the other went on ahead to a small garage in which stood a Ford. He backed this out and motioned Bayard forward. The garage was built to the Ford’s dimensions and about a third of Bayard’s car stuck out the door of it.
“Better’n nothin’', though,” the marshal said. “Come on.” They entered through the kitchen, into the jailkeeper’s living-quarters, and Bayard waited in a dark passage until the other found a light. Then he entered a bleak, neat room, containing spare conglomerate furnishings and a few scattered articles of masculine apparel.
“Say,” Bayard objected, “aren’t you giving me your bed?”
“Won’t need it be to’ mawnin’,” the other answered. “You’ll be gone, then. Want me to he’p you off with yo’ clothes?”
“No. I’m all right.” Then, more graciously: “Good night, Buck. And much obliged.”
“Good night,” the marshal answered.
He closed the door behind him and Bayard removed his coat and shoes and his tie and snapped the light off and lay on the bed. His head was clear and cold; the whisky he had drunk was completely dead. Or rather, it was as though his head were one Bayard who lay on a strange bed and whose alcohol-dulled nerves radiated like threads of ice through that body which he must drag forever about a bleak and barren world with him. “Hell,” he said, lying on his back, staring out the window where nothing was to be seen, waiting for sleep, not knowing if it would come or not, not caring a particular damn either way. Nothing to be seen, and the long, long span of a man’s natural life. Three score and ten years to drag stubborn body about the world and cozen its insistent demands. Three score and ten, the Bible said. Seventy years. And he was only twenty-six. Not much more than a third through it. Hell...