The influence of Modernism on the Novels of William Faulkner

Introduction

In William Faulkner: The Making of a Modernist, Daniel J. Singal, a professor of history at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, remarks that “intellectual historians have almost invariably steered clear” of Faulkner with the effect that “one subject remains largely unexplored—the structure and nature of his thought.”[1] This will come as a surprise to Faulkner's bibliographers, who are inundated each year with fresh historical, critical, textual, and biographical studies galore. Faulkner is very probably the most extensively analyzed and most frequently criticized of American writers. Practically every scrap of his literary expression has been subjected to repeated interpretation. But it is the case that most of the criticism of Faulkner has been produced by students of literature rather than of history. The boundary of these disciplines having been blurred; however, novels are now, for better or worse, the historian's domain and history the literary critics. Mr. Singal therefore intends to relate Faulkner's work “to the cultural and intellectual discourse of the era”— a project that necessarily involves, I should imagine, the novelist's relationship to the modernist movement in all its salient forms.

Discuss the influence of Modernism on the novels of William Faulkner

In offering to trace this relationship, Mr. Singal provides an introductory chapter defining the cultural and intellectual temper of the Victorian era. He then turns to the era of aesthetic modernism and defines its typical characteristics, as abstracted from some of the major modernist works of the early twentieth century. The balance of the book is a series of chapters devoted to Faulkner himself: his family origins in Oxford, Mississippi—particularly the importance of his great-grandfather, Colonel W. C. Falkner, author of The White Rose of Memphis and an embodiment of the flamboyant “Cavalier” sensibility of the old South; Faulkner's World War I experience and its aftermath; the fin-de-siècle character of his literary apprenticeship; his eventual discovery of “Yoknapatawpha County” as an adequate field of fictional invention, a discovery brilliantly justified in that modernist masterwork The Sound and the Fury (1929); his rejection of the Cavalier myth, or the illusion of a Southern aristocracy, as he struggled to achieve a “modernist identity,” a struggle that culminated in the pivotal work Light in August (1932); the growing mastery of Faulkner's historical understanding, as it was reflected in Absalom, Absalom! (1936); and Faulkner's slow artistic decline, beginning with Go Down, Moses (1942), culminating in his death in 1962 (Parini, P 309).

I confess at the outset to a particular liking for cultural history, for criticism that relates an author to the intellectual and artistic tendencies of his age. Literary study is now so disfigured by polysyllabic gobbledygook, so taken up with ideological posturing and with the arcane theories of unreadable Continentals, that it is a pleasure to follow the discussion of a matter-of-fact historian who admires Faulkner and wants to make plain why we ought to admire him, too (Parini, P 309).

Mr. Singal's analysis, which has a number of fine paragraphs, concludes that Faulkner was ...