FIVE FAMOUS FAULKNER FABLES

CLASSIC REVIEWS OF THE NOBEL PRIZE-WINNING

MISSISSIPPIAN'S MOST ICONIC NOVELS
September 24, 2018  

By Book Marks

The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.

Tomorrow, September 25th, marks the 111th birthday of

Mississippi’s marquee modernist and the granddaddy of
Southern Gothic literature: William Cuthbert Faulkner. One of
the most garlanded authors in the history of American letters
(with a Nobel, two Pulitzers, and two National Book Awards to
his name), Faulkner’s novels and short stories—largely set in
the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, MS—are legendary for
their cerebral, stream of consciousness style and grim, often
grotesque, happenings. His fictional characters are spiritually
impoverished southerners: weary slaves and their embattled
descendants, desperate white sharecroppers, morally decayed
aristocrats, bitter families with buried secrets.
Below, we look back on a selection of classic reviews of some of
Faulkner’s most famous novels—from his notoriously difficult
psychological opus, The Sound and the Fury (1929) and the
multi-voiced masterpiece, As I Lay Dying (1930), to the WWI-
set late-career Christian allegory, A Fable (1954).
 The Sound and the Fury (1929)
Clocks slay time…time is dead as long as it is being clicked off
by little wheels;  only when the clock stops does time come to
life.

“It is customary to label as experimental books that do not

conform to traditional modes of writing, but the traditions have
been violated so often of late that this designation no longer
fits. The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner, is the latest
novel that defies classification. To many it will be as
incoherent as James Joyce, but its writer is a man of
mature talent, and the story, if read with patience, turns
such a powerful light on reality that it gains a fast grip
on the emotions of the reader.
The books tells the story of a rotting southern family from the
viewpoint, for the most part, of an idiot whose present and past
are hopelessly jumbled. The distortion in his eyes is so great
that as a man of 33 years he is still seeing the events of his
boyhood as if they were actually taking place once more. The
author, endeavoring to record the psychological reaction of
Benjy and the other members of this strange household in
terms of their own inability to record logically, tries in a style
almost as idiotic as the idiot’s thought process. Hence the
reader’s difficulty.
…
“But we cannot dismiss the book merely because some
passages are difficult. It has the baffling virtue of making the
reader want to understand all the devious ways of these
creatures’ minds. On the face of it this is a family not worth
artistic attention. And yet the dumb suffering of Benjy; the rich,
unselfish devotion of his sister, Caddie, who becomes the
plaything of circumstance; the harsh brutality of Jason; the
sensitive, self-tortured despair of Quentin, the only one of the
family who is educated; and the simplicity of Dilsey, the family
servant; together with a view of the broken lives of mother and
father, beget an emotional sympathy for these poor players
which is proof of the author’s talent.”
–Harry Hansen, The Detroit Free Press, November 17, 1929
*
 As I Lay Dying (1930)
My mother is a fish.

“This is a family of groundlings tied to the land, subject to the

elements, to the seasons, and to natural disasters. Their lives
are unmediated by culture, schooling, or money. It is as if the
universe pressing down on them is created by themselves.
Faulkner does a number of things in this novel that all together
account for its unusual dimensions. Nothing is explained,
scenes are not set, background information is not supplied,
characters’ CVs are not given. From the first line, the book is in
medias res: ‘Jewel and I come up from the field, following the
path in single file.’ Who these people are, and the situation they
are dealing with, the reader will work out in the lag: the people
in the book will always know more than the reader, who is
dependent upon just what they choose to reveal. And at
moments of crisis and impending disaster, what is happening is
described incompletely by different characters, so as to create
in the reader a state of knowing and not knowing at the same
time—a fracturing of the experience that has the uncanny effect
of affirming its reality.
…
“Apart from its technical achievement, and the descriptive
prowess here as in all of Faulkner’s major works, As I Lay
Dyingcan be read as having been written in anticipation of the
South’s cultural designation as the symbolic face of the Great
Depression. Someone who knew the South, as Faulkner did,
would not abide that sort of reductionism. There is no claim of
social inequity in this novel; there’s barely a moment or two of
compassion. Suffering is not seen as a moral endowment, nor
is poverty seen as ennobling.
…
“Faulkner wanted to write a tour de force and he did. His
famous claim is that he pulled it off in six weeks. His
biographer, Joseph Blotner, says it was more like eight. The
book would have been astonishing if it had taken eighty. It is a
virtuosic piece, displaying everything that Faulkner has at his
disposal, beginning with his flawless ear for the Southern
vernacular.”
–E.L. Doctorow, The New York Review of Books, May 24, 2012
*
 Light in August (1932)
Dear God, let me be damned a little longer, a little while.

“With this new novel, Mr. Faulkner has taken a tremendous

stride forward. To say that Light in August is an astonishing
performance is not to use the word lightly. That somewhat
crude and altogether brutal power which thrust itself through
his previous work is in this book disciplined to a greater
effectiveness than one would have believed possible in so short
a time. There are still moments when Mr. Faulkner seems to
write of what is horrible purely from a desire to shock his
readers or else because it holds for him a fascination from
which he cannot altogether escape. There are still moments
when his furious contempt for the human species seems a little
callow.
But no reader who has followed his work can fail to be
enormously impressed by the transformation which has been
worked upon it. Not only does Faulkner emerge from his book a
stylist of striking strength and beauty; he permits some of his
people, if not his chief protagonist, to act sometimes out of
motives which are human in their decency; indeed, he permits
the Rev. Gail Hightower to live his life by them. In a word,
Faulkner has admitted justice and compassion to his scheme of
things. There was a hint of this to come in the treatment of
Benbow in Sanctuary. The gifts which he had to begin with are
strengthened—the gifts for vivid narrative and the fresh-minted
phrase. His eye for the ignoble in human nature is more keen
than ever, but his vision is also less restricted.
There are two or three scenes in this book more searing than
anything Faulkner has heretofore written, but they are also
better integrated. Although the pattern of  Light in August is
streaked with red, there is a blending here with colors both
more subdued and more luminous than were customary to his
palette. The locale is again the ‘deep South’; and the characters
include the white trash of which he has drawn such relentless
portraits, plain folk of a better strain, whites of a higher order,
Negroes, and for the subject of his most detailed attention a
poor white with a probable mixture of Negro blood.
Light in August is a powerful novel, a book which secures
Mr. Faulkner’s place in the very front rank of American
writers of fiction. He definitely has removed the objection
made against him that he cannot lift his eyes above the
dunghill. There are times when Mr. Faulkner is not unaware of
the stars. One hesitates to make conjectures as to the inner
lives of those who write about the lives of others, but Mr.
Faulkner’s work has seemed to be that of a man who has, at
some time, been desperately hurt; a man whom life has at
some point badly cheated. There are indications that he has
regained his balance.”
–J. Donald Adams, The New York Times, October 9, 1932
 Absalom, Absalom! (1936)
Tell about the South. What’s it like there. What do they do
there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.

“The new novel by William Faulkner is worth all the effort

required to read it. That is not faint praise. In Fact, it is an
almost inevitable primary statement. For Mr. Faulkner again
is writing—in Aldous Huxley’s phrase—as though the
hounds were after him.
The first few pages of Absalom, Absalom! give the impression
of being the start of an escape from Devil’s Island. The reader
will have that same sense of plunging into a jungle though
which no trails run, of the necessity for labored flight though a
malevolent, unknown, fever-stricken land. It is a land of
tropical overgrowth. Sentences grow to immense lengths and
twist and writhe as though consciously blocking movement.
Nightmare emotions rise like djinns from insignificant-seeming
causes. Phrases spread out, pushing their wiry lengths down
half a page.
…
“Yet there was no simpler way in which he could have told it.
Substance cannot be blown up with shadow—until men and
women stand huge and important, made massive by a mood—
by direct, simple declaration. He has told his story as it should
be told to satisfy himself, and while it is entirely conceivable
that this book may narrow the audience that was made fairly
large by Sanctuary, those who complete the reading of this
novel will find that it is an even more remarkable achievement,
a better novel, than was Light in August, his finest novel before
this.”
–Robert Van Gelder, The New York Times, October 26, 1936 
 A Fable (1954)
War is an episode, a crisis, a fever the purpose of which is to
rid the body of fever. 
So the purpose of a war is to end the war.

“A modern allegory to which each reader will append his own

symbolism, his own interpretation. This is slated for a wide
acceptance on intellectual snob appeal, but most honest
readers will confess to some difficulty in coming to grips with
the essential significance. Conceived as World War II
approached its last year, the story envisions World War I—in
the trenches in France—coming to an end as the soldiers
mutiny. The inspiration of the mass movement is a figure
symbolic of the Christ. The action parallels the span of Holy
Week—with the triumphant entry, the Last Supper, the
Crucifixion, the the resurrection. Judas is there, and Peter, the
apostles, Pilate and Herod, the Marys, and so on—recognizable,
but distorted-although never with irreverence. Creatively, it is
an extraordinary achievement with its underlying
commentary on an unready world. Practically, it is difficult
reading, and often obscure.”
–Kirkus Reviews, August 1, 1954