William Faulkner

WILLIAM FAULKNER DmeenFowler and Ann J. Abadie, eds. Faulkner and Humor: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1984. Jackson: UmversityPress of Mississippi, 1986. 243 pp. Michael Grimwood. Heart in Conflict: Faulkner's Snuggles with Vocation, Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987. xx + 378 pp. Alice Hall Petry He surely must be America's most written-about author. Indeed, in a good year the scholars of William Faulkner probably produce more printed pages, a larger mountain of manuscripts, than did Mr. Bill himself in his fairly lengthy career. Much of that scholarly material is quickly forgotten, and perhaps rightly so; but a few studies do manage to emerge as valuable contributions to Faulkner scholarship , shedding important light on little-known or under-appreciated aspects of his mind and art, and changing - perhaps permanently - our understanding of Faulkner's unique achievement as a writer of fiction. Two such studies are Faulkner and Humor, a collection of essays edited by Doreen Fowler and Ann J. Abadie of the University of Mississippi, and Heart in Conflict by Michael Grimwood of North Carolina State University. Although read in tandem, they are mutually illuminating, each warranting serious consideration in its own right. One might be forgiven for approaching Faulkner and Humor with a misgiving or two. After all, it is one of the quirks of scholarly activity that literary humor is peculiarly resistant to analysis. Dissecting ajoke tends to ruin it, as that instinctive reaction responsible for the laughter must be sacrificed on the altar of noninstinctive , systematic scrutiny. This situation is compounded when a scholarly study of humor was originally prepared for oral presentation at a conference: the lame "you-hadda-be-there" becomes the operative phrase as essays which packed a punch in conference rooms filled with appreciative, jolly colleagues seem to wither disconcertingly when reduced to cold print. Mercifully, Faulkner 424 Alice Hall Perry and Humor, a collection of essays originally presented at I984's "Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha" conference at Ole Miss, manages to sidestep these difficulties. It may not be hilarious read,ng (I admit to a chuckle or two), but it is consistently perceptive, absorbing and readable, and it confirms for all time the rightnessof Katherine Anne Porter's 1948 o-.-ymm__,nic assertion that Faulkner "has the deepest and most serious humor" in the United States (ix). Par1of the strength of Faulkner and Humor is derived from the varie' ~-ofessays it contains. Barry Hannah's rather personal musings on the diminutive Paulkner's kmship with Napoleon and Charlie Chaplin is, at three pages, appropriately tiny. German scholar Hans Bungert probes his country's enthusiastic rt·ceptionof Faulkner's novels. Especially admired in Germany are The Unvam;uislzed and The Reivers, both of which are redolent of Twainian humor; and. yes, ~ome German readers are indeed confused by FaulLner's distor~;'1n'. J;·English won 1 s (e.g., "sour deans" for "sardines") (138, 145). James M. Mellard\ po)tFreudian exploration of Faulkner's use of "metonymic displacement and metaphoric condensation'' for humorous purposes (212) may not be everyone's cup::if tea, but it surely provides an intriguing counterpoint to M. Thomas Inge's li\'ely. lengthy (thirty-seven pages), and copiously-illustrated discussion of Faulkne1 's awareness of such popular comic strips as Bringing Up Father, Popeye and Barney Google. Not surprisingly, several of the essays point to the humor of the Old Southwest and the timeless "tall tale" as important sources of plot and style in Faulkner's fiction. Thomas L. McHaney, for example, argues that Faulkner's lifelong interest in·the tall tale intensified in the mid-I 930s, when the Federal Write1~· Project brought Southern folk tales L0 national attention and, concurrently, hisold friend Arthur Palmer Hudson published Folksongs of Mississippi and Their Background and Humor of the Old Deep Soi.th. McHaney's observation that Faulkner's temperament responded simultaneously to tal1 -tale humor and the seeming,J antithetical ''decadent'' humor of Wilde et al. is surely well-taken, and in fact other contributor.. to Faulkner and Hum'?r likewise stress Faulkner's capacity to modify and enlarge the paradigms of the Southern folk tale. PartncaR. Schroeder, for example, perceives As I Lay Dying as drawing upon three...