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Faulkner'sYoknapatawpha Doreen Fowlerand Ann J. Abadie, eds. ''.ACosmos of My Own": Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1980.Jackson: University Press ofMississippi, 1981.304pp. JohnPilkington. The Heart of Yoknapatawpha. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1981.328 pp. Noel Polk."Requiem For a Nun": A Critical Study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981.273 pp. H.P. Robson A necessary condition for an author's survival over the years must, of necessity,be a strong desire on the part of his readers and critics that he survive. When criticism and commentary on Faulkner's amassed work continues to be published so prolifically, therefore, we, as devotees of the authorand Yoknapatawpha's history, should rejoice. These three books, the latestinthe ever-growingbody of Faulkner criticism, provide new perspectives onthat Southern world and exhaustive study of his individual novels. John Pilkington's The Heart of Yoknapatawpha offers his own personal interpretation of William Faulkner's nine major novels written during the period1929to 1942.Included are Sartoris, The Sound and the Fwy, As I Lay Dying,Sanctuary, Light in August, Absalom, Absaloml, The Unvanquished, The Hamlet and Go Down, Moses. In this examination, he emphasizes Faulkner's concern with history, thus time past and present; he makes comparisons of Faulkner's work with that of other American authors whose literarytraditions have already been established; he points to thematic links amongthe novels, and challenges some of today's accepted criticism. Pilkington believes that Faulkner, when he began writing in the 1920s,was greatlyinfluenced by the concept and shaping of Sherwood Anderson's novel, Winesburg,Ohio. No doubt the example of Ellen Glasgow's Barren Ground alsopersuaded him of the importance of examining Mississippi's history in hisnovels. Faulkner, aware of the disillusioned Lost Generation, utilized Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume 14,Number 3, Fall 1983,333-41 334 H.P. Robson themes already introduced by Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, F.Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Ernest Hemingway's In Our Time. He may even have started to create the character of Jason Compson whenhe first read Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt and Elmer Gantry. "To a degree, Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha was a literary microcosm of the 1920s"(p. xii). The relationship between fiction and autobiography has concerned novelists for a long time; Faulkner wrote that he was convinced "that all serious creative work must be at the bottom autobiographical." In Sartoris, he used his great-grandfather to help shape a legend that is history. His pervasive concern with the historical past as related to the living present overshadows all his best fiction. Like most Southerners, Faulkner believed that knowledge of his own ancestors helped him to understand the question, "Who am I?'' and gave him a sense of continuity. Pilkington's research draws parallels between Faulkner's ancestors and fact, but he is not concerned when the '·facts" do not tally because he realizes that the author used his greatgrandfather merely as an imaginative representative. Pilkington agrees with most Faulkner scholars that Sartoris is not complete!\ successful because, like many beginning writers, he tried to crowd to~ much into the novel. In his second attempt, The Sound and the Fwy, he handles Quentin Compson with more competence than with which he portrayed Bayard Sartoris. Nevertheless, Pilkington appraises Sartoris asan important novel in the author's career. While writing it, Faulkner learned how to illuminate his own Southern ancestral tales through his reading and interpretation of Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn:' the poetry of T. S. Eliot, classical mythology and the Bible. The past, reflecting problems of the present and of history, could be integrated into the quality of life. In The Sound and the Fwy, the decay of the Compson family is total; Quentin exemplifies a Lost Generation youth. The errors noted in Sartoris have been corrected; Faulkner's lessons produce a masterpiece, and the author changed overnight from a young writer of promise into a genius. Telling the story in four different ways, and challenging readers to the taskof interpreting Benjy's and Quentin's interior monologues, Faulkner created a tour de force. As Pilkington points out, however, many readers were baffled and, until the identification guide to the Compson family was...

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