Faulkner’s “Many Glancing Colours”

The Canadian Review of American Studies. Volume 10. No. 3, Winter 1979 Faulkner's "ManyGlancingColours" Kerry McSweeney Arthur F. Kinney. Faulkner's Narrative Poetics: Style as Vision. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1978. 286 + xviii pp. Evans Harrington and Ann J. Abadie, eds. The Maker and the Myth: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 1977. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. 1978. 169 + xvi pp. Until recently, the enormous, ever-growing body of Faulkner criticism could be roughly divided into two parts: on the one hand, commentary which concentrated on the world of the writer who described his life's work as "the creation of my apocryphal country" and who claimed in 1941to have as yet "found no happy balance between method and material"; on the other, commentary which concentrated on the individual works of one of the great modern experimental novelists, the younger contemporary of Conrad, Joyce and Proust. Some critics tried to do justice to both the world and the works. In the first half of his William Faulkner: A Critical Study (1952), for example, Irving Howe offered an overview of the Faulkner world, while his second half was devoted to "the individual novels [which] must themselves be the final object of criticism." And Cleanth Brooks, whose William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (1963) attempted to describe the novelist's "characteristic world," promised that a subsequent volume (finally published fifteen years later) would deal with "Faulkner's development as a writer." But neither of these critics satisfactorily solved the peculiar methodological difficulties caused by the dual focuses of world and works, and in the main critics have opted to study one or the other. While the title of the rather limp collection of papers given at the fourth annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, held on the Oxford campus of the University of Mississippi, gives equal billing to each, most 356 Kerry McSweenf'.y of the eight papers in The Maker and the Myth are in fact devoted to aspects of the Faulknerian world. Calvin S. Brown's lightweight offerings, "Faulkner's Localism" and "Faulkner's Universality" (the former is anecdotal , the latter fatuous), are respectively devoted to the microcosmic and macrocosmic poles of the world. The subject of Margaret Walker Alexander 's fustian paper is "Faulkner and Race." Albert J. Guerard does discuss the maker in his "Faulkner the Innovator"; but it is hard to see what Guerard is up to in his other paper on "The Faulknerian Voice." One understands the theoretical distinction between style and voice, the latter being "the expression of temperament, and of an inward self ... " (p. 26), but one learns little about the unique Faulknerian voice and comes to wonder whether Guerard's critical ear is attuned to it. The best pages in Guerard's essay are on sexuality in the early works, and the two best essays in The Maker and the Myth are similarly concerned with sexuality and women. "Sex and History: Origins of Faulkner's Apocrypha " is one of two substantial but rather old-fashioned papers by Lewis P. Simpson. (The other is "Yoknapatawpha and Faulkner's Fable of Civilization ," which examines the writer's "highly particularized myth of history [which] implies a larger myth of man" [p. 122].) Simpson has interesting things to say about the first four novels, especially Mosquitoes and The Sound and the Fury. His argument is that Faulkner's "perception of history found a focus in the tension generated in the literary imagination by the conquest of the cosmic sexuality of the Greco-Roman garden by the historicism of the Hebraic-Christian interpretation of sexuality" (p. 46). The earliest stage of this perception is found in the young Faulkner's fin de siecle Romanticism, for "his early sensibility cannot be dismissed as merely imitative .... Faulkner early made a heavy emotional investment in Arcadia and in all the beings who populated the Greco-Roman imagination" (p. 48). In the second stage of perception, Faulkner, "like all the great modern writers," was led into "the literary and artistic experience of world historical alienation." In the third stage, he came to "employ specific sexual situations as emblems of the estrangement of modern consciousness from a unified or harmonious order of sense and spirit...