Faulkner, p. 161-180

As in other areas of literary criticism, Faulkner studies enjoys a renewed interest in formalist criticism. Some of these contributions would benefit from greater familiarity with work done in the 1960s-1980s, and some signal a genuine revival and extension, bringing poststructural sensibilities to myth criticism, source study, and linguistic analysis. We also see more studies that combine texts, fewer addressing single novels or stories. Conspicuous this year is a peculiar kind of speculative criticism, commentary marked by Faulkner's signature adverb, "perhaps," with arguments made self-consciously in the absence of reliable factual or textual evidence. Martin FitzPatrick might call the phenomenon "subjunctive criticism."

i Biography

Two critical studies of Faulkner biographies reach identical conclusions: we may never have a definitive biography because the subject is too compelling, complex, and dogged by myth and error. Patrick Samway, "Toward Evaluating the Biographies of William Faulkner" (SoR 38: 880-88), compares treatments of Faulkner's life in 1928-29 (the period of the composition of The Sound and the Fury and his marriage to Estelle Oldham) as presented in Joseph Blotner's two biographies and in biographies written by David Minter, Stephen Oates, Frederick Karl, and Joel Williamson. "If subsequent biographers, without doing substantial original research themselves, rely too heavily on the flawed or incomplete work of predecessors, the evolving picture of the subject will suffer." Blotner's one-volume 1984 biography, which corrects and builds on the two-volume biography published in 1974, "is an exemplar of how to build on past work." The others do not pass the test. Mary P. Gillis, "Faulkner: Life, Art, and the Poetics of Biography" (POMPA 30-38), compares the Blotner and Williamson projects, the former a chronological account, almost a chronicle, and the latter building from "a crucial event in the life of Faulkner's great-grandfather." Blotner is characterized as the stonecutter, "laying the foundation for future biographers of Faulkner" (and taking hits for being "enslaved to chronological order"), and Williamson is exemplary of the revisionist, "incorporating information Blotner omits" while at the same time being highly selective of the aspects of the life to interpret.

ii Bibliography, Editions, Manuscripts

Peter Caster, "Go Down, Moses [and Other Stories]: Bibliography as a Novel Approach to a Question of Genre" (PBSA 96: 509-19), revisits the question of "whether Go Down, Moses is a novel or a collection of stories," within a particularly revealing context of "the relationship between aesthetics and economics in the shaping of literary modernism in the U.S." Caster provides a ledger-book accounting of the publication and sales history of the novel and the individual stories, documents Faulkner's acute sensitivity to critical reception and sales, and places the book in the context of modernist notions of difficulty and the New Critical preference for organic unity. Attending also to such publishing industry strategies as the (cheap) Modern Library edition, Caster argues that the publication history of Go Down, Moses provides a case study in the relationship among aesthetics, business, and the creation of literary value, making the question of whether the book is a novel or a short story at once beside the point and the point itself.

Interesting correspondence about Italian censorship of Sanctuary appears in Minna Proctor, "Reader's Files: The Fascist Archives" (LitR 45: 479-99), which reprints reports from the Mondadori publishing house between 1929 and 1943, during the period of Italian Fascism. According to Proctor, the reports "reveal perhaps more about Fascism than they do about translation per se." Reports are included on novels by Fitzgerald, Maugham, Lawrence, Hemingway, Faulkner, Roth, Wright, and others. The 1934 translator of Sanctuary describes the "arduous undertaking" necessary to keep "this powerful book" from "seeming grotesque and off-putting." After completing a first draft in 1935, the translator accurately predicts the Italian censor's prohibition. "There is no way to euphemize Faulkner's text—for the text itself might even be called chaste—the intent is quite moral, even in its tragedy, but the subject is atrocious and they will flunk us." When Sanctuary was censored, the translator offered Pylon, "an original and fun novel" which nonetheless posed...