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NOTES WILLIAM FAULKNER AND SOME DESIGNS OF NATURALISM M. Gidley University of Exeter In William Faulkner's "Address upon Receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature" (1950), there is the insistence that the artist must write of "the old verities and truths of the heart . . . love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice." "Until he does so," Faulkner continues, "he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope. . . . He writes not of the heart but of the glands."1 The distinction Faulkner elaborates here (disregarding his tautologies) is the general one of free will as against determinism. The "heart" represents the seat of choice: it is an umbrella word which denotes the source of voluntary emotions and actions: love, honor, etc. The "glands" on the other hand represent the seat of compulsions. "Lust," for example, is presumably an involuntary emotion, a mere response, or, better, reaction to the stimulation of the sexual glands: in Theodore Dreiser's famous phrase, "the chemic compulsions of sexuality." Victories and losses due to the operation of compulsions are, in this view, necessarily devoid of meaning. In other words, in his later career, Faulkner posited "the heart," choice, as a way out of what Frederick J. Hoffman has termed "the naturalist impasse" represented by the glands.2 But, in his earlier years, Faulkner seems to have travelled some way down the road of Naturalism, and a Naturalism sometimes evoked in physiological terms. Noel Polk has shown that as early as the compositon of the unpublished play "Marionettes" (1920), Faulkner was interested in the "forces that ever compel."3 In Soldiers' Pay (1926) there is explicit reference to "sex and death" as "the front door and the back door of the world" and to "sexual compulsions,"4 while at about the same time Faulkner was telling William Spratling that there are "only two basic compulsions on earth, that is, love and death,"5 and in Mosquitoes (1927) Julius insists that "man's old compulsions . . . the axis and circumference of his squirrel cage ... do not change."6 In Ffogs in the Dust, the novel from which Sartoris (1929) was cut, 76Notes Horace discusses with his sister his own and other peoples' acts as determined by "chemicals" with, perhaps, "a plan somewhere . . . known to Whoever first set the fermentation going."7 The story "Black Music" (1934) uses the phrase "the old gutful compulsions" to summarize the forces that control,8 and it would be possible to find other examples in the earlier works. An extremely influential book during the twenties, and one which was ordered with Faulkner "in mind" by his friend Phil Stone, was Louis Berman's The Glands Regulating Personality (1921).* Many of its ideas, as Geoffrey Bullough has pointed out (though he mistakenly renames the author as Charles Berman), found their way into the novels of Aldous Huxley,10 one of Faulkner's models in the making of Mosquitoes.11 A further instance of its pervasiveness is the following casual allusion dropped by Percy H. Boynton, who clearly thought it would be picked up easily by readers of the English Journal: "The reader of Masters' 'Victor Rafolskf or . . . Hergesheimer's Cytherea or the run of many other novels and poems is less likely to be disturbed by the joy of elevated thoughts than by the rousing of elevated pulse. Literature, like social philosophy, is becoming physiological, and glands are regulating personality on every printed page."12 The Ghnds Regulating Personality proclaims the doctrine that a person's emotions, his physique, his actions and personality are all rigidly determined by his glandular structure. Faulkner's selection, so many years later, of the glands as his metaphor is, then, suggestive.13 Faulkner was not, of course, alone when he took the turn towards Naturalism; as well as Berman, several of the people he was reading took, or, at least, pointed down, that road, including Havelock Ellis and H. L. Mencken.14 And, while this is not the place to attempt a presentation of the intellectual bases for American literary Naturalism, it is worth remembering that in the Naturalist...

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