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Section Six. Southern Literature and
Faulkner
I. Southern Literature:
The
American South includes the southeastern states and the southern
states along the Gulf of Mexico. This is a unique region where
people have their distinctive culture, viewpoint and history. In the
southern history, the southern whites kept slaves since 1621 until
the end of Civil War. So the south had quite special tradition
different from the north. First, the southerners have a strong sense
of the past, a strong feeling of history. They had high opinions on
family tie. And the southerners are also known as a hot-blooded
people, because they had more interest in guns and hunting. They are
usually considered as violent people. Besides violence, they firmly
believed in revision. The south is known as the Bible Belt. Finally,
the south is a land of oratory. Those great American speakers were
all from the south.
In fact, southern literature can find its
origin in Edgar Allan Poe. The early expressions of the 20th century
southern literature came from James Branch Cabell, Ellen Glasgow and
Erskine Caldwell who denounced the wicked nature of southern
aristocracy. Many women writers represent the realist tradition of
the southern literature. They are Katherine Anne Porter,
Eudora Wetly and Flannery 0’Connor.
Southern Literature reached
its peak with the appearance of the two giants: Thomas Wolfe
(1900-1938) and William Faulkner (1897-1962).
Although southern
writers focus their literary creation on the southern society with
southern setting, southern characters, and southern subject matters,
they are not just concerned with the South but the human situation
in general. The spiritual deterioration which characterizes modern
life stems directly from the loss of love and want of emotional
response. Southern writers use the South as a microcosm, a miniature
world for exploring problems of America, as well as the universe
itself.
The basic features of Southern Literature can be
summarized as: (1) love of south. All the writers show their
affection and concern for the region they come from and write about.
(2) a sense of history. They have ambivalent feelings toward their
history and also describe southern people’s decision and hesitation
in front of social change. (3) creation of Gothic world in human
heart.
Ⅱ.William Cuthbert Faulkner (1987-1962)
1. Life:
Faulkner was born on September 25 in New Albany, Mississippi, and
brought up in nearby Oxford. He came from an old, white upper class
family. It was from his own family history that Faulkner drew the
material for most of his fiction. His family history represented the
typical southern region’s characteristics of white social status,
racial violence, honor codes, and tradition moral values.
In
1925, Faulkner went to New Orleans where some of his early poems,
articles and sketches were published and where he came in touch with
Freud’s psychology and James Joyce’s fiction.
2. Literary Career:
Faulkner’s first novel Soldier’s Pay was accepted by the
publishers in 1926.The story tells about the return of a soldier
disabled in World War I. His second novel Mosquitoes is a
satirical story about a group of southern artists and intellectuals.
During the time from 1929to 1942, Faulkner produced a lot of
literary works, including The Sound and the Fury (1929) and
As I Lay Dying (1930). And those novels are made powerful but
difficult by the use of convoluted sentences, strange vocabulary and
other extraordinary elements of composition.
In 1950, Faulkner
was awarded the Nobel Prize for his literary achievement. And in
1940s and 1950s, his works won a popular readership as well as
critical appreciation. In 1955, he received the National Book Award
and the Pulitzer Prize for A Fable.
His major works took
Yoknapatawpha County and Jefferson town as setting, which resembled
his native Oxford in Lafayette county, Mississippi. These works
include Sartoris (1929), The Sound and the Fury
(1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Sanctuary (1931)
Light in August (1932) Absalom, Absalom19361! and
Go down, Moses (1942), which are characterized by a series of
events and activities as well as families that appear as the central
focus in one novel, but as a minor plot in another. In this sense,
Faulkner made his novels reflect the whole process of southern
development on different levels.
The imaginary place of
Yoknapatawpha functions as an allegory or a parable of
the South. In this mythical kingdom, Faulkner explored the society
on different levels, from plantation owners to the blacks, the
townspeople, the poor whites and even the native Indians. He
presented conflicts between generations, classes, races, man and
environment, and man and himself. He believed that in the long run
the brotherhood of man would triumph.
Faulkner, as the foremost
southern writer of the 20th century altogether produced nineteen
novels, four collections of about seventy short stories, and two
volumes of poetry. He depicted the bitterness of southern history
with poetic expression. His important subjects are childhood,
families, sex, obsessions, the past and the modern southern memory,
myth and reality, race and alienation.
3. Features:
Faulkner
used the South to embody all human beings in terms of the violence
and evil. He presented setting and characters in rather ambiguous
way. He stressed on symbolic approach to literature in order to
discover the truth of human heart. There are three emphases in
Faulkner’s writing: history and race; folk humor of the South;
horror, violence and the abnormal to cause moral
outrage.
Faulkner was a great experimenter. He successfully
applied some modern literary techniques. He used the device of
stream of consciousness. He also used the floating or multiple point
of view and circular form which make it difficult for the reader to
reach a true judgment. He stressed authorial transcendence to avoid
authorial intrusion in narration. He applied an original narrative
method giving confusing information. The violation of chronology in
the narrative structure is combined with a violation of everyday
language habits. His prose varies from colloquial, regional to
formal diction and cadences of American speech.
Faulkner also
probed the inner lives of the southerners when he provided the
reader with external events. He created images to convey the mood,
atmosphere of his fictional world. His artistic techniques include
the exploration of psychological reality, the nature of time, and
the relation of the past to the present. He also created the
anti-hero, who was weak and
ineffective.
The
Sound and the Fury is a good example to illustrate Faulkner’s
concern in creative writing. The novel is a complex account of the
breakdown of the once distinguished and honored Compson family. Mr.
Compson is disenchanted with life and the society he lives in.
Unable to find meaning in the moral verities he was brought up with,
he escapes into alcoholism and cynicism. Mrs.Compson is spiritually
effete and has little love to spare for her children. Of the four
children, Caddy is the only one capable of loving, but she loses her
virginity. The youngest brother, Benjy, is an idiot, a curse on the
family. Another, Quentin, lives in the ideal world of his youth with
his dreams of love, honor, and integrity, and, when he fails to keep
off the intrusion of the“loud, harsh world,”he destroys himself. The
life of the eldest brother, Jason, is empty and meaningless. Love is
alien to him, and so are other traditional humanistic values. The
book is divided into four sections, largely reliant on stream of
consciousness. The first section (April 7, 1928) is narrated by
Benjy, the youngest member of the family. Like his brothers Quentin
and Jason, he is chiefly preoccupied with his sister Caddy. For
Benjy, her disappearance amounts to the loss of the center of his
universe. The second section is told by Quentin, a Harvard freshman,
on the day (July 2, 1910) he commits suicide. In the third section
(April 6, 1928) Jason, the eldest son, reveals his bitterness and
anger at the opportunities he has lost because of the
irresponsibility and selfishness which he feels predominate in his
family. The final section (April 8, 1928, Easter Sunday)
concentrates on the Compsons’ black servant, Dilsay, and her
grandson, Luster. This section provides some objective information
to unify the previous subjective narrations into an organic
entity.
The Sound and the Fury tells a story
of deterioration from the past to the present. The past is idealized
to form a striking contrast with the loveless present. There is in
the book an acute feeling of nostalgia toward the happy past.
Quentin’s section offers a good illustration. A miserable creature
in the modern world, Quentin frequently casts a backward glance at
the time of his childhood when life was innocent, romantic, and
secure. He just cannot bring himself to come to terms with the
present, which is, to him, purposeless, futile, and devoid of the
values which make life worth living. His suicide offers an example
of a complete negation of the present. In a sense, Quentin’s value
system may represent Faulkner’s own idea of an ideal way of life,
that of an ante-bellum society. The face that Benjy’s section begins
the book is not a haphazard arrangement on the part of the author,
for it is Benjy who feels most keenly the loss of love. Benjy lives
on the emotional support of love. Although an idiot with no sense of
time, he knows who loves him best. When Caddy is gone, his world of
love vanishes with her; and nobody can take her place, not even
Dilsey. Thus this section helps to dramatize the theme of loss from
the very beginning of the story. With the story of Jason whose life
embodies all the vices of the modern world, the contrast between the
ante- bellum society and the present one is brought out in the most
poignant manner possible, The triumph of rationalism over feeling
and compassion is best illustrated in this sterile and loveless
individual.
Reference Book：
1. Booz, Elizabeth. A Brief
Introduction To Modern American Literature, Shanghai:
Shanghai Foreign Language
Education Press,1982.
2. 吴定柏编著：《美国文学大纲》， 上海外语教育出版社，1998。
3.
李宜燮、常耀信主编：《美国文学选读》（下册），
南开大学出版社，1991。
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