Customer Reviews

THE PORTABLE FAULKNER: Revised and Expanded Edition

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The Portable Faulkner is a wonderful intro to Faulkner, but it's just that--an introduction. It can't do whan the entirety of one of Faulkner's novels will do, and in some cases I recommend skipping a bit in the Portable Faulkner until the corresponding novel has already been read (for example, Dilsey's section of The Sound and the Fury shouldn't be read in the Portable if you haven't read The Sound and the Fury. Trust me, TSatF is a book where you don't want to read the last chapter before the first three).

Better than an introduction, the Portable Faulkner also serves as a very interesting companion to those already familiar with Faulkner--it does the great service to readers of putting Yoknapatawpha stories in chronological order, which is an interesting perspective we may not otherwise get to see.

However, above all, there are two reasons why I bought this book.

First, it includes the Compson Appendix. If you've read a copy of the Sound and the Fury that didn't include the Compson Appendix, you need this. It's something that has to be read after the Sound and the Fury to capture the whole of Faulkner's story.

Second, it includes Faulkner's Nobel acceptance speech, which is wonderful, especially as a complement to reading the books themselves, and which is very nice to have in book format like the Portable Faulkner.

The Portable Faulkner is THE way to be introduced to William Faulkner, arguably the best of 20th century American novelists. Cowley arranges whole work and excerpts chronological for Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County; it should be noted that Faulkner did not write his body of work chronologically. By arranging the work in this way, Cowley does us a great service in seeing Faulkner's great creation as an ordered whole.

The drawback to this work is in its goal -- to make more understandable Faulkner's creation in his mythic county. The drawback is that, by design, none of Faulkner's other work is included, such as The Fable.

The Portable Faulkner should be viewed only as an introduction, a tantalizer. Upon seeing the greatest of the work, we can then proceed to the work in its entirety.

An influential collection, partly responsible for the late 1940s resurgence of interest in America's greatest author, this construction of Faulkner's narrative world is certainly no substitute for any of the novels. But it has its uses: readers who don't plan to read more than 3 of Faulkner's best novels may find some of Cowley's excerpts a reasonable consolation; Cowley's chronological ordering not only clarifies Faulkner's fictional world but exposes its organic unity; with the exception of "Barn Burning," most of the essential short fiction (including the frequently excerpted "The Bear") can be found here; the concluding commentary and genealogy which Cowley elicted from Faulkner himself is both helpful and a kind of Faulknerian literary piece in its own right.

A slight "down side" (apart from some questionable excerpting and over-emphasis on chronological at the expense of "narrative" time) is Cowley's somewhat "dated" aesthetic judgements (though at times refreshing, since the author was applying them to a "non-canonical" writer).

As for "Burn Burning," it's readily available, free of charge, on the Internet.

When you see a book with the title "The Portable Anything", you may figure it a handy compendium, digestible in relatively short order to give you a feeling about something without running you through the gauntlet.

What you may not expect are two of the longest sentences in the American literary canon, one alone running some 35 close-set pages; double-parentheses; 100-page stream-of-consciousness narratives about bad horses and deadly bear hunts, and churning through names like Eck Snopes and Tomey's Turl. Unless maybe the book is "The Portable Faulkner", in which case what you are dealing with is not a title but an oxymoron.

There's nothing simple about Faulkner. Even ordinary things come out convoluted, like graffiti, "the gross and simple terms of his gross and simple lusts and yearnings, the gross and simple recapitulations of his gross and simple heart" as described near the beginning of that 35-page sentence in "The Jail". Forensic science is easy compared to making headway of a plot like "Old Man" or "Was". In short, Faulkner's hard to read, and Malcolm Cowley's book doesn't make him any easier by picking these three pieces and other examples of Faulkner's singularly manic density as nuggets for sampling.

For Cowley, who first put this together in 1946, the goal was to rescue Faulkner from obscurity. It seemed to work. Largely unregarded except by other notable American writers (Hemingway touted him in "Death In The Afternoon"), Faulkner emerged over the next few years as a Southern-fried combination of Poe and Hawthorne, of dreams and morality served up in the messy racial and generational gumbo of the American South. It culminated in his winning the 1950 Nobel Prize for Literature, and his reputation has not only endured but prevailed ever since.

I just wish it was available in digestible form. There are some examples of a more direct and comprehensible style to be found in this book, like Faulkner's Nobel address. "A Rose For Emily" sums up Faulkner's whole view of the South as cleverly and succinctly as a "Twilight Zone" episode. There are two other fine stand-alone short stories in that vein, "A Justice" and "Red Leaves", while "That Evening Sun" and "Appendix: The Compsons" serve as a perfect prequel and postscript to "The Sound And The Fury", one of the richest and most daring novels I ever read.

I just wish Cowley had gone easy on the novel excerpts. "Dilsey," a quarter section of "The Sound And The Fury", thrusts you into the Compson saga as it is winding down, and there's little help for you if you don't know going in that the fellow named Quentin referred to here is actually a girl. Supposedly these pieces were chosen by Cowley to flesh out Faulkner's imaginary Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, though "Old Man" is set well outside county lines while the boring and pedantic "Ad Astra" occurs in France.

In a terrific introduction, Cowley describes Faulkner's writings "like wooden planks that were cut, not from a log, but a still living tree. The planks are planed and chiseled into their final shapes, but the tree itself heals over the wound and continues to grow."

Cowley's enthusiasm for Faulkner's artistic messiness is admirable and even necessary in getting the right handle on what made Faulkner great, but it doesn't make for the best of introductions. "The Portable Faulkner" works best for those who know the writer well enough not to need a "portable" version in the first place.

I could not make order out of the Snopes Tribe. Cowley with his map of Y. County and
his order of events saved my floundering in the swamps. His actual friendship and counseling with Faulkner was the best insight I found on the dynamic writer.
Top of the list commentary! Ever, Cat

Malcolm Cowley is a genius, only to be suceeded by Faulkner himself. This is the ultimate history of Faulkner's (non?)fictional world.