15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Fine Guide to a Legendary Southern Writer, July 16, 2006
This review is from: Reading Faulkner: Introductions to the First Thirteen Novels (Hardcover)
Richard Marius (1933-1999) was the author of four novels: The Coming of Rain (1969), Bound for the Promised Land (1976), After the War (1992), and An Affair of Honor, published posthumously. He also wrote two works of non-fiction: Thomas More: A Biography (1984) and Martin Luther: The Christian Between God and Death (1999).
Reading Faulkner is a collection of delightful lectures delivered by Marius at Harvard Univ. in 1996 and 1997. These lectures are introductions to Faulkner's first 13 novels: Soldier's Pay, Mosquitoes, Flags in the Dust, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, Pylon, Absalom, Absalom!, The Unvanquished, The Wild Palms, The Hamlet, and Go Down, Moses.
What a remarkable period of creativity Faulkner enjoyed, stretching from his first novel, Soldier's Pay (1926) to the last of his great novels, Go Down, Moses (1942). "In 1942," Marius comments, "[Faulkner] could look back on sixteen years of the most productive greatness in American literary history."
Faulkner grew up in Oxford, Miss. (one can visit there his beloved home, Rowan Oak), which was the prototype of the town of Jefferson, in mythical Yoknapatawpha County. It was a narrow, circumscribed world, full of various passions and prejudices, a world of conflicting issues of sex, class, and race. But out of this particular time and place Faulkner created a body of literature that has universal relevance and timeless appeal. The characters created by his fertile imagination reveal the human condition and, as Shakespeare put it, throws up the mirror of nature to ourselves. His work reveals "the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself."
"[I] discovered," wrote Faulkner, "that my own little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it, and that by sublimating the actual into the apocryphal I would have complete liberty to use whatever talent I might have to its absolute top. It opened up a gold mine of other people, so I created a cosmos of my own."
Marius points out various influences on the development of Faulkner's dark and tragic art: Greek and Roman mythology, especially as chronicled in Sir James George Frazer's The Golden Bough;the plays of Shakespeare (whom he loved); and the writings of depth psychologists.
According to Marius, however, the two greatest influences on Faulkner were the poetry of T. S. Eliot ("The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "The Hollow Men," "The Waste Land" and so forth) and the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin.
"I think a strong case can be made," writes Marius, "for Faulkner as someone deeply interested in the implications of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwinism is inherently pessimistic. Darwin did not believe in God and did not believe in any ultimate purpose to the life of the individual, the nation, or the human race."
In another place, Marius writes, "Darwin held that human beings are a higher form of animal--higher only in that our brains give us a superior capacity to survive. I believe it is demonstrable from the text that Faulkner was enormously influenced by the teaching of Charles Darwin, that human beings evolved from lower forms of life, and that the most important feature of any species is that it adapt itself sufficiently to its environment to survive....I see a Darwinian impulse that I find constant in Faulkner from the beginning."
Faulkner is often difficult to "read," that is, to understand. Like James Joyce's Ulysses, many of his works exhibit a stream-of-consciousness dislocation of time. Marius: "Faulkner plays with time, happy to break up, indeed to shatter the traditional idea of chronology in the novel, a tradition where we have a linear progression of plot with occasional clearly marked flashbacks." There is a curious interplay of consciousness and memory in Faulkner that often disorients and confuses the reader.
Like Shakespeare, Faulkner features characters who are puzzling mixtures of good and evil, light and darkness. Nor does Faulkner give us much help in understanding his characters. Again like Shakespeare, he maintains a distance or detachment from them, letting their deeds speak for them and putting the burden of interpretation of the readers.
A persistent theme in Faulkner's novels is the hypocrisy of those who attempt, at all costs, to keep up appearances, which to them is more important than reality. So long as a code or custom is ostensibly upheld and honored, the true state of affairs is relatively unimportant. Thus, incest may be winked at while miscegenation may become a capital offense (often by lynching). One doubts that such an obsession with appearances is peculiar to the South, but Faulkner certainly seems to think that such hypocrisy is an endemic Southern problem.
Faulkner's world is a tragic world, and his art is a tragic art. Death is the end of life, and life is filled with pride, prejudice, lust, greed, deceit, hypocrisy, and violence. One begins to wonder if Darwin is correct in saying that human beings are higher than the other animals. Perhaps labeling some human act as "bestial" is a vile and vicious slander of the beasts.
Reading Faulkner is so rewarding that one despairs of doing it justice in a review. It inspires one to reread Faulkner's novels and short stories, for such a rereading, using Marius' excellent literary compass will doubtless help one see things missed on first reading.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Superb overview of Faulkner's most creative period, September 4, 2007
Marius concludes his fine collection of essays on Faulkner by asserting, "In 1942 [Faulkner] could look back on sixteen years of the most productive greatness in American literary history." If you consider that four of the thirteen novels authored in this period -- THE SOUND AND THE FURY, AS I LAY DYING, LIGHT IN AUGUST, and ABSALOM! ABSALOM! -- would be on anyone's list of best 100 American novels of all time or best English-language novels of the 20th century, it is indeed an awesome accomplishment. If you consider the hardship Faulkner worked under during this period (always close to bankruptcy, doing degrading script work in Hollywood, enduring a bad marriage, surviving the deaths of a daughter and brother, and manifesting what was surely clinical alcoholism), the achievement is even more awesome.
The sense of the greatness of Faulkner's mind pervades Marius's analyses of the texts. In spite of Faulkner's great experimentalism, Marius always assumes the author knew what he was doing and that Faulkner's ultimate choices (about point of view, character, narration, dialect, vocabulary choice) can be trusted as essential to the great storyteller's craft and intentions. The novels FLAGS IN THE DUST, THE WILD PALMS and GO DOWN, MOSES are good examples of times when editorial intervention did more harm than good. Marius also does a good job of sorting out the influences that are key to understanding and appreciating Faulkner: Darwin, Freud, Frazer, Eliot, Joyce, and Proust; and he gives teasing insights into the rivalry between Faulkner and Hemingway. (For instance, Hemingway often seems coy on sexual matters that wouldn't raise an eyebrow in mainstream fiction today; this is mostly because of the prudishness of his editor at Scribners', Max Perkins. Faulkner's freedom from such censorship stirred Hemingway's envy; Hemingway's runaway sales stirred Faulkner's.) In addition to the chapters on Faulkner's thirteen first novels, the book includes insightful essays on "Faulkner and Blacks: The Endemic Problem of Race and Racism in American Society" and "Faulkner an the Mythological World." Understood as class lectures, this book is best read from beginning to end, as much in the later chapters assumes the reader is familiar with concepts introduced earlier. Marius is clearly a gifted teacher--one who coaxes as well as instructs--and I would have loved to have sat in his class. I would also love to know what he thought of Faulkner's later work, the novels that most critics consider inferior but which to me still show sparks of greatness (and in some cases are as easy to read as Hemingway or any other bestselling author.)
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