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FAULKNER'S EARLY WORKS.   Term Paper ID:18070 Click to get this paper

Essay Subject: Mentions Faulkner's concern with slavery, poor whites, interracial clashes & sectionalism.... More...

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Paper Abstract: Mentions Faulkner's concern with slavery, poor whites, interracial clashes & sectionalism. Paper Introduction: The purpose of this paper is to discuss the early works of William Faulkner and to analyze Faulkner's concern with slavery, poor whites, interracial clashes and sectionalism. William Faulkner is one of the greatest of American writers. Critically, there is no doubt about that. But his views on certain topics were sure to cause controversy. Witness his views on slavery. Karl (461) discusses Faulkner's views on slavery as expressed in an interview with the New York Herald Tribune. In this interview, Faulkner thinks that "negroes would be better off under slavery, in a benevolent autocracy." He says that the Negroes would be better off because they would have someone to look after them. He doesn't think it would be as good for the white people as for the negroes to have slavery come back. Faulkner says that the negroes are "like children in many of their reactions." When asked about Negro artists, Faulkner Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. The antithesis is apparent even in Joe'sclothing, which, Faulkner reminds us, consists of black and white. Faulkner was not, in fact, a"Southern" writer, but, as modern criticism has it, he was a "universal"writer, longing to present mankind's experience within a southern context.In doing, this, he immortalized both himself and his homeland. The direction or drift of his body of work is certainly away fromromance and more toward realism. While Stone used Oxford andLafayette County for much of his fiction, his purview extended well beyond. He doesn't think it would be as good for the white peopleas for the negroes to have slavery come back. The southernwhite family in which Faulkner grew up was defined in one term: racism.Witness the following: Philip Stone was Faulkner's mentor. Yet even so, the South fell, and because ofthis fall it experienced misery and squalor: ravaging by the conqueringside, loss of faith among the descendants of the defeated Southerners, andthe rise of a new breed of exploiters who would thrive on their neighbors'humiliation. That thiscondition would persist into modern times in America was a fear Faulknervoiced throughout his mature life, both in fiction and in public statements(Parker 161). He became involved with someliberal members of the University of Mississippi faculty to form a moderategroup in the face of what was then ('6 s) a coming struggle. Was it Faulkner's way of making sure someone lower on thesocial and economic scale remained there, as a sort of scapegoat? He was able to look beyond the regionalaspects of his beloved homeland and see how the Southern experiencerepresented the universal experience of man. Faulkner was very much concerned with expressing the "Southern myth." This myth is a story (or a cluster of stories) that expresses the deepestattitudes and reflects the most fundamental experiences of a people. As he moves from book to book, turning a more critical andmature eye upon his material, the rejection of an inherited traditionacquires a much greater intellectual and emotional stress than its defense. Their responses to modern life seem to illustrate thevarious moral courses that are, or were, open to the South: the chivalricrecklessness and self-destruction of the Sartorises: the more extreme andtragic disintegration of the Compsons and, by way of resolution, the heroicexpiation for the evil of the past upon which Isaac McCaslin decides.Similarly, the families on a lower economic plane--the Bundrens, Tulls,MacCallums--are related not so much to a range of social conditionsexistent among the Southern farmers and "poor whites" as they are to aseries of moral contrasts worked out within the limits of those conditions(Snead 213-14). "Answering Faulkner: Did Faulkner Really Mean Those Words, Or Was He Showing Off For Posterity?" America Magazine 13 May 1989: 19.Snead, James A. To link these topics wasnot to reduce them, for each in its own way was an important topic,Faulkner's "American" topic. Joe Christmas is not a mulatto. According to the myth,this homeland had proudly insisted that it alone would determine its owndestiny. Faulkner connected loss of the land to loss of values and ethicalsystems which in turn leads to decline and fall. William Faulkner: American Writer. During much of this century American writers have been engaged in alarge scale examination of myths of industrial capitalism such asenterprise, accumulation and success; the rejection of these myths hasmotivated a great many of these writers. Itssubject is basically the fate of a ruined homeland. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989.Kreiswirth, Martin. As presented by William Faulkner, the bloods ofthe whites and negroes do not fuse together--they remain independent andantithetic. Clan rather than class forms the basic social unit in Faulkner'sworld. At no point, neither in his early romanticizing nor his later moralrealism, is Faulkner's attitude toward the South's past a simple or fixedone. His overriding concern was the "fall of"--whether land or people; so that modernism and its twin evils, commercialismand security, are corruptors of the human spirit. By reacting so strongly to the inroads of thenew and modern and by attaching that to the fall of the South, Faulkner hadfar more than a regional theme. Somewhat similarly, Faulkner inhis stories and novels conducted a long, sometimes painful and at othertimes courageous examination of the Southern myth. This was connected to hissense of the receding, destroyed wilderness. This is not a good picture of Faulkner on a subject upon which hewrote so much, and perhaps it is unjustified. Finally, he examined the myth by themorality which has emerged from this process of exploration. According to Faulkner, the white and black bloods runseparately in his veins. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1983.Parker, Robert Dale. When a character like Jason Compson, forexample, turns from clan loyalty to class aggrandizement, he isrepudiating, Faulkner implies, not only his immediate inheritance but anentire mode of life. Heart in Conflict: William Faulkner's Struggles with Vocation. This was not some mythical nation he wroteabout, but a nation caught by class, caste, political and economic issues;all of it linked to land and people. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1987.Karl, Frederick R. Provoked into a bloody and protracted was which it could not win,the South had nevertheless fought to its last strength, and (according tothe myth) it had fought this war with a reckless gallantry and a superbheroism that, as Faulkner himself would probably say, made of its defeatnot a shame but a vindication. In this interview, Faulkner thinks that "negroeswould be better off under slavery, in a benevolent autocracy." He saysthat the Negroes would be better off because they would have someone tolook after them. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1985.Phillips, Louis. From these stories there follows that pride in ancestral glory andthat mourning over the decline of the homeland which constitutes thepsychology of the "lost cause." Faulkner obviously understood the Southern myth very well but, sincehe was opposed to the provincial sectionalism that kept his part of thecountry backward, he wrote in opposition to it. Faulkner and the Novelistic Imagination. Faulkner said as much when he stated, later, that while he wassubject to "the usual proselytizing of an older person," the "strings werepulled so casually as scarcely influenced" his point of view. Faulkner's "Negro": Art and the Southern Context. Karl (461)discusses Faulkner's views on slavery as expressed in an interview with theNew York Herald Tribune. Was it outand out racism? These motives are tobe expected in a society where the past clings to the present like ahabitual lover, neither relinquished nor enjoyed. In Faulkner's writings,man had to endure against these onslaughts. It was also part of Faulkner's genius that he was able to take the"Southern myth" and transform it into a topic of such intense reality thathe could win a Nobel Prize. Slavery, and in particular, miscegenation are prime subjects inFaulkner's body of work. Eventhough we know that Faulkner consciously meant well for negroes,it is difficult to assess his continued use of such disparaging term toHaas (Davis 221). Witness his views on slavery. For Phil Stone, Oxford and Mississippi were the world, and he was eager tokeep his friend within that world. He has set his pride inthe past against his despair over the present (his contemporary South) andfrom this counterpoint has come much of the tension in his work. He washeavily involved in the integration battle. This was notone Mississippian speaking to another in the common depreciatory idiom whenreferring to negroes; but a sophisticated writer communicating with asophisticated Northerner who, he must have known, would not use the termhimself. The homosexual implicationsof this relationship are obvious, but nowhere stated in any biography ofFaulkner (Grimwood 146). But his views on certain topicswere sure to cause controversy. Also connected to the Southern myth theme in his books, wasFaulkner's "fall of the House of Atreus" motif. we have to conclude that while Faulkner's public statementsabout race would create outrage, they would not at all coincide with theway he presented race in his fiction. Faulkner says that thenegroes are "like children in many of their reactions." When asked aboutNegro artists, Faulkner responded, "Well, most artists are children, too"(Phillips 19). The point is, with all his intelligence and heavy reading, Stoneremained a small-town boy. The mythical kernel inFaulkner's thought was the tragic decline of the ancient Greek House ofAtreus, parent against child, brother against brother, the curse carryinginto every cranny of family life and destroying all semblance ofrelationship. If Faulkner wereworking the farm and speaking to Johncy, who remained a segregationist andstate's righter, we could understand that cultural contexts often dictatepoor taste. Works CitedDavis, Thadious M. The realquestion here is how much inner will Faulkner could mount against theundisputed big guns of the older tutor--and how much he was his own manbefore he could call himself a man (Kreiswirth 117). Despite the great service he performed,a narrowness and provinciality underlay all, although Faulkner resisted. Perhaps Faulkner wasspeaking "tongue in cheek," since he did not at all believe that the artistis like a child. Stone wantedto keep Faulkner under control--to have him become a Mississippi writer,not one on a national or international scale. His relation to his own beliefs,characteristically "modern" in its ambivalence and instability, is far moredifficult than was the case with most nineteenth-century American writers. Haas inparticular, there is his persistent use of the word "nigger." Sometimes heuses "negro," but more often "nigger" is the preferred word, as in "fourstories about niggers," or "nigger attitude about debt." By 194 the wordhad become so beyond the pale in common usage that one wonders why Faulknerdid not recognize that Haas, a Northerner, a Jew, a man connected to aliberal publishing house, must have cringed at its use. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the early works of WilliamFaulkner and to analyze Faulkner's concern with slavery, poor whites,interracial clashes and sectionalism. In Light In August, his ongoingproject, race enters into the novel as a curse on white as well as black. In Faulkner's letters to Random House and Robert K. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1983.Grimwood, Michael. Pride in family and reverence for ancestors are far more powerfulmotives in behavior than any involvement with class. At this time,Faulkner published an essay called, "If I Were A Negro" which "Ebony"Magazine bought for $35 . It is through this breakup of the clans that Faulknercharts the decay of the traditional South. It is largelyfrom Faulkner's constant testing ofthe Southern myth that we can see his growing vision as an artist (Karl387). When speaking of Mammy Callie, Faulkner was all deference--shewas not a "nigger," but a woman second only to his own mother. Each of the majorfamilies in Faulkner's world comes to signify a distinct kind of conductthat is based on a moral code. But with Haas, the situation was very different. He has tested not only his "modern"South by comparing it with the past, but also the past by the myth, whichis very strong and persists today. He is whiteand negro. He struggles with theproblems of the Southern myth, while at the same acknowledging its powerand charm. This conception of fusion of races is most pronounced andevident in Light In August. Figures of Division: William Faulkner's Major Novels. His degree from Yale University gave him acertain intellectual patina, but underneath he remained attached to Oxford,Mississippi in ways that Faulkner was not. This was part of Faulkner's genius. William Faulkner is one of the greatest of American writers.Critically, there is no doubt about that. New York: Methuen, 1986.----------------------- 8 He hasinvestigated the myth itself and wondered about the relation between theSouthern tradition he admires and the memory of Southern slavery to whichhe is forced to return time and again. In terms of Faulkner's attitude toward poor southern whites, there ismuch to go on, especially in Faulkner's immediate family. William Faulkner, The Making of a Novelist. This also took into account interracial relationships. Quite the contrary, he held an exalted view of the artistas a maker and a poet, and his favorite writers were masters of theimagination. Additionally, William Faulkner was an affirmed liberal. We constantly see "loss" and"decline" in his works, concerning the land on the one hand and the peopleliving on it, on the other. TheCivil War was the primary struggle illustrating the fall, when the housebecame divided against itself and brother fought brother. Though the Compsons,Sartorises, the McCaslins, all landowners of prominence, begin roughly onthe same social level, their histories from the Civil War serve radicallydifferent purposes. 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