the novels and stories that he did. His genius, in other words, was not in the kind of life he led, as is sometimes the case, but in the fictions he created. If it were not for Faulkner’s genius, no one would have been much interested in his life anyway. Writing the life, as Blotner so lovingly did, is but one way of trying to understand and acknowledge the nature of this genius. Another way, is to go directly to the works of the genius; still a third way—as in the work of David Minter and Judith Wittenberg—is, to borrow Wittenberg’s subtitle—to try to discover how the life was “transfigured” into the fictions.2 My way was to go directly to the works, the novels, and to study them, in terms of themselves (the laws of the imagination and of fiction) more or less to the exclusion of everything else. I do not mean by this that my primary emphasis is aesthetic because it isn’t; only that, with very few exceptions, I found all of my evidence, all of the “facts” that I worked with, in the novels themselves and worked on the assumption, as I always have when dealing with literary works, that the work will reveal its intention to me from internal evidence if I study it hard enough.
I have used what Faulkner said about his novels somewhat sparingly because, once created, novels have a life of their own which even the creator of them does not, in retrospect, necessarily fully understand and maybe did not ever fully understand. History, though it does not change the text, changes the way in which we may read that text, and the huge accrual of readings of the novels adds dimensions to them not even Faulkner could possibly have anticipated. Faulkner certainly knew he was a genius; in fact, he was sometimes amazed at his own genius: but his word is not necessarily the definitive word on any novel or character—though what he says is certainly always worth paying attention to. Novels have intentions of their own which clearly transcend an author’s intentions. An author can tell us exactly what he intended, which does not mean that is what was achieved, or that there wasn’t more there than was intended or even consciously recognized. It is here that the whole theory of archetypes and symbolism becomes so important. The texts of all great writers soon transcend the intentions, and maybe even the understanding, of their creators. And it is perfectly clear from the record, that authors are great liars about their texts and that there are some things about any great text so private and secret no author will ever talk about them or divulge them. We may document the external life of an author from the record, but the only reliable record for the interior imaginative life is the record provided by the text itself. The author may lie, but the text can’t—not even so cryptographic a text as Absalom, Absalom!.
I do not mean to argue here that the life of the author and his fictions are not related and connected in interesting and complex ways—if we can but figure them out—and that pursuing this line of investigation often yields surprising, often very startling results. Minter and Wittenberg have clearly shown this to be true.3 What I want to argue is that the fictions have a life of their own; it is the fictions that will survive and remain important, not the life of the author; and even if we knew nothing at all about the author or about anything he might have said about his own work, that would not in any way diminish the power of these great fictions. Their power is intrinsic to them, and can be gotten at directly, by taking a reasonably well-trained critical mind to the texts themselves. Anyone who has taught Faulkner knows this to be true: a whole class learns to live within the imaginative world of the novels, to talk about the characters as if they were really real and as if what happened to them really mattered. It soon learns that this imaginative world, from novel to novel, has a coherence of its own, that certain kinds of characters keep reappearing, certain themes and conflicts are returned to again and again, that, no matter what, the great comic voice speaks out over and over again. These things are all in the novels and no external evidence—from the life, or anywhere else—is needed to explain or justify any of them.
If this seems like an extremely puristic (perhaps critically naive) view of the relationship between the reader and the text, a view that seems to argue that neither scholarship nor criticism is really necessary, that the text can stand alone as a set of internally coherent signs which a reader can work his way into and back out of again—well, yes, it is somewhat puristic, but certainly not critically naive. It argues for the autonomy of the text over and above all else, and for the value of as direct an experience of the text as possible. It is a position, not a dictum or a hard line doctrine. It says, I do not want to approach the texts through the life, or through the vast archeo-critical deposits that have now accumulated over and around every Faulkner novel; it says I do not want to take a psycho-critical approach, trying to explain the texts in terms of the psychology of the author: it says I want to approach the texts directly, as acts of the imagination, realizing that between reality and fiction mysterious transformations take place which are largely the work of the imagination, and that only the fiction, the finished work of the imagination, can tell its own story.
This study of Faulkner’s novels is anything but critically naive. Very high powered and extremely sophisticated critical and interpretive ideas and methods have been used to read the novels and enable me to accomplish what I set out to do when I decided I would write a book on Faulkner and the novel. Anyone familiar with modern critical theory will immediately recognize the pervasive influence of some of the great voices that have spoken to us about literature in our time. Among the most prominent are Kenneth Burke, who is ubiquitous, in this book as in my mind. My passion for Burke is certainly equal to my passion for Faulkner.4 Northrop Frye, especially his Anatomy of Criticism, certainly one of the most powerful and coherent theories of literature developed by anyone in our time, is also everywhere at work in my reading of the novels because his theory of the imagination and the nature and function of its creations, certainly had much to do with my view of these matters. Two of Gaston Bachelard’s many wonderful books, The Psychoanalysis of Fire and The Poetics of Space taught me more than I can acknowledge about the ways of the imagination and the effects of what we read on our own imaginations—a central concern of this study of Faulkner’s novels. René Girard, especially in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure revolutionized the way in which I read novels. His book—still—is certainly one of the most stimulating on the novel that I ever read, and I simply transferred much of what he said about the great European novelists to my study of Faulkner and his major characters—especially what he said about models for the self and mediators, and destructive and generative being. From my own generation, J. Hillis Miller showed me the way better than anyone else, especially in his Poets of Reality, through all the wonderful work he did on the novel and through the different ways he showed us for reading the works of poets and novelists as whole, coherent visions. Finally, I took much Roland Barthes with me to my reading of Faulkner’s novels, especially what I learned from Critique et Vérité and Sur Racine. Both of these books tell us much about the coherence of the imaginative life and the interconnectedness of what it creates—whether in poetry, drama, or fiction.
Had I not read the books of these critics (and many others, of course, including the pioneering critics of Faulkner like Olga Vickery), I could not have written this one on Faulkner; so that, contrary to what I seem to suggest above in my remarks on puristic approaches, I certainly did not come to Faulkner and his novels empty headed. Single-mindedly, yes! You might say that I came loaded for bear or, more exactly, that I came loaded for “The Bear” (as Chapter 7 will show). A book should be read in the spirit in which it was written and should not be asked to do, or be faulted for not doing, what it never intended to do. There are many things that I have not done because they did not—or did not seem to—have anything to do with what I wanted to do. I have not dealt with any of Faulkner’s early work, though at one time I tried to, but abandoned it when it seemed clearly irrelevant to my purpose. I have not discussed Faulkner’s first two novels because I wanted to begin at that point in his career where his true genius as a novelist first discovered and expressed itself. At one point that seemed to be in Sartoris. But when Douglas Day edited the complete text of Flags in the Dust in 1973, it was obvious to any student of Faulkner that Flags in the Dust, not the heavily cut and edited Ben Wasson Sartoris, was the text with which one should begin. So, though I had written part of a chapter on Sartoris, I took it out and wrote a new one on Flags in the Dust when—somewhat embarrassed—I finally got around to reading it. I have not discussed any of Faulkner’s short stories, though I recently reread all of them because none seemed to add anything to what I was
