Abstract
The very designation ‘non-Yoknapatawpha’ serves to suggest the anomalous position which Soldiers’ Pay, Mosquitoes, Pylon, The Wild Palms, and A Fable occupy within the Faulkner canon. That these novels as a group are customarily defined in terms of what they are not attests to the overwhelming power which the Yoknapatawpha texts exert on the general estimation of Faulkner’s career. In some respects, this response seems appropriate since there can be no question that Yoknapatawpha constitutes the heart of the canon. Nevertheless, ‘non-Yoknapatawpha’ must be construed as a rather misleading term if it is taken to imply that these novels are intrinsically less important than—and entirely unrelated to—those novels set in Faulkner’s fictional county.
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Yonce, ‘Soldiers’ Pay: A Critical Study of William Faulkner’s First Novel’, Diss. University of South Carolina 1970; ‘The Composition of Soldiers’ Pay’, Mississippi Quarterly, 33 (1980) 291–326; and ‘Faulkner’s “Atthis” and “Attis”: Some Sources of Myth’, Mississippi Quarterly, 23 (1970) 289–98; McHaney, William Faulkner’s ‘The Wild Palms’: A Study (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1975); Butterworth, A Critical and Textual Study of Faulkner’s ‘A Fable’ (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1983).
Brooks, William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978). Randolph E. Stein’s 1965 dissertation, ‘The World Outside Yoknapatawpha: A Study of Five Novels by William Faulkner’, deals almost exclusively with the novels as separate texts, and his comments are now dated: many of his remarks, while perhaps of some value when the dissertation was written, have by the present time become critical commonplaces, while others—such as his reading of Pylon as an unrelenting attack on the spiritual wasteland of modern society and his view of the tall convict in The Wild Palms as a primitive hero—have since been discredited. Duane MacMillan’s more recent dissertation, ‘The Non-Yoknapatawpha Novels of William Faulkner: An Examination of Soldiers’ Pay, Mosquitoes, Pylon, The Wild Palms, and A Fable’ (1972), provides synopses of observations made by others on the non-Yoknapatawpha novels, and these in turn establish the foundation for his own detailed analyses. Although MacMillan occasionally develops worthwhile points, especially with regard to A Fable, his dissertation as a whole is hampered by his extreme reliance on Faulkner’s Nobel Prize Address as a schema through which the entire canon must be interpreted. Indeed, although MacMillan takes issue with those commentators who read A Fable as a ‘gloss’ on the Nobel Prize Address, this is essentially his own position with each of the non-Yoknapatawpha novels. His statement that Faulkner’s basic attitudes as expressed in Stockholm were present very early in his literary career, and consequently ‘required little or no development or evolution’ (297) during the subsequent forty years of that career, seems dubious in itself and dependent upon the assumption, evident throughout the dissertation, that Faulkner’s novels tend more toward explication than exploration. See Stein, ‘The World Outside Yoknapatawpha: A Study of Five Novels by William Faulkner’, Diss. Ohio University 1965, and MacMillan, ‘The Non-Yoknapatawpha Novels of William Faulkner: An Examination of Soldiers’ Pay, Mosquitoes, Pylon, The Wild Palms, and A Fable’, Diss. University of Wisconsin 1972.
McHaney, ‘Brooks on Faulkner: The End of the Long View’, in Review I, eds James O. Hoge and James L. W. West, III (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979) pp. 29–46.
See, for example, Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner 1926–62, eds James B. Meriwether and Michael Millgate (New York: Random, 1968) p. 255.
For a valuable discussion of Soldiers’ Pay and Mosquitoes as pre-Yoknapatawphan, apprenticeship fiction, see Martin Kreiswirth, William Faulkner: The Making of a Novelist (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1983).
See Joseph Blotner, Faulkner: A Biography. 2 vols. (New York: Random, 1974) pp. 508–10, 516–19.
See Michael Millgate, The Achievement of William Faulkner (London: Constable, 1966) pp. 138–41, and Brooks, pp. 395–405.
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© 1990 Gary Harrington
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Harrington, G. (1990). Introduction. In: Faulkner’s Fables of Creativity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10837-4_1
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