Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Home
  • Home

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Send to Kindle
  • Send to Dropbox
  • Send to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

3 results

  • 12 - William Faulkner: an impossibly comprehensive expressivity
    • from KEY NOVELISTS
  • Edited by Morag Shiach, Queen Mary University of London
  • Book: The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel
  • Published online: 28 July 2007
  • Print publication: 19 April 2007, pp 178-190
  • View extract

    Summary

    I went to the dresser and took up the watch, with the face still down. I tapped the crystal on the corner of the dresser and caught the fragments of glass in my hand and put them into the ashtray and twisted the hands off and put them in the tray. The watch ticked on … Father brought back a watch-charm from the Saint Louis Fair to Jason: a tiny opera glass into which you squinted with one eye and saw a skyscraper, a ferris wheel all spidery, Niagara Falls on a pinhead.

    William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)

    As regards any specific book, I'm trying primarily to tell a story, in the most effective way I can think of, the most moving, the most exhaustive. But I think even that is incidental to what I am trying to do, taking my output (the course of it) as a whole. I am telling the same story over and over, which is myself and the world … This I think accounts for what people call the obscurity, the involved formless 'style', endless sentences. I'm trying to say it all in one sentence, between one Cap and one period. I'm still trying to put it all, if possible, on one pinhead.

    William Faulkner, Letter to Malcolm Cowley

    By 1944 the literary critic Malcolm Cowley had been reading the novels of William Faulkner (1897-1962) for some time, and 'gradually and with errors of judgment' he had begun to 'perceive a pattern' in the novels that had largely escaped him on first reading (6). Among the first to describe the emergence of literary modernism in America, Cowley was struck by the inverse relationship between his own growing certainty of the importance of Faulkner’s fiction and what he termed the author’s ‘quoted value on the literary stock exchange’ (as he noted, by ‘the later years of World War II … [Faulkner’s] seventeen books were effectively out of print’), and he decided ‘to write a long essay on Faulkner … to see whether it mightn’t redress the balance between his worth and his reputation’ (5–6).