Abstract
Although Mosquitoes, Faulkner’s second novel, is often considered to be his least significant work, that is a judgment which will seem damning only to those who underestimate all the other works in the canon. Whatever its strengths and weaknesses may in fact be, the novel remains a fascinating document for an understanding of the ideas, assumptions and ambitions with which Faulkner started out in the twenties and of the stages by which he came so astonishingly into his own. Mosquitoes occupies a pivotal position in the canon, immediately preceding the beginning of Faulkner’s exploration of his mythical county, Yoknapatawpha. Constituting an extensive exploration of art and the role of the artist, Mosquitoes thereby assumes particular importance as an expressive index of Faulkner’s aesthetics at this critical point in his career.
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Notes
The Selected Letters of William Faulkner, ed. Joseph Blotner (New York: Random, 1978) p. 40.
Brooks, ‘Faulkner’s Mosquitoes’, Georgia Review, 31 (1977) 217.
Warren, ‘Faulkner’s “Portrait of the Artist”’, Mississippi Quarterly, 19 (1966) 121–31.
Frank Budgen, James Joyce and the Making of ‘Ulysses’ (New York: Smith & Haas, 1934) p. 60.
Richard Ellman, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959) p. 450.
Arnold, ‘Freedom and Stasis in Faulkner’s Mosquitoes’, Mississippi Quarterly, 28 (1975) 289–90, and ‘William Faulkner’s Mosquitoes’, Diss., University of South Carolina 1978, pp. xiv–xix, xxiii–xxiv.
See Blotner, Biography, p. 405, and Walter B. Rideout and James B. Meriwether, ‘On the Collaboration of Faulkner and Anderson’, American Literature, 35 (1963) 85–7.
Carvel Collins, ‘Introduction’ in ‘Helen: A Courtship’ and ‘Mississippi Poems’ (New Orleans and Oxford: Tulane University and Yoknapatawpha Press, 1981) p. 32.
For a discussion of other archetypal images in this scene, see David Williams, Faulkner’s Women: The Myth and the Muse (Montreal and London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1977) p. 36.
Kenneth W. Hepburn in ‘Faulkner’s Mosquitoes: A Poetic Turning Point’, Twentieth Century Literature, 17 (1971) 23, suggests that in section ten of the Epilogue Talliaferro attempts two ‘artistic’ acts.
While in New Orleans, interestingly enough, Faulkner, like Talliaferro, carried a walking stick and spoke with a vaguely British accent, and in the course of his career he twice used the first name ‘Ernest’ as a pseudonym: once, in 1925, in a facetious letter to H. L. Mencken urging him to publish a poem by one William Faulkner and again, much later, when he published ‘Afternoon of a Cow’ under the name of his ‘amanuensis’, Ernest V. Trueblood. See Blotner, Biography, p. 480, and Uncollected Stories of William Faulkner, ed. Joseph Blotner (New York: Random, 1979) p. 703. See also Grimwood, p. 34, who sees a further connection in the fact that just as Faulkner had altered the spelling of his family name from ‘Falkner’, so does Talliaferro change his name from ‘Tarver’.
See also Max Putzel, Genius of Place: William Faulkner’s Triumphant Beginnings (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985) pp. 91–5.
‘Carcassonne’, in The Collected Stories of William Faulkner (New York: Random, 1977) p. 899.
The Wild Palms (New York: Random, 1939) p. 324.
The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (New York: New Directions, 1971) p. 47.
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© 1990 Gary Harrington
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Harrington, G. (1990). Mosquitoes. In: Faulkner’s Fables of Creativity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-10837-4_3
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