Abstract
In this chapter I want to look at two novels from the mid-1930s, Pylon, a book that has never been anyone’s favourite Faulkner, and Absalom, Absalom!, one that did not sell well and got mostly bad reviews, but is now one of the most highly regarded novels of the century. The two books have a symbiotic relationship in his career: both come out of Faulkner’s ideas about how we try to understand history and his search for a style in which to embody them, and both provide an indication of how he was going to direct his energies in the years to come.
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Notes
John Duvall, Faulkner’s Marginal Couple: Invisible, Outlaw, and Unspeakable Communities (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), p. 82; Reynolds Price, Pylon, Awake and Sing!, and the Apocalyptic Imagination’, Criticism, 13 (1971), pp. 131–41, p. 138; Richard Pearce, Introduction to Pylon (New York: Signet, 1968), vi.
‘Test Pilot’, Essays, Speeches and Public Letters, ed. James B. Meriwether (New York: Random House, 1966), pp. 188–92. When he tries to imagine the pilots of tomorrow, he sees them as sexless, ‘not game chicken but capons’ (p. 191). This is curious, because he refers briefly to Francesco Agello, who set a record of 711 km/h on an Italian seaplane in 1934, a record that still stands for piston-engined seaplanes. He and his fellow pilots were a breed apart in a sense, but their macho courage was their most distinguishing characteristic, particularly in view of the almost certain death that awaited test pilots and racers in this era. Faulkner usually writes admiringly about male heroism, and the testosterone-inspired kind as much as any. The comment about ‘capons’ suggests an important qualification in his feelings for the new pilots, a sense that he is writing against a part of himself, and that he is trying to imagine a different sort of being altogether.
‘Pylon, Joyce, and Faulkner’s Imagination’, Faulkner and the Artist, eds. Donald M. Kartiganer and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996), pp. 181–207, p. 188.
‘Against Narrativity’, Ratio, 17.4 (2004), pp. 428–52.
Strawson’s claim has stimulated a great deal of discussion. See, for example, Walter L. Reed and Marshall P. Duke, ‘Personalities as Dramatis Personae: An Interdisciplinary Examination of the Self as Author’, Common Knowledge, 11, 3 (2005), pp. 502–13;
James Phelan, ‘Who’s Here? Thoughts on Narrative Identity and Narrative Imperialism’, Narrative 13, 3 (2005), pp. 205–10;
James Battersby, ‘Narrativity, Self, and Self-Representation’, Narrative, 14, 1 (2006), pp. 27–44
See John T. Irwin, Doubling and Incest/Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), pp. 148–51, for a suggestive and detailed reading of the biblical parallels with the novel.
The domination of male voices in the novel has been much discussed. See Minrose Gwin, The Feminine and Faulkner: Reading (Beyond) Sexual Difference (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), pp. 104–5, who argues that ‘these voices encode the sexual politics of patriarchy by silencing women as speaking subjects within its narrative of mastery’, but holds out the hope we can hear ‘the mad voice of Faulkner’s own text’ that ’speaks out of a feminine silence which men created but which men cannot control.’
For an insightful account of how national myths can affect our understanding of history, see Sacvan Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 1–9.
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© 2008 David Rampton
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Rampton, D. (2008). Two Views of History. In: William Faulkner. Literary Lives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230581975_5
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