New Essays on Light in August (The American Novel) PDF
Preview New Essays on Light in August (The American Novel)
NEW ESSAYS ON LIGHT IN AUGUST The American Novel GENERAL EDITOR Emory Elliott, Princeton University Other books in the series: New Essays on The Scarlet Letter New Essays on The Great Gatsby New Essays on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn New Essays on Moby-Dick New Essays on Uncle Tom's Cabin New Essays on The Red Badge of Courage New Essays on The Sun Also Rises New Essays on The American Forthcoming: New Essays on Chopin's The Awakening (ed. Wendy Martin) New Essays on Ellison's Invisible Man (ed. Robert O'Meally) New Essays on Light in August Edited by Michael Mitigate CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1RP, United Kingdom CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK http: //www.cup.cam.ac.uk 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA http: //www.cup.org 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia © Cambridge University Press 1987 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1987 Transferred to digital printing 1995 Reprinted 1998 Typeset in Meridien A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data is available ISBN 0-521-31332-5 paperback Transferred to digital printing 1999 Contents Series Editor's Preface page vii 1 Introduction MICHAEL MILLGATE page 1 2 "A Novel: Not an Anecdote": Faulkner's Light in August MICHAEL MILLGATE page 31 3 Plots and Counterplots: The Structure of Light in August MARTIN KREISWIRTH page 55 4 Light in August: The Closed Society and Its Subjects ANDRE BLEIKASTEN page 81 Contents 5 The Women of Light in August JUDITH BRYANT WITTENBERG page 103 6 On the Difference between Prevailing and Enduring ALEXANDER WELSH page 123 Notes on Contributors page 148 Selected Bibliography page 149 VI Series Editor's Preface In literary criticism the last twenty-five years have been particu- larly fruitful. Since the rise of the New Criticism in the 1950s, which focused attention of critics and readers upon the text itself- apart from history, biography, and society - there has emerged a wide variety of critical methods which have brought to literary works a rich diversity of perspectives: social, historical, political, psychological, economic, ideological, and philosophical. While at- tention to the text itself, as taught by the New Critics, remains at the core of contemporary interpretation, the widely shared as- sumption that works of art generate many different kinds of in- terpretation has opened up possibilities for new readings and new meanings. Before this critical revolution, many American novels had come to be taken for granted by earlier generations of readers as having an established set of recognized interpretations. There was a sense among many students that the canon was established and that the larger thematic and interpretative issues had been decided. The task of the new reader was to examine the ways in which elements such as structure, style, and imagery contributed to each novel's acknowledged purpose. But recent criticism has brought these old assumptions into question and has thereby generated a wide vari- ety of original, and often quite surprising, interpretations of the classics, as well as of rediscovered novels such as Kate Chopin's The Awakening, which has only recently entered the canon of works that scholars and critics study and that teachers assign their students. The aim of The American Novel Series is to provide students of American literature and culture with introductory critical guides to vn Series Editor's Preface American novels now widely read and studied. Each volume is devoted to a single novel and begins with an introduction by the volume editor, a distinguished authority on the text. The introduc- tion presents details of the novel's composition, publication histo- ry, and contemporary reception, as well as a survey of the major critical trends and readings from first publication to the present. This overview is followed by four or five original essays, specifical- ly commissioned from senior scholars of established reputation and from outstanding younger critics. Each essay presents a dis- tinct point of view, and together they constitute a forum of in- terpretative methods and of the best contemporary ideas on each text. It is our hope that these volumes will convey the vitality of current critical work in American literature, generate new insights and excitement for students of the American novel, and inspire new respect for and new perspectives upon these major literary texts. Emory Elliott Princeton University vin 1 Introduction MICHAEL MILLGATE HEN his seventh novel, Light in August, was published in WOctober 1932, William Faulkner was just thirty-five years old and at the peak of his creative powers. This is not to say that his career, so shapely in its outlines, was ever marked by radical shifts in the levels of his achievement: his first novel and his last are both distinguished works, quite different from one another yet alike in displaying the stamp of their author's genius. But there is general agreement among Faulkner's readers and critics that the years between 1928 and 1936 - years that saw the composition and publication of The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctu- ary, Light in August, Pylon, and Absalom, Absalom!, as well as of numerous short stories - constituted a period of extraordinarily sustained creative activity, unmatched either in Faulkner's own career or in that of any other American writer of the twentieth century. The exceptional intensity with which Faulkner worked at this time perhaps had something to do with the relative slowness with which he found his way into print - or, at least into public notice. At a time when his near contemporaries F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos were already established and, indeed, famous writers - Fitzgerald's great success with This Side of Paradise came in 1920, when he was only twenty-three years old - Faulkner remained entirely unknown and almost entirely un- published, hanging around the campus of the University of Mis- New Essays on Light in August sissippi, the French Quarter of New Orleans, or, more briefly, the fringes of the American expatriate world in Paris. He had been born - "male and single at early age/' as he once 1 humorously declared - in New Albany, in northern Mississippi, on September 25, 1897, but by the time he was five he had moved with his family to Oxford, the county town of Lafayette County, Mississippi, and the place he was later to use as the principal model for his fictional Jefferson, the focal point of Yoknapatawpha County. In Oxford he experienced the characteristic open-air up- bringing of a Southern white youth of middle-class parents, and although he never finished high school he read omnivorously in his teens - the extent and depth of Faulkner's reading should never be underestimated - and began to write and draw. In 1918 he joined the British Royal Air Force and spent several months in Canada training to be a pilot, but the armistice of November 1918 came too soon for him even to get into the air, let alone to Europe. Back in Oxford he published a few poems, essays, and illustrations in campus newspapers and acted out a self-conscious, self-drama- tizing role as a local poet; in 1924, encouraged and supported by his friend Phil Stone, an Oxford lawyer, he published with a "van- ity" press a verse sequence in rhymed octosyllabic couplets en- titled The Marble Faun - of which the few surviving copies have become extremely valuable collector's items. In the autumn of 1924, however, he met the novelist Sherwood Anderson, then at the height of his popularity, and his own first sustained attempts to write fiction seem to have belonged to the period of the six-month visit to New Orleans that began in January 1925 and ended with his departure in early July for a five-month tour of Europe. Faulkner's first novel, Soldiers' Pay, written while he was in New Orleans and published in 1926, was an impressive achievement, ambitious as a piece of writing and strikingly effective in its treat- ment of the isolation and incomprehension encountered by sol- diers returning from the World War I to a civilian world of which they seem no longer a part. A second novel, Mosquitoes (1927), was distinctly less successful, and in the autumn of 1927, after he had returned to Oxford and settled down to make a serious literary career for himself, Faulkner was badly shaken by his failure to find
The list of books you might like
