Introduction to Faulkner

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Introduction to Faulkner

• William Faulkner A Rose for Emily

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Contents

• Faulkner biography
• A Rose for Miss Emily discussion
• tableau

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Introduction

• Today we are going to be looking at a very famous
  story by one of Americas most important writers,
  William Faulkner. And while Faulker is most
  famous for his novels, he was also a master
  craftsman when it comes to short stories. One of
  the reasons Faulkners stories keep showing up in
  anthologies is their meticulous crafting.

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Some of his major works

• The Sound and the Fury,1929
• As I Lay Dying,1930
• Sanctuary,1931
• Light in August,1932
• The Wild Palms,1939
• Absalom, Absalom!1936
• The Hamlet,1940
• A Fable,1954

Faulkner was especially proud of his riding habit.
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Faulkner on the short story form

• Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put
  more trash in a novel and be excused for it. In
  a short story that's next to the poem, almost
  every word has got to be almost exactly right. In
  the novel you can be careless but in the short
  story you can't. I mean by that the good short
  stories like Chekhov wrote. That's why I rate
  that second it's because it demands a nearer
  absolute exactitude. You have less room to be
  slovenly and careless. There's less room in it
  for trash.

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What writers should write about

• The problems of the human heart in conflict with
  itselfalone can make good writing because only
  that is worth writing about, worth the agony and
  the sweat.
• Faulkner, in his Nobel Prize Acceptance speech,
  1950.

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A remarkable feat

• It is one of the more remarkable feats of
  American literature, how a young man who never
  graduated from high school, never received a
  college degree, living in a small town in the
  poorest state in the nation, all the while
  balancing a growing family of dependents and
  impending financial ruin, could during the Great
  Depression write a series of novels all set in
  the same small Southern county novels that
  include As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and
  above all, Absalom, Absalom! that would one day
  be recognized as among the greatest novels ever
  written by an American.
• John B. Padgett

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Yoknapatawpha County

• William Faulkner, Sole Owner Proprietor
• Based on his own home county of Lafayette,
  Mississippi.
• Faulkner included a hand-drawn map of the
  county as an appendix to Absalom,
  Absalom!

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Writing honors, part one

• Elected to the National Institute of Arts and
  Letters, 1939
• Nobel Prize for Literature, 1949
• Awarded the Howells Medal for distinguished work
  in American Fiction, 1950
• National Book Award,1951
• Awarded the French Legion of Honor, 1951
• A Fable awarded the National Book Award for
  Fiction and a Pulitzer Prize, 1955

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Writing honors, part two

• Silver Medal of the Athens Academy as one chosen
  by the Greek Academy to represent the principle
  that man shall be free, 1959
• A Reminiscence, Pulitzer Prize, posthumously
  awarded, 1962
• Eudora Welty presented Faulkner with the Gold
  Medal for Fiction awarded by the American Academy
  of Arts and Letters, 1962, a month before his
  death

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Birth

• William Cuthbert Falkner (as his name was then
  spelled)
• Born on September 25, 1897, in New Albany,
  Mississippi

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Parents and family

• Murry and Maud Butler Falkner
• first of four sons.
• Named after his great-grandfather, William Clark
  Falkner, the Old Colonel,
• had been killed eight years earlier in a duel
  with his former business partner in the streets
  of Ripley, Mississippi.
• A few days before Williams fifth birthday, the
  Falkners moved to Oxford, Mississippi.

Father Murry
13
Indifferent student

• Demonstrated artistic talent at a young age,
• drawing and writing poetry.
• Around the sixth grade he began to grow
  increasingly bored with his studies.
• Finally, he dropped out of high school in 1915.

14
A broken heart

• He lost his sweetheart, Estelle Oldham, to
  another man.
• Her family pressured her into marrying a
  young lawyer.

Estelle Oldhams yearbook photo, 1913
15
Moves to New Haven

• Faulkner went to stay with a friend studying law
  at Yale in New Haven.
• There Faulkner first took a job with the
  Winchester Repeating Arms Company
• for the first time, his name was spelled
  Faulkner in employee records, possibly the
  result of a typing error.

16
RAF Cadet

• June 1918, became a cadet in training in the
  Royal Air Force in Canada.
• Earlier had tried to join the U.S. Army Air
  Force, but turned down because of his height.
• In his RAF application, he lied in an attempt to
  pass himself off as British. Also spelled his
  name Faulkner, believing it looked more
  British, and in meeting with RAF officials he
  affected a British accent.
• Began training in Toronto, but before he finished
  training, the war ended. He received an honorable
  discharge.

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Mississippi and university

• Back in Oxford in 1919, enrolled at the
  University of Mississippi in Oxford under a
  special provision for war veterans, even though
  he had never graduated from high school.
• In August, his first published poem,
  LApres-Midi dun Faune sic, appeared in The
  New Republic.
• After three semesters of study at Ole Miss, he
  dropped out in November 1920.

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Not a very good worker!

• His most notorious job during this period was his
  stint as postmaster in the university post office
  from the spring of 1922 to October 31, 1924. By
  all accounts, he was a terrible postmaster,
  spending much of his time reading or playing
  cards with friends, misplacing or losing mail,
  and failing to serve customers. When a postal
  inspector came to investigate, he agreed to
  resign.

19
Literary friends

• In January 1925, Faulkner moved to New Orleans.
• Group of friends there centered around The Double
  Dealer,
• literary magazine whose credits include the first
  published works of Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway,
  Robert Penn Warren, and Edmund Wilson.

20
Estelle Faulkner

• In April 1929, Estelle Oldham divorced.
• In June she and Faulkner were married.
• Estelle brought to the marriage two children,
  Malcolm and Victoria.

21
As I Lay Dying

• After his marriage, and his increased needs for
  funds Faulkner works nights at a power plant.
• While there, wrote As I Lay Dying,
• later claiming it was a tour de force and that
  he had written it in six weeks, without changing
  a word.
• Published in October 1930.

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1930 a significant year

• First, he bought a decrepit antebellum house in
  Oxford.
• Faulkner named the house Rowan Oak, after a
  Scottish legend alluding to the protective powers
  of wood from the rowan tree.

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Also publishing success

• First national publication of a short story, A
  Rose for Emily, in Forum magazine.
• Followed that year by Honor in American
  Mercury,
• Thrift, and Red Leaves, both in the Saturday
  Evening Post.

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Survival strategies

• Over the coming years, as sales of his novels
  sagged, he would write numerous short stories
  for publication, especially in the
  Saturday Evening Post, as a principal means
  of financial support.

Faulkner, 1931
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The bitter and the sweet

• In January 1931, Estelle gave birth to a
  daughter, Alabama.
• The child, born prematurely, lived only a few
  days.
• Faulkners first collection of short stories,
  These 13, would be published in September and
  dedicated to Estelle and Alabama.

26
Hollywood

• In 1932 Faulkner began his association with
  Hollywood.
• He would write screenplays on and off
  through the 1950s.
• Most werent memorable.

In Hollywood mode.
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The best Faulkner films

• Hit his pinnacle in the mid-1940s with
• The Big Sleep, based on Raymond Chandlers
  detective novel,1944
• To Have and Have Not, based on the Ernest
  Hemingway novel,1945
• The Southerner,1945.

28
Daughter born

• Jill Faulkner, his only surviving child, was born
  in 1933.
• The Faulkner family was intensely private, so
  there are no photos available of them.
• It wasnt until after Faulkner won the Nobel
  Prize that he consented to do publicity tours.

29
Wrights Sanatorium

• January 1936, Faulkner spent what would be the
  first of many stays at a nursing home facility in
  Byhalia, Mississippi.
• He would go to recover from his drinking binges.
• Not yet an alcoholic in a clinical sense, would
  go on extended drinking binges, oftentimes at the
  conclusion of a writing project.

30
Nobel Prize

• His Nobel Prize Acceptance speech is
  today considered one of the finest ever
  made.

After the ceremony.
31
Post-Nobel

• In the last years of his life, Faulkner often
  undertook good will tours throughout the world at
  the request of the US State department.

32
Desegregation

• He got involved, albeit rather unwillingly, in
  the debate about desegregation in the South.
• He was morally against segregation, but felt the
  government should not get involved.
• He was also against forced integration.

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Writer-in-residence

• From February to June 1957, Faulkner was
  writer-in-residence at the University of
  Virginia.
• He agreed to a number of question-and-answer
  sessions with the students, faculty, and
  faculty spouses.
• These were published as Faulkner in the
  University.

34
The End

• On July 6, 1962 Faulkner died of a heart attack.
• He was 64.

The final formal portrait.
35
A Rose for Emily

• Faulkner's first short story published in a
  national magazine
• Originally published in Forum Magazine, April 30,
  1930.
• Later reprinted in a revised version in These 13.
• Original version was reprinted in Collected
  Stories.

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The germ of an idea

• Where he got the idea
• That came from a picture of the strand of hair
  on the pillow. It was a ghost story. Simply a
  picture of a strand of hair on the pillow in
  the abandoned house.
• Faulkner in the University

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Images/themes

• Decay and rot
• Time and the Past. See paragraph 55, to whom
  the past is not a diminishing road but, instead,
  a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches,
  divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck
  of the most recent decade of years.
• Her fathers portrait

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Tableau vivant

• A representation of a scene, picture, by a person
  or group in costume, posing silently without
  motion, an actual stoppage of human action,
• "a freezing of time and motion in order that a
  certain quality of the human experience may be
  held and contemplated"

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Miss Emilys tableau vivant

• "We had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss
  Emily a slender figure in white in the
  background, her father a spraddled silhouette in
  the foreground, his back to her and clutching a
  horsewhip, the two of them framed by the
  backflung front door."

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Links to the tableau vivant

• Miss Emily, the idol in the window, paragraph
  24.
• Followed immediately by the tableau of she and
  her father, paragraph 25.
• Resembles the angels in the church windows,
  paragraph 29.
• The carven torso of the idol in the niche
  paragraph 51.

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Faulkner on Miss Emily

• "She had been trained that you do not take a
  lover. You marry, you dont take a lover. She
  had broken all the laws of her tradition, her
  background, and she had finally broken the laws
  of God, too, which says you do not take a human
  life. And she knew what she was doing was wrong,
  and thats why her own life was wrecked. Instead
  of murdering one lover, and then to go and take
  another and when she used him up murder him, she
  was expatiating her crime."