ABSTRACT
In Light in August and in Absalom, Absalom! Mr. Faulkner seemed well on his way towards making ofhis vices the virtues they potentially are. About Pylon there was little good to be said. The Wild Palms lies somewhere between the two extremes. In it, the publishers say, he has 'achieved a straightforward and smashing dramatic story in the best manner ofhis Sanctuary and As I Lay Dying.' Their shelving is correct, and one quarrels only with the inclusion ofthe word 'straightforward'; -Mr. Faulkner's most cherished trick in trade here and elsewhere being to march his readers through partially unintelligible, powerfully charged pages until they find themselves almost deciding what it is the author wishes to (or not to) tell them, then to jerk them into a new series of pages designed to the same end. For the rest of it, one looks again through the preface to the Modern Library edition of Sanctuary, glances through the subsequent corroborating pages, considers The Wild Palms and concludes that the author has not changed his spots. He even goes a step further here in that he tells two unrelated stories which have been placed in the same volume for little other discernible purpose than to afford him the pleasure, after engrossing you in one story to the point where you have forgotten what occurred in the other and have lost all interest in its characters, of transporting you to the other, there to remain until the same disinterest has arisen concerning the first set; then back again. Which bears more resemblance to the manner in which a fisherman disports himselfwith reel, rod and sucker than to the preoccupations ofa serious and talented artist whose realm
is the human soul. (The two stories, concerned with different characters, different locales, different times do ofcourse permit the reader to make certain comparisons and contrasts, but the author does little in the choosing and the shaping ofhis stories to impress us with a relationship -unless it be the basic inevitability underlying the beguiling opulence ofphrase in the 'take-it-off, knock-it-off, or have-the-crow-to-pick-itoff' alternatives life frequently restricts us to.)
And yet Faulkner has gifts which, were his core of the same caliber, would place him in the foreranks of twentieth century novelists. For that reason only does one not accept his performances with equanimity. Those to whom ten talents have been given cannot escape the hard requirement that they produce therewith another ten. Whereas Mr. Faulkner seems to have selected as his goal the search for a corrosive with which to overlay each ofhis ten rarely duplicated talents. Yet it is perhaps useless, even stupid, to rail out at Mr. Faulkner for this. His books, more than those of any other American writer, seem to draw their power and their poison from their author's unconscious. They seem to be fashioned: just as certain ofour dreams are charged with an emotion far in excess of the requirements of their ostensible subjectmatter, yet not too great for the deep elemental forces for which the dream symbols unrecognizedly stand, so Faulkner's novels have a surcharge of power and terror which though fully warranted by certain under-currents and conflicts of life, yet remain definitely excessive for the matters he chooses to write about. Or perhaps he no more chooses what to write about than we choose what to dream about -the subject-matter in both cases being that compromise material which simultaneously affords outlet for pent-up unconscious emotions and screen against conscious recognition ofthe basisof those emotions. One feels even that Faulkner's mad search for ever more and more bizarre material may be an attempt to find something spectacular enough, something awe-ful enough, to justify to his conscious mind (compelled to rationalize where it fears to reason) the emotion which he has and which he recognizes is out of proportion to what he seesin more conventional subject-matter-he not having attained that rare maturity ofvision which seesthat the most turbulent, the most distressing, the most exquisite emotions a human being can feel are not the outcroppings of lurid adventures, but have their roots in simple experiences which are the common lot ofman; and that the booger-men, the horror tales, the envisioned and the enacted perversions with which from time to time we confound ourselves are but feeble and inaccurate
