ABSTRACT
Weare grateful to Mr. Faulkner for his certainty, and for his repeated powerful affirmations of this certainty, that life is not the stereotyped, mediocrity-encrusted affair which the conventional mind in and out of books contents itself that it is. That his fiction should impatiently and angrily state and overstate the inadequacy ofcustomary assumptions concerning what is important in life is understandable and valuable. But it is not sufficient. There is great potential virtue, both artistic and psychological, in Mr. Faulkner's tendency to isolate one compelling factor, instinct, drive, perversion, character trait, in a person's life, taking a bulldog grip on it, following the person where this compulsive motive power leads him, refusing to be diverted from the scent by the false trails human beings lay to bemuse themselves and their fellow-travelers. But Mr. Faulkner does not give continuous evidence that he discards conventionalities discriminately or for the honest purpose oflearning what liesbeneath. More frequently he seems to be flaunting in our faces the cheapness in which he holds us-and himself; or to be following compulsions of his own which only coincidentally take him into the rich, inadequately explored bottom lands of civilization.
