ABSTRACT
No one can write about William Faulkner without committing himself to the weary task oftrying to disengage the author and his work from the misconceptions that surround them. It has taken me ten years of wary reading to distinguish the actual writer of The Sound andthe Fury from a synthetic Faulkner, compounded of sub-Marxian stereotypes (Negro-hater, nostalgic and pessimistic proto-fascist, etc.); and I am aware that there is yet another pseudo-Faulkner, derived mostly from the potboiling Sanctuary, a more elaborate and chaotic Erskine Caldwell, revealing a world of barnyard sex and violence through a fog of highbrow rhetoric. The grain of regrettable truth in both these views is lost in their misleading emphases; and equally confusing are the less hysterical academic partial glimpses which make Faulkner primarily a historian of Southern culture, or a canny technician whose evocations of terror are secondary to Jamesian experiments with 'point of view.' Faulkner, also distorting Faulkner, once told a class of young writers that he never considers form at all ! I am moved by the newest collection of Faulkner's short stories (Collected Stories of William Faulkner) to propose another partial view as a counterweight to the others.
