Lord, Protect me from William Faulkner.
I have been reading some novels by Faulkner. I just finished The Sound and the Fury, and will be starting Light in August in a short time. Incidentally, I apparently started with his hardest to understand work first, and then will be going to the one that is known as his most accessible. The Sound and the Fury is not a very easy book to read. Faulkner makes liberal use of stream-of-consciousness in his writing. On top of this already complex style of telling a story, the first main character who is telling the story (Benjy) turns out to be mentally retarded. Try as I might, my small mind has a hard time understanding who Faulkner is try to say.
I have come to the conclusion that he is trying to tell us something important. Not so much because I have seen the flashes of light in his novels, but by comparison. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is a story I am sure most of my readers are familiar with. It will be the vehicle for my comparison with Faulkner. After September 11th, many people knew that The Lord of the Rings had something important to say about the events that had transpired. Some people even thought that the movies were made as some sort of thinly veiled response to the then current world events. Of course they could not have been, the movies had been in production for awhile before September 11th. At any rate, they were working from a series of books that has over half a century old, and was writing with no knowledge of the terrorist attacks on the United States. This brings me to my first point, good literature deals with universals in human nature.
Point two, regarding literary criticism. N.T. Wright has said that much of the modern quest for the historical Jesus is nothing other than an excuse to do autobiography under the pretense of biography. I think Wright is on to something here, and I think it also applies to a large part of the field of literary criticism. Critics can pretend that they are writing a review, all the while saying more about what they want to say that what the author is saying. Christians are probably more familiar with this concept in the distinction between exegesis and eisogesis.
So how does this relate to good literature? If you took, say The Hobbit, and looked at what literary critics are saying about it, you would probably be surprised at how many different ideas people are pulling out of this story. There are socialist interpretations of The Hobbit, where Smaug becomes a capitalist hoarding the wealth. Others have looked at the different races in the story and come to the conclusion that it deals with racial tensions. There are even Klingon (more commonly known as Feminist) interpretations of The Hobbit that see no story, only oppression.
My point being that any good piece of literature can be wrestled in the the service of some ideology because it deals with the issues that are at the core of what it means to be human. Think of the Bible. Some people think Jesus was a socialist, a communist, a capitalist, a feminist, a revolutionary, etc.
Now back to William Faulkner. I know he must be saying something important, if for no other reasons than, one I can relate to the problems his characters are dealing with, and two, my library has almost as much space dedicated to the criticism and interpretation of Faulkner as there is dedicated to Shakespeare.
Of course most of these interpretations are bunk. I doubt that Faulkner wore half as many masks as his critics claim he did. Most people who write great literature wear few, if any masks. That makes them more human, and able to speak to a wider audience. I do have a quote from a promising book however, that I plan on review at a later date.
“The usual method of avoiding coming to terms with Faulkner’s theological interests is to claim him as a humanist in such a way as to imply that humanism is a position unto itself, devoid of theological ties of presuppositions. Perhaps it is here that the greatest theological naiveté of much criticism lies.”
William Faulkner: Art in Theological Tension — John W. Hunt, page 17.