The Essential Faulkner Read Online Free PDF Page B

with most of his demons exorcised, but the younger possessed and unregenerate author is the one whose works amaze us, as they never ceased to puzzle and amaze himself.
    Even in an introduction confined to those earlier works, I should, if I were writing it today, adopt a somewhat different emphasis. In 1945 I was arguing against the scandalous neglect of his novels. Not only were they little read at the time but it seemed to me, as I kept saying, that hardly any critic had looked for a general design in whichone novel was linked to another. So it was the design that I chiefly emphasized: the imaginative effort to understand the present in terms of the past that led Faulkner to elaborate a legend of Southern history. In so doing I shifted my attention from book to book without pausing long enough on any one of them, even
The Sound and the Fury
or
Absalom, Absalom!
and without examining each of them as a separate achievement. Fortunately that emphasis has been corrected and overcorrected by a host of later critics.
    Perhaps I dwelt too much on what is in the foreground, that is, on the story of a single county in northern Mississippi presented as, in Faulkner’s words, “that chronicle which was a whole land in miniature, which multiplied and compounded was the entire South.” Faulkner in his early novels is indubitably a Southern nationalist and an heir of the Confederacy—for all his sense of guilt about the Negroes—but he is something else besides, a fact that I failed to make sufficiently clear. What he regarded as his ultimate subject is not the South or its destiny, however much they occupied his mind, but rather the human situation as revealed in Southern terms—to quote from one of his letters, 5 “the same frantic steeplechase toward nothing everywhere.” He approached that steeplechase in terms of Southern material because, as he also said, “I just happen to know it, and dont have time in one life to learn another one and write at the same time.” There was of course another reason, for it was the South that aroused his apprehensions, that deeply engaged his loyalties (“
I dont. I dont hate it
”), and that set his imagination to work. He always dreamed, however, that his fables might stand for a universally human drama.
    So I would have different points to emphasize if I were writing the introduction today. I would be able to use the cartographical studies of other critics instead of gropingmy way without maps—except those supplied by Faulkner himself—and stumbling more than once. It seems to me, however, that my introduction, combined with the selections in the present volume, continues to mark out the straightest path into Faulkner’s imaginary kingdom, and the surest path for those who might otherwise get lost in the swampy places. Yoknapatawpha County is a region where every landmark has a story of its own, and every story goes back to earlier times. Accordingly the selections were planned to give a general panorama of life in the county decade by decade, from the days when the first settlers came riding westward from Carolina on the Wilderness Trail or northward on the Natchez Trace. So as not to distort the sequence, I included no complete novels, but there are three stories almost of novel length: “The Bear,” “Spotted Horses,” and “Old Man.”
    For this new edition I have not found it necessary to make many changes in the text. Faulkner’s later books round out the Yoknapatawpha story, but without transforming it into something else. The principal borrowings I have made from them are two of the prologues that appear in the printed version of
Requiem for a Nun
. One of these, “The Courthouse,” contains his most detailed account of the early settlers (and enabled me to omit a chapter from
Absalom, Absalom!
dealing with the same material). The other is “The Jail,” which is Faulkner’s most effective statement of how the past lives in the present: “It’s not even past.”