ONE OF THE SIGNS of a writer’s greatness is that continued study of his work does not exhaust its significance for us. This book has been written from the conviction that the large body of Faulkner criticism, much of it of very high quality, has not exhausted the meanings or fully defined the values of Faulkner’s works. Critics have tended to concentrate their efforts on the novels that nearly everyone agrees are the greatest, to the neglect of others less great but deserving of careful study. This concentration on the high points of a career is natural enough, and proper enough too in a sense, but one of its results is that we have not yet fully perceived the outlines of Faulkner’s career as a whole or the unity of the whole of his work.
I have attempted to get at this largest of the unities that may be discovered in a writer’s work not by ignoring Faulkner’s writings and concentrating on large philosophical questions, or by using his works merely to illustrate generalizations about Faulkner the man, the problem of the South, or contemporary social conditions, but by looking attentively at the writings themselves, noting signs of continuity and development, and relating these to Faulkner’s many statements of intention. I would not argue that such a procedure is the only valid one, or even necessarily the best one, but only that it is capable of revealing some things that have remained dark.
The first ten chapters, accordingly, treat the fiction in the order of its publication, allotting to each novel a more or less extended discussion. Limitations of space made it impossible to treat the short stories in this way, but chapter nine, which interrupts the chronological presentation of the novels, attempts to relate the stories to the major themes that have emerged in the study of the novels and offers analyses of several stories taken to be representative. In the last two chapters I turn from specific works to consideration of problems common to the whole body of work, attempting first (in chapter eleven) to clarify the moral and religious implications of the fiction, concentrating on what I take to be central and determinative in Faulkner’s writing, his uneasy relation to his Christian background; and finally (in chapter twelve) attempting to evaluate Faulkner’s achievement thus far in his career.
Literary criticism is never definitive; criticism of a still living author, moreover, is exposed to special hazards of its own. The only justification for such a study as this lies in the hope that it may usefully supplement the explorations of others who have walked the same tortuous and rewarding trail.