Chapter 4 - Critical reception

Summary

With the exception of another William, Faulkner has now generated more published commentary than any other writer, and that one's last name is Shakespeare. During his lifetime, Faulkner developed a few strategies for dealing with critics and with criticism. He usually ignored it, but when he could not he tended to agree with it and add his own. When Malcolm Cowley was preparing the Portable Faulkner (1946), for example, Faulkner wrote, “I'll go further than you in the harsh criticism. The style, as you divine, is a result of the solitude, and granted a bad one” (SL 215). To an English professor who had sent him three essays, Faulkner sent his thanks and added, “I agree with them. You found implications which I had missed,” partly because “I am an old 8th grade man.” Yet when he closed the letter with “Excuse all the I's. I'm still having trouble reconciling method and material, you see,” he as much as told the professor to take a hike (SL 142–3). The prefatory note to The Mansion (1959) says that “the author has already found more discrepancies and contradictions than he hopes the reader will” and serves as yet another reminder that Faulkner and not professional critics held sway in the worlds of his creation. Yet he wrote to be read, and one of his earliest critics noted a quality that readers still prize in his work, “a game in which he displays tremendous ingenuity and gives pleasure to the reader by stimulating a like ingenuity on his part.”