The Portable Faulkner (1946)

Summary

Caroline Gordon. “Mr. Faulkner's Southern Saga: Revealing His Fictional World and the Unity of Its Patterns.” New York Times Book Review, May 5, 1946, pp. 1, 45.

William Faulkner, alone among contemporary novelists, it seems to me, has the distinguishing mark of the major novelist: the ability to create a variety of characters. He is also a poet, or, as the Germans would put it, a dichter. It is Malcolm Cowley's distinction to have presented in his preface to The Portable Faulkner the first comprehensive survey of Mr. Faulkner's work that takes into account his symbolism. In 1939 a young Southern writer, Marion O'Donnell, published in The Kenyon Review an essay in which he traced in great detail an allegorical scheme in Mr. Faulkner's work. In his view the Snopes, hillbillies who have moved in to town from the piney-woods section and have become horse traders, ginners, merchants and finally bankers, represent the forces of corruption at work within the South.

The Sartoris, Millard, Compson and other families stand for the old order. Their powerlessness to avert disaster, partly through the combination of circumstances and partly through their own weakness, is best symbolized by Colonel Sartoris, who, coming back from the Civil War with a citation for bravery at the hand of General Lee, turns politician and degenerates into such a forensic old windbag that his son Bayard finds himself unwilling to avenge his death. So far as I know, these two critics are the only ones who have read Mr. Faulkner's work in the way I think he wants to be read: seeing in it not a series of novels with sociological implications, but a saga, a legend that is still in the making.