Living With Books
HICKS, GRANVILLE
The Disturbing Problem of 'Genius': New Studies of Proust and Faulkner LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks Writing about William Faulkner a couple of years ago, Irving Howe said: "He is--to use...
...Hindus maintains that that is not what really takes place in Remembrance of Things Past, and that, in any case, Proust was not interested in what happens to classes but simply in what happens to individuals...
...Professor Hindus discusses the point acutely and convincingly...
...But he has already given evidence of what many persons have in mind when they speak of decadence and amorality...
...On the other hand, he demands of Go Down, Moses and Intruder in the Dust a greater consistency than he asks of the earlier work...
...And sometimes he is downright obtuse, as when, in the chapter on Knight's Gambit, he suggests that working on the screen version of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep may have "helped turn Faulkner toward, or strengthen his interest in, the detective story...
...William Faulkner is another challenge to critics, as William Van O'Connor is the latest to discover...
...The Disturbing Problem of 'Genius': New Studies of Proust and Faulkner LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks Writing about William Faulkner a couple of years ago, Irving Howe said: "He is--to use a troublesome word--a genius...
...I do not see in Proust," Hindus writes, "the evidence of that decadence and amorality which many of his critics have found in him...
...Proust's belief in the transcendent importance of art is obvious to any reader of Remembrance of Things Past, for the climax of the work comes with the narrator's realization that only as it is transformed into art does experience have significance...
...He seems, however, to contradict himself when he emphasizes Proust's "merciless exposure" of the aristocracy...
...On the question of Proust's sociology, there has been considerable difference of opinion, with the Marxists arguing that his work depicts the decline of the old aristocracy and the rise of the bourgeoisie...
...The theory is vitiated by the fact that four of the six stories in Knight's Gambit had been published before this Hollywood excursion...
...But such failures are honorable, for there is always something more to be said about a great writer...
...In comparison with Irving Howe's William Faulkner, The Tangled Fire seems pretty pedestrian, but much of what O'Connor has to say is sound and useful...
...for Proust, like all geniuses, contains multitudes...
...New meanings are constantly hinted at, and one finishes the article with a clear sense of how much more there is in Faulkner's work than anyone has managed to set forth and with a strong conviction that he has a lot more to say...
...The topics are arranged approximately in ascending order of difficulty...
...And even thornier problems arise in the course of the discussion of Proust's ethics...
...In The Proustian Vision (Columbia, $4.00), Milton Hindus has written a systematic study of the French novelist, discussing his esthetics, philosophy, psychology, sociology and ethics...
...The article is full of echoes of the novels and stories, to which Faulkner often calls attention by using the names of characters...
...He was too busy emphasizing the best qualities which he discovered in the world around him to be charged with responsibility for corrupting it...
...In an article on Mississippi in a recent issue of Holiday, Faulkner writes with beauty and tenderness of the region in which he grew up...
...Hindus makes a good case for tolerance as a major virtue in Proust, but otherwise he goes further than the evidence warrants, and his insistence that Proust was an affirmative writer cannot easily be reconciled with what he has said earlier about his pessimism...
...Among the comments that are not useful I would include his attempt to find specific sources for Faulkner material in tall tales of the early nineteenth century...
...In the chapter on philosophy, he has some interesting comments on Proust's similarity to Schopenhauer, and in the chapter on psychology he emphasizes the parallels between Proust's thinking and Freud's, while denying that the former derived his ideas from the latter...
...His virtuous Proust is no more the whole man than the decadent, amoral Proust of other critics...
...When a critic calls a writer a genius, he confesses that he has failed to catch him in the snare of his critical apparatus...
...A troublesome word for a troublesome phenomenon...
...One useful thing that O'Connor does is to question, even more sharply than Howe, the view, set forth by George Marion O'Donnell and Malcolm Cowley, that the Yoknapatawpha saga can be interpreted in terms of a conflict between the aristocratic Sartorises and the plebeian Snopeses...
...O'Connor's The Tangled Fire of William Faulkner (Minnesota, $4.00) takes up Faulkner's books chronologically...
...He also sees that the affirmative statements made by Faulkner in his Nobel Prize address are not in contradiction to the early novels, such as The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, but are in fact exemplified in them...
Vol. 37 • April 1954 • No. 15
