Revisiting the Southern Master
PIPER, HENRY DAN
Revisiting the Southern Master William Faulkner: First Encounters By Cleanth Brooks Yale. 230 pp. $19.50. Reviewed by Henry Dan Piper Professor of English, Southern Illinois University: author,...
...Ransom moved from Vanderbilt to Kenyon College in Ohio, where he edited the prestigious Kenyon Review...
...Go Down, Moses: A Novel, for example, was first published as Go Down, Moses and Other Stories...
...It spread rapidly after World War II...
...What made these books unique was their emphasis on a close, careful reading of the poem or story being studied, with special attention to the formal elements of structure and language that characterized it as a work of art...
...Hundreds of required courses in composition and the study of literature were instituted to alleviate the problem, many using the Brooks and Warren texts...
...Some of the latter were included in Knight's Gambit, then excluded from the Collected Stories...
...It remains at that level today...
...Brooks himself moved away from the New Criticism to a degree in the preface to his 1971 volume of essays, A Shaping Joy: Studies in the Writer's Craft, announcing his unwillingness to be "trapped" by any "pigeonhole label...
...Faulkner published between 75-100 stories, depending on how one classifies the early sketches and numerous magazine pot-boilers...
...Brooks has consistently remained the academic critic...
...In addition, he was linked to his subject by the fact that their respective achievements were to an extent parallel...
...Wading through their output, Brooks realized that most of it was sterile and jargon-laden...
...In 1947, too, Brooks moved to Yale, where he was joined in 1950 by Warren...
...Brooks' elegant essays, offering fruitful "new" interpretations of difficult poems, appeared there regularly, as well as in the Sewanee Review, edited by his old friend Tate, and in his own Southern Review...
...Nevertheless, if it steers the latest crop of literary-minded college students (whose interest in Faulkner shows no signs of abating) to the rest of Brooks' work--particularly to the dual capstone of his distinguished career, Yoknapatawpha Country and Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond -it will have performed a great service...
...And, since all are set in and around Faulkner's mythical Yoknapatawpha County, Brooks has already treated them more fully and in a larger context in Yoknapatawpha Country...
...He also produced three volumes of excellent thematically linked stories that he ultimately decided to call novels...
...The trend that had set in was partly responsible for his disenchantment, but so was his 20-year quest to come to terms with Faulkner...
...Nonetheless, a look at the rise and decline of the New Criticism helps explain why so many college English departments are in their present sorry predicament...
...The innovation that had greatly enriched the experience of an elite student body back in the '30s and' 40s proved to be of limited application by the early '70s...
...Brooks examined both at length in Toward Yoknapatawpha, recognizing their interdependency and calling them a "double novel...
...Much of the best early commentary-by Europeans like Sartre, Malraux and Graham Greene, and Americans such as Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Perm Warren--as brought together by Warren in Faulkner: A Collection of Critical Essays(1966...
...Warren was his colleague there, and they collaborated in the compilation of two seminal college textbook anthologies, Understanding Poetry (1938) and Understanding Fiction (1943...
...Very little of the scholarship, however, merits a permanent place on the bookshelf...
...One reason was that short-handed faculties hired a large number of PhDs, both from the universities that traditionally offered graduate degrees and from former teachers colleges that had quickly established doctoral programs...
...In the hands of these green instructors and their greener graduate teaching assistants, the pioneering methodology was often reduced to a blunt instrument, too doctrinaire to serve the needs of mass higher education...
...In William Faulkner: First Encounters, Brooks intends to provide a short introduction to the most important fiction "for the general reader and for the student coming to Faulkner for the first time...
...The accounts of the novels are relaxed, charmingly written, yet superficial summaries of "what happens" in each one...
...In 1947,- eight years after the appearance of his initial collection of important short pieces, Modern Poetry and the Tradition, a second compilation that was to be widely read appeared, The Well-Wrought Urn...
...Among the full-length works, the standouts are The Achievement of William Faulkner (1961) by Michael Millgate, an Englishman who currently teaches in Canada, and Brooks' two absolutely essential books, William Faulkner: The Yoknapatawpha Country (1963) and William Faulkner: Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond (1978...
...Both the verbal and the structural complexities of Faulkner's fiction had long made it a playground for New Critics...
...Unfortunately, after merely summarizing eight stories he has dealt with more extensively elsewhere, Brooks surprisingly turns to "Old Man," a short novel Faulkner wrote at the same time as "The Wild Palms" and published as part of it, with the chapters alternating...
...Scott Fitzgerald: A Critical Portrait" Although William Faulkner's novels probably sold more copies in France than in the United States until he won the Nobel Prize in 1949, since that time critical writing on the great Southern author has become a growth industry in this country...
...The discussion of the short stories does not contain much that is new either...
...Now the retired Gray Professor of Rhetoric at Yale gives us a third treatment, William Faulkner: First Encounters...
...The Brooks/Warren approach was also adopted by their former mentor, Ransom, and gained its name from the title of his 1941 book, The New Criticism...
...Faulkner's work receives more attention than the classics produced by Chaucer, Milton or Dickens...
...Reviewed by Henry Dan Piper Professor of English, Southern Illinois University: author, "F...
...Furthermore, freshmen who had not learned to write got little help from the sort of passive exposure to literature the New Critics envisioned...
...At the time, many English departments, especially in the church-affiliated liberal arts colleges, were still dominated by clergymen who believed with Matthew Arnold that in an increasingly Godless age, literature should replace religion as a guide to proper conduct...
...A vast segment of the incoming freshmen revealed an abysmal lack of high school preparation in reading and writing...
...why the teaching of freshman composition is now frequently turned over to so-called communicators trained in applied linguistics and communications...
...Students who were never required to read a novel in high school were turned off by introductory English courses that stressed the techniques of formal analysis...
...It is not surprising that scholars of widely varying critical persuasions have joined in declaring Brooks' Yoknapatawpha books the foremost studies of the novelist...
...It consists of a chapter entitled "Short Stories," plus individual chapters on the six major works: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, The Hamlet, and Go Down, Moses...
...Still, because neither he nor any other critic of his stature has thoroughly confronted Faulkner as a master of the genre, one approached the analysis here with anticipation...
...Brooks commented on a number of these in his previous books, and devoted a full chapter to the very early stories and sketches in Toward Yoknapatawpha and Beyond...
...After a sojourn as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, he returned to his beloved South and for many years taught English at Louisiana State University...
...why so many potential English majors are flocking to interdisciplinary programs (American Studies, Black Studies, Women's Studies, Creative Writing, and Writing for TV, Radio and Theater) that usually have a heavy literary content yet are outside the province of English instructors...
...Brooks, Warren and their colleagues, of course, cannot be blamed for this state of affairs...
...Along with Warren and Tate, he was a member of the famous group that studied English under John Crowe Ransom at Vanderbilt during the 1920s...
...Of the stories that are unambiguously recognized as such, a score rank with the best of Joyce and Hemingway...
...Thus First Encounters is not an effective one-volume condensation of Brooks' two longer works on Faulkner, nor is it a better introduction to the great man than Edmond L. Volpe's more comprehensive Reader's Guide to William Faulkner...
...Meanwhile, though, a very different development was laying the groundwork for the New Criticism's decline...
...Unlike most other well-known Faulkner scholars, who have been Yankees or Europeans, Brooks was born in the same decade as the novelist in a small Tennessee town 50 miles from Faulkner's home in northern Mississippi...
...This was a long-overdue corrective to the prevailing view of literary works as illustrations of historical trends, good taste, or moral lessons...
...The effort, alas, is far less successful than its two predecessors...
...For it is not too much to say that, at approximately the same time Faulkner was changing the way we write literature, Brooks was one of the critics changing the way we study and teach it...
...Moreover, in struggling to account for every aspect of Faulkner's breath-taking artistry, the eminent critic felt compelled to make use of any helpful approach...
...During the following two decades, the New Criticism reached the zenith of its influence, and the Yale English Department--especially its graduate program--attained the reputation of the liveliest and best in the United States, perhaps in the world...
...Thanks to the GI Bill and continuous economic prosperity, university enrollment mushroomed from around 1 million before the War to 12 million in the late 1960s...
...But ironically, as the New Criticism was gaining increasing acceptance as a tool for college teachers, its utility sharply diminished...
...For the past several years, the annual bibliography of the Modem Language Association has listed a larger number of new books and essays published about him than any other English-language writer, with the exception of Shakespeare and Joyce...
...He offers no explanation for taking up "Old Man" separately on this occasion...
...Besides the close reading in which he was so skilled, he turned to history, biography (particularly evidence of Faulkner's intent), setting, themes, values, and his own intimate knowledge of the South...
Vol. 66 • December 1983 • No. 24
