William Faulkner (1897-1962), a modernist writer of the same generation as E. Hemingway, who worked in the same genres (short and full-length prose); like Hemingway, winner of the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes (1949), almost simultaneously with Hemingway passed away, in other things he was almost the exact opposite. If Hemingway’s work is based on the facts of his biography and is inseparable from his time (20-50s. XX century), the prose of W. Faulkner – outside the specific events of his life and outside time, even if the author indicates the exact date of this or that event.
У. Faulkner grew up in Oxford, Mississippi, in a house full of near and distant relatives and family lore about glorious ancestors, among whom the writer’s great-great-grandfather William Clark Faulkner particularly stood out. The glorious great-great-grandfather was a lawyer, a colonel in the Confederate Army in the Civil War, author of the popular romantic novel The White Rose of Memphis (1881), and possessed a solid income and a keen sense of honor. The Faulkner family, prominent and wealthy, owned the railroad, had experienced financial decline by the early twentieth century. W. Faulkner’s father had to earn a living: he kept stables, a store, then became treasurer of the University of Mississippi.
In 1915 Faulkner graduated from school; in 1918 he enlisted as a volunteer in the Royal Canadian Air Force and served several months in Toronto. In 1919 he was admitted as a young veteran to the University of Mississippi, where he studied French language and literature, but left that occupation after a year and a half. He worked as a bookstore clerk in New York City, a carpenter, a house painter, and then as a university postmaster in his native Oxford. In 1924 he went to New Orleans, where he met S. Anderson, which determined his fate as a writer.
Since his school years, trying to compose poetry and short prose without much success, who had a few magazine publications and a poetry collection “Marble Faun”, Faulkner found in Charles Anderson a patron, an inspiration and teacher. In 1925 he traveled through Europe, visiting Italy, Switzerland, France and England, and returned to New Orleans, and soon went to his Oxford, to live there until the end of his days. Faulkner’s tribute to the cosmopolitan spirit of his generation was thus minimal; what nourished Hemingway, Henry Miller, and others all their lives–travel, impressions, exposure to the world–Faulkner fit into one year. It was not until the early 1950s, when he became a Nobel Prize winner, that he left Oxford for short trips to lecture in Europe and once in Japan.
Faulkner’s tribute to the theme of “lost” prose was also minimal, boiling down to a collection of short stories and two novels (The Soldier’s Reward, 1926; Mosquitoes, 1927). Already in his late 20’s he found his original theme – the history and modernity of the American South – and published two works (“Noise and Fury,” 1929; “Sartoris,” 1929), which then became part of the so-called “Yoknapatof Saga.”
Faulkner’s Yoknapatof is more than seventy short stories, mostly grouped into cycles (“Come Down, Moses!”, “The Undefeated,” etc.), and seventeen novels: “Light in August” (1932), “Absalom, Absalom!” (1936), Requiem for a Nun (1951), The Village Trilogy (1940), The Town (1957), The Mansion (1960), and others, all set in the fictional Yoknapatofa County in the Southern United States, with characters moving from work to work.
Yoknapatofa, populated by aristocrats (Sartoris, Compsons, Sutpens, DeSpaines), descendants of their black slaves and “white rabble,” is an exact model of the Southern province, behind which a certain global mythological model of life in general peeks. The scale and significance of what is happening is emphasized by the author’s explicit or implicit reference to the Bible, to ancient Native American mythologies and rituals.
The very structure of mythopoetic thinking of America of the passing is imprinted in a peculiar principle of organization of the artistic world of the Yoknapatof saga, where the past is intertwined with the present, for time here moves not in a progressive sequence, but cyclically, and the fates of people are built into its eternal rotation.
The writer’s accurate reproduction of the mythological concept of time and human life, the very style of mythological thinking, is the result of his intuitive approach to the primary foundations of existence, which, in turn, is associated with Faulkner’s rootedness in the life of the patriarchal agrarian American South, which carefully preserves its traditions. This rootedness in many respects explains the fact that W. Faulkner’s work, closed in space but infinitely broadened in time, based not on individual concrete historical experience but on the eternal human experience, escaped from the rather narrow aesthetic framework of post-war literature.
