English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Zendy Open

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Insights

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Zendy Tools

Zendy Plus

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

ions and “grand pronouncements.” What needs to be further explained in this passage, however, is the claim that the critical response to Faulkner in the fifties was purely laudatory: this celebration was only directed at the works of the thirties. While Faulkner is no doubt treated as an institution, it is precisely the renunciation of the late style that ties Howe to the critical consensus of the fifties. Although he appears to be formulating a critique of recent Faulkner criticism, Howe merely joins the chorus and paves the way for the kind of response to Faulkner that he seems to be renouncing (a celebratory formalism that bypasses value judgments). The other work singled out by Millgate for critical praise was Olga Vickery’s The Novels of William Faulkner. Commenting on Vickery, Millgate writes: It is not at all an easy book to read, and it is not, in the full sense, a critical work—Mrs. Vickery passes no judgments on the books with which she deals—but it offers cogent and extremely thorough explications of the meaning and thematic structure of each of the novels in turn. Because the book is not concerned with value-judgments, it gives almost as much attention to Faulkner’s “minor” works as to those usually considered major, and such books as Pylon and even Mosquitoes emerge more interestingly from this detailed treatment than from the more cursory discussions of earlier critics. (William Faulkner 111) It is important to note that Millgate’s next book, The Achievement of William Faulkner (1963), performs precisely this same move: it becomes an analysis of the complete oeuvre proceeding from work to work with rather suppressed value judgments. Consequently, it abandons the belligerent tone of the earlier work, which demanded a confrontation with Faulkner’s obvious failures and adopts a much more reverent attitude towards a few of the novels so categorically dismissed in the first book. In a sense, one can witness here the influence of the suspension of judgment Millgate identifies in Vickery. As we have seen, Millgate’s earlier book called for a double project: a formalist reading of Faulkner capable of critiquing the shortcomings of the late period. As opposed to this Faulkner in the Fifties 93 double imperative, Vickery’s book is based on an exclusive adherence to the first demand (formalist reading) at the expense of the critical attitude.7 This suspension of judgment, however, is much more problematic than Millgate would let us know. First of all, it needs to be acknowledged that the whole of Vickery’s project is one single value judgment: “Faulkner is great.” Granted, Vickery rarely concerns herself with the kind of explicit evaluations that characterize Millgate’s first book, and her readings of the “minor works” deliberately go against the grain, but her general project is still informed by the evaluative framework that made Faulkner’s canonization possible. One needs only to look at the table of contents to identify the general structure of the evaluative canonization. The book is composed of three parts that correspond with Faulkner’s three phases (although Vickery herself does not make this connection): the first section of the book, which does contain explicit value judgments, is devoted to the early novels; the second section is called “The Achievement of Form” and discusses the so-called “major works,” The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!; the third section is called “The Pursuit of Themes” and is devoted to the rest of the oeuvre, the lesser novels which also happen to be primarily the later novels. At best, Vickery transforms the majority of the value judgments that account for the periodizing canonization into formal distinctions. Instead of a simple lack of judgment, we have here a universal framework of constantly recreated literary value (the preliminary judgment that Faulkner is great), in which formalist judgments obscure the problems of the minor works since, if the grand pattern is predicated upon the complete interdependence of every single work, the weight of the major works lends gravity to the minor ones. Nevertheless, this formalist totalization is based on value judgments on at least two levels: on the one hand, we have the judgment that Faulkner as such represents literary value; on the other hand, we have the troubled and quite often obscured judgment concerning the minor works. But the real significance of Vickery’s “non-judgmental” formalist study is that, through this displacement, it formulates a critique of Cowley’s canonizing reading of Faulkner. Vickery effectively displaces the unity of pattern from the unity of Yoknapatawpha onto the unity of technique and theme (primarily through recurrent formal and struc-

Faulkner in the Fifties: The Making of the Faulkner Canon