William Faulkner 威廉 福克纳

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1、William Faulkner 威廉 福克纳（1897-1962）William Faulkner ranks with Ernest Hemingway as one of the leading American authors of the Twentieth Century. Faulkner, like Robert Frost, was a regionalist, who spent most of his life in a small, particular area of the United States, writing about the scenes and pe

2、ople he knew best. Faulkners region was the Deep South, with its bitter history of slavery, civil war and destruction. He invented a county and a town in his imagination very similar to his own part of Mississippi, and he wrote about the society in the South by inventing families which represented d

3、ifferent social forces: the old, decaying upper class; the rising, ambitious, unscrupulous class of “poor whites”; and the Negroes who labored for both of them. Most of his stories take place in this imaginary Yoknapatawpha County, and concern members of the same families at different times in histo

4、ry. 他旳多数故事都发生在他设想旳Yoknapatawpha县，他笔下旳人物不是一次写完，同一人物会在几本书中，在不同历史时期反复浮现。这显然加深了人物旳开掘，使其具有历史旳深广度。His Life.William Faulkner was born in the Deep South, the oldest of four brothers. His father was the business manager for the State University in Oxford, Mississippi, where Faulkner spent most of his life. H

5、is family came from the old, white upper class. Though in decline in the 20th century, the family retained some of the old customs. Falkner was brought up by a black nurse whom he called Mammie Cally, who told him many stories remembered from the time of slavery. Faulkner was an imaginative boy. The

6、re was no public library in Oxford, but there were plenty of English classics at home, which he read at random. He disliked school and dropped out after two years of high school. The people of Oxford considered him a wastrel. (a wasteful or worthless person)Two neighbors had a decisive influence on

7、him. He fell in love with a young neighbor named Estelle, and, hoping to get married one day, he took a respectable job in a bank. Another neighbor, Philip Stone （菲尔，斯多）, found young Faulkner unusually intelligent, and took charge of his reading. Stone gave him books which were unknown in Oxford, Mi

8、ssissippi, including the 19th Century French symbolist writers who had deeply influenced Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot. Faulkner taught himself to read French at night, while he worked in the bank by day. In 1918, when Faulkner was 21 years old, Estelle married another man and went to live in Asia. Hear

9、tbroken, Faulkner left Mississippi and enlisted in the Canadian Air Force, hoping to fight in the First World War. However, the war ended before he had finished his basic training in Toronto. He went home and restlessly worked at one job after another, writing poems in his spare time. He ended up as

10、 the postmaster (person in charge of a post office) in his hometown of Oxford. His neighbor Mr. Stone encouraged him to keep writing, and even supplied the money to get the poems published. In 1925, he took a job with a newspaper in New Orleans, the most important city in the South at that time. He

11、joined a literary circle which centered around Sherwood Anderson, and with Andersons encouragement he wrote his first novel (Soldiers Pay 1926), about a wounded air force pilot. Anderson arranged to get the novel published and Faulkner, like nearly every other young American writer in the 1920s, the

12、n made his way to Paris. He was vey lonely there, however, and when he received the first money from the sale of his novel, he bought a ticket home. The novel was not popular, and Faulkner did not make much money from it. Back in Mississippi, he worked once again at many different jobs while he wrot

13、e a second novel in his spare time. (Mosquitoes, 1927) This novel was a satire about the New Orleans literary circle. Faulkner was a solitary man who wrote in isolation. He criticized talkative, self-important writers who were easily influenced by current fashions in literature. Faulkner wrote fierc

14、ely and constantly, giving every poem and story to Mr. Stone, who tried in vain to find publishers for them. In the 1920s, vey few people wanted to read the kind of things he was writing. He wrote another novel and when it, too, was rejected, he decided that his work would never be published again.

15、In a way this realization liberated him. Such a true artist as he, that it only enconcouraged him to write more, exactly as he wanted, unbothered by thoughts of what the public might like. Faulkner rewrote the rejected novel under the title Sartoris (1929), and at the same time wrote a new one The S

16、ound and the Fury, his first masterpiece. To his great surprise, both of them were published in 1929, and although vey few copies were bought by the public, reviews by literary critics praised them highly. In the same year, Estelle came back from Asia, having divorced her husband, and she married Fa

17、ulkner. He bought a deserted, ruined mansion, built before the Civil War, which he began to repair with his own hammer and saw, and settled down to be a fulltime author. From 1930 to 1942, Faulkner was hugely productive. He wrote two collections of short stories, a volume of poetry and nine novels.

18、他完毕了两部短篇小说集，一本诗集，尚有九部小说。 Even so, he could not earn enough money to live in those Depression years, because his books were difficult to read. The literary critics also turned against him, blaming him for concentrating too narrowly on Southern subjects, and for writing in a complicated, highly origin

19、al style. Undeterred, he took a job writing film scripts for Hollywood at a low but steady salary (just as F. Scott Fitzgerald was doing at that time) and continued to write his own books. Faulkner believed that every writer should invent his own style and method, as Hemingway had done, and continue

20、 to experiment. For instance, in his early book, The Sound and the Fury, he used a technique called “stream of consciousness”, in which the whole story was told through the thoughts of one character. Later, he used the same technique but explored its utmost possibilities by putting the thoughts into

21、 the mind of a lunatic. (a person who is mentally ill) He was willing to take the risk of making mistakes, which he sometimes did, and learning from his mistakes. In 1936, his novel Absalom, Absalom!（押沙龙，押沙龙！）, now considered one of his best, was most scathingly reviewed (harshly criticized) , and h

22、is readers began to fall away. By the early 1940s, Faulkner was more or less forgotten by the public, although his work was intensely admired by several other American novelists, and his books were greatly appreciated in France, where they had been very well translated. During his great productive p

23、eriod of the 1930s, Faulkner began writing about an imaginary place in the Deep South called Yoknapatawpha County （约克那帕特法县）, with its main town which closely resembled Oxford, Mississippi. He invented its geography, its history and its people so precisely that it seemed like a real place to his read

24、ers and to himself. Faulkner did not lay out a plan for his cycle (series) of Yoknapatawpha books, as John Galsworthy in England and Emile Zola in France had planned theirs. Instead, Faulkners legend simply grew, book by book. Family sagas (long stories) developed inside the larger cycle through sev

25、eral books, covering the history of two principal families in Yokanpatawpha County. One was the Sartoris family, which had belonged to the ruling class of slave-owners before the civil war, but which deteriorated in the 20th century because it could not adapt to new conditions. As the old leadership

26、 died out, power was seized by a new class of poor-white up-starts, symbolized by the unscrupulous Snopes family. They were scorned and feared by the effete (衰老旳) Sartoris clan. Other stories about life, past and present, in Yoknapatawpha County filled out this extraordinarily diverse, imaginative b

27、ody of work. Faulkner started a second rise to fame, higher than the first, in 1945, when, at the insistence of other writers, a New York publishing house issued The Portable Faulkner, which presented the Yoknapatawpha stories in historical order. Many novelists took the opportunity to write explana

28、tory essays and the public began to read Faulkner again. His books were studied with great care by scholars and academic critics, and an ever-growing stream of essays and dissertations on Faulkners work began to pour out of American universities. His next novel, Intruder In The Dust (1948), was a su

29、ccess and so was his next collection of short stories. In 1950, he received both Americas highest literary award and the Nobel Prize for Literature. Against his private, solitary nature, Faulkner became a well-known public figure. He was sent abroad by the State Department to give lectures in South

30、America, Europe and Japan.In his last period of writing, in the late 1950s, Faulkner completed his cycle of stories about Yoknapatawpha County. The county became a pleasanter place in his imagination, and he expressed a more tolerant view of human nature, even changing his opinion about some of the

31、characters who had appeared in his earlier books “Because” he said, “I know them better now.” his last book, The Rievers (1962) was a comedy about boyhood. It was published and widely acclaimed only a month before his death in Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner died just one year after Hemingway, and so

32、passed away Americas two most remarkable modern writers. His Style.Faulkner used a remarkable range of techniques, themes and tones in his fiction. His stylistic innovations were often adapted from the experiments of other modern writers, which he then used in his own way. His books are sometimes di

33、fficult to read, and need close study by the reader. His works are distinguished by complex plots, sometimes extending over several novels in which the same characters appear. The hero of one story may appear as a minor character in another. He successfully advanced two modern literary techniques: s

34、tream-of-consciousness, and multiple point of view. Stream-of-consciousness, first used by James Joyce, the Irish novelist, in 1922, tells a story by recording the thoughts of one character. Action and plot are less important than the reactions and inner musings (what is said to oneself in a thought

35、ful manner) of the narrator. Time sequences are often dislocated (disrupted). The reader feels himself to be a participant in the story, rather than an observer, and a high degree of emotion can be achieved by this technique. Faulkner became a master at presenting multiple points of view, showing wi

36、thin the same story how the characters reacted differently to the same person or the same situation. The use of this technique gives the story a circular form- wherein one event is the center, with various points of view radiating from it - rather than a linear structure, with one event following an

37、other by cause and effect, in a logical progressional time. The multiple point of view technique makes the reader recognize the difficulty of arriving at a true judgment. Faulkners frequent themes were history and race. He sought to explain the present time by examining the past, particularly by tel

38、ling the story of several generations of one family as history altered their lives. He was deeply interested in the relationship between blacks and whites in the South, where both races exist side by side in almost equal numbers. He was especially concerned about the social problems of people who we

39、re of mixed race, unacceptable to either blacks or whites. His Point of ViewFaulkner generally shows a grim picture of human society, where violence and cruelty are frequently included. His later books showed more optimism, and his last book was a comedy. His intention was to show the evil, harsh ev

40、ents in contrast to such eternal virtues as love, honor, pity, compassion and self-sacrifice, and thereby exposed the faults of society. He felt that it was an artists duty to remind his readers constantly of true values ad virtues. His major works Faulkner wrote 19 novels, 4 collections of short st

41、ories, and 2 volumes of poetry. Among the best known are the following: Style and theme: Perspectivism is an important structural principle of his novels. With competing or complementing perspectives set in a narrative system, the Faulknerian novel becomes an environment of voices, constantly deferr

42、ing meaning and delaying the readers judgment. This is further enhanced by the open-endedness of his novels and his long sentences. The Russian thinker Bakhtins theory enables us to see this kind of novel discourse as the polyphonic novel (多声部小说), which is a vigorous form of resistance to the thinki

43、ng that favors a single and absolute truth that is, indeed, philosophical totalitarianism. Faulkners novels fully utilize the psychoanalytical insights provided by Freud and have been subjected to such studies. His style is often cited as the American example of the “stream of consciousness.” But th

44、e more important point to be made in this regard is that Faulkner made use of modern psychology to capture the traces of Southern history psychologically and to explore the connection between erotic passions and human cruelty. Often Faulkners novels reveal the more personal as a sign of the cultural.