Doctor Martino’s Other Stories: Unity and Cohesion in “These Fourteen”

Abstract

ABSTRACT William Faulkner’s second short-story collection, Doctor Martino and Other Stories (1934), has never received much critical attention, certainly not compared to its predecessor, These Thirteen (1931). That is not because the stories themselves are insignificant. All but two of its selections reappear in Collected Stories of William Faulkner (1950), the definitive overview of the artist’s contributions to the genre. Rather, critics tend not to know what to make of the book because it lacks a clear-cut sense of organization, a pattern of arrangement that would help the reader decide the overall thematic statement its author intends. This article explores how, in the absence of overt signals and clues as to why contents are ordered as they are, readers compensate for the miscellaneous feel of such collections. Without sequential connections or unifying motifs, audiences scour works for images of interpretation that teach them how to make meaning: every text, in a sense, allegorizes its own consumption. In the case of Doctor Martino, these images involve absence and substitution. If not exactly cohering the entries into an artistic totality, the pattern of lack and filling lack offers readers insight into the struggle to form a whole from discrete parts.