Faulkner's Career: An Internal Literary History by Gary Lee Stonum (review)

Abstract

FAULKNER'S CAREER: AN INTERNAL LITERARY HISTORY BY GARY LEE STONUM (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1979. 207 pages.) Following Edward Said, Gary Lee Stonum argues in this book that a writer's achievement is in part determined by "the writer's relationship to his own career, or more specifically to his own past writings and to the possibility of continuing to write" (p. 23). Stonum contends that the successive phases of a writer's career are founded on different beliefs about the nature of art, and that close attention to these beliefs, particularly to the ways in which they challenge previously-held beliefs, will allow us to trace the writer's artistic development. What this theory has to do with William Faulkner may seem obscure, but I would reassure the skeptical that Stonum does not merely use Faulkner to illustrate his ideas about a poetic career; his book is very much a study of Faulkner's career. Stonum argues that the "phases" of this career were marked by very different conceptions about art. These phases correspond to the periods of Faulkner's early verse and first two novels ("art as a vision of the transcendence of life"), The Sound and the Fury through Light in August ("art as a representation of life's motion"), Absalom, Absalom! ("art as a problematics of arresting"), and all of the later works but especially the Snopes trilogy ("art as a meta-form for investigating the value of cultural forms"). Stonum is very good at defining the assumptions about art — as well as life — which underlie Faulkner's earliest writings, especially the poems; and his chapter on The Sound and the Fury, clarifying this novel's transitional role in Faulkner's career, is a genuinely original contribution. Thereafter I think that his theory of "phases" bogs down badly. Stonum's four-stage approach may be valid, but he needs to do more than discuss aspects of three novels — As I Lay Dying, Absalom, Absalom!, and Snopes — to justify so comprehensive a theory about the evolution of Faulkner's career. His book is extremely well-written and often revealing, but I would suggest that the quality of Stonum's specific commentary is a good deal more impressive than his intermittent theorizing. ROBERT MERRILL* •ROBERT MERRILL is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Nevada, Reno. He has published a book on Norman Mailerand articles on various American novelists or Shakespeare in such journals as American Literature, Modern Language Quarterly, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Modern Fiction Studies, Modern Philology, Critique, Centennial Review, and Studies in American Fiction. 162VOI. 34. NO 2(SPRING 19801 ...