In the Traces of Modernism: William Faulkner in Swedish Criticism 1932–1950

Mats Jansson

doi:10.3390/h7040096

Abstract

This article focusses the reception of William Faulkner in Sweden from the first introduction in 1932 until the Nobel Prize announcement in 1950. Through reviews, introductory articles, book chapters, forewords, and translations, the critical evaluation of Faulkner’s particular brand of modernism is traced and analyzed. The analysis takes theoretical support from Hans Robert Jauss’ notion of ‘horizon of expectations’, Gérard Genette’s concept of ‘paratext’, and E.D. Hirsh’s distinction between ‘meaning’ and ‘significance’. To pinpoint the biographical and psychologizing tendency in Swedish criticism, Roland Barthes’s notion of ‘biographeme’ is introduced. The analysis furthermore shows that the critical discussion of Faulkner’s modernism could be ordered along an axis where the basic parameters are form and content, aesthetics and ideology, narrator and author, and writer and reader. The problematics adhering to these fundamental aspects are more or less relevant for the modernist novel in general. Thus, it could be argued that the reception of Faulkner in Sweden and Swedish Faulkner criticism epitomize and highlight the fundamental features pertaining to the notion of ‘modernism’, both with regard to its formal and content-based characteristics.

Highlights

This article focusses the reception of William Faulkner in Sweden from the first introduction in 1932 until the Nobel Prize announcement in 1950
William Faulkner is a distinctly American writer who is deeply rooted in the cultural milieu and historical tradition of the American South
Through the 1930s: Sanctuary as Modernist Touchstone. In this dynamic time when international modernism first began to seep into Swedish letters, Artur Lundkvist in 1932 published the first Swedish article on William Faulkner in the magazine

Summary

Through the 1930s

In this dynamic time when international modernism first began to seep into Swedish letters, Artur Lundkvist in 1932 published the first Swedish article on William Faulkner in the magazine. Faulkner article in 1932 takes stock of Faulkner’s writings, presenting short interpretative paraphrases of the plots of his novels up to Sanctuary (1931) and the collection of short stories These 13 (1931). Lundkvist did publish the first Swedish translation of a Faulkner text, namely the short story “En ros åt Emily” (“A Rose for Emily”) in same issue of BLM In his 1932 article, he praised the combination of “tragedy and grotesquerie” (“tragedi och grotesk”) in Sanctuary, and noted that. The critic Knut Jaensson referred to Malraux’s preface to Sanctuary in two extensive articles on Faulkner in 1935 in the daily Social-Demokraten He interpreted Faulkner’s narrative objectivity and unwillingness to step forward to explain and ensure himself of the reader’s agreement as an expression of the author’s moral pride.

Narrative Technique versus Ideology

The Foreword as Paratext

Faulkner’s ‘War Wound’ as Biographeme and Critical Cliché

Towards the End of the 1940s