Incense and Honeysuckle: Men and Women In Faulkner

Abstract

Estella Schoenberg. Old Tales and Talking: Quentin Compson in William Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom!" and Related Works, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1977. 156 + xi pp. David Williams. Faulkner's Women: The Myth and the Muse. Montreal and London: McGill-Queen's, 1977. 268 + xiii pp. There is a kind of literary criticism which insists on the importance of the writer with whom it is concerned, which may speak of the social, political, moral and philosophical issues that define that importance, and yet which remains curiously distant from the life of the reader to whom it is directed and from the world in which its chosen authors wrote. An urgency is missing from its discourse, and in that absence the issues raised by the critic are drained of much of the importance claimed for them. This is a criticism more interested in the "insights" it offers than the demands on the life of the reader that such 1 insights might seem to imply. It is a criticism that is not intended for the life but rather for the scholarly and pedagogical activity of the reader. One can call this criticism "academic," since it comprises the great bulk of the writing that issues from the pens of the professors—who write for the professors. Also, it is the academic profession of criticism—that congeries of "methods," "heresies" and conventions that make up "literary studies" at the present time—that accounts for the space between the critical discourse and the life of the reader.