Law and Grace in Styron's "Set This House on Fire"

Abstract

While William Styron's first novel, Lie Down in Darkness, was accorded great praise, his more ambitious Set This House on Fire was either greeted by polite silence or "treated to a torrent of critical abuse the like of which has seldom been seen in our time." 1 The passage of several years, however, has afforded the opportunity for a reassessment of the later novel, which has resulted generally in a much greater appreciation of it.2 Yet it will be hermeneutically significant to consider why, according to the suggestive hypothesis of Louis Rubin, the novel was so roundly condemned at first. In Rubin's view, Lie Down in Darkness was seen by the critics to be a distinctive but continuous extension of the southern tradition of Wolfe and Faulkner. But Rubin holds this to have been a mistaken reading. Given the great history of the southern tradition, the critics brought to Lie Down in Darkness an expectation and frame of reference into which the novel seemed to fit. But it x ras really a matter of making it fiterroneously-their expectation.3 Or to use the categories of Hirsch, the critics on the basis of past experience came to a genre expectation about the novel which was wrong, and the mistaken genre expectation caused them to misinterpret the details.4 Rubin carefully compares Lie Down in Darkness with Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury showing that the two