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This chapter is an essay which reviews William Faulkner's novel As I Lay Dying, the story of the corpse of a woman in late middle age. As I Lay Dying is concerned not with death, but merely with the chemical changes which happen in a dead body. The history Faulkner relates is the history of this body before it is finally buried. It may be said that the novel's most interesting character, or at least the character in which Faulkner shows most interest, is the corpse in its dead, or rather gruesomely alive, state. The effect that this story produces is one of self-indulgence, disgust rather than horror. The essay argues that there is nothing much to be said for As I Lay Dying except for a few isolated accounts of violent action.

Chapter 5 examines Faulkner’s engagement with eugenics discourse as that Progressive-era reform movement began making inroads into the South in the twenties and thirties. Eugenics was riddled with contradictions: in addressing itself to the purification of modern whiteness, it ironically divided whiteness against itself, positing deviant, degenerate forms that supposedly sapped the vitality of the nation’s economy and racial stock—a problem with distressing implications for the strict biracial order of Jim Crow. In his first five Yoknapatawpha County novels along with the early Snopes narrative “Father Abraham,” Faulkner appropriates many of the signature features of eugenics discourse—its fondness for elaborate genealogies, its use of the family-study genre, its rhetorical framing of heredity as problem or doom, its concept of “feeblemindedness” and emphasis on the compulsory segregation and sterilization of the unfit—in ways that by turns collude in and powerfully critique the guiding assumptions of the movement.

This essay examines affinities between Faulkner and one of the South’s most important contemporary authors, Ernest J. Gaines. It begins by noting the powerful geographical and intertextual imagination at work in the two writers: each created a bounded fictional domain that served as the principal setting for numerous works (Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County and Gaines’s Louisiana parish of St. Raphael), each used recurring characters across multiple fictions and each writer’s assembled books speak in a kind of dialogue with each other that integrates and amplifies the impact of the overall body of work. By his own admission, Gaines learned much from Faulkner, but just as important are the things to avoid that he found in Faulkner. Where Faulkner too often portrays African Americans in narrow terms of victimization or sheer endurance, Gaines went beyond those limitations to present black figures who achieve a full human standing acknowledged by the larger community.

This chapter is aimed as an obituary of William Faulkner. It describes Faulkner as an arrogant and ill-mannered individual in a way that is peculiarly “Southern”: in company he usually failed to reply when spoken to, or when he spoke there was something grandiose in the profusion with which he sprinkled his remarks with “Sirs” and “Ma'ms.” No matter how great a writer he may be, the public gets increasingly tired of Faulkner; his death seems to remove the obligation to read him. Nevertheless, the chapter regards Faulkner as the greatest American novelist after Henry James since the 1930s. It cites five masterpieces written by Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, and The Hamlet.

In this chapter, John Crowe Ransom offers an impression of William Faulkner's achievement, an impression that he says has not changed much during the years that followed his reading of The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Light in August. According to Ransom, these three early novels are proof of the narrative power and the detailed poetry of Faulkner's creations. He argues that Faulkner's books are unequal, and that the style is less than consistently sustained. Faulkner is therefore not Ben Jonson, he is not even William Shakespeare; he is John Webster. The chapter concludes with the opinion that there are imperfections in Faulkner's work, but that his perfections are wonderful, well sustained, and without exact precedent anywhere.

This chapter discusses the work of William Faulkner, describing him as a man of genius, although a willfully and perversely chaotic one. Faulkner was born in Oxford, Mississippi; in his vast work the provincial and dusty town, surrounded by the shanties of poor whites and Negroes, is the center of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. During World War I, Faulkner enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force. He then became a poet, a journalist connected with New Orleans publications, and the author of famous novels and movie scenarios. In 1950 he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Faulkner represents in American letters that feudal and agrarian South which lost in the Civil War. Among his works are The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and Intruder in the Dust.

This chapter reviews William Faulkner's 1929 novel As I Lay Dying, the story of the death of Addie Bundren and her family's journey to a cemetery in Jefferson, Mississippi. Addie's husband and five children, carrying her body in a coffin in a wagon, encounter various difficulties along the way. The chapter first discusses humor in existentialist literature before focusing on the absurd in As I Lay Dying. It also considers protagonists in English fiction who all possess candor and a sense of the absurd, including Jimmy Porter, Sebastian Dangerfield, Charles Lumley, Billy Liar, and Larry Vincent. It argues that the “grotesque” in Faulkner is not ordinarily read as humorous because the highly personalized style tends to obscure it.

The early years of the “talkies,” which correspond with Faulkner’s surge into a fully realized literary modernism, brought technical problems that the cinema was slow to work out, especially the challenge of synchronizing the film soundtrack with its image stream to achieve verisimilitude. This technical crisis pointed to new creative opportunities for artists imaginative enough to seize the possibilities and extend montage effects across the visual and auditory realms. As sound film struggled through its growing pains, Faulkner experimented with new stylistic techniques of punctuation that introduced new discontinuities between speech and speaker, voice and subject, sound and source, into literary narration and onto the printed page, making his own unique contribution to his era’s aesthetic repertoire. This transmedial embrace of asynchrony went hand in hand with a new appreciation for the affective and thematic potential of silence, another aesthetic development that leaves its mark on Faulkner’s contemporaneous fictions.