THE CULT OF EXPERIENCE
421
Faulkner, what is at once noticeable is the uneven, and at times
quite distorted, development of the various elements that constitute
literary talent. What is so exasperating about Pound's poetry, for
example, is its peculiar combination of a finished technique (his
special share in the distribution of experience) with amateurish
and irresponsible ideas. It could be maintained that for sheer
creative power Faulkner is hardly excelled by any living novelist,
yet who would seriously compare him to Mann or Joyce? The
diversity and intensity of the experience represented in his.narra–
tives cannot make up for their lack of order, of a self-illuminating
structure, and for their irksome obscurity of value and meaning.*
One might naturally counter this criticism by stating that though
Faulkner rarely or never sets forth values directly, they none the
less exist in his work by implication. Yes, but implications inco–
herently expressed are no better than mystifications, and nowadays
it is values that we can least afford to take on faith. Moreover, in
a
more startling manner perhaps than any of his contemporaries,
Faulkner illustrates the tendency of -the experiential mode,
if
pur~
sued to its utmost extreme, to tum into its opposite through uncon–
scious self-parody. In Faulkner the excess, the systematic inflation
of the horrible is such a parody of experience. In Thomas Wolfe
the same effect is produced by his swollen rhetoric and by his com–
pulsion to repeat himself-and repetition is an obvious form of
parody. This repetition-compulsion has plagued a good many
American writers. Its first and most conspicuous victim, of course,
was
Whitman, who also occasionally slipped into unintentional
parodies of himself.
Yet there is a positive side to the primacy of experience in
late American literature. ·For this primacy has conferred certain
benefits upon it, of which none is more bracing than its relative
immunity from abstraction and otherworldliness. The stream of
life, unimpeded by the rocks and sands of ideology, flows through
it freely.
If
inept in coping with the general, it particularizes not
at all badly; and the assumptions of sanctity that so many Euro–
pean artists seem to require as a kind of guaranty of their profes–
sional standing are not readily conceded in the lighter and clearer
American atmosphere. "Whatever may have been the case in years
•His most recent novel,
The Hamlet,
includes so many imaginative marvels that one
il
appalled by the eaae with which it nevertheleas runs aground.
·
