BOO KS
561
allegory. The moral Faulkner of
A Fable
represents the sort of ac–
complished retreat one notices, say, in Tolstoy's
Resurrection.
In the novels of his generation, like
Ulysses
or
Finnegans Wake,
which have influenced Faulkner (novels which had worked back
through the chaos of the mind's associations toward archetypal myth),
the human representative figures like Mr. and Mrs. Bloom for example,
have been more powerful than their myth. Mr. Faulkner's are weaker.
But his richness of texture is still there and, above all, there is that
capacity for passion which-combining, as it does, with literary arti–
ficialities-gives him his intensity, his thwarted power and his integrity
as an artist. I am not one to defend a novelist for being exasperating to
read, or for being difficult; no amount of intellectual sophistry can
make the unreadable readable and, after all, we have learned to do our
best by the 'difficult' writers of the last thirty years. Some private
worlds are nuts that cannot be cracked except by one university on
behalf of another and not on behalf of readers. But if the difficulty
of Faulkner is partly the result of too much reading in an isolated so–
ciety, it springs from a genuine judgment on our time. He has been a
writer divided between idiosyncrasies of regional genius and a nostalgia
for a contemporary means of dealing with a universal subject. The
division is still apparent in the rather laden majesty of this allegory
where a universal subject has been treated as the compendium of a
word-drunk mind.
v.
S. Pritchett
HOMER AND HELLENISM
THE HOMERIC GODS: THE SPIRITUAL SIGNIFICANCE OF GREEK
RELIGION .
By
Wa lter F. Otto. Translated
by
Moses Hadas. Pantheon.
$5.00.
Although it is addressed to the general reader and all the
impedimenta of scholarship are refreshingly absent, Walter Otto's study
of the Olympian religion (first published in Germany twenty-five years
ago) displays a profound insight into the spirit of Greek civilization.
This is probably the best introduction to the study of Hellenism avail–
able in English. Primarily an interpretation of the Homeric view of
life, with little reference to the historical background of Achaean so–
ciety, it shows how the intellectual and aesthetic achievements of Greek
civilization developed out of the conception of the gods conveyed
in
the Homeric poems. Unlike virtually all English-speaking and most
