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RICHARD POIRIER
(for example, in the phrase 'the heart's driving complexity')' Faulkner
emphasizes the heart over all other parts of life. How does this affect
writing, particularly Faulkner's? Does he neglect reason and intellect?
Is he endangered by sentimentality?"
It
cannot be said here or else–
where that the editors are endangered by English grammar, unless, of
course, they really do want to suggest that "sentimentality" has an
existence not very different from that of a virus. The question reveals the
kind of thinking about literature and literary history implicit in the
emphasis on "approaches" and "backgrounds"-the simpleminded no–
tion of causation and of the possible connections between things that
actually can be attributed to a writer (such as Faulkner's remarks about
the "heart") and certain puzzles, like the sources of a writer's style.
What if it could be shown that he worked on the story only on rainy
mornings and that he used a borrowed and recalcitrant typewriter with
eccentric punctuation? Questions about a writer's working habits may
be vulgar, but they are at least not as silly as questions about the "heart."
This
is
especially true when the students are not even asked what
Faulkner means by the "heart." (Is "heart" here the same "heart"
that in another writer is said to be in the Highlands?)
Of course the students imagined in such a book as this have a per–
spective so wide that they need not bother with simple or picky ques–
tions. They can answer questions which I cannot even understand: "In
what ways does Faulkner use nature in
The Bear?
With what effects?"
"Nature" apparently exists in the same way "sentimentality" does, not
as something produced by the language of the writer and therefore dif–
ferent from "nature" in some other writer, but as an object "out there,"
acting upon him or to
be
used by him. Maybe the New Critics were
wrong in claiming that a literary work is self-explanatory, but theirs
was an invigorating mistake of emphasis compared to the mind-mushing
assumption that terms like "nature" and "sentimentality" are self-ex–
planatory. Or take the term "audience," so essential to people who like
to
talk about "background." "What concepts of audience might Faulk–
ner have held," the editors ask, "in writing
Lion
and the
Saturday
Evening Post
version of
The Bear?
How do they affect his writing?"
This question is unanswerable, even assuming that the student had
successfully met a question which he
could
have answered, but which
isn't asked here, about the writing itself, what it sounds like, what it
looks like. Do we know that in writing
The Bear
Faulkner ever actually
thought of the
Saturday Evening Post?
And if he did think of it, how
do we know what he thought of it? The question asked by the editors
calls for nothing but the most presumptuous banalities about every item-
