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Preface to Faulkner
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13936 |
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BOOK WORLD
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2 / 1988 |
2,190 Words |
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Clyde Wilson
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ON THE PREJUDICES, PREDILECTIONS, AND FIRM BELIEFS
OF WILLIAM FAULKNER
Essays by Cleanth Brooks
Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1987
162 pp., $16.95
The present belongs to the rich, the powerful, and the famous. But the past and the future belong to the powers of imagination. Some centered hence, the celebrities of our day--like Dan Rather or Michael Jackson--will be as utterly forgotten as the famous courtesans and gladiators of ancient Rome. Minor presidents will be but a name in the history books, like the forgotten triumvir Lepidus, while more important presidents will rate a few lines that will strike a pale glimmer of recognition among the better educated, as do Marius and Sulla today.
But at that future time intelligent men and women will, quite possibly, speak and write of Faulkner's America in somewhat the same fashion as they do now of Shakespeare's England or Virgil's Rome. Faulkner cast the consciousness of our time and country into the enduring form of great literature, and in the long run it is by literature that a people and an era are known.
In a dozen major works, out of which anyone may make his own choice of half-a-dozen masterpieces, the Mississippi storyteller recorded a vision of man's experience on this continent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and placed that vision in a juxtaposition with God, nature, and history that will compel attention and generate meaning as long as civilization exists in anything resembling the form that we know it.
A great literary achievement is self-evident, or nearly so. It becomes itself a historical event, a benchmark for an era. It differs from public and collective historical events, however, in a significant respect. Historical events take on a certain inevitability and factuality. A great artistic achievement, on the other hand, though indispensable in understanding an era, is intrinsically improbable. Masterworks of the imagination, in the final analysis, cannot be explained by reference to the conditions of the time or the artist's experience or personality. They represent in some sense a stunning and unexpected intervention of the gods, and inspiration in the original signification of the term--the creation of something valid and true that did not exist before.
Surprised, we tend to doubt even the plain and self-evident aspects of a great piece of literature and to cast into unnecessary mystery and confusion those parts of the artist's life and work that are fairly easily understood. We make complications out of simple matters and simplifications out of mysterious ones. Consider all that has been said about Shakespeare, and how much of it has been sheer foolishness.
While the greatness of a literary corpus may be self evident, it is not self-explanatory, and is bound to create a large and continuing commentary. A figure that looms as vast as Faulkner's will create around it the inevitable concomitants of commerce, in the same way that souvenir salesmen always appear on the outskirts of a tragedy or a miracle. Thus, Faulkner's home may be toured at times, for a fee; literary hacks who met him once in New York or Hollywood can sell their
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