Evening star., 1962-07-08
Death in Yoknopotowpho

William Faulkner, dead at "a, prob
ably will always remain a controversial
figure in the history of American letters.
There are those who rhapsodize over his
works, who find them virtually flawleSs,
and who come close to deifying him In a
literary sense. On the other hand, leav-
Ing aside people who have sometimes
denounced him as a sort of hoax, there
are critics who view him with a large
measure of reserve, but who recognize at
the same time certain touch of genius
in all that he has written, especially
about that terribly dark, swampy, myth
ical and altogether improbable place
atroctously named Yoknapatawpha
County in Mississippi.
Certainly there is great deal to be
said against many aspects of Faulkner's
novels-Such as Sanctuary" and "The
Sound and the Fury"-dealing with this
excruciatingly dismal and basically un-
real Southern milieu. His extravaganza
OF style, his long sentences rivaling those
Of Proust, his emphasis on decay, his
dank symbolism, his seeming desire to
be obscure merely for obscurity's sake,
his preoccupation with violence, mad
ness and perverSion, his generally bleak
caricature Of the South, past and pres
entail these and kindred things re-
main to challenge the judgment of those
who regard him as a giant and who
brook no criticism Of him. Still, regard
less OF his shortcomings, the fact re-
mains that his workS-like Proust'S in
an earlier day-are full Of truly great
passages studded with poetic insightS,
and there can be no doubt that they
have had marked influence on the
course of literature here in America and
abroad.
Nor can there be any doubt that
Mr.. Faulkner, despite his stylistic &C.
centricities, could write with extraor-
dinary clarity and eloquence whenever
he felt sufficiently moved to pull him
self away from his interest in decadence
and to think about and to comment
upon the nature of man as temple of
flesh endowed by the Creator with in
dwelling individual nobility and an i'm
mortal soul. The bleak chronicler of
Yoknapatawpha's ugly events showed
this affirmative side in his celebrated
remarks accepting the Nobel Prize for
literature in 1850. He showed 1t, too, in
the following, less familiar words he ad-
dressed to graduating class at the
University High School in Oxford, his
home town:
It Is not men in the mass who can and
will save Man. 1t is Man himself, created in
the image of God so that he shall have the
power and the will to choose right from
wrong. and so be able to save himself because
he is worth saving; man, the individual, men
and women who will refuse always to be
tricked or frightened or bribed into surren-
dering, not just the right but the duty, too,
to choose between justice and injustice, cour-
age and cowardice, sacrifice and greed, pity
and self-who will believe always not only
in the right Of man to be free Of injustice
and rapacity and deception, but the duty and
responsibility of man to see that justice and
truth and pity and compassion are done.
Whatever his true literary stature,
it may surely be said of William Faulk-
ner that he was an American of great
artistry and constructive human being
who has enriched the life of his country
and the world at large.