Born Again Into History: On the Jubilee of Faulkner's Fiftieth Birthday
Résumé
In the late 1940s Faulkner's sense of his own writing was taking a new turn. He was revisiting the world of past novels and matching it with mock-historical sketches in the Compson Appendix" or Requiem for a Nun, creating innovative hybrid forms alternating between essay, autobiography and fiction. He was alos working on A Fable, a struggle to make fiction out of history. History, repressed, haunting and personal in earlier fiction, was now loud, monumental and collective, as a look at the short story "Snow" helps to show. The change in the status of history reflects a change in the status of the author's own work, firmly anchored in the canon when Malcolm Cowley edits The Portable Faulkner. Thus Faulkner completes a journey away from modern tragedy and the anguish of crumbling sets of moral and cultural references, to a post-modern one, with the prison firmly pre-existing but absurd discourses. The world of Faulkner's late fiction has less to do with loss than with the stifling profusion of historial determination, and his attitude converges withy that of Thomas Jefferson, who had been so anxious that the legacy of past ages should not bind future generations.
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