Product Description

The Library of America edition of the novels of William Faulkner culminates with this volume presenting his first four, each newly edited, and, in many cases, restored with passages that were altered or (in the case of Mosquitoes) expurgated by the original publishers. This is Faulkner as he was meant to be read.

In these four novels we can track Faulkner's extraordinary evolution as, over the course of a few years, he discovers and masters the mode and matter of his greatest works. Soldiers' Pay (1926) expresses the disillusionment provoked by World War I through its account of the postwar experiences of homecoming soldiers, including a severely wounded R.A.F. pilot, in a style of restless experimentation. In Mosquitoes (1927), a raucous satire of artistic poseurs, many of them modeled after acquaintances of Faulkner in New Orleans, he continues to try out a range of stylistic approaches as he chronicles an ill-fated cruise on Lake Pontchartrain.

With the sprawling Flags in the Dust (published in truncated form in 1929 as Sartoris), Faulkner began his exploration of the mythical region of Mississippi that was to provide the setting for most of his subsequent fiction. Drawing on family history from the Civil War and after, and establishing many characters who recur in his later books, Flags in the Dust marks the crucial turning point in Faulkner's evolution as a novelist.

The volume concludes with Faulkner's masterpiece, The Sound and the Fury (1929). This multilayered telling of the decline of the Compson clan over three generations, with its complex mix of narrative voices and its poignant sense of isolation and suffering within a family, is one of the most stunningly original American novels.

The editors of this volume are Joseph Blotner and Noel Polk. Joseph Blotner, who wrote the notes, is professor of English emeritus at the University of Michigan. Biographer of William Faulkner and Robert Penn Warren, he is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the French Legion of Honor. Noel Polk is professor of English at Mississippi State University and editor of The Mississippi Quarterly. He has edited the texts in all five volumes of William Faulkner's novels for The Library of America.

In his first four novels, William Faulkner moved beyond early experiments to discover the themes and style of his maturity. With Soldiers' Pay, a sardonic distillation of postwar disillusionment, and Mosquitoes, a freewheeling roman à clef satirizing the writers and artists of his New Orleans milieu, Faulkner served his restless apprenticeship as a writer of fiction before settling in Flags in the Dust (first published in truncated form as Sartoris) on the material that would chiefly engage him: a mythic Mississippi region dense with ancestral memories and echoes of the Civil War. The volume concludes with what many consider Faulkner's greatest work, The Sound and the Fury, a novel of family torment whose audacities of form and fearless explorations of the inner life continue to astonish. The newly edited texts in this volume include passages altered or in some cases expurgated by the original publishers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #30216 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 1170 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781931082891
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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Customer Reviews

All of Faulkner's novels now available in exquisite Lib/America eds!
Although chronologicallly the four novels in this volume (which includes Faulkner's masterpiece The Sound and the Fury) are Faulkner's first, this is the last volume of his novels to come off the presses of the Library of America. This is a landmark event in the world of Belles Lettres, not just American literature! The first volume (Novels 1930-35) was published in 1985, making the publication of the definitive texts of the novels of William Faulkner a 21-year enterprise. Kudos to Library of America and editors Noel Polk and Joseph Blotner.

For those who haven't heard of them, the Library of America (LOA) is a non-profit venture with the mission of publishing the definitive texts of the best of American literature in uniform clothbound editions designed to last. (Google them to find out more about their mission and for a complete list of titles in print and forthcoming.) But these are not just handsome books or cheesy Franklin Mint style collectables. Establishing the best texts for the works selected for the series is a difficult and tricky enterprise, and the most qualified scholars are sought to take on the series' diverse authors. For Faulkner this editorial task fell to two of the most prominent Faulkner scholars around, Joseph Blotner (also his biographer) and Noel Polk. LOA does not clutter up its pages with footnotes and does not commission literary introductions for its volumes, so the casual reader may be unaware of the extensive amount of scholarship that goes on "behind the scenes." As noted in brief "Notes on the Text" to the Novels 1926-1929, "By preserving Faulkner's spelling, punctuation, and wording, even when inconsistent or irregular, the Polk texts strive to be as faithful to Faulkner's usage as surviving evidence permits. In this volume, the reader has the results of the most detailed scholarly efforts thus far made to establish the texts of Soldier's Pay, Mosquitoes, Flags in the Dust, and The Sound and the Fury" (p. 1175).

Since the publisher's own description of this volume here on Amazon.com doesn't point this out, it should be noted that the version of The Sound and the Fury published by LOA includes the "Appendix (Compson: 1699-1945)" which does not exist in all editions of the novel still in print. Although this Appendix was first published in 1945 as part of The Portable Faulkner (16 years after the novel itself was published), I always found it perverse and annoying that it was excluded from all but the Modern Library edition of the novel. (After all, if readers want the experience of reading the novel in the pristine form of the 1929 first edition, all they have to do is ignore the Appendix.)

I don't know what else, if anything, of Faulkner's output LOA intends to publish going forward (short stories, screenplays, speeches, letters, poetry?), but these five volumes of novels contain (arguably?) the best works of American fiction by any author. Each volume is a handy size (though some contain four novels, they are all the size of one of Faulkner's novels as orinally published), and set in large and readable type. Buy them all and you can own all of Faulkner's best work without giving up three bookshelves to store them!

Beautiful edition of Faulkner's first four novels including the masterpiece "The Sound and the Fury"
We all owe the wonderful Library of America a great deal for publishing the volumes of William Faulkner's complete novels. It has taken more than twenty years to bring them out and now concludes with his first four novels. These were published from 1926 until 1929. This volume includes "Soldier's Pay", "Mosquitoes", "Flags in the Dust", and "The Sound and the Fury".

"Soldier's Pay" is a first novel and shows it. While it has some fine moments and shows Faulkner's style of presenting "reality" without context and focusing on emotional interiors and the aspects of life that we tend to hide even from ourselves, it is not a great work. However, it is still worth reading. The central figure is a disfigured and dying pilot brought home from the war by strangers into a complex family dynamic that is made much worse because the pilot was thought dead, but is now alive and horribly disabled.

I personally found "Mosquitoes" to be all but unreadable. It is too self-indulgent with a delight in talking about intimate things as if that were profound. No thanks.

"Flags in the Dust" was published in part as "Sartoris" in the late twenties. In 1973, Random House published the complete text as far as it could be restored. It reads much differently than his first two novels and it is here that the voice starts sounding like a mature and confident Faulkner. It concerns multiple generations that fester into ruin and misery of all kinds that seem to include perverse sexual relations and alcoholism. Yes, there is also racism in the books, but the books are not racist because the attitudes of the characters are consistent with their times and do not include any sympathy from Faulkner that I can find. And his is a worldwith living memories of the tragic Southern experience of the Civil War and the shock and loss of the Great War (WWI)for the living generation.

The volume ends with Faulner's first clear masterpiece, "The Sound and the Fury". While all Faulkner's prose is not easy to read and requires constant attention and often some re-reading, this book also has multiple unannounced perspectives and shifts in narrator. At the end of the book is an appendix that was first written by Faulkner for "The Portable Faulkner" edited by Matthew Cowley in 1946. You might want to read this first if you want to understand the story more clearly the first time through. However, it could be argued that you shouldn't because the confusion and disorientation is part of the reading experience that author wants you to have as you work through his story.

It is clear to me that Faulkner is a great master of prose and that his works are great treasures in the English language. However, his ethos is quite foreign to me. I do not find great value in reading about lives of misery, incest, adultery, perversion, ruin, and loss. Is that really all there is to human life? Not in my more than fifty years of experience. And since Faulkner was a young man when he wrote these works, what did he really know about life and what was just rumor and hearsay?

Still, the use of language is powerful and unique. Attempts have been made to copy aspects of his style, but none can come closer than mannerisms. Faulkner's was a genius that not only included his words, but in the way he conveyed reality. We don't experience our lives with chapter headings or with moments clearly delineated as part of this or that. We construct our filing system for events in retrospect. So, Faulkner presents us his stories in ways that require us to ask ourselves what is happening, what just happened, did anything happen? Where does this go? Who is this? Why the different names for the same people? Why the same names for different people? It is working through these and every other question that occurs to you that you come to an understanding of the work. And your understanding will almost certainly be personal and different from almost everyone else.

This is a fine volume with reliable texts for these important works, a chronology of Faulkner's life, notes on the texts, and a beautiful binding with materials and type that add to the quality of the reading experience.

The Sound and the Fury
The decline of a southern family is in view here. Most of the story is told through the eyes of Caddy Compson's three brothers Benjy, Quentin, and Jason. The first section called by readers and critics the Benjy section is told through the eyes of a 33 year old mentally handicapped man. Benjy loved three things: his pasture, his sister Caddy, and firelight. Cared for by his sister (before she left home) and by the Compson's black servants, he could not speak and suffered from a strange sense of timelessness, in which the slightest sensory stimulus could trigger vivid past memories. He and the reader of this novel experience those memories as if they are still happening. There are a few parallels between Benjy and Christ. Benjy is 33, the same age as Christ when he died, he suffers mockery and other unjust treatment and his story (omitting the flashbacks) unfolds on Easter weekend. In addition Benjy lives outside of time as if in an eternal celestial realm. In a touching scene Benjy is waiting at the gate for his sister to come home from school: "What is it." Caddy said. "Did you think it would be Christmas when I came home from school. Is that what you thought. Christmas is the day after tomorrow. Santy Claus, Benjy. Santy Claus. Come on, let's run to the house and get warm." She took my hand and we ran through the bright rustling leaves. We ran up the steps and out of the bright cold, into the dark cold."
The Quentin section is about the day that Quentin Compson commits suicide while away at Harvard. Quentin is kind of a southern Holden Caulfield or maybe Holden is a kind of Northern Quentin Compson since The Sound and the Fury was written long before The Catcher in the Rye. Quentin and Holden are obsessed with innocence and see the changes time brings as corrupting. Quentin is tortured by the loss of innocence of his beloved sister Caddy. In one scene as Quentin contemplates his watery grave he imagines that having commited incest with Caddy they are consigned to hell where they are safe burning in the clean flame: "And maybe when He says Rise the eyes will come floating up too, out of the deep quiet and the sleep, to look on glory. And after a while the flat irons would come floating up. I hid them under the end of the bridge and went back and leaned on the rail. I could not see the bottom, but I could see a long way into the motion of the water before the eye gave out, and then I saw a shadow hanging like a fat arrow stemming into the current. Mayflies skimmed in and out of the shadow of the bridge just above the surface. If it could just be a hell beyond that: the clean flame the two of us more than dead. Then you will have only me then only me then the two of us amid the pointing and the horror beyond the clean flame."
The Jason section is told in a more straight forward style as we follow the evil and occasionaly funny doings of Jason Compson. Much of these sections center, in one way or the other, around their sister Caddy. The last section is usually called the Dilsey section after the Compsons black cook and housekeeper although the doings of Jason appear as well. Faulkner said "Dilsey is one of my own favorite characters, because she is brave, courageous, gentle, and honest. She's much more brave and honest and generous than me..." Dilsey holds the family together by her sheer strength of character. Dilsey's daughter Frony objects to her bringing Benjy to the [...] church on Easter Sunday. "I wish you wouldn't keep on bringin him to church, mammy," Frony said. "Folks talkin." "Whut folks?" Dilsey said. "I hears em," Frony said. "And I knows whut kind of folks," Dilsey said, "Trash white folks. Dat's who it is. Thinks he aint good enough fer white church, but [...] church aint good enough for him." "Dey talks, jes de same," Frony said. "Den you send um to me," Dilsey said. "Tell um de good Lawd don't keer whether he smart er not. Don't nobody but white trash keer dat." Dilsey says to Benjy, "You's de Lawd's chile, anyway. En I be His'n too, fo long, praise Jesus."
In Oxford Mississippi, Faulkner's model for fictional Jefferson, a road circles the court house so that seen from above the court house would look like a giant clock face with the confederate monument as the 12. So I am standing there in Oxford looking at the monument and it occurs to me there are two reasons Benjy bellows when Luster takes the surrey to the left instead of right at the monument. I had read that Benjamin in Hebrew means son of the right hand and also Benjy lives outside of time moving back and forth in time, just as his brother Quentin considered time an enemy Benjy escapes linear time living in an almost celestial realm. They always take Benjy right at the monument because that is counter clockwise escaping linear time. When Luster goes to the left at the monument this is going clockwise and Benjy bellows because he finds himself in linear time.
According to Faulkner, the story began with a vision of a little girl's muddy drawers as she climbed a tree to look at death while her brothers, lacking her courage, waited below. Caddy having let go of fear has a loving heart. She is the warm sun the other characters orbit around and the heart at the center of the universe called The Sound and the Fury.